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If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs

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541–550 of 637 posts

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs

#541

Post by pcdoodle »

state_less wrote: post #419
blobbers wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The internet has stopped being an internet but rather being a few large intranets.

It’s the corporate internet, upload/download ratio, it’s the lack of IP address space. It’s social media, it’s private blogging platforms and it’s the plight for power. It's the way you're given knowledge, slow with thought control and subtle hints It's the fast talk they use to abuse and feed my brain It stretches for as far as the eye can see It's reality, fuck it, it's everything but me Atmosphere - Scapegoat, wit…

Hell yeah! Never thought to find an Atmosphere reference in the comments @ HN.

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs

#542

Post by jiofih »

vimslayer wrote: post #425
jiofih wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great! You can do the test yourself: pick a few quotes from those old posts and try to find them with a google search.

I found (possibly) this guy's blog by googling 'passthejoe blog'. I don't think it was the Blogger blog they were talking about, though so I made another search with (presumably) their real name and word blog. Bang,there it is. Picked one post from 2011 and searched its opening line "I’m no Backports guru, though I’d like to become one" (with quotes). The post came up as the second search result.

The question is do the posts come up for searches around the topic their cover, not that the domain is discoverable.

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs

#543

Post by jiofih »

ulisesrmzroche wrote: post #437
jiofih wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People publishing blogs were not “creators”. They were ordinary people publishing their personal, not-fashionable, unfiltered ramblings. That’s what we lost. It’s obvious that with the growth of internet access “variety” has grown exponentially, but it’s the same kind of variety you get from supermarket products, not real life experiences. > just not in the one strict format It’s exactly the other way around. 95% of…

That last point is wrong, it doesn’t make any sense, for example, Banksy. He’s not sharing for the sake of sharing and he has no trouble expressing himself, even pissing off the governments of the world more often than not

This is about Instagram/YouTube, I don’t see where banksy fits the comparison.

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs

#544

Post by jiofih »

rubatuga wrote: post #465
jiofih wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t have a source right now, but what the previous poster said is precisely true. The span of time google will actually search for has been consistently shrinking. I had a very frustrating one not long ago, where I bookmarked a post and could not for the love of god find it again using google, even with an exact quote that produced 0 results. That’s what led me onto researching about how bad the situation is and…

I'm not so sure, my blog shows up as the first result for the following terms in Google, while it doesn't even show up for the first few pages in DuckDuckGo. It seems to suggest that Google prioritizes blogs. [0]: https://google.com/search?q=ghost+blog+latex [1]: https://google.com/search?q=disable+networkd [0]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ghost+blog+latex [1]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=disable+systemd+networkd

Your post is from 2018, not very old and on a very niche topic. Look for the “google is forgetting the old web” article.

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs

#545

Post by kickscondor »

qznc wrote: post #511
kickscondor wrote: post #10

> The other day I searched for an hour and couldn't find even one. They used to be endless. Oh there are still endless blogs. There are definitely a lot of defunct ones - but many have become active again recently. I review the unknown ones I come across here: https://www.kickscondor.com/hrefhunt/ (I skip software and startup blogs, because they are so numerous.) You just can’t use the old avenues (Google searches, c…

HrefHunt is awesome! Thank you. Crawling through it for my spartan collection: https://old.reddit.com/r/SpartanWeb/

Oh hey! I’ve definitely mined your collection as well! Thank you for the good stuff.

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs

#546

Post by mikro2nd »

aazaa wrote: post #178

The best way to bring back blogs is to start with your own. It looks like this is the author's fourth post and s/he hit a home run with the top post on HN. But that's rarely how things work. The thing few people tell you when you start blogging is how futile it will seem - for a long, long time. You'll start by posting something you put a lot of work into. You'll publish, thinking of all the comments and emails you'l…

> You'll check the analytics. Abysmal. Nobody is reading!

And that, right there, is the best reason to remove all analytics from your blog/website[1]. At the risk of being held guilty of self-promotion, I wrote a little blog post about just this a couple of weeks ago: https://one.mikro2nd.net/2020/05/why-no-web-analytics-are-to... (Thing is, if anybody here does go and read it, I won't even know.)

At the root of the unease is the question, "Why are you blogging?" If it's something you do for yourself, then analytics -- specifically: who is reading which posts -- is a distraction, and sure to lead you astray into the thickets and quagmire of writing mere clickbait.

If you're writing to establish "thought leadership" in some sphere, then display leadership, not followership (i.e. chasing the analytics.) It's a strange and uncomfortable feeling at first (perhaps always!) but at least you'll always know who you're writing for (yourself). If you're writing for some "payback" then I'd suggest that submitting articles to magazines is a better path/platform than blogging.

Personally I am more interested in inciting thought and discussion through my blog, so mere visitor statistics are of little interest. What would validate what I do there would be someone who reaches out to talk about something I've written. That's the real payback.

[1] Nor any trackers of any sort.

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs

#547

Post by freddie_mercury »

mawise wrote: post #199
aazaa wrote: post #178

The best way to bring back blogs is to start with your own. It looks like this is the author's fourth post and s/he hit a home run with the top post on HN. But that's rarely how things work. The thing few people tell you when you start blogging is how futile it will seem - for a long, long time. You'll start by posting something you put a lot of work into. You'll publish, thinking of all the comments and emails you'l…

Those blogs from the time before were written for the purpose of writing, not for the purpose of getting lots of viewership. The blogs the author misses aren't written to make money off of ad traffic, they were just written to put down ideas. Today that need is filled with Facebook/Twitter/... and even there with the currency of likes/comments those motivations get twisted. Some of the internet has also shifted to a…

> written for the purpose of writing, not for the purpose of getting lots of viewership

I've never really bought this line of argument. People who "write just for writing" don't publish. They write it in One Note or Evernote or Tiddlywiki or plain old text files on their laptop. They don't sign up for Wordpress accounts (or even worse, spend hours configuring some static site generator) and publish it.

People publish things because they want them to be read. Having no indication that they are being read is, understandably, discouraging for people who are publishing things.

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs

#548

Post by tiborsaas »

jason0597 wrote: post #513
bachmeier wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just looking for good academic websites in my field, and I found that for the most part, they're gone. They still exist, especially Google sites. It's just that they're purely for promotion. Almost entirely things an employer would look for. 20 years ago, you'd have academics putting material on their websites to provide information to others.

Where do academics put their material nowadays?

arXiv.org?

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs

#549

Post by timq »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #547
mawise wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those blogs from the time before were written for the purpose of writing, not for the purpose of getting lots of viewership. The blogs the author misses aren't written to make money off of ad traffic, they were just written to put down ideas. Today that need is filled with Facebook/Twitter/... and even there with the currency of likes/comments those motivations get twisted. Some of the internet has also shifted to a…

> written for the purpose of writing, not for the purpose of getting lots of viewership I've never really bought this line of argument. People who "write just for writing" don't publish. They write it in One Note or Evernote or Tiddlywiki or plain old text files on their laptop. They don't sign up for Wordpress accounts (or even worse, spend hours configuring some static site generator) and publish it. People publish…

There is of course a middle ground between 'writing for writing' and 'writing for payback'. For instance people might want to post how they did some stuff, with the hope that it helps at least one guy. That's how most blog were written.

Then internet slowly became a place where everything is a business opportunity, and blogs were relayed into the second zone. Google also somehow became much less useful when it comes to find good blogs, probably because of aggressive SEO.

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs

#550

Post by basicallydan »

dewey wrote: post #32

Blogs are still there, just not easily findable through Google as most of the ones you find are low-value SEO blogs aiming at search engine traffic. Discovery is a problem but I just subscribe to blogs when I find them via RSS (Blogs still have RSS, it's hard to find one without which is surprising but I'm glad that's the case), over time I build up my list of blogs I like and they usually link to other blogs and the…

I like your blog! It reminds me of https://littlebigdetails.com/ except it’s the opposite. Bookmarked!
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