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

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

#561

Post by jerrac »

Chathamization wrote: post #459
jerrac wrote: post #130

Heh. I remember the days before blogs. Everyone posted on community forums. You'd get some amazing, long, and lasting conversations that way. Then everyone who posted in the forums started blogging, and I saw the forums dry up. Sure, part of it was that teenagers grew up and went to college and didn't have time for the forums, but a good portion was due to blogs. I suppose good communities still exist out there, some…

I agree. Forums and old school personal web sites were much better for quality content than blogs or social media. Things went in the direction of mental junk food, focusing on getting a lot of new content as quick as possible.

It makes me wonder, how could we rebuild things?

It's not a tooling problem. There are several high quality forum tools out there. Discourse being one of them. But getting people to actually participate seems impossible. I've had a Discourse instance running for family for over a year now. It's basically empty.

I've tried inviting friends to a another instance, and only one ever showed up.

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

#562

Post by laurex »

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…

The thing I miss most is LiveJournal. Sure, over time it kind of failed, and later having data owned by possibly nefarious new owners didn't help reputationally, but what I loved was having a small, approved set of people who could read, and getting to know other people in long form, where writing was the primary draw, rather than links, brags, and ads, like social media has become. I miss the very internal nature that the platform allowed, but it was a more naive time, where the idea that whatever was there would inevitably become public wasn't a barrier to intimacy.

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

#563

Post by tonyarkles »

Reelin wrote: post #496
larsrc wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Hi! It looks like you're trying to solve complex social problems with technology. Would you like some help in your futile endeavour?"

What complex social problem? All I see are a few technical problems regarding security, anonymity, and interrelations between nodes on a graph. There's also a closely related ease of use (ie UX) problem regarding the convenience (or rather lack thereof) of publishing things in a reasonably anonymous manner. All the social problems, such as the underlying reasons for wanting or needing anonymity in the first place, re…

“Authorship Attribution” is an active field of research. Even if you manage to solve the problem of anonymously publishing a bunch of content under distinct anonymous pseudonyms (or completely anonymously), there’s a non-negligible probability that, as soon as the author of one work is identified, the entire body of work can be attributed to that person.

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

#564

Post by cxqtheresh »

_uvvk wrote: post #191
asplake wrote: post #101

It’s not so much that blogging died but that commenting on them directly did, and with it blog culture. Commenting now takes place in other venues, not visible to the blog’s reader unless that venue is where they came from. HN is part of that of course.

Shameless plug: I wrote my own blog engine in Python ( https://github.com/betodealmeida/nefelibata ). It generates static pages, but publishes a snippet to Twitter/Mastodon/etc., linking back to the blog post. People can only comment on the social media sites, and periodically the comments get scraped and appended to the blog post. Here's an example: https://blog.taoetc.org/mastodon_integration/index.html This way, p…

Worth checking https://indieweb.org/Webmention and https://brid.gy

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

#565

Post by karatestomp »

api wrote: post #559
karatestomp wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What do you do in the next internet to try to avoid the spam and SEO problems on this internet? Ban (yes, legally) collecting & monetizing most information about users. But do that generally, not just for the Internet. Or at least make holding such data incredibly risky (enormous company-ending fines for leaks or misuse). No loading third-party domain content in browsers. At all. No images, no scripts. You can link…

You are forgetting the other half of the equation. The web must have a first class payment system. Nothing is free; money will be made overtly or covertly. If there is no honest overt method, there will be a dishonest covert method.

Maybe. Most of the best parts of the web are totally free, donationware (wikipedia), or illegal to begin with (library genesis). Ads served 1st party and aimed at a reading demographic, not at individuals, like all ads except junk mail before the web, would be possible regardless.

But yes some kind of payment flow that is just about entirely controlled by the browser—special UI pages cannot mimic, a “you’ll find a way to accept what this form sends you, or you won’t take payments” attitude from the spec—might be OK. I’d have to think it through some more. It’d be easy to screw up in a way that let the Nu Web become overrun with bad incentives and dangerous garbage again (watch the “non-computer-literate”, which is a lot of people and yes that includes the next generation now entering adulthood, not just old folks, try to use the web to accomplish any task at all if you don’t get what I mean by “dangerous”)

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

#566

Post by l72 »

Why isn't anyone creating smaller, specialized search sites?

Imagine a search site that is dedicated to nothing but sci-fi, and it includes blogs, reviews, and discussions from a curated list of smaller and independent publications. No large, ad-heavy, seo gimmicky sites are indexed.

YaCy (https://yacy.net) seems like a reasonable option for this.

I run an instance (non-peered) internally on my network. I index smaller blogs, mostly around music reviews. While I like to use RSS to get updates, I find having a search engine is great to go back and find something or to seek out something new. I only index with a depth of 1, so I get the origin site plus any direct links to external sites. For my purposes, it has been working really well and is easy to maintain.

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

#567

Post by ulisesrmzroche »

jiofih wrote: post #543
ulisesrmzroche wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People have been spreading their opinion to the masses forever. It was not born with YouTube. I don’t understand why you’re not getting it.

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

#569

Post by dvtrn »

kickscondor wrote: post #412
dvtrn wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi kicks! I didn’t know you were on HN, ever since discovering it I’ve been promoting the IndieWeb, and yours was the first site I came across; to me the IndieWeb and microformats is the web we should have gotten instead of one dominated by platforms .

Where are you promoting things, dvtrn? Good to meet you.

Where are you promoting things

...on a platform (it was a tweet), ironically. I tore my jekyll-based site down earlier this year because I have a bad habit of redesigning it every other Tuesday.

it’s a strange compulsion, but your site and a few others I found on indieweb.xyz have been some good motivation to work towards some degree of content permanence that I own and control (plus a general frustration and growing loss of patience with the platform)

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

#570

Post by bachmeier »

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?

Apparently, they've stopped posting it. I'm referring to things like advice, introduction to the field, a bibliography of the important papers in the field, why they love their research topic, and that sort of thing.
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