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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

#581

Post by Shared404 »

cameronbrown wrote: post #115
Shared404 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imho, try to keep it from going mainstream. If there aren't enough viewers to make advertising profitable, then many of the problems filling the current internet would not appear in the first place.

Gatekeeping then?

Not gatekeeping, I phrased my idea badly before, and I'm sorry about that. I would like to make it clear that I feel very strongly against gatekeeping, and against censorship.

More like not pushing for more acceptance. Allow a community to form, but do not try to market your way into a larger community.

Obviously this approach is not sustainable, at least on the first try, as the Internet itself shows.

However, now that the internet already exists, a parallel internet so to speak would not have as much/any appeal to the average consumer/corporation, which ideally would lead to only those who are interested in the community/content arriving there.

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

#582

Post by rob2312 »

marmot777 wrote: post #579

I disagree with the author’s idea that blogs shouldn’t have a focus. I think the best blogs are these sort: 1. By an expert in a specific domain. 2. Blogs by someone in the process of developing expertise, documenting what they learned along the way. The idea is it really helps the learning process to learn something well enough to write about it cogently and teach others.

On the second point, the ones that really appealed to me were the indie game dev blogs. They would figure out a unique mechanic or way of implementing a nice graphical effect, and then do a short post about it. Then other developers might pick up on it and adapt it for their projects. Most of the time those blogs were eventually abandoned along with the games they were trying to make but I think that a lot of indie games that have been released probably learnt a lot and sourced inspiration from those blogs. I wouldn't be surprised if a game like Terraria found a lot of inspiration from all the procedural generation blog posts after Minecraft came out.

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

#583

Post by nialv7 »

_bxg1 wrote: post #432
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…

You inspired me to do a project today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23208846

There seem to already be such a list: https://github.com/jkup/awesome-personal-blogs

But certainly the more the merrier

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

#584

Post by AmericanChopper »

mirimir wrote: post #534
AmericanChopper wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world hasn't had enormous user generated content platforms (where it's reasonably common to use your real name) for very long at all. But I would say it started out in a much better state than it is now, and has been progressively getting worse. It's reasonably common to have somebody held in high esteem by the various groups that are highly concerned with political correctness, suffer catastrophic falls from gra…

You mean "not strictly technical", right? As Mirimir, I have voiced opinions about such topics. I'm not dogmatic, but neither do I avoid dark humor, so I suspect that I've managed to piss off some on every "side". Anyway, I was thinking about decades ago. There were opinions that you just didn't voice, if you cared about your reputation. Back in the 50s, communism became a dangerous topic in the US. And homosexuality…

> You mean "not strictly technical", right?

Yes I did, sorry.

The rest of your comment here highlights why I believe freedom of expression is so important. Society would not have progressed if it were not for people brave enough to defy those social norms. I guess the intolerance for alternative points of view has not changed, but over the past ten years or so we have seen the establishment of an entirely new set of sacred social norms, which I would characterize as a bit of a regression.

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

#585

Post by tenebrisalietum »

> Nowadays people won't share content simply because they don't trust the internet to share content to it.

What the author speaks of sounds a lot like I2P.

Years ago I played around with I2P. I2P was pretty interesting, it was a traffic obfuscator like Tor that had the express goal of not connecting to anyone else who wasn't also on I2P. (Of course people can and did run outproxies where you could connect to the web through them).

If you made a site available on I2P you had to keep the local I2P router running. You could register your node with a I2P hosts maintainer if you wanted and that was as far as DNS went (it was pass around the hosts text-file style).

The couple sites I found were a lot like the web in the early 90's as far as style and content. Before I stopped messing around with it, someone had created a Twitter clone and made it available. At that point it was very slow. This was probably 2011.

Overall, there's nothing preventing people from trading lists of URLs, and nothing preventing anyone from putting these in local a searchable database. It's completely possible to do this without Google. Google made it much easier and spoiled us, but there was a world before Google and there can be one afterward.

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

#586

Post by benhurmarcel »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #457
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…

This is so true... Youtube is kind of the new blog because so many people don't like writing but they love seeing themselves on screen. This made it too commercial. All the top youtubers do it just for the sponsorship. People like Linus Tech Tips etc, all this "check this out from our sponsors" crap. It really put me off Youtube. The only ones I still watch are zero punctuation and EEVBlog. Dave is also doing it as a…

You might be interested by this: https://sponsor.ajay.app/

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

#587

Post by hispanic »

crazygringo wrote: post #358
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Blogs ... show up easily in search results if a post matches a relevant query. No, they don't. This comes down to two main changes in how Google operates: 1) Google no longer respects search operators so that users can get fine-grained results, and 2) Google has chosen to progressively delist old content, even if many blog posts from the early millennium remain just as relevant today because no one has posted at le…

Not that I don't believe you, but that just hasn't been my experience with Google at all, and I use it extensively for research tracking down fairly obscure sources with presumably close-to-zero traffic by putting in quoted sentence fragments. Do you have an example of a website that is linked to from other sites (so Google can find it) where a quoted search for a unique sentence fragment from it doesn't list it as a…

Google 100% removes viable entries from their index. I have a blog and I can see via the Google Search Console [1] that several of my posts are marked as "Crawled - currently not indexed". Meaning, Google was led to the page via my sitemap.xml or some other source, crawled it, and then chose not to include it in their search index. It's very discouraging, particularly when it happens to posts that, personally, I'm quite fond of [2]. If it matters, Google has recorded 1,085 clicks from their search results to my blog, in general, over the course of the past 3 months.

[1] https://search.google.com/u/2/search-console/

[2] https://blog.michaelscepaniak.com/how-to-find-choose-and-boo... https://blog.michaelscepaniak.com/i-am-retired-kinda

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

#588

Post by marmot777 »

rob2312 wrote: post #582
marmot777 wrote: post #579

I disagree with the author’s idea that blogs shouldn’t have a focus. I think the best blogs are these sort: 1. By an expert in a specific domain. 2. Blogs by someone in the process of developing expertise, documenting what they learned along the way. The idea is it really helps the learning process to learn something well enough to write about it cogently and teach others.

On the second point, the ones that really appealed to me were the indie game dev blogs. They would figure out a unique mechanic or way of implementing a nice graphical effect, and then do a short post about it. Then other developers might pick up on it and adapt it for their projects. Most of the time those blogs were eventually abandoned along with the games they were trying to make but I think that a lot of indie g…

Funny you mention Minecraft. My son LOVES Minecraft.

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

#589

Post by anticsapp »

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…

I disagree, I had 100,000 uniques on my third blog post. Of course, there was less Internet in 2005.

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

#590

Post by cameronbrown »

Shared404 wrote: post #581
cameronbrown wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gatekeeping then?

Not gatekeeping, I phrased my idea badly before, and I'm sorry about that. I would like to make it clear that I feel very strongly against gatekeeping, and against censorship. More like not pushing for more acceptance. Allow a community to form, but do not try to market your way into a larger community. Obviously this approach is not sustainable, at least on the first try, as the Internet itself shows. However, now t…

How is that different from subreddits - Or communities like HN? Those aren't technical decisions, but social ones, so why do we need a new internet to implement them?
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