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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

#601

Post by carom »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #281
gfody wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

blogger's founder went on to create Medium after being chewed up and spit out by Google, you should give it a try you might have better luck

It's paywalled. I'm not interested. Perhaps I'm a fool, but I don't want to be part of that kind of internet. Most of my blogs have no ads. There are no paywalls. There is no subscription. I am trying to monetize it with Patreon and tips because I want that information to be freely available, but I have bills to pay. I gotta eat and I'm frequently broke. I'm flat broke right now. That's an all too common occurrence.…

The evils of ads and the brokenness of pay walls are a lot more nuanced than that.

Ads have created an ecosystem where no one is willing to pay for media because we have gotten it free in exchange for our privacy. This hurts you, small publications, large publications. No one wants to pay for shit and we are tracked everywhere we go.

Paywalls are broken because of the credit card system. Publishers can not charge a reasonable rate for an article. Due to minimums, our financial system really only makes sense to have subscriptions. I do not want to pay $5 per month recurring. I want to pay 25 cents per article. That is not possible though. Pop up a pay wall for 25 cents and I will pay it. Good luck having that make sense with Stripe fees though.

I try to monetize my work with Patreon as well. It is difficult work. Fuck ads though. That's not the world I want. I have other income though.

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

#602

Post by mirimir »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #598
mirimir wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... over the past ten years or so we have seen the establishment of an entirely new set of sacred social norms ... That depends on who you are, and where you hang out. By "sacred social norms", I presume that you mean what some call the "social justice movement": liberal perspectives on "race", culture, sexuality, gender, and other human rights. It's true that those norms now apply for liberal mass media, academica…

I mostly agree with you. But I do take issue with this: >But either way, both sides are ~equally intolerant. When I was growing up it was the intolerance of Christian morality that prevented people from living their lives and expressing themselves the way they wanted to. The intolerance was a largely bipartisan (see the PMRC with Tipper Gore and Paula Hawkins for instance), but it was really the Democrats that gave w…

> In the past those views (which I have not changed) aligned me much more firmly with the "left" than the "right", and the reverse is true today.

Yeah, same here.

But arguably the "right" just talks that way because they're recruiting. If they had a lock on the government, and the mass media bagged, they'd be far less tolerant.

But in any case, that's why I'm an anonymous coward. In meatspace, I just keep my head down. Nothing to see here, move along.

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

#603

Post by DoreenMichele »

carom wrote: post #601
DoreenMichele wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's paywalled. I'm not interested. Perhaps I'm a fool, but I don't want to be part of that kind of internet. Most of my blogs have no ads. There are no paywalls. There is no subscription. I am trying to monetize it with Patreon and tips because I want that information to be freely available, but I have bills to pay. I gotta eat and I'm frequently broke. I'm flat broke right now. That's an all too common occurrence.…

The evils of ads and the brokenness of pay walls are a lot more nuanced than that. Ads have created an ecosystem where no one is willing to pay for media because we have gotten it free in exchange for our privacy. This hurts you, small publications, large publications. No one wants to pay for shit and we are tracked everywhere we go. Paywalls are broken because of the credit card system. Publishers can not charge a r…

The picture is certainly a lot more complicated than I have covered here. I get tired of repeating the same points, but it boils down this:

1. The current status quo is that there are no acceptable ways for me to monetize my writing: People hate ads and use ad blockers, people hate Patreon, people hate tips, people hate it if you are using your writing to sell other products (aka "content marketing") etc ad nauseum. There is no means to monetize writing that doesn't get hated on, so people de facto expect writers to work for free.

2. I'm tired of trying to analyze it to death and prove my point. I'm more focused on "Where do we go from here?" and less focused on "How did we get here and why is this so messed up?" If you hate it, help me find a path forward and forge a new model we can spread.

I increasingly try to focus on "If you hate the status quo, do something about it and vote with your wallet instead of bitching on the internet and then acting like this is inevitable and we can't change it."

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

#604

Post by sandspar »

cousin_it wrote: post #501
Chathamization wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The publish or perish nature of blogs is one of the many reasons why I feel they're generally inferior to the personal web pages that were popular during the early web. It seems that there has been a general trend towards a constant churning of output in order to keep up the dopamine hits for users. The quality of a lot of online content reflects this.

Yeah. The antithesis of the blog is the evergreen page, where you collect and systematize information about one thing you're interested in, and keep improving it over the years. A great example is Robin Whittle's page about pink noise algorithms: http://www.firstpr.com.au/dsp/pink-noise/ It covers the topic from more angles than any single blogpost. Then at some point your page can become a collection of pages, like…

I love these types of pages. I know nothing about programming. Can you (or anyone reading this) suggest how I can go about making one? What's the bare minimum I'd need to learn to have essentially a single or a few pages with plain text, links, and photos on it, like the ones you posted? What terms should I search for to learn how to do this?

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

#606

Post by thomasahle »

tiborsaas wrote: post #531
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…

> 1) Google no longer respects search operators so that users can get fine-grained results They do. Search for "javascript vscode" and "javascript -vscode" completely different results.

Yesterday I was trying to find code examples using the d3 join() and each() functions. I tried searching "join(" "each(", but apparently Google completely removes parenthesis, even when inside quotes. Github's code search does the same thing :-(

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

#607

Post by TeMPOraL »

ian0 wrote: post #421
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…

>> Those blogs from the time before were written for the purpose of writing, not for the purpose of getting lots of viewership. Exactly this. Im not sure if my experience was typical, but i recall lots of small mini communities of bloggers, where each blog would have less than a dozen real followers, but everyone would read the other peoples content. Thats why you had the "follows" tab on the sidebar of the blog. I a…

Definitely true for me in the 2000s. My social network formed a bunch of circles with very little overlap. A blog, like the ones I and some of my friends used to have, would serve as a bridge, thanks to the sidebar linking to other people the blog author reads/recommends. Back in the day, I used to be active in a local gamedev scene, so my sidebar was mostly full of links to blogs of other hobbyist/aspiring game developers, who would in turn link back to me. If you were interested in gamedev, you could easily go from blog to blog and enumerate almost everyone in the group, but at each step you also had an opportunity to branch out to a given author's other interests.

It was a nice way of discovering new things, and a more personal one. You jumped around topics and social networks simultaneously; at every step it wasn't just a new theme, but a new person, an acqauintance of an acquaintance, someone with a name (or more likely then, a nickname) you would remember and refer back to in conversations. Even though we mostly didn't know one another except from blogs and IRC, the Internet felt much more like a village back then. Now, it feels like a strip mall.

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

#608

Post by cousin_it »

sandspar wrote: post #604
cousin_it wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. The antithesis of the blog is the evergreen page, where you collect and systematize information about one thing you're interested in, and keep improving it over the years. A great example is Robin Whittle's page about pink noise algorithms: http://www.firstpr.com.au/dsp/pink-noise/ It covers the topic from more angles than any single blogpost. Then at some point your page can become a collection of pages, like…

I love these types of pages. I know nothing about programming. Can you (or anyone reading this) suggest how I can go about making one? What's the bare minimum I'd need to learn to have essentially a single or a few pages with plain text, links, and photos on it, like the ones you posted? What terms should I search for to learn how to do this?

The bare minimum is to learn some HTML tags (the main ones are ,

, , ...), create a plain text file in Notepad and sprinkle it with these tags, save it as index.html, test it in a browser, then put it in a zip archive (along with other pages and images if you want) and upload at https://app.netlify.com/drop

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

#609

Post by saagarjha »

polishdude20 wrote: post #225
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 often notice when I start writing on a particular topic, I learn more about my thoughts and opinions of it and realize my thoughts are wrong or not really novel. Halfway in I give up since I feel like, "oh, this actually isn't really adding anything new to the conversation". Then I leave with a new humbleness about my beliefs but also a sense of "when am I actually going to know enough to warrant writing about it?"…

I have this happen too. What this means at least for me, is that I have dozens of little ideas of things to write about, usually after I’ve seen that I’ve encountered it multiple times, I really think I have a position on it, and I want to really see where they would go (those who know me on the site may have some good guesses as to what I currently have stashed for this). And then I stick that idea in a little list I call “future blog posts” and slowly add ideas to them over months (note I have not actually written anything for the blog post yet!) until they are polished the key points I really want to include and a coherent story that I want to tell with them. Then I sit down and write them, and by that time I’m very confident of which way I’m going, the rebuttals and my responses to those just flow naturally, and I generally keep that position in the future.

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

#610

Post by saagarjha »

mikro2nd wrote: post #546
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…

Note that you can’t actually get rid of all knowledge of which blog posts of yours are popular, because you’ll find out in other ways: it’ll be on the front page of Hacker News or people will email you about it, or a friend will link it back to you. If you’re looking for privacy-preserving analytics, this is the ultimate in that. If you want nothing at all…yeah, there’s really no way to run away from the world after you publish something.
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