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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

#611

Post by saagarjha »

cameronbrown wrote: post #552
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…

Lmao.. Literally the only time I've gotten a flood of emails was from when I described my experience applying to a FAANG company. Quite sad actually, as I'd been shouting into the void about far more interesting things for years.

You really don’t get to pick, sadly.

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

#612

Post by saagarjha »

xwdv wrote: post #278
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 feel that rather than blogging, more people should write comments. I’ve never written one blog article, but I’ve written a novel worth of comments over the years. A comment IMO is more pure and true, and is created out of a strong desire to say something, rather than for some other extrinsic motivation. My problem with blogging is that I can’t just write in a vacuum, I must always write in response to something and…

As someone who writes a lot of comments but also now blogs a bit: blog posts for me are just long, thought out comments; often they’re an amalgamation of comments I might have left, or little bits on a topic that I keep around but have never had a place to write as a comment so I put them all together into one big one and polish it.

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

#613

Post by saagarjha »

fragmede wrote: post #447
freehunter wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is super awful when you’re trying to have a potentially controversial discussion with someone. Even if both of you are interested in the discussion it gets to a point where why bother continuing because no one is going to see it when they have to click “load more comments” and follow the thread for hours or days. Forums like Reddit and HN actively encourage short pithy sound bites that sound interesting but are…

Reddit, at least, has an active reply notification system, so while this is rare, at least it's possible to have a conversation, even if it's probably only visible to its participants. HN's lack of an active reply notification means that, unless you're checking the [threads] link obsessively, replies can easily go unnoticed, so writing here is more performative. How that intersects with the rest of the site's dynamic…

I enjoy https://www.hnreplies.com. Perhaps you might too.

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

#614

Post by sideshowb »

sideshowb wrote: post #4

Well you can have a link to my unsuccessful unfocused blog. I have posted fairly recently though. Software music mountaineering etc http://omnisplore.wordpress.com

...though when I say unsuccessful I should clarify I'm being tongue in cheek. Sharing ideas makes me happy whether or not it brings me any material benefit :)

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

#615

Post by solidist »

A very short post (a graphic, really) about what I learned about blogging over the years.

https://medium.com/@solidi/the-one-about-blogging-cd9e65a205...

The discovery? I am interested in humanist side of software development. With writing once every 2 months for 3.5 years, this small but impactful finding changed my life and focus.

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

#616

Post by mikro2nd »

lufte wrote: post #553
mikro2nd wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I started my own blog last month and I am following this advice 100%. I'm not using analytics or trackers of any sort, not only for believing they create they same delusion you mention in your post, but also because I try to block all types of trackers when visiting other sites. Why would I use the very thing I'm trying so hard to avoid when surfing the web? It's basically a matter of respect to the reader. So I desi…

Your reason -- respect for your readers, treating them as you wish to be treated yourself -- is the exact reason I started down this road. It took me a while to realise that there was this other, more subtle, benefit, too.

+1 on joining in. Perhaps we can turn it into a movement. ;)

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

#617

Post by r_c_a_d »

freehunter wrote: post #334
pmlnr wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The blogs the author misses aren't written to make money off of ad traffic, they were just written to put down ideas. This is what I've been pointing out for years as the lost core of the internet.

It seems like this is a cultural shift in society as well. There are no more hobbies, everything is a side hustle and if you can’t turn a profit from it, it’s not worth doing. I’m not an economist or sociologist so I can’t Even pretend to understand why this is, but it’s a trend I’ve noticed over the past few years.

Is that true? Or is it just the case that people trying to make a profit have learned how to promote themselves to an extent that drowns out the hobbyists?

I had some hobby pages in the 1990s that got a lot of views and came high up in search results. None of them were ever deliberately publicised. I doubt that any of my material would show in the top 1000 of any web search today.

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

#618

Post by pell »

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…

I won't argue whether the (American) left is necessarily protecting free speech at all costs. That's a complicated question.

But I think it's a stretch to call the situation "reversed". You can see the right often using the very methods and talking points they seem to criticize on the left. From efforts to shut down protests, to constant usage of patriotic symbols to silence speech ("if you kneel during the anthem, you're disrespecting the flag"), to starting investigations for cases where speech didn't align with their values.

Here's an article about growing right-wing threats to free speech on campus for example. Note, this article was published in Reason of all places: https://reason.com/2019/09/19/the-growing-right-wing-threat-...

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

#619

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

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…

Annoying Technology is one of my favorite recent finds. Just wanted to vouch: Good stuff!
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