I like the way blogs are written today. If a take care not to find them through google, I can even reach some good ones. A large proliferation of blogs has detrimental effects when searching. Except for SEO aberrations, currently only people who have really interesting things to say about a subject have incentives to write blogs and that is how things should be.
If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs (2020)
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Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs (2020)
#62Yeah blogs are still here, BUT: (like email ( sob ) and telephone-calling (hooray)) a lot of people that once did blog don't anymore. Not in the "I had kids so my blog went dark for a few years" sense, but in the sense of "ooh twitter was invented and now I just emit a halfassed one-sentence brainfart or 5-second tiktok cellphone video and get way more dopamine hits". I've been reading blogs and perusing my self-cura…
There are more blogs out there today. But with a focus on SEO the quality of blogs has dropped.
To meet some arbitrary SEO goal like, longer articles do better we have people filling in the top 1/3 with unneeded filler. Then we have companies trying to plug their product in a "10 best tools for X" article. Even if their product is crap for that feature, along with the content mills, the quality has dropped.
Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs (2020)
#63Plenty of well-written, insightful and contemporary blogs on the Gemini network.
Get off the web and into some other part of the internet.
Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs (2020)
#64As a minor counterpoint: I've come to dread blogs and newsletters because so many of them are written by grind culture freaks who only write faux-insightful SEO'd content as a way to build an audience to sell snake oil to. These days the only blogs I trust are the ones I see on the top of HN or lobsters, which is unfortunate because I have interests beyond tech and I find it very, very difficult to find good blogs I…
I feel like web rings really resolved this issue.
Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs (2020)
#65As a minor counterpoint: I've come to dread blogs and newsletters because so many of them are written by grind culture freaks who only write faux-insightful SEO'd content as a way to build an audience to sell snake oil to. These days the only blogs I trust are the ones I see on the top of HN or lobsters, which is unfortunate because I have interests beyond tech and I find it very, very difficult to find good blogs I…
Metafilter and some hand-selected sub-reddits may fill that need for non-tech fields.
Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs (2020)
#66As a minor counterpoint: I've come to dread blogs and newsletters because so many of them are written by grind culture freaks who only write faux-insightful SEO'd content as a way to build an audience to sell snake oil to. These days the only blogs I trust are the ones I see on the top of HN or lobsters, which is unfortunate because I have interests beyond tech and I find it very, very difficult to find good blogs I…
> I've come to dread blogs and newsletters because so many of them are written by grind culture freaks who only write faux-insightful SEO'd content as a way to build an audience to sell snake oil to.
My way around that is to pay. I find paid newsletters/blogs tend to evade SEO crap, for good reason: no one actually likes writing or reading that shit. Also, usually by forgoing the SEO crap they can focus on niche topics and content because they focus on retaining subscriptions.
The subscription also allows the writers to be more human for lack of a better description. They actually use their voice when writing instead of the generic SEO salesman pep, and they feel more comfortable with offering their real opinions and views.
Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs (2020)
#67Substack is driving a blog renaissance. A ton of high-quality niche blogs popping up everywhere. See, for example, https://antonhowes.substack.com/ (I'm not affiliated with the writer, though I am considering switching from free to paid)
Why would I use this instead of my own domain and a website hosted for free on Netlify or GitHub Pages? I can get quite a lot of views by posting my latest posts to the relevant forums (HN, Reddit, programming forums)... if there's any advantage I am not seeing, I actually do want to know.
> Why would I use this instead of my own domain and a website hosted for free on Netlify or GitHub Pages?
Email subscriptions made easy enough for a non-techie audience to subscribe.
Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs (2020)
#68Yeah blogs are still here, BUT: (like email ( sob ) and telephone-calling (hooray)) a lot of people that once did blog don't anymore. Not in the "I had kids so my blog went dark for a few years" sense, but in the sense of "ooh twitter was invented and now I just emit a halfassed one-sentence brainfart or 5-second tiktok cellphone video and get way more dopamine hits". I've been reading blogs and perusing my self-cura…
> Not in the "I had kids so my blog went dark for a few years" sense, but in the sense of "ooh twitter was invented and now I just emit a halfassed one-sentence brainfart or 5-second tiktok cellphone video and get way more dopamine hits".
Most blog-entries were never much more than that anyway, especially since the free blog-services started appearing and setting up a blog was effortless. There is a reason why Twitter were named micro-blogging-service in the beginning. And the other side was blogging being a primitive form of social network, till better social networks appeared. So it made sense for people who were more interested in the social aspect to moved to the optimized services.
> I've been reading blogs and perusing my self-curated NetNewsWire RSS feeds for 20+ years, and blogs never went away, RSS never died, Google Reader getting googled didn't really matter, etc.
In both cases, the hype died down, and was replaced by other hypes. The remaining people use them now for the dedicated reasons where both can shine their best. But the danger remains that loosing support will long term lead to them dying for real. In case of RSS it's already happening slowly. Though blogs are more resistant to this, as your blogging does not depend much on external support, as long as you do not care about money or reader-stats.
Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs (2020)
#69Blogs should not be reliant by search engines, we need a better way to build trusted networks between content authors where tech Giants are not required.
Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs (2020)
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah -- off the top of my head: danluu.com, plover.com, ciechanow.ski, essays by pg and many others have very high quality writing and are insightful. I don't accept there is a shortage of blogs.
I’ve got one topic that gets a lot of referral traffic, and then people follow the other more rambling personal stories. Twitter and YouTube drive a lot of traffic too.
I had the same experience. Have a few very popular posts that rank quite high even on Google (with absolutely no SEO bullshit done to them) but they represent maybe 5% of what I wrote about.
People find me through those posts and end up sticky around for the more personal/rambly stuff.