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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)

#71

Post by ypcx »

capybara_2020 wrote: post #62
veidr wrote: post #25

Yeah 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.

Yep, "SEO" killed the internet. As have "Accept Cookies" prompts, "Do you want notifications" prompts, "Subscribe to our newsletter" prompts and "Why are you leaving our page" prompts. Content farms, click-bot-like farms, fake-review farms. The free internet is dead.

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs (2020)

#73

Post by BiteCode_dev »

veidr wrote: post #25

Yeah 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…

Yes, I think is a need for some platform that provides blog+microblog on your domain, and that automatically forwards the content to social platforms so that you get the best of both worlds:

1 - owning your blog is too big of a barrier of entry, there is a need for a platform: look at the success at medium for tech writers, despite that we hate it.

2 - we need the return of the domain name based blog. This helps with independence, censorship, and the like. You can always move from the platform, and the platform can claim they can't censor you since it's your domain, so DMCA should be sent to you directly.

3 - this platform should do blog + microblog. You don't always have something long to say, announcement, though and quick tips are very well suited to tweets. But only this format leads to quality deficiency. Being able to write a big article easily is equally important.

4 - forwarding all posts to your social networks is essential. Yes, your blog should be the original source (so you get ref, credit, independence and not the duplicate content ban from google). But the discovery problem cannot be solved easily, and those networks already exist.

EDIT: unrelated, but I love phone calls. I mean, I hate doing them, but I love having the ability to do them. It's a universal reliable tech, it works in the country side, it works when the wifi is down, it works well in the car, and I don't have to have the app du jour installed or insist that the other party does.

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs (2020)

#74

Post by azhenley »

solarengineer wrote: post #7

How do you all discover blogs? I used to discover blogs via the Yahoo Directory, blog rolls (where we mention others' blogs as external links to follow up), Live Journal's listing, and cross-referencing of blog posts. Google search used to surface blog posts too. Now it's all on Medium - where I don't grudge those who want reliable hosting+discoverability and want to get paid for content, and where Medium charges for…

I find blogs by periodically asking my friends for suggestions. I recently made my list of favorites:

https://web.eecs.utk.edu/~azh/blog/favblogs.html

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs (2020)

#75

Post by mkr-hn »

d3nj4l wrote: post #56

As 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'm experimenting with a once every other month newsletter using Revue + the Twitter integration.[0] Tweeting is about the only way I've found to get views on stuff I write nowadays, and Twitter's analytics say I get tens to hundreds of profile views a month. Now there's a big signup button on there that pre-fills the email address.

I have a theory that 99% of blog posts could fit in a tweet's worth of text or a short thread. Most things that need more length probably don't need SEO-friendly length (500+ words) and are better bundled up in a traditional newsletter. And the stuff that does need that length can just be the main part of the newsletter.

[0] https://twitter.com/ViewfinderFox / https://newsletter.viewfinderfox.com/

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs (2020)

#76

Post by adrianN »

d3nj4l wrote: post #56

As 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…

The lack of central discovery is one of the main appeals of blogs imho. I don't want to discover blogs via a directory. I want to discover them through links from blogs I already read or recommendations from friends.

I think blogs started dieing when they optimized for maximizing their audience instead of being locations where people write about stuff that interests them without an expectation of "making it".

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs (2020)

#77

Post by anovikov »

d3nj4l wrote: post #56

As 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…

Isn't this the whole people of blogs today? "Write something Google bot will like reading"

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs (2020)

#79

Post by lonk11 »

d3nj4l wrote: post #56

As 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…

Discovery of good sources of information such as blogs is hard. And I think the biggest problem is the lack of trust. Everyone wants to grab your attention [1]. So how do you know that others won't waste your attention?

To solve this problem I am building https://linklonk.com that cultivates trust as you rate content. When you upvote a link you connect stronger to the feed that posted it (which could be a blog's feed) and to other users that upvoted this link before you. When you downvote - your connections to those who upvoted become weaker.

The strength of your connections to other feeds and users represents how useful their content recommendations have been to you in the past and they could be used as a measure of how likely their future recommendations will be worth your time (ie, trust that they won't waste your time).

The content is ranked according to the connection weights - so you get information from the sources that have shown to be content curators for you.

I did a Show HN recently for this project that has more details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28405643

[1] - like my comment here tries to draw your attention to my hobby project.

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs (2020)

#80

Post by manuelmoreale »

SMAAART wrote: post #49

Evolution of offline information networks: Printing press -> Radio -> Television Evolution of online information networks: Blogs -> Podcasts -> Videos What is interesting is that: 1. Podcasts > Videos since they can be consumed in more places than Videos 2. People love and consume long forms podcasts (>1 hour)

The issue with podcast—which I absolutely love—is one of discoverability and distribution.

Blogs can be easily indexable and searchable while podcasts are definitely not.

Also, the vast majority of podcasts rely on 3rd party services to distribute their content on podcast apps.

Which makes the entire infrastructure a lot more fragile than a simple self hosted blog IMO.

They’re still an awesome medium though, especially for long conversations.

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