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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)

#111

Post by pixelgeek »

Interesting that there has been no comment on the impact of social media on blogging. I had a blog to chronicle my gaming hobby for over a decade and I gave it up recently because the audience for that type of blog has disappeared.

Most of the people that would read non-technical blogs have changed their browsing habits to mostly consume content on Facebook. Most commercial content has moved to social media. Forums have disappeared for the most part. My hobby, and I suspect a lot of hobbies, have moved on to social media. As an example, the local tabletop gaming community here at one point had four distinct forums and a large number of hobby blogs. All of that is now on Facebook.

I think you can see the impact of that on the decline in Blogger support and Wordpress' move to include more tools and support for 'professional' bloggers. Wordpress is more and more a platform for those SEO huxsters.

Blogs aren't going to come back to the internet until the audience for them comes back and that won't happen until social media, especially Facebook, is no longer capturing that audience.

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

#112

Post by habibur »

lonk11 wrote: post #79
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…

We need a standard API to subscribe to blogs on other sites, that will appear on our blog feed as news feed -- like how facebook or tweeter feeds work. RSS is too personal, too much outside the flow.

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

#113

Post by marginalia_nu »

SPBS wrote: post #13
asicsp wrote: post #5

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23205588 ( May 16, 2020, 614 comments )

The top comment: > You'll check the analytics. Abysmal. Nobody is reading! > You may write a few more posts, but it's always the same story. A lot of work goes in, but not much comes out. I never understood this sentiment. Who cares if no one is reading? You blog because you have something to express on the internet, not because you're seeking attention from others. Content creation for the sole purpose of views is i…

I do think there's a middle road. I do indeed think it's incredibly toxic to write for the reactions, but at the same time, it's extremely lonely to find your only readers are the bots that probe for compromised wordpress installs.

It's great to have a community of sorts. I've found that in gemini space, there's a small number of active bloggers that run in the same circles and occasionally make replies on each posts they feel interesting (because almost virtually all pages are static, almost no comment fields).

It's not so much about the attention as it is about the sense of community and belonging.

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

#115

Post by stevoski »

I have a feeling the author of this post wasn’t an active blogger themselves when the heyday of personal blogs ended. I blogged actively from 2008 to about 2015. Through some luck, I had a good sized audience right from the beginning.

Sometime around 2012 or 2013, the amount of time the average person spent on social media got high enough that it became their default time sink. People simply stopped interacting with personal blogs in the way they used to.

Writing blog posts every couple of days was fun when every new post would get a few comments from regular readers. But quite rapidly those comments simply stopped, and instead almost every comment was blog spam.

In my opinion, it had nothing to do with the blogging platforms, and everything to do with the rise of social media.

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

#116

Post by weird-eye-issue »

varrock wrote: post #89
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've always wanted to blog because I love to write. However, I've been very hesitant to do so because of exactly what you described: the grind culture. I've felt immense pressure to make every post academic, but I realized that the blog should be for me first and foremost. In fact, my first blog post ever is describing the purpose behind my blog and _why_ I started it. It will help keep me accountable. However — I do…

This is some serious premature optimization you are doing.

The fact is nobody is going to read your blog post about why you are starting a blog, so you are basically just writing it for yourself. Which is fine - but you need to be aware that if you are writing for yourself there is basically a 0% chance your blog will ever get any amount of traffic.

So keep writing for yourself and leave it at that but don't stress about problems you aren't going to have and calling yourself a content creator

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

#117

Post by mkr-hn »

agent008t wrote: post #57
krapp wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If anything there's probably more blogs now than there were before There's more everything than there was before. Despite popular opinion, the rest of the web didn't shrivel up and die when Twitter, Facebook and Youtube got popular.

Do you have any evidence for that? The message boards/blogs that I frequented a decade ago are all either gone or are a lot less active than they were before, and certainly have a lot fewer users. So it's not just activity per user that has gone way down, but the number of users as well.

Discord killed off a lot of forums that survived Reddit. This is especially true for forums where chat threads were the most active.

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

#118

Post by varrock »

weird-eye-issue wrote: post #116
varrock wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always wanted to blog because I love to write. However, I've been very hesitant to do so because of exactly what you described: the grind culture. I've felt immense pressure to make every post academic, but I realized that the blog should be for me first and foremost. In fact, my first blog post ever is describing the purpose behind my blog and _why_ I started it. It will help keep me accountable. However — I do…

This is some serious premature optimization you are doing. The fact is nobody is going to read your blog post about why you are starting a blog, so you are basically just writing it for yourself. Which is fine - but you need to be aware that if you are writing for yourself there is basically a 0% chance your blog will ever get any amount of traffic. So keep writing for yourself and leave it at that but don't stress a…

I understand, which is why I mentioned it being a hypothetical. Maybe I shouldn't have used myself as an example. It's not something I'm worried about. I've only shared the blog with close friends. That's my intention moving forward.

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

#119

Post by coliveira »

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…

You misunderstand blogs: you can find the good ones only by personal referral or by actively trying. If you have to search Google, then you'll, by definition, find only the ones that are optimizing for search engines. There is no way to solve this problem, and I think the same is true for other forms of social interaction.

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

#120

Post by pixelgeek »

throwawaaaaay17 wrote: post #40

Substack 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)

Well it is for professional writers. I think that the initial wave of blogs lead to a lot of people getting work as paid writers and now Substack is helping those people build their own market outside of the declining magazine and newspaper industries.
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