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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)

#161

Post by maskros »

dsr_ wrote: post #136
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 way to find good blogs is to start by asking technical questions in whatever subject you are interested in. If you want to read about barbeque, you need to start with a technical question about barbeque; if you want to read about Greek history, you need a question about that. Eventually you will find somebody knowledgeable who is writing about that subject. They will in turn link to others, or comment on others,…

Discussion groups and forums used to be useful, but now they're dying out and being replaced by undiscoverable walled garden facebook groups and discord servers...

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

#162

Post by Lamad123 »

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…

I used to hate canned tuna in the past but I love it now!! Your mechanism doesn't account for this!

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

#163

Post by TOGoS »

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)

Don't know why sibling is dead; perfectly good points about discoverability of podcasts. To which I reply: I have had success discovering podcasts when they had transcriptions on the page. Google for some words, hit upon page, say "I can't read all this now but hey there's a link to audio", download the entire series, transcode to 16kbps Opus using ffmpeg, put it on my phone, listen in the car.

(The two examples I have in mind are https://www.psymposia.com/podcasts/plusthree/ and https://www.organism.earth/library/document/conversations-on..., which would suggest that posting transcriptions with your audio is something that occurs to people after consuming a certain quantity of mushrooms, or maybe it's just that the stuff those people tend to say happens to match stuff I'm googling for. Something something "hierarchical power structures".)

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

#164

Post by rchaud »

shoto_io wrote: post #33

Content marketing, medium and twitter crushed blogging. The first two are about the reputation of blogging and the third about lower levels of entry for most people. Sad but true.

Medium and Twitter siloed blogs into a 'recommended for you' type of delivery medium. Blogger was agnostic in that regard, it only showed your content, and the blogroll was set by the user.

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

#166

Post by rchaud »

codingdave wrote: post #17

Their about page talks about using reddit to post hate speech, then just link to it from their blog, to get around censorship on blogging platforms. I honestly cannot tell if this author is wanting that because they are truly passionate about freedom of speech, or if they are feeling personally stifled in expressing their opinions. Either way, this post feels like an attempt to say they want a blogging platform where…

It was weird how the latter half of the post seemed completely detached from the first.

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

#167

Post by dfxm12 »

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…

only write faux-insightful SEO'd content as a way to build an audience to sell snake oil to.

I really wonder, is the money from ads good enough that publishing content like this profitable, even with all the blogspam competition?

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

#168

Post by shadowgovt »

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 working on a hypothesis that there is something I call the "AM radio effect," which, roughly speaking, is "As communication technologies progress in comfort and convenience, the older generation will become dominated by hucksters who try to take advantage of those who cannot or will not switch." It's my explanation for

- what happened to AM radio as FM, satellite, and podcasting came to dominate the American driving experience

- what happened to landline telephone as point-to-point communication became dominated by cellphones, smartphones, and increasingly non-phone-voice-network audio and videoconferencing technologies

I wouldn't be surprised if blogs suffer the same problem in the era of microblogging and centralized microblogging services.

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

#169

Post by rchaud »

brabel wrote: post #42
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)

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.

You'd go to Substack if the endgame was to develop a paying audience. Views alone don't pay writers' bills.

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

#170

Post by ant6n »

s_dev wrote: post #10
nxpnsv wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have discovered many blogs reading HN...

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.

there's a shortage of blog reading, meaning theres less of an incentive to write.
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