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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)

#251

Post by Brajeshwar »

I was lucky to be part of the early blog sunrise around 2000. I was even more lucky to have a blog that was picked up, recognized by the likes of Macromedia, Adobe, and linked by a lot others. I believe there are a few references from few entries in Wikipedia and few other well known websites.

When Google Adsense was a thing and fun, I had it running on my site for quite a long time. There was a time when I supported my Startup with the income from my blog. A few of my years in Mumbai was just living off of the income from my blog.

20+ years now, I just have my blog as a record and archive for all the fun, stupid, silly, and nonsense that I wrote. Now, I write for myself and perhaps for my kids to browse around in future and, may, laugh. I have no comments, no analytics, nothing at all now.

I can understand the new generations loathing the likes of Blogs, Emails. However, I look at them as a digital record of my life.

For instance, I stumble on people online and then I reply back to the email thread we had in 2005. How nice is that?

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

#252

Post by diskzero »

epc wrote: post #185
habibur wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Like OPML? http://opml.org/

OPML could be part of a solution for authoring blogs that then can publish using RSS. It is an interchange format for outline with attributed text.

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

#254

Post by FiggyPudding »

Nextgrid wrote: post #218
schemescape wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish there was some way to "undo" my contribution to a site's advertising revenue when I start reading and discover the page is just SEO garbage (e.g. when I see a sentence that starts with "many reviewers noted that ...").

This is a “feature”. There’s so much content out there whose sole purpose is to drive advertising revenue, either with complicity of the brand being advertised or incidentally (as targeting is never 100% reliable, there’s always a bit of “leakage” where an ad would be displayed next to irrelevant or content that the advertiser would normally object to - at scale that leakage is money someone can capitalise on). A lot…

Some of these comments seem to support that LBRY thing that was on HN again recently if using it for blog docs instead of videos

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

#255

Post by diskzero »

stared wrote: post #140
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…

Setting a blog is easier than ever: Medium has a close to zero barrier of entry. With all its criticism here, it helped many people start blogging in the first place. I don't know if bloggers turned to Twitter, TikTok, and similar goldfish attention span media. (Maybe. I don't have data.) I think it is more likely that high-quality blog posts drown in the sea of tweets. More people do the latter, and the cost of doin…

I agree with the ease of use, but I won't author or read Medium articles anymore. I am sure Medium feels that it is providing a valuable service by providing a platform for authors to monetize their content. I would prefer to pay an author directly and have no desire to support a service that sits between me and the content provider.

I realize I am being utopian, but providing a facility like Medium that uses open standards, allows bloggers to blog and doesn't skim profits should be a public service.

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

#256

Post by __turbobrew__ »

grifball wrote: post #223
coliveira wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can you recommend a good blog then?

https://nullprogram.com/

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

#257

Post by BiteCode_dev »

tablespoonsruby wrote: post #245
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

blog+microblog on your domain, and that automatically forwards the content to social platforms Micro.blog does this!

Not really, it does not provide a blog feature, only a bridge.

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

#258

Post by omegalulw »

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…

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

This cracked me up good lol. Btw, another big problem is people writing "blogs" as if they were experts without having expertise e.g. machine learning medium articles making wild unsubstantiated. It's so misleading, especially because ML is already not particularly rigorous due to black box models.

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

#259

Post by Digit-Al »

slightknack wrote: post #14
tinyprojects wrote: post #11

I've built a service that lets you create a micro-blog from a paper journal: https://paperwebsite.com/ It's given me great joy just publishing my unfiltered thoughts on the internet straight from my pen, which sounds similar to the "unfocused blogs" the author was talking about. Perhaps in this highly edited, Instagram world we now live in - the raw, unedited nature of a blog is a bit more scary. I still love them th…

I vote that we add our blogs / other good blogs we have come across as children on this comment. I'll start, here's mine: - https://slightknack.dev/blog Here are some others: - https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com - https://www.gwern.net/index - https://danluu.com - https://tonsky.me/ - https://lemire.me/blog/ - https://waitbutwhy.com/ - https://www.kalzumeus.com/archive/ - https://blog.codinghorror.com/

I'll bite and submit mine. Las year, during lockdown, I read the Rolling Stone 100 greatest metal albums list. As I was stuck at home most of the time and had nothing better to do I decided to listen to all 100 albums and write my thoughts on each one. I originally posted them to Facebook, but as Facebook is a crap environment to write longer form content I wrote each one into a text note and pasted it to Facebook when I had finished writing it. When I had finished I thought it would be good to put them into a blog so it would be easier to revisit them later if I wanted to.

https://www.pandelon.co.uk/blog

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

#260

Post by lupire »

lonk11 wrote: post #147
naravara wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think trust can be reliably built with elements of gamification like this. The deal with gamification is that people learn to game it out, which erodes the kinds of sincere or honest interactions you're trying to cultivate. In the olden times blogs earned trust by cultivating a reputation. The reputation was earned by having an audience that trusted them and recommended them. Cross-linking content to other bl…

> If you want to build trust it has to work on the agents producing the content... LinkLonk's algorithm works that way. It builds trust in sources of information (including users who rate content). And it does not and will not try to understand the individual pieces of content. Unlike the social media feeds that are powered by black box neural networks, LinkLonk's algorithm is transparent. You know how your interacti…

I hope you are inspired by your experience today, seeing that all the negative criticism of your project is so weak. Keep up the good work.
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