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How the blog broke the web (2017)

stackingthebricks.com

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Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)

#21

Post by greatNespresso »

Liked the article but my feeling is that, at the end of the day, nobody cares about the tools you choose. People are only interested in the end results.

There's nothing preventing you from building your site out of manually crafted HTML pages (I do for instance) and I would even dare to say that it has never been easier to do so (things like Emmet make it really easier to produce HTML content from your text editor of choice, services like cloudflare pages or vercel take less than a minute to go from local to public).

CMS made it easier indeed for not-so-technical-savvy folks to push stuff on the WWW but is it actually a bad thing? At the end of the day, it's the content that matters in my opinion.

Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)

#22

Post by jimbler »

You can't go home again. I think an argument could be made that tools like Moveable Type and Blogger and Wordpress made the web. And, another argument could probably be made that seo-chum "articles" like this (and ad networks) broke the web. But, really Twitter and FB and YouTube are probably the most likely killers.

Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)

#25

Post by SkeuomorphicBee »

I loved the insight of how the chronological method of organization took over the zeitgeist of the early Internet, pushing out the handcrafted lists/hierarchies into weird niches in the sidelines, and eventually leading to it being superseded by the algorithmic-sorting that dominates the web today.

It is not that we can't make a non-chronological (or non algorithmic-sorting) website now a days, we obviously can as there are many comments here listing various CMSs. But it is about how the vast majority of people don't do feel inclined to participate on the non-chrono/non-algo internet (either because they don't like it or don't know it). For them to put something out there in the internet is synonymous to put it on a chrono/algo format.

Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)

#26

Post by tiborsaas »

firasd wrote: post #8

This is interesting but I don't think it's what "broke the web". What really broke it is that those 20-30 million people who would have made hobbyist blogs or posted to forums are now part of the 200million (twitter) or 2 billion+ (FB) who just post on social media instead. Almost nobody is out there blogging about gardening just cause they like the topic, the new gardening content on the web is all SEO driven

80 gardening bloggers:

https://codesupply.co/gardening-blogs/

Optimized for SEO driven possibly, but the question is, is it still useful?

The web still has all kinds of niche content, it just takes a bit of time to find it. Publishing content has diverged a great deal since 1993 and if someone is passionate about a topic, they will share it in a format they like. It might not be a classic blog post, but what matters in the end?

The web is not broken IMHO.

Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)

#27

Post by JackMorgan »

sushibowl wrote: post #3

There's lots of tools around nowadays that allow you to build a site that doesn't conform to the blog format, but the old web hasn't really made a comeback. I think there is truth in the author's statement: > Here’s the crux of the problem: When something is easy, people will do more of it. writing up whatever daily musing into a short-form article is much easier than carefully organizing and categorizing an entire l…

I think of https://wiki.c2.com/ where pages are organized like a graph, but within a page you might see a thread of paragraphs from people replying to each other. That's an interesting mashup of the two ideas.

Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)

#29

Post by orthoxerox »

nickelpro wrote: post #9

Reference sites still exist, Wikipedia isn't organized by reverse-chronological and MediaWiki is a far more formidable CMS than MT ever was. Same goes for ReadTheDocs, Sphinx, Jekyll, Hugo, or any number of static site generators that power the infinite libraries of documentation, reference material, and personal sites on the web. What the author is bemoaning is the loss of the eclectic, bespoke, personal-style of ho…

> What the author is bemoaning is the loss of the eclectic, bespoke, personal-style of homepage that existed in the early web. These sites still exist of course, they're just a much smaller percentage of the content.

When I stumble upon a Web 1.0 living fossil, it's a delight every time. Someone felt an overpowering need to say something, they made a website about their favorite topic (be that shoelace knots, unsolved mysteries of Ancient Mediterranean literature, their train trip from Europe to North Korea or the CUBIC NATURE OF TIME), wrote everything they wanted to say and mostly stopped.

They didn't enter into a parasocial relationship with millions of people, they didn't try to get rich by producing content, they didn't become slaves to The Algorithm, they didn't ruin the brilliance of their first LPs by producing a dozen more.

Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)

#30

Post by 6stringmerc »

In a more short-hand summary: When money creeps into art or intellectual pursuits that originated from personal interest, they usually race to the bottom.

There's nothing wrong with blogs. There is a lot wrong with the internet as an advertising machine. Heck, the comments here frequently are first-hand blog entries on a subject and I enjoy it very much. Now if it was monetized, I'm not sure if the signal to noise would be as equivalent.

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