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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)

#81

Post by bachmeier »

Ensorceled wrote: post #68

What really broke the web? 1. SEO click bait crap gumming up the works. 2. Walled gardens (there are many, but Facebook is the worst) 3. Rampant polarization driven by bad actors; governments (both local and foreign), political organizations, extremists, and corporations. 4. Ad tech siphoning off the value of the web and enabling the worst of the other issues. Blogs wouldn't even make my top ten.

The first was certainly a big player, but that came about as a result of the rise of Google, which replaced links as the primary way to navigate the web. Once Google claimed its place, the web turned into a game to generate clicks rather than a place to put good content.

Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)

#82

Post by maxbond »

mansoon wrote: post #60
pjc50 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think your wife would appreciate that. (joking, but the point is that non-para-social relationships, "real" ones, exist and can usefully be distinguished)

Not sure I agree with this. Once you look closely enough, the distinction collapses. I used to think otherwise, but that was largely based on a refusal to look, knowing that if I did, the perceived reality would fall apart, and the naked nothing would be revealed.

What do you mean by parasocial here?

Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)

#83

Post by azangru »

The article is internally inconsistent. Consider the following quotes:

> The early web itself, of course, was pretty exclusive: first, you had to be online, then you had to know HTML, and that wasn’t enough, you also had to have a hosting account, and know how to use it. [1]

> Culturally, though, it was devastating. Suddenly people weren’t creating homepages or even web pages, but they were writing web content in form fields and text areas inside a web page. [2]

> Movable Type didn’t just kill off blog customization. It (and its competitors) actively killed other forms of web production. [3]

> The old web, the cool web, the weird web, the hand-organized web… died. [4]

> There are no more quirky homepages. There are no more amateur research librarians. All thanks to a quirky bit of software produced to alleviate the pain of a tiny subset of a very small audience. That’s not cool at all. [5]

The claim about the death of the personal homepage puzzles me. If we consider statement (1), which says that people had to be fairly technically literate to set up their own, custom and quirky, homepages, then the same is true today. There are lots and lots of personal pages created by web developers for themselves; some quirky others less so. In absolute numbers, they must have multiplied. In relative numbers, they are dwarfed, of course, by all the social media apps that make it easy to just start typing into an input field somewhere. We have both the means for sufficiently skilled people to express their creativity, and low-entry-bar instruments for the rest. What's not to like? What exactly has died?

Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)

#85

Post by layer8 »

nickelpro wrote: post #45
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I say in a sister thread, I transitioned from handmade websites to blogs as the author describes, and then from blogs to social media. The reason was also what the author describes: convenience. I am the same person. I don't think I was more of a nerd when I wrote personal websites in 1998 than when I wrote blogs in 2002 or social media posts later. So I do think the tools have a lot to do with the changes describ…

> personal websites still exist, there are just fewer of them And my point is that this isn't true. There are more weird, wonderful, random single-purpose and eclectic websites today than ever before in the history of the Internet. It's just that they are suspended in an ocean of so much more Internet than existed before that they feel absent compared to the halcyon days. I'm not trying to invalidate anyone's persona…

There are absolutely more, but relatively fewer, and you come across them less. They stopped being a well-known role model for how to put content out on the web.

Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)

#86

Post by jcelerier »

mansoon wrote: post #32
orthoxerox wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, unsolve…

All relationships are parasocial.

If all X are Y then Y is meaningless when talking about X

Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)

#87

Post by snarf21 »

Ensorceled wrote: post #68

What really broke the web? 1. SEO click bait crap gumming up the works. 2. Walled gardens (there are many, but Facebook is the worst) 3. Rampant polarization driven by bad actors; governments (both local and foreign), political organizations, extremists, and corporations. 4. Ad tech siphoning off the value of the web and enabling the worst of the other issues. Blogs wouldn't even make my top ten.

I would argue that all of those (and even more) reasons are the same reason. Ad tech driving the "free" web is the source of all the problems. Outrage (faux) is more profitable than journalism and information sharing.

Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)

#88

Post by myfonj »

For those interested, that "Mozilla Museum" site pictured is and Mozilla banners came from [1] (it is visible in status bar tooltip in the screenshot, so just to save you some typing).

That broken "Animation: Mozilla destroys Internet Exploder" is archived [2].

[1] http://home.snafu.de/tilman/mozilla/ [2] http://web.archive.org/web/20000816155258/http://www.remarca...

Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)

#89

Post by oriolid »

AndrewStephens wrote: post #65

There are many suspects in the "who killed the web" mystery but blogs are low down on that list. The real problem is that building a web page is much, much harder today than it was 25 years ago. Back then you could slap together some HTML, add a picture and an under-construction GIF and call it a day. Everyone with their huge 800x600 monitors would see the same thing. Today you have to take into account not just moni…

> Back then you could slap together some HTML, add a picture and an under-construction GIF and call it a day. Everyone with their huge 800x600 monitors would see the same thing.

How I remember it was that HTML standards were lagging far behind what browsers did. So you you put a "Best viewed with Netscape " GIF there, or even "Best viewed with Mozilla" if you weren't afraid of turning back some people.

Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)

#90

Post by dsr_ »

mansoon wrote: post #60
pjc50 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think your wife would appreciate that. (joking, but the point is that non-para-social relationships, "real" ones, exist and can usefully be distinguished)

Not sure I agree with this. Once you look closely enough, the distinction collapses. I used to think otherwise, but that was largely based on a refusal to look, knowing that if I did, the perceived reality would fall apart, and the naked nothing would be revealed.

If you define a term differently from most other people, it's on you to make the translations.

If you're a solipsist, it doesn't matter, but then nothing does.

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