Something cool I noticed while living in South Korea is that Naver Blog is very popular and a large amount of people use it, either writing content or looking up content for recommendations, e.g. where to go when travelling.
Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?
101–110 of 405 posts
Re: Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?
#102Here are some reasons to start a personal blog: 1. It's a great way to learn. Teaching something to someone else has always been the best learning tool, and writing about something with an audience in mind is an effective way to capture some of that value. 2. It can be a big boost in job hunting. As a hiring manager two of the most important questions I have about a potential candidate are: Can they code? Can they co…
[flagged]
Re: Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?
#103There are just not enough ways to discover personal blogs. HN is a great source, but you'll notice over time there are always AskHN posts asking something like "What is a site like HN for..", and people trying to build HN clones. Reddit was good for a while for this, but hasn't been for a long time. I'm hoping people rediscover/reinvent slashdot.
If you blog I think it's really important to develop a habit of linking to other people's blogs. That's how blog discovery used to work back in the 200xs and it can still work effectively today.
If you mean creating a blogroll to show other blogs you recommend, that is no longer so effective now that mobile phones are most of the world’s default interface to the internet. Themes for common blogging platforms like Wordpress generally hide the sidebar, blogrolls included, on mobile.
Re: Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?
#104We have medium.com too. I hate that. Blogging kind of was better in the past. I also remember geocities. It was kind of cool. Neocities unfortunately does not really capture that old spirit. It's just ... different.
> Neocities unfortunately does not really capture that old spirit. It's just ... different.
Geocities was used by slightly nerdy average joes while from a brief glance Neocities looks to be a place for Mastodon techies to roleplay an internet they never participated in.
Re: Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?
#105I was around when the blog got invented and I never felt the need. Now I am starting to. Even if no one reads it, it is still a better way to organise my thoughts and at least celebrate my own achievements like I would want to without the suffering modern social media.
Re: Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like Point No. 4. By now, I have enough articles to point to when people ask the same questions over and over. I have been asked, “Do you always have a blog post for these questions?” Another advice or a deduction that I learnt from reading biographies and many historical books is — write as if you are writing for a stranger, even on your own personal blog/diaries/memoir — when you get older, your younger self will…
I really like that. It's absolutely true, I constantly find older stuff on my blog that I had entirely forgotten about and it's always interesting to get back in touch with past-me.
Oh, absolutely true about finding stuff, and I go like, “Ah! I wrote about that.” I got my search working (abandoned for a long time) and a list of all post archives just so I can find them easier.
Btw, I have had a to-do item for quite a while to copy your blog’s yearly archive link style in the footer. I haven’t figured out a way to make it simpler and I don’t have to deal with it for a long time. :-)
Re: Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?
#107Every blog is a niche blog because blogging is a niche. It never was and never will be mainstream. Social media began as an attempt to make the spirit of blogging a low lift for the noobs. Today, you’re talking to an audience that is online, willing to venture outside social media, and opting to actively read content rather than passively listen or watch. That’s far from everyone and that’s okay.
> Every blog is a niche blog because blogging is a niche. It never was and never will be mainstream.
Content creation is indeed something a minority of society practices, but that can still be mainstream. In the first decade of the new millennium, the Movable Type and Wordpress ecosystem was active enough among ordinary people, not just nerds, that it led to things like local politicians being ousted, religious denominations’ leadership being shook up. All the drama now associated with Twitter/X happened on blogs before that.
Watch the last episode of The Onion’s series Sex House from 2012. A joke about everyone focusing on blogging is used multiple times. Even after the rise of Web 2.0 social media platforms, social media and blogs still coexisted for a time. It wasn’t until just after this that Google began deranking niche sites, and social media platforms sought to keep people on their sites for maximum engagement.
Re: Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It never was and never will be mainstream. We had the time around when blogspot was a thing when everyone and their dog had a blog. It was mainstream enough for "Julie and Julia". It was a different time.
I would argue that most people who had a blog were 15-25 in that time. Yes it was very common in that demo, but outside of it, it was definitely not. I don't know if that classifies as "mainstream".
The very active ecosystem of blogs I followed in the first decade of the new millennium, on arts themes (literature, cinema, non-popular music) and religious-denomination news, were mainly people above 30 blogging, sometimes much older. Wordpress had made it easy for any computer user, not just tech nerds, to set something up.
Re: Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?
#109There are just not enough ways to discover personal blogs. HN is a great source, but you'll notice over time there are always AskHN posts asking something like "What is a site like HN for..", and people trying to build HN clones. Reddit was good for a while for this, but hasn't been for a long time. I'm hoping people rediscover/reinvent slashdot.
Cloudhiker is pretty healthy as a StumbleUpon revival. I've found lots of great personal blogs and sites across a lot of categories through it. https://cloudhiker.net/
Re: Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. Substack feels more like Op Ed writers realised they could make more money by self publishing than by staying at a dying media company with multiple levels of editorial oversight. To do well on Substack you need to publish pretty regularly, several times a week to keep and build an audience, and the only thing anyone can generate that fast are opinions. So Substack has really just become a decentralised Op E…
Decentralized and expensive. Maybe I’m looking at the wrong blogs but my impression so far is that a lot of subscriptions are around 5-10$ monthly for a single creator. I can get a ton of newspapers (ok not papers, websites) magazines etc for that price or better, and those have way more than one contributor. The video platform Nebula for example has 175 creators for 6$/month. It does seem to work for a lot of people…
The minimum price is enforced by Substack, unfortunately. You can make everything free but you can't charge, say, $1/month. It definitely pushes the platform toward writers who think "I want to make this my full-time job & income". It also definitely suffers from, to a lesser extent, the Medium problem of way too many people thinking it is some kind of get-rich-quick thing. Somehow the Reddit algorithm started showing me the substack reddit, which seemed to mostly be pretty new authors complaining that they aren't making much money from Substack.