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Blogging Is Not Dead

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Re: Blogging Is Not Dead

#11

Post by AQuantized »

xwdv wrote: post #7

Blogging is not dead, it's just being rapidly made obsolete by commenting. Comments are everywhere. Total volume of comments on the internet compared to blogs is larger by several orders of magnitude. Readership is up, everything has comments. Comments don't care about SEO, or money, or fame, that makes them one of the purest forms of content you can find on the internet. You could argue that some sites have people c…

I think this underestimates how much exploitation of this idea of comments as unbiased is currently taking place. There's a reason you can sell a Reddit account with a ton of karma and activity for a decent buck. Tons of PR firms now utilize faux accounts on almost all social media.

Re: Blogging Is Not Dead

#12

Post by calvinmorrison »

softwaredoug wrote: post #2

It all changed when marketing firms latched onto "blogging" Now it's sadly the case a lot of blogs don't have a lot of content, are full of SEO boilerplate, with click-bait headlines instead of being interesting or well written. Some blogs are great, well-written lead ins that end with "to get the end of this story, contact our sales person for a demo!". Or there's the form that pops up that really, really wants your…

I mean this is like the Rock Auto newsletter. It's unabashedly a bunch of sales spiel about their newest discounts, with one fun anecdotal story, a picture of a contestants car, and a pop quiz on obscure car knowledge. I love it!

Re: Blogging Is Not Dead

#13

Post by xwdv »

AQuantized wrote: post #11
xwdv wrote: post #7

Blogging is not dead, it's just being rapidly made obsolete by commenting. Comments are everywhere. Total volume of comments on the internet compared to blogs is larger by several orders of magnitude. Readership is up, everything has comments. Comments don't care about SEO, or money, or fame, that makes them one of the purest forms of content you can find on the internet. You could argue that some sites have people c…

I think this underestimates how much exploitation of this idea of comments as unbiased is currently taking place. There's a reason you can sell a Reddit account with a ton of karma and activity for a decent buck. Tons of PR firms now utilize faux accounts on almost all social media.

Those however are a small portion of total comments.

Pretty much whenever you see a blog you can bet it's being monetized somehow or used for some financial gain.

When you see a comment, it's unlikely there is any motive behind it beyond expressing an idea.

Now imagine the world where every comment is also some kind of ad or invitation to buy or subscribe to something. Hell.

Re: Blogging Is Not Dead

#14

Post by foob »

If you want to see more high quality blog posts, then I highly recommend taking actions to help promote and encourage them. Sign up for a mailing list or subscribe to an RSS feed when you find a blog that consistently produces quality material. Post new or old content on Hacker News, Reddit, Lobsters, Twitter, and other communities where you think they would be a good fit. Upvote and retweet quality content that you run across, and flag stuff that's blatantly marketing spam. Leave comments on the blog or reach out to the author over email. Even as a single individual, these sort of actions have a much bigger impact than you might expect.

I used to blog extensively, and I've spent a lot of time thinking about this. The content I would write was loosely for marketing purposes, but I put a lot of effort into generating high quality content that I would genuinely enjoy reading myself. An article that I spent 50+ hours on and felt very proud of might have a 30% chance of reaching the front page of Hacker News. A fluffy post with a decent title that I spent only an hour or two on would still have a 10-15% chance of front paging. The way the math works out, it's simply much lower ROI to generate quality content. It's also a bit heartbreaking to invest a lot of time making something for other people to enjoy only for nobody to ever see it.

The second chance queue on Hacker News is a major step in the right direction, and I'm grateful for all the times where my posts were given another chance. A lot of great content still slips through the cracks however, and relatively small actions by community members would go a long way towards helping incentives align towards generating quality content.

Re: Blogging Is Not Dead

#15

Post by rhacker »

Get out of the software development blogging bubble. Spend 3 minutes looking at each of the following: Look at woodworking blogs, recipe blogs, gardening blogs.

One thing you'll note is that those are all filled with a shit fuck ton of ads and are completely unusable.

I know this because my wife wades through that stuff and the only way she can is by using a blocker. I don't use a blocker because very few of the software specific websites I visit have ads (generally).

Recipe blogs are the worst - here's a sample from pinch of yum:

https://imgur.com/A4e53R5

Re: Blogging Is Not Dead

#16

Post by JoshTriplett »

AQuantized wrote: post #11
xwdv wrote: post #7

Blogging is not dead, it's just being rapidly made obsolete by commenting. Comments are everywhere. Total volume of comments on the internet compared to blogs is larger by several orders of magnitude. Readership is up, everything has comments. Comments don't care about SEO, or money, or fame, that makes them one of the purest forms of content you can find on the internet. You could argue that some sites have people c…

I think this underestimates how much exploitation of this idea of comments as unbiased is currently taking place. There's a reason you can sell a Reddit account with a ton of karma and activity for a decent buck. Tons of PR firms now utilize faux accounts on almost all social media.

> There's a reason you can sell a Reddit account with a ton of karma and activity for a decent buck.

What does "a decent buck" amount to, these days? How much does it take to get people to sell their reputation to an unethical marketing firm?

Re: Blogging Is Not Dead

#17

Post by emsal »

jakevoytko wrote: post #6

We're overly attached to a specific idea of a "blog". In practice, "web logging" never died, even if the specific blog format has diminished over time. Blogs are websites that host posts in chronological order, but defined in a very specific way that excludes your Facebook and Twitter. The difference isn't self-hosting - Blogger and Wordpress.com host your blog. I reckon the difference is aggregation. Facebook groups…

I think there's room for both self-directed aggregation (à la reader sites) as well as the centralized aggregator model. It's quite shackling to never have any control over the content that you're about to consume, and being able to check up on websites that you have personally discerned as being good content is quite empowering.

Re: Blogging Is Not Dead

#18

Post by Spivak »

rhacker wrote: post #15

Get out of the software development blogging bubble. Spend 3 minutes looking at each of the following: Look at woodworking blogs, recipe blogs, gardening blogs. One thing you'll note is that those are all filled with a shit fuck ton of ads and are completely unusable. I know this because my wife wades through that stuff and the only way she can is by using a blocker. I don't use a blocker because very few of the soft…

I would hesitate to call recipe blogs "blogs." They're ad farms with good SEO and the thinnest veneer of content to get clicks.

There are actual cooking and baking blogs of the quality you see in software where professionals or hobbyists talk about their craft but they won't show up on Google with terms like "$food_name recipe" and it doesn't really make sense for them to. Cooking blogs are for cooking nerds -- people who have notebooks and scrap books full of recipe clippings from old magazines and cake boxes and a shelf of random dog-eared culinary textbooks and recipe anthologies that could knock a person out if you got hit with them. These blogs are full of crappy unflattering photography, zero web design skills, okay-ish writing, and cult-like followings.

Re: Blogging Is Not Dead

#20

Post by skybrian »

"X is alive / X is dead" is binary thinking and taking sides on this is pointless and divisive. Better to use a float rather than a boolean to model how popular something is.
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