Browsers dropped RSS support, Google killed Reader and social networks are easier to use.
What I never understood is: why did browsers drop RSS support?
What happened to blogs
11–20 of 66 posts
Re: What happened to blogs
#12Can I rant for a sec please?
Why do so many data sci/ML engineers use medium? It’s the biggest piece of shit blog platform on the face of the earth.
Re: What happened to blogs
#13Can I rant for a sec please? Why do so many data sci/ML engineers use medium? It’s the biggest piece of shit blog platform on the face of the earth.
How we live is so different from how we ought to live ...
- Machiavelli
Re: What happened to blogs
#14There are still awesome blogs by real people out there. Here is one way to discover them, one post at a time: https://indieblog.page
Re: What happened to blogs
#15There are still awesome blogs by real people out there. Here is one way to discover them, one post at a time: https://indieblog.page
I can't seem to load the list :/
But, Hacker News is really good for finding interesting blogs too.
Re: What happened to blogs
#16Can I rant for a sec please? Why do so many data sci/ML engineers use medium? It’s the biggest piece of shit blog platform on the face of the earth.
It gives you some amount of easy discoverability if you are just starting out.
Re: What happened to blogs
#17Browsers dropped RSS support, Google killed Reader and social networks are easier to use.
What I never understood is: why did browsers drop RSS support?
Chrome alone is 65% of all browsers. So Chrome dropping RSS support already addresses an overwhelming majority of all potential readers.
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share>
Google's interests are pretty evident and self-serving: RSS short-circuits both the browser (you can use an RSS reader) and Google's search engine. Both directly reduce advertising exposure.
Firefox killed default RSS features in 2018 "because they're hardly used and would take too much effort to modernise":
https://www.zdnet.com/article/end-nears-for-rss-firefox-64-t...>
Browser extensions can still be used to read RSS feeds.
Re: What happened to blogs
#18The basic answer is "nothing". Things happened to the rest of the internet.
The author's SEO diagnosis is correct: the bulk of HN traffic is blogs, but they are almost never on the first page of Google results for the relevant terms. Still, they're there. They're also propping up LLM training datasets - high-quality content regurgitated without attribution whenever you ask ChatGPT a niche question.
But then, this is more or less a product of our behaviors and preferences. We bemoan the loss of blogs, but what have we done to support or promote old-school content creators? And how often do we reward memes and clickbait?
Re: What happened to blogs
#19I don't believe the SEO blame. I think in reality microblogging won. People get the same engagement with 2% of the effort.
Re: What happened to blogs
#20There are still awesome blogs by real people out there. Here is one way to discover them, one post at a time: https://indieblog.page
Very much this. Blog are still out there, still written by awesome people.
I’m gonna add a bunch of resources:
- https://ooh.directory/ more than 2000 blogs listed here and organized in categories
- https://kagi.com/smallweb allows you to jump from one page to the next all from a big list of small independent sites that are almost all blogs. Raw sources are available on GitHub https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb
- https://peopleandblogs.com/ I’m personally maintaining this project where once a week I feature a person with a blog