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Let's make the web personal again

blog.nymhq.com

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Re: Let's make the web personal again

#101

Post by asdff »

javajosh wrote: post #18

Great idea! But the problem, now, is on the client side. Readers need RSS. This lets authors publish at their own pace (which we can assume is relatively slowly) and doesn't burden the user with checking for new content manually. Of course, Twitter is a de facto RSS feed for some, and several other services (HN included) serve that role to some extent. But for the personal web, for those readers (and writers) of the…

>Until then we'll have to make do with Twitter, etc for RSS and cobble together our own ad hoc editor networks via awkward emails and/or shared google docs.

Or you can use existing blogware and rss. Plenty of people do use rss still today. Plenty of small and major media websites still offer it. Every few years there's a hn thread something akin to "ask hn: does anyone use rss still" at which point its the most engaged thread on the front page, with nearly all replies either saying that "yes I use it every day," or even "I got to this very thread from an rss feed." Honestly, if you are a blogger and want to select a readership base that has certain characteristics you are interested in (maybe it overlaps with your stereotypical hn user: techie or in the technology industry with more money than the median worker), you should offer an rss feed to capture these readers who might not even bother with platforms like twitter at all.

Re: Let's make the web personal again

#102

Post by ako »

fragmede wrote: post #50
nunez wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

thanks! agreed. browsers can still talk HTTP/0.9 and HTTP/1.0 (though they largely don't want to, for good reasons) and HTML still works! i loved (LOVED) the old Internet, but time has moved on. that said, Hugo is amazing and I absolutely love it! sidebar now that I'm on this soapbox. i think this is 100% the reason why iOS and macOS will never converge. The desktop OS is a dying product. If everyone could do their w…

Desktop not a dying product anymore than cars are a dying product. They are undergoing changes (ICE to EV) and there are alternatives (trains) but they're simply not going away. Desktop OS is for creating digital things. Phones are the way to digitize things that have been created outside of the computer. Phones don't have dual 24" monitors. Dual 24" monitors don't fit in your pocket. Different use cases, with a lot…

You’ll be able to connect you’re mobile devices to large screens soon, see the M1/M2 iPads. A lot of professional content creation is already moving to mobile devices like music, 3D design, writing, painting, video shooting and editing, photo shooting and editing. Other professions are also using mobile devices for professional work like inspections, pilots, medical doctors, etc, etc. Soon (already?) more professional work will be done on mobile devices rather than on desktops.

Re: Let's make the web personal again

#103

Post by asdff »

Eupraxias wrote: post #67
julianlam wrote: post #2

The HN zeitgeist (at least as of 2021) was to use a static site generator like Hugo or Jekyll. Why would we want to use Nym — speaking as someone who doesn't use either, that is. When the itch to "small b blog" (love the term, by the way) came around, I built my own blogging frontend utilising GitHub Gists as the data store[1]. It's been working great so far, and uses basically no resources. [1] https://devnull.land/…

Honest question: does anyone else open notepad and start typing when they want to make a new webpage? I have been making website and pages since 1998, and have never done it another way.

Likewise but with nano for html syntax highlighting. Workflow is write file then reload my browser window. I'm working on a personal website with my resume and projects listed and such in plain html without any css and I'm struggling to imagine why I would want anything more complicated, short of sexier window dressing perhaps or as a proof of work itself that I know how to fiddle with the latest webdev libraries. With plain jane html I can embed images and hyperlinks and format text into nice little bullet points or however. The entire site is about 600kb so far, images included. What more could I possibly want that isn't just cruft?

Re: Let's make the web personal again

#106

Post by lkrubner »

bovermyer wrote: post #76
lkrubner wrote: post #75

The law matters. Section 230 of the Telecommunications Act matters. And in the old days, for several centuries, the laws regarding libel and slander mattered, but of course at the moment they are not being aggressively pursued. Nowadays you can go on Twitter and say that Hillary Clinton runs a child sex ring out of a pizza restaurant in Washington DC, and Clinton is not allowed to bring a libel suit against Twitter b…

You can encourage personal websites without discouraging communal platforms, though.

The historical evidence suggests otherwise.

Re: Let's make the web personal again

#107

Post by bccdee »

lkrubner wrote: post #75

The law matters. Section 230 of the Telecommunications Act matters. And in the old days, for several centuries, the laws regarding libel and slander mattered, but of course at the moment they are not being aggressively pursued. Nowadays you can go on Twitter and say that Hillary Clinton runs a child sex ring out of a pizza restaurant in Washington DC, and Clinton is not allowed to bring a libel suit against Twitter b…

This would create a web enormously hostile to social interaction. No website would be able to host user-generated content. The only ways to communicate would be to read someone's website or send them an email. It's such a destructive proposal that I'm honestly kind of amazed by it.

Re: Let's make the web personal again

#109

Post by michaelbrave »

nirimda wrote: post #35
nunez wrote: post #5

If this were true, SquareSpace would be trading way higher than they are now, Twitter wouldn't exist, and Facebook would look a lot like MySpace. My take: people created websites back then because there was no other choice. People RUSHED into MySpace when it got hot partly because of this. Many people don't care about web culture; they only care about consuming. Just like many people don't become screenwriters or dir…

> Many people don't care about web culture; they only care about consuming. Strong disagree. People want to participate, they want to be part of a conversation. When you "consume" content on Facebook or Twitter, you can produce content and reasonably expect to get an audience - because you know there's other people there. If you have your own personal website, you have no natural audience. If you're lucky, Google mig…

I think it's closer to "people are willing to sacrifice some culture for convenience, until it destroys all the culture"

I think we are reaching the point where it's been hollowed out enough that there is finally showing some pushback against it, many asking if the convenience or access to audience is still worth the cultural sacrifices we give for it.

That said the demographics of most things are ballpark 70% just consume content, and this seems to be roughly true ranging from websites to video games (change interact to multiplayer and produce to things like YouTubers or Bloggers about it)

Re: Let's make the web personal again

#110

Post by Karrot_Kream »

asdff wrote: post #99
superultra wrote: post #93

I think the flaw in this logic is that somehow it's technically hard to start a personal blog, so they invent a technical solution (a better platform). But there are plenty of great platforms that are easy to use, Wix, Squarespace, and Wordpress.com, etc. The problem isn't technical though, in my opinion, it's social. My working theory is that there are probably the same amount of people or more who were or would be…

I think what makes it difficult is that there's a sense that self hosting (or coding in general) is not going to click with you if you aren't already a techie. People just shut down, but its not their fault, that's just what marketing has told them for 25 years. Marketing comes in lying, saying its hard to do these things, that you need to pay someone to hold your hand and keep you safe, and doing otherwise means you…

I think you're missing the forest for the trees. You're right, basic coding skills are easy to learn. Much like basic accounting, basic DIY skills, pretty much the basics of anything. But not everyone finds it interesting.

I have a friend who's quite technically savvy and has been on the net since the early '90s. He used to maintain a website but once social media came along, he was gone with the wind. I asked him recently if he ever wanted to go back to posting on a personal blog and he said no, he found the minutiae in writing content, hosting, maintaining, etc to be boring and a waste of time even if he was only spending 10 min a week on it, given that he was mostly just interested in interacting in small comment-like bursts on online forums. For chatting with known friends, he's in group chats and Discords. He just doesn't find the value on having a personal website. I suspect most people don't either.

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