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Blogging Is Not Dead

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Re: Blogging Is Not Dead

#121

Post by 3nf »

PakG1 wrote: post #79
foob wrote: post #14

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…

What do you recommend as a good RSS reader these days? Can't say that I found one I like.

I got used to browser-based plugins early on, and have been stubbornly resisting change.

Sage was great on firefox (for me, at least) for a long time, but got abandoned, I have found "drop feeds" to be a good replacement.

Re: Blogging Is Not Dead

#122

Post by blueridge »

shruubi wrote: post #91

I've tried blogging in the past, but have since given up on it. I found that I was putting in a lot of time and effort to have my work read by maybe 3-5 people and came to the conclusion that I had nothing interesting or worthwhile to contribute or say, nor am I a person who can compete with the usual horde of twitter-tech-celebrities who seemingly control a majority of the audience. These days, whether it be blogs o…

Agreed. Pulling over a comment I left the other day in a similar thread about blogging, seems relevant here:

We all know too much about one another these days. It doesn't seem to matter to whom we address our writing. There is something to writing for yourself, writing offline, writing as a means of forming a private life and a private consciousness. And what about writing for the experience of writing itself? Forget publishing.

Ours is a society that says so little about nearly everything, and most commentary on the web today isn't worth reading. Furthermore, all content is ephemeral, people share gentle opinions instead of strong convictions because it is safer for one's public reputation, nobody is good at or cares about typography, self-editing is not a skill that people have, and you can never tell where the delusional self-promotion ends and the truthful personal expression begins.

We have become so sensitive to other people's personalities, accomplishments, productivity habits, recommendations, and advice for life. To what end? I don't know. Reading blogs is not my idea of quality time.

Re: Blogging Is Not Dead

#123

Post by SllX »

SquishyPanda23 wrote: post #77
souterrain wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But now? The spammers helped murder the pingback/trackback -- RSS is still alive but it is often Spammers are such superb agents of Internet centralisation. It seems both decentralised mail and content netizens have little choice but to seek shelter with large service providers as a defence from the trash on the net. I’m not saying the large players have a hand in spam, but they certainly aren’t being harmed by it…

> Spammers are such superb agents of Internet centralisation. I think this is very close to the heart of why decentralization hasn't worked (yet?) Try to design a decentralized system that is resistant to abuse, and really think through the loopholes as an attacker would. It's very difficult. Decentralization is little villages. Little villages are weak and they gain strength against their common enemies as they band…

Decentralization works all the time in meatspace, but when you have a wide open channel of information anywhere, it tends to get flooded with lots of bad information.

Email spam is the obvious one. Algorithmically promoted conspiracy crap was the less obvious less predictable one that bit YouTube and other services and is much harder to police because it turns out the police are also just as biased and dumb as the people they're trying to police, just in different ways.

Someday the Internet will be filled with programs flooding the Internet with increasingly sophisticated malformed information, and at some point it will probably devolve into an arms race of these programs trying to con the other programs. I think Anathem had a passage in there about this, "insanity programs" or something to that effect, can't really remember, but until that day, you'll have to actually pay people to disseminate your own carefully crafted propaganda instead.

Centralized services provide the illusion of safety against this in much the same way urban landscapes do, but there's no substitute to taking responsibility for your own safety, your own hygiene, and your own bullshit.

Re: Blogging Is Not Dead

#124

Post by http-teapot »

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…

These blogs recommend products where in reality it’s an ad in disguised. They recommend the products because they are paid to do so.

Re: Blogging Is Not Dead

#126

Post by prebrov »

type0 wrote: post #102
prebrov wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Missing the Mobile boat is a major blow to blogging, the way I see it. Self-hosted blogging had passed on the format of ad-hoc notes while on the move, and basically ignored the entire category of mobile content creation. It’s odd and sad to see that the desktop-first authoring trend is actually getting re-enforced these days in indie blogging community, as the tools are getting less and less mobile-friendly (another…

You don't mean microblogging right? I have yet to see a good written blog composed from a mobile phone.

Genre-binding naming conventions are exactly the problem.

"Blog" originally stood for "web log", and as such didn't put any constraints or expectations on the media format, length, or quality. At some point format-specific platforms came in, artificially fragmented self-publishing into "microblogging", "photoblogging", "videoblogging", and took it over.

Not everything has to be a well written article, but blogging relinquished "just thinking out loud" type of publishing to mobile-first social networking walled gardens, and it's a real shame and a loss.

Shift to mobile is a massive contributor. Many newcomers to the internet are mobile first, and either don't have permanent access to desktop computers at all, or just couldn't be bothered.

And I don't see many blogging platforms that take this audience seriously. Wordpress seems to be the only one that has a mobile app at all.

Re: Blogging Is Not Dead

#127

Post by filmgirlcw »

prebrov wrote: post #126
type0 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't mean microblogging right? I have yet to see a good written blog composed from a mobile phone.

Genre-binding naming conventions are exactly the problem. "Blog" originally stood for "web log", and as such didn't put any constraints or expectations on the media format, length, or quality. At some point format-specific platforms came in, artificially fragmented self-publishing into "microblogging", "photoblogging", "videoblogging", and took it over. Not everything has to be a well written article, but blogging re…

Right — and the WordPress app has taken years to get semi-decent. There was a third-party WP app that WordPress acquired/acqhired many years ago that was excellent (it was the only app that allowed me to access a very customized WP backend with custom fields and other configurations so I could edit work posts back in the day), but the best features were never brought over to the main WP app and WP has evolved now so those features wouldn’t even be useful.

Tumblr has a great mobile app — as I said in my initial post, it was actually on top of the mobile trend — but none of the other blogging platforms do. They assume a response web page will work and it won’t — or that you’ll be creating a new file and kicking of a CI/CD build pipeline for a static site — which still doesn’t help if you just want to write an update or post a photo from your phone.

Even easy web builders like Squarespace and Wix and the like have, frankly, subpar mobile options.

You can’t blame people for just deciding to use Facebook or Instagram.

Re: Blogging Is Not Dead

#128

Post by filmgirlcw »

m-localhost wrote: post #108
filmgirlcw wrote: post #53

Blogging isn't dead but blog discovery basically is. Fifteen years ago (through about 2009, I would say -- about the time Facebook demonstrably took over MySpace), there were tons of services and startups built around blog discovery. And even into the early 2010s, Tumblr was still a thriving community that paid host to many different different subcultures and demographics (whereas today, Tumblr is largely fandom). Bu…

Tumblr is imho still the best blogging platform. Wonderful posting experience on mobile. Great API. Actively development. Great inspiration (scroll through vintage photos, art, music, funny stuff and nudes on one dashboard). The only thing that sucks is that public blogs are hidden behind that cookie consent wall. For that I built my blog with php and just query their API. Works well!

I still lament the days before Tumblr got rid of RSS feed imports. I know why that happened (spam), but it was so nice to be able to help build kind of a curated feed of activity from all over.

But I agree that Tumblr remains a gem. I’m glad Automattic bought it and agreed to continue to support its staff and development.

Re: Blogging Is Not Dead

#129

Post by juliend2 »

I think psychology needs to be taken into account here:

The currency we have right now on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook is reputation. There, it's in the form of Followers. That's the very currency that Stack Overflow uses to grow and sustain.

It's "gamified". And the blogosphere needs that, too.

And in a way, blogs have that, but it's in the form of Reddit and HN and some other sites, where people get their karma fix by taking the time to read the blog post (upfront time investment), comment on it (risk losing karma), then get their comment being liked (return on investment), which augment their karma.

(Facebook does not have a Karma system like Reddit or HN has. But if it would, it would make the world a bit more like a certain black mirror episode of season 2.)

Why do you see coders put their reddit+HN profile links on their site? Because they want their reputation/karma/notoriety to follow them in real-life context, so it can be converted as real "notoriety currency". (people looking at their profile will say Gosh, this guy has 2000 points on SO and 4000 points on HN, he must be very smart or influent!).

So my guess is that the reason blogs still exist is because of sites like Reddit, HN, where people can get reputation (and not only knowledge) out of their reading. There's also something satisfying in the act of praising a good post with your friends. It's like watching a good movie and talking about how good it is with your friends.

And blogs also survived because that still being viewed as THE most professional was of expressing one's opinions. It gives you gravitas by default when you have your own blog, compared to having a Twitter / Facebook account like the plebs.

And you get the best of both worlds when you promote your blog posts on social networks.

Re: Blogging Is Not Dead

#130

Post by kyuudou »

SllX wrote: post #123
SquishyPanda23 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Spammers are such superb agents of Internet centralisation. I think this is very close to the heart of why decentralization hasn't worked (yet?) Try to design a decentralized system that is resistant to abuse, and really think through the loopholes as an attacker would. It's very difficult. Decentralization is little villages. Little villages are weak and they gain strength against their common enemies as they band…

Decentralization works all the time in meatspace, but when you have a wide open channel of information anywhere, it tends to get flooded with lots of bad information. Email spam is the obvious one. Algorithmically promoted conspiracy crap was the less obvious less predictable one that bit YouTube and other services and is much harder to police because it turns out the police are also just as biased and dumb as the pe…

> Someday the Internet will be filled with programs flooding the Internet with increasingly sophisticated malformed information

We've been there for a while now:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7dfJ1lZ13g

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