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If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs (2020)

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Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs (2020)

#191

Post by derekzhouzhen »

No, blogs are still here. The casual blog readers are gone.

Now there are a thousand good static site generators and free hosting in github page, vercel and netlify, publishing a blog has never been easier, at least for the people dare to call themselves hackers.

However, the mass has moved on to social media to sink their idle time. The question every blogger should ask themselves should be:

Am I writing because I have something to say, or just to sound important to people I don't even care about?

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs (2020)

#192

Post by iainctduncan »

lonk11 wrote: post #79
d3nj4l wrote: post #56

As a minor counterpoint: I've come to dread blogs and newsletters because so many of them are written by grind culture freaks who only write faux-insightful SEO'd content as a way to build an audience to sell snake oil to. These days the only blogs I trust are the ones I see on the top of HN or lobsters, which is unfortunate because I have interests beyond tech and I find it very, very difficult to find good blogs I…

Discovery of good sources of information such as blogs is hard. And I think the biggest problem is the lack of trust. Everyone wants to grab your attention [1]. So how do you know that others won't waste your attention? To solve this problem I am building https://linklonk.com that cultivates trust as you rate content. When you upvote a link you connect stronger to the feed that posted it (which could be a blog's feed…

This is a really nice idea. If I may make a suggestion, scrolling down takes a lot of scrolling because each link takes up so much vertical screen space on account of really big whitespace gutters, size of the thumbnail, and the general layout. I wind up being able to see only 3 on a screen compared 16 on HN! I would be much more likely to adopt this regularly if you changed the layout to pack more previews in to a vertical screen of space. HTH

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs (2020)

#193

Post by pixelgeek »

elzbardico wrote: post #58

video and podcasts killed blogs. When we figured out it the spoken world has truly dismal bandwidth compared to reading, it was already too late, blogs were dead. Also, SEO trickery completely drowned the honest blogger, not to mention rampant plagiarism from the same SEO farms.

> Also, SEO trickery completely drowned the honest blogger, not to mention rampant plagiarism from the same SEO farms.

Well it makes it impossible to find any good information about a topic.

I wonder if stackoverflow would be as popular if there weren't 101 content farm articles for every subject you want to search for.

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs (2020)

#195

Post by mikewarot »

A lot of the bloggers I read back in the day would now be called influencers, and the attention they fed on moved to other platforms, like Facebook, etc. Writing a good blog post takes time and effort, and what's the point if nobody is going to be around to read it? We all need that dopamine hit to keep putting in the effort, don't we?

>But Blogger was shut down by Google years ago,

That was a shock to read, as I last posted to my blog there recently.

However, Blogger isn't dead, I still post stuff there from time to time on my personal blog.[1]

I tried to make a more coherent case for capabilities based security in Capabilities Digest[2], back in 2015

1 - http://mikewarot.blogspot.com

2 - http://capabilitiesdigest.blogspot.com/

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs (2020)

#196

Post by bodge5000 »

slightknack wrote: post #14
tinyprojects wrote: post #11

I've built a service that lets you create a micro-blog from a paper journal: https://paperwebsite.com/ It's given me great joy just publishing my unfiltered thoughts on the internet straight from my pen, which sounds similar to the "unfocused blogs" the author was talking about. Perhaps in this highly edited, Instagram world we now live in - the raw, unedited nature of a blog is a bit more scary. I still love them th…

I vote that we add our blogs / other good blogs we have come across as children on this comment. I'll start, here's mine: - https://slightknack.dev/blog Here are some others: - https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com - https://www.gwern.net/index - https://danluu.com - https://tonsky.me/ - https://lemire.me/blog/ - https://waitbutwhy.com/ - https://www.kalzumeus.com/archive/ - https://blog.codinghorror.com/

I dont regularly follow blogs as often as I should, but I always recommend this one to people interested

https://iquilezles.org/www/index.htm

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs (2020)

#197

Post by brentis »

maskros wrote: post #161
dsr_ wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way to find good blogs is to start by asking technical questions in whatever subject you are interested in. If you want to read about barbeque, you need to start with a technical question about barbeque; if you want to read about Greek history, you need a question about that. Eventually you will find somebody knowledgeable who is writing about that subject. They will in turn link to others, or comment on others,…

Discussion groups and forums used to be useful, but now they're dying out and being replaced by undiscoverable walled garden facebook groups and discord servers...

Came here to say forums. Niche areas of information which no social media platform can begin to compete with.

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs (2020)

#198

Post by bodge5000 »

tinyprojects wrote: post #11

I've built a service that lets you create a micro-blog from a paper journal: https://paperwebsite.com/ It's given me great joy just publishing my unfiltered thoughts on the internet straight from my pen, which sounds similar to the "unfocused blogs" the author was talking about. Perhaps in this highly edited, Instagram world we now live in - the raw, unedited nature of a blog is a bit more scary. I still love them th…

I remember reading your 8-bit MMO post a few years ago and loved it, and frequently come back to it when I feel like a project is running out of control

Love the look of paper website as well, right now I use bearblog but I would like to use paper a bit more

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs (2020)

#199

Post by cavalcade119 »

d3nj4l wrote: post #56

As a minor counterpoint: I've come to dread blogs and newsletters because so many of them are written by grind culture freaks who only write faux-insightful SEO'd content as a way to build an audience to sell snake oil to. These days the only blogs I trust are the ones I see on the top of HN or lobsters, which is unfortunate because I have interests beyond tech and I find it very, very difficult to find good blogs I…

I get the Thinking About Things newsletter [1], which focuses on sending out articles by lesser known blogs. I don't know how they do it but they seem to know about all the fascinating blogs before they make it big. It's been a great way to discover interesting but not sponsored, SEO'd-to-death content.

[1] http://thinking-about-things.com/

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs (2020)

#200

Post by chenmike »

solarengineer wrote: post #7

How do you all discover blogs? I used to discover blogs via the Yahoo Directory, blog rolls (where we mention others' blogs as external links to follow up), Live Journal's listing, and cross-referencing of blog posts. Google search used to surface blog posts too. Now it's all on Medium - where I don't grudge those who want reliable hosting+discoverability and want to get paid for content, and where Medium charges for…

I don't think you have to justify or challenge your dislike for Medium. It's pretty reader-hostile. I get why authors write on it but I personally click away every time I get hit with the paywall.
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