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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)

#301

Post by lonk11 »

unraveller wrote: post #298
lonk11 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You are still going get splash damage from people who trust people who fall for plausibly non-clickbait clickbait, as is the top item for me right now [1]. As this system gets larger and more overlapping you are going to have to work more diligently to undo bad follows to get tinier amounts of content referrals. The discovery problem should be solved on page and spread that way, to remain decentralised and free from…

If you see content that is not worth your time recommended to you then you can downvote it to stop trusting those who found it useful. It is all in your control as a user.

I didn't quite get what are the centralized incentives that lead to clickbait. Is it a comment about LinkLonk or centralized systems in general?

Centralization and decentralization have trade-offs. Right now the downvotes on LinkLonk are private. The upvotes are semi-public, but not available in raw form. If you wanted to implement the LinkLonk's algorithm in a decentralized manner then you would need all hosts to make the upvote and downvote data available to all other participants. Maybe homomorphic encryption can solve this problem.

My goal is to build a proof of concept in my spare time and the centralized approach seems to be the right option in my situation.

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

#302

Post by JohnL4 »

slightwinder wrote: post #68
veidr wrote: post #25

Yeah blogs are still here, BUT: (like email ( sob ) and telephone-calling (hooray)) a lot of people that once did blog don't anymore. Not in the "I had kids so my blog went dark for a few years" sense, but in the sense of "ooh twitter was invented and now I just emit a halfassed one-sentence brainfart or 5-second tiktok cellphone video and get way more dopamine hits". I've been reading blogs and perusing my self-cura…

> Not in the "I had kids so my blog went dark for a few years" sense, but in the sense of "ooh twitter was invented and now I just emit a halfassed one-sentence brainfart or 5-second tiktok cellphone video and get way more dopamine hits". Most blog-entries were never much more than that anyway, especially since the free blog-services started appearing and setting up a blog was effortless. There is a reason why Twitte…

I have a blog, which is

(a) Basically just a bunch of glorified retweets, but (b) Free of the moronic 280-character limit, and (c) Immune to Twitter's moronic "jail" algorithm (all I have to do is delete the IFTTT tweet, not my "blog post")

And I think that's fine. And, yes, I do have opinions on the moronicity of Twitter, how did you know?

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

#303

Post by JohnL4 »

butterisgood wrote: post #53

I kind of miss the days when people had servers and ".plan" and ".project" files that folks could read via finger servers. We used them in college, but I guess folks would need shell accounts on unix systems to do that today? I miss lightweight internet stuff. Maybe gemini will bring some of that back? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)

.plan:

None of your business. Go away. You have mail.

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

#304

Post by ashtonkem »

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…

The number of blogs that try and stretch out a simple “how much is “ into a few hundred words by defining every term is infuriating. Just tell me the number already! I know what all the terms mean, I just forgot what the right number is!

SEO content farming is really destroying the web.

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

#305

Post by dsr_ »

AA-BA-94-2A-56 wrote: post #282
dsr_ wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're taking a tool -- a chef's knife -- and telling us that the point of it is to open packages from Amazon. Sure, you can do that. It will even work for that. But the tool has many, many more uses than that.

This isn’t it at all. The blogs are in a race to the bottom in terms of quality because there is huge incentive to write for long-tail SEO rather than humans. This is a lot closer to tragedy of the commons.

The tragedy of the commons would be people chewing up a limited resource in a way that prevents other people from doing better things with it.

What is the common resource that you think is being used up?

If it's the brainpower of the people writing SEO blogs, it doesn't prevent other people using their own brains.

If you think they are polluting the infosphere with crap, I can't really argue with that, but I can point out that it's generally ignorable and self-curing: when you don't make money at it, you stop.

So if anything, it resembles a late-stage ponzi where people aren't paying in much but are getting nothing back.

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

#306

Post by moogly »

butterisgood wrote: post #53

I kind of miss the days when people had servers and ".plan" and ".project" files that folks could read via finger servers. We used them in college, but I guess folks would need shell accounts on unix systems to do that today? I miss lightweight internet stuff. Maybe gemini will bring some of that back? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)

Back in the mid-to-late 90s when it was (somewhat) popular for game developers to use .plan files, there were some gaming news sites like Shacknews and Blues News aggregating that content for you.

These were definitely proto-blogs.

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

#308

Post by epc »

diskzero wrote: post #252
epc wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like OPML? http://opml.org/

OPML could be part of a solution for authoring blogs that then can publish using RSS. It is an interchange format for outline with attributed text.

Back in the old Web 2.0 days we used OPML files to publish and exchange blog rolls, Dave Winer even had a site you could log into and share, in a sort of social-networking way, your blog/RSS subscriptions via OPML.

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

#309

Post by polynomial »

pixelgeek wrote: post #111

Interesting that there has been no comment on the impact of social media on blogging. I had a blog to chronicle my gaming hobby for over a decade and I gave it up recently because the audience for that type of blog has disappeared. Most of the people that would read non-technical blogs have changed their browsing habits to mostly consume content on Facebook. Most commercial content has moved to social media. Forums h…

I would only note that blogs originally didn't have an "audience" outside of the (then small) blogging community. The goal wasn't to amass followers or become an influencer, but just to share things you discovered and write about them in an interesting way, amongst a very small (certainly by modern web metrics) group of appreciative and like-minded people.
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