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

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

#421

Post by ian0 »

mawise wrote: post #199
aazaa wrote: post #178

The best way to bring back blogs is to start with your own. It looks like this is the author's fourth post and s/he hit a home run with the top post on HN. But that's rarely how things work. The thing few people tell you when you start blogging is how futile it will seem - for a long, long time. You'll start by posting something you put a lot of work into. You'll publish, thinking of all the comments and emails you'l…

Those blogs from the time before were written for the purpose of writing, not for the purpose of getting lots of viewership. The blogs the author misses aren't written to make money off of ad traffic, they were just written to put down ideas. Today that need is filled with Facebook/Twitter/... and even there with the currency of likes/comments those motivations get twisted. Some of the internet has also shifted to a…

>> Those blogs from the time before were written for the purpose of writing, not for the purpose of getting lots of viewership.

Exactly this. Im not sure if my experience was typical, but i recall lots of small mini communities of bloggers, where each blog would have less than a dozen real followers, but everyone would read the other peoples content. Thats why you had the "follows" tab on the sidebar of the blog.

I also recall a distinction between homepages (IE where useful static information collected in one place) and blogs (personal stories not with the goal of teaching). Homepages could have lots of traffic but little real interaction (like FB today). Blogs would have lots of detailed interaction but but very little viewership.

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

#422

Post by chipotle_coyote »

rland wrote: post #356
mawise wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those blogs from the time before were written for the purpose of writing, not for the purpose of getting lots of viewership. The blogs the author misses aren't written to make money off of ad traffic, they were just written to put down ideas. Today that need is filled with Facebook/Twitter/... and even there with the currency of likes/comments those motivations get twisted. Some of the internet has also shifted to a…

Well, this is why I don’t have a blog. I have a lot of strong opinions that might be interesting to some people, but I don’t want to miss opportunities because some HR person googled my name and found a post they disagreed with. Or, in the future, not a real person but an algorithm.

Anecdotal counterexample: I successfully moved from development into technical writing because I had a blog that a company got in touch with me about and said, "We really like your writing. Have you considered being a technical writer?"

My honest feeling is that if you're a good writer and not just posting ranty flamebait -- and "strongly worded and highly opinionated" is not the same thing, although it can be -- blogging is valuable. Or at least it used to be. And really, I'd like to see it make more of a return, too.

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

#423

Post by justanotherc »

crazygringo wrote: post #154

This article makes... no sense to me. Blogs are still around, everywhere, and show up easily in search results if a post matches a relevant query. And bloggers still list other blogs in sidebars. I genuinely don't understand the author's complaint. The only thing I can imagine is that there are a lot more alternatives for self-expression on the internet now, e.g. Instagram, Twitter, podcasts, etc. So blogs are perhap…

Thank you, I'm glad I'm not the only one to think this. I have a blog on blogspot (formerly blogger), and I had to go check it to make sure it wasn't wiped... definitely still there lol.

Not sure what this author is talking about.

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

#424

Post by donaldcuckman »

freehunter wrote: post #334
pmlnr wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The blogs the author misses aren't written to make money off of ad traffic, they were just written to put down ideas. This is what I've been pointing out for years as the lost core of the internet.

It seems like this is a cultural shift in society as well. There are no more hobbies, everything is a side hustle and if you can’t turn a profit from it, it’s not worth doing. I’m not an economist or sociologist so I can’t Even pretend to understand why this is, but it’s a trend I’ve noticed over the past few years.

100% agree

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

#425

Post by vimslayer »

jiofih wrote: post #385
passthejoe wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My 2000s Blogger sites are all still live. I've ported some of those posts to other sites, but most just live over at Blogger.

Great! You can do the test yourself: pick a few quotes from those old posts and try to find them with a google search.

I found (possibly) this guy's blog by googling 'passthejoe blog'. I don't think it was the Blogger blog they were talking about, though so I made another search with (presumably) their real name and word blog. Bang,there it is. Picked one post from 2011 and searched its opening line "I’m no Backports guru, though I’d like to become one" (with quotes). The post came up as the second search result.

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

#426

Post by skyfaller »

alisonatwork wrote: post #89
christiansakai wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m curious. Have any company or anyone implemented something like this? Basically let people blog and let author themselves pay (instead of being paid by ads) subscription fee to pay cloud machine that hosts their content. I think something does exist in Ethereum platform but why it doesn’t exist out there anywhere else.

LiveJournal has worked this way for decades and still exists.

Dreamwidth is the spiritual successor. https://www.dreamwidth.org/

LiveJournal went closed source in 2014. It was also bought by Russians, relocated its servers to Russia, and began enforcing Russian law in 2017, which included laws against "gay propaganda", which was when me and my remaining friends abandoned the service for good.

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

#427

Post by jrochkind1 »

zhdc1 wrote: post #72
dewey wrote: post #32

Blogs are still there, just not easily findable through Google as most of the ones you find are low-value SEO blogs aiming at search engine traffic. Discovery is a problem but I just subscribe to blogs when I find them via RSS (Blogs still have RSS, it's hard to find one without which is surprising but I'm glad that's the case), over time I build up my list of blogs I like and they usually link to other blogs and the…

Blogs and forums stopped being a thing when Google flushed them out sometime between 2009-2012 (with the Panda update? I'm not an SEO guy so I wasn't really following it at the time). Anyway, it felt like a bunch of places went from having active communities to stagnating or dying outright overnight. People forget just how much general innovation was being driven by these sites - Styleforum and AskAndy for men's fash…

> Blogs and forums stopped being a thing when Google flushed them out sometime between 2009-2012… Reddit was supposed to become the trusted alternative,

Are you suggesting Google had a plan to promote reddit? or what do you mean by "was supposed to"?

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

#428

Post by hachibu »

aazaa wrote: post #178

The best way to bring back blogs is to start with your own. It looks like this is the author's fourth post and s/he hit a home run with the top post on HN. But that's rarely how things work. The thing few people tell you when you start blogging is how futile it will seem - for a long, long time. You'll start by posting something you put a lot of work into. You'll publish, thinking of all the comments and emails you'l…

Thanks for the wonderfully insightful comment. I need to save this so I can periodically look at it for motivation!

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

#430

Post by Chathamization »

aazaa wrote: post #178

The best way to bring back blogs is to start with your own. It looks like this is the author's fourth post and s/he hit a home run with the top post on HN. But that's rarely how things work. The thing few people tell you when you start blogging is how futile it will seem - for a long, long time. You'll start by posting something you put a lot of work into. You'll publish, thinking of all the comments and emails you'l…

The publish or perish nature of blogs is one of the many reasons why I feel they're generally inferior to the personal web pages that were popular during the early web. It seems that there has been a general trend towards a constant churning of output in order to keep up the dopamine hits for users. The quality of a lot of online content reflects this.
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