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Blogging Is Not Dead

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Re: Blogging Is Not Dead

#61

Post by souterrain »

gonehome wrote: post #59
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…

A lot of the intent behind Urbit is to solve this (which is why I find it pretty interesting) and push things back towards decentralization. Basically have a small cost to creating an identity in the network to prevent spam. The system is peer-to-peer where each user has their own 'server' on their local machine which interacts directly with the server's of other users. It's a pretty neat idea, they recently released…

Interesting. Seems like a cousin to https://solidproject.org/ but with Ethereum as a sort of identity provider.

Re: Blogging Is Not Dead

#62

Post by hagy »

gonehome wrote: post #44
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…

It would be neat to have an HN like place that restricted posts to only blog like content (where the rules are defined in some way to try and prevent marketing blogs/ad-farms). A subreddit could be the place for this, but it might be tricky to kickstart a community with interesting content. Then if successful could move it to its own community somehow (similar to CMV). I created one here: https://www.reddit.com/r/hnb…

Like your idea! Posted my blog and looking forward to discovering new blogs.

I too miss the days of curated links on personal sites. Occasionally, I'll find a gem consisting of a simple, yet captivating personal sites with links to additional interesting information. The sites almost always appear to have been up for a decade or two, showing they came from those golden days.

If your new subreddit takes off, which I hope it does, it would be cool to start building an organized and curated list of blogs and individual posts on the wiki.

Re: Blogging Is Not Dead

#63

Post by gonehome »

hagy wrote: post #62
gonehome wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be neat to have an HN like place that restricted posts to only blog like content (where the rules are defined in some way to try and prevent marketing blogs/ad-farms). A subreddit could be the place for this, but it might be tricky to kickstart a community with interesting content. Then if successful could move it to its own community somehow (similar to CMV). I created one here: https://www.reddit.com/r/hnb…

Like your idea! Posted my blog and looking forward to discovering new blogs. I too miss the days of curated links on personal sites. Occasionally, I'll find a gem consisting of a simple, yet captivating personal sites with links to additional interesting information. The sites almost always appear to have been up for a decade or two, showing they came from those golden days. If your new subreddit takes off, which I h…

Yeah I think that would be great.

I've added some guidelines to the sidebar and others have contributed some of their own blog posts, thanks!

Re: Blogging Is Not Dead

#65

Post by [deleted] »

jakevoytko wrote: post #6

We're overly attached to a specific idea of a "blog". In practice, "web logging" never died, even if the specific blog format has diminished over time. Blogs are websites that host posts in chronological order, but defined in a very specific way that excludes your Facebook and Twitter. The difference isn't self-hosting - Blogger and Wordpress.com host your blog. I reckon the difference is aggregation. Facebook groups…

[deleted]

Re: Blogging Is Not Dead

#66

Post by coding123 »

vinceguidry wrote: post #31

A blogger I used to follow, Steve Pavlina, shut down his forums like in 2011 after 5 years of running them stating that they were always completely irrelevant to his biz model. He's still posting to his blog, daily, having started in 2004. Still going strong after 15 years.

Nice, thanks for pointing this out. I am amazed by the quality of writing!

Nice random nugget:

https://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2020/05/herd-stupidity/

> This isn’t a situation where you should look to the masses for guidance. When you see idiotic behavior, don’t let the fact that everyone else seems fine with it persuade you that it’s probably okay. Stupid behavior that’s popular is still stupid. A bar full of idiots taking reassuring cues from each other is still a bar full of idiots.

Re: Blogging Is Not Dead

#67

Post by netcan »

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…

In some sense, it's financial.

All the stuff you said is true. Spammers did sort of win, at least against the more open media structures. Video did represent a hosting hurdle. On RSS, I feel that it failed^ moreso than it got murdered. That one was quite a blow, considering that (a) I still think it could have succeed, somehow and (b) the tremendous "free internet" value of a success case.

Money isn't everything when it comes to gaining people's attention. What's good counts for a lot. There were a lot of factors to the way things played out.

but.....

The financial difference between now and about the time Facebook demonstrably took over MySpace would a douglas adams to describe it. It accounts for a lot.

I wonder if a wikipedia would be possible today, if somehow a good web encyclopedia didn't exist. I suspect that it wouldn't be. Obviously, the interest and capacity to subvert would be (and is) huge. Possibly enough to prevent a solid start. But, financial realities are also a factor. Wikipedia would probably be a highly funded startup, and the incentives would be totally different.

^Notable exception: podcasts. Also the reason why I think it had (has?) massive potential.

Re: Blogging Is Not Dead

#68

Post by saagarjha »

netcan wrote: post #54
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…

About 15 years ago I was following some small podcast on my new ipod nano. Nothing too grandiose. It was about beekeeping, worm farming... Probably dozens of listeners, hundreds at most Anyway, the podcaster went dark for a week and then posted something about hiatus. I sent him a " thanks for the content, I'll be here when you get back " type message. A week or two later an episode went online. He explained that he…

I put my email on the bottom of my blog posts and am invariably delighted whenever I receive mail from people.

Re: Blogging Is Not Dead

#69

Post by saagarjha »

tekknolagi wrote: post #56
Finnucane wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a "Hacker News" equivalent for cooking/foodie blogs? If not, there probably could be.

Sure there is. There's a super well-frequented bread forum that is kind of like HN. Experience reports, recipe recommendations, etc.

You can't say that it exists and not share the name of it!

Re: Blogging Is Not Dead

#70

Post by abbadadda »

I wonder if a dedicated company could build a non-privacy invasive RSS reader that could: (1) show targeted ads based on a user's curated blog feed; (2) Develop a profit-sharing model for those authors that generate the most traffic. I'm kind of thinking like hackernews but (A) user-curated content; and (B) Advertising; and (C) optional subscriptions to support the bloggers. There could of course be a discovery mode to find new blogs, but the default would be user-curated. To ensure payments were significant enough to overcome the micropayment problem, perhaps a "minimum payout" could be set for authors so they could accumulate proceeds (and see some fruits of their labor without having to set up their own individual payment system) even if they couldn't withdraw them yet. If someone really was motivated they might even be able to set this up as a non-profit. Just kind of a brain dump. Thinking of this as "the front page for blogs" by bloggers for bloggers (instead of a big corporation whose primary objective is to generate profits, which is exceedingly difficult with traditional RSS feeds). Fraud and spoofing views would be an obvious challenge of this framework.
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