Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Blogwashing

eggonomy.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 117 posts

Re: Blogwashing

#71

Post by drakonka »

sdegutis wrote: post #64
djsumdog wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a HN post a few weeks ago showing how Duck Duck Go was better at showing old content. I totally agree. We like what's fresh and new, but next time you go to a blog and read some tech article; look through their archive and see what else they've written. If you run your own blog, keep an easily indexd archive page. Mine goes back to 2007: https://battlepenguin.com/archives/

I had a blog for a decade but I realized that I would post something and nobody would read it, but then a famous programmer would post the same thing in their own blog a year later and everyone would hear about it. So I concluded that blogs are only for the well known programmers and that it’s a waste of my time to share my thoughts with “the web” as a general entity. Instead I share my thoughts with individuals when…

I blog to share my thoughts with myself, but in public. I blog with the intent of consolidating what I'd just learned or experienced in my mind. I've had some popular posts inbetween years of content that nobody cares about, and sometimes I'll have a reader email me about an old post I wrote and describe how it's helped them in a recent project. Or sometimes someone will comment about how they just saw a post mentioned in a conference slide, and they're commenting on it _from_ the conference. Or I'll notice traffic coming in from an online newsletter about some programming topic. Those emails and brief spikes make me feel nice. The occasional acknowledgement from a reader is like a bonus to what's essentially a private diary I don't expect anyone to take interest in.

Re: Blogwashing

#72

Post by papln »

sdegutis wrote: post #64
djsumdog wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a HN post a few weeks ago showing how Duck Duck Go was better at showing old content. I totally agree. We like what's fresh and new, but next time you go to a blog and read some tech article; look through their archive and see what else they've written. If you run your own blog, keep an easily indexd archive page. Mine goes back to 2007: https://battlepenguin.com/archives/

I had a blog for a decade but I realized that I would post something and nobody would read it, but then a famous programmer would post the same thing in their own blog a year later and everyone would hear about it. So I concluded that blogs are only for the well known programmers and that it’s a waste of my time to share my thoughts with “the web” as a general entity. Instead I share my thoughts with individuals when…

Blogging is also for your own benefit, and to have a history of your ideas. You can also post your bog articles to HN, Reddit, etc. And blogging like much else is a bit of a marketplace / ecosystem. We don't need you are blogging on generic popular topics that anyone can and does write about, we need you to blog about niche topics that aren't being covered.

Re: Blogwashing

#73

Post by hinkley »

nicoburns wrote: post #3

Honestly, I feel like this is Google's fault. It shouldn't be prioritising new content as much as it does. The best articles are often "classics" from several years ago that haven't changed because they haven't needed to.

I run into a similar problem trying to chose libraries for projects.

There's one project that is 'active'. Are they active because they're better, or because they arrived late to the party and are reinventing the wheel.

This other project is 8 years old and has hardly been touched in 2 years. Is that because it takes 4 years to cover the entire domain and a couple years to fix all the bugs that can be fixed? Or because it's languishing?

Novelty is not a good selection criterion. Sometimes the old ways are best.

Re: Blogwashing

#74

Post by flagpack »

lessname wrote: post #63

That's not just a thing done by blogs. Several "news" sites like (german) t3n.de do this. Or some sites like cnet.com etc... mostly content like "The best CMS as of {insert year here}" - so mostly things you can use years later. However, it doesn't help if the library isn't receiving any updates anymore. I don't think it's just to get a better search ranking but also to manipulate users (they want to use up-to-date s…

I‘ve been working for an online news network in Germany for several years. They hire people (mostly students) to do nothing but update their old articles on at least a weekly basis. Even too a point where it becomes almost unreadable because of so many useless and non-contextual updates. But it works in terms of ad revenue from google traffic.

Re: Blogwashing

#75

Post by flagpack »

pjc50 wrote: post #2

Not a particularly detailed post and, as it says, it's an old SEO trick. But if people want an answer as to why the blogosphere is dead and everything's on centralised silos: this is why. Any decentralised system that doesn't take spamfighting into account from the beginning will drown under it as soon as it becomes popular.

It’s not just the blogosphere that is dying because of this „trick“. Some bigger mainstream media houses (at least in Germany) do the same thing to their news. They change the date and headline so often that you happen to click the same news several times in one or two weeks, only to realize „oh, that again, but with a totally misleading headline“

Re: Blogwashing

#76

Post by antjanus »

I can't be the only one thinking that:

1. it's possible the author double checks the content each year and redates so that visitors know it still applies

2. the author updates the article to be current and redates it

It's a little weird to say this is "blogwashing". It's pretty common (for me at least) to check the date of an article when it's a tutorial so I know if it's current or not. And I've seen this happen before where authors append a "changelog" to the article at the end so you know that it's up to date.

Re: Blogwashing

#77

Post by sdegutis »

drakonka wrote: post #71
sdegutis wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a blog for a decade but I realized that I would post something and nobody would read it, but then a famous programmer would post the same thing in their own blog a year later and everyone would hear about it. So I concluded that blogs are only for the well known programmers and that it’s a waste of my time to share my thoughts with “the web” as a general entity. Instead I share my thoughts with individuals when…

I blog to share my thoughts with myself, but in public. I blog with the intent of consolidating what I'd just learned or experienced in my mind. I've had some popular posts inbetween years of content that nobody cares about, and sometimes I'll have a reader email me about an old post I wrote and describe how it's helped them in a recent project. Or sometimes someone will comment about how they just saw a post mention…

I get that idea and it’s not new: one blog said in its subtitle “letting google index my thoughts”. But it’s the equivalent of talking out loud. Sure someone might hear you accidentally and benefit but most of the time it should be kept to ourselves. If something should be said, it should probably be written in a book. That will set at least some bar to prevent the constant stream of noise on the internet. Everyone complains about the quality of content going downhill and the signal to noise ratio being unbalanced but the solution is for all of us to consider that we’re probably generating a lot more noise than signal. So I for one will quit blogging and comment a lot more rarely and if I have something more important to say I’ll write a book. Getting published isn’t infallible of a mark of signal but it’s better than git push.

Re: Blogwashing

#78

Post by carapace »

geocrasher wrote: post #12

If I wrote an article in 2015 and freshen it up with more relevant links, better writing, or some other thing, is it still published in 2015? Should I re-date it? Am I "gaming" the system by doing that? Or am I notifying my readers (all 3 of them!) that there is fresh content? This is actually a real question from me, and I'd love feedback. I look back on my stuff from a few years ago and the blog posts need fixing u…

Add a little changelog.

Re: Blogwashing

#79

Post by CiPHPerCoder »

jagged-chisel wrote: post #60
endorphone wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or they didn't change because the author moved on to other things. So their article is full of obsolete information, comparisons are no longer relevant, old APIs, invalid syntax, incorrect library assumptions, etc. When I search for anything technical the first thing I do is change the date range to the past year.

> ... full of obsolete information ... That would make it not "one of the best," right?

I'm sure the best PHP 4 article will be of no help to someone writing code targeting PHP 7.3 today.

Re: Blogwashing

#80

Post by dbatten »

cmsd2 wrote: post #10
dbatten wrote: post #8

Am I the only one who still bristles when people say blog but mean blog post? Or is this generally accepted now?

what's a blog? oh you mean a weblog. /s

I'm assuming your point is that words get shortened for convenience and that that's OK. That's a fair point. It's also true that language doesn't always evolve in ways that make sense, and I get that.

With that being said, there's a huge difference between shortening "weblog" into "blog" and shortening "blog post" into "blog":

First, when "weblog" was shortened to "blog," "blog" didn't already mean something (and certainly didn't mean anything in the relevant context). When "blog post" got shortened to "blog," "blog" already had a meaning - AND it already had a meaning _in the context of the internet_. One of these leads to confusion, one of them doesn't.

Second, when "weblog" was shortened to "blog," we didn't already have a shorthand way of saying "weblog." But we've been shortening "blog post" to "post" basically since the beginning. There was no reason to shorten it to "blog" also. "Post" was just fine.

I'd argue that a more fair comparison would be if, after using "blog" for a while, we decided to shorten "weblog" into "web" instead. It would have been silly, because "web" already meant something, and because we already had a shorthand version of "weblog" (i.e., "blog") - so why did we need another?

But I guess your sarcasm and the down votes answer my question anyway. The internet has accepted "blog" as meaning "blog post." I might as well get on board.

Post reply on HN