91–100 of 335 posts
Substack is driving a blog renaissance. A ton of high-quality niche blogs popping up everywhere. See, for example, https://antonhowes.substack.com/ (I'm not affiliated with the writer, though I am considering switching from free to paid)
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've always wanted to blog because I love to write. However, I've been very hesitant to do so because of exactly what you described: the grind culture. I've felt immense pressure to make every post academic, but I realized that the blog should be for me first and foremost. In fact, my first blog post ever is describing the purpose behind my blog and _why_ I started it. It will help keep me accountable. However — I do…
The grind culture thing comes from people trying to make money off of their blogs. So, don't do it for the money :)
If you get to a point where your hosting provider comes knocking because you're generating too much traffic, you'll have a good inflection point to determine if there's some way to get the blog to pay for its own hosting without you having to change your approach (tip services are cool for this).
It makes sense blogging would see an integration move, that blends up some social media, email list, blogging, etc activities (social media, images/video/sound, email lists, text blogging/writing, pick a few and blend them). It's extremely obnoxious for the average person to attempt to do all of those things separately.
Yet I still use it?
But the gold is really in the commment section. There is so much quality content and so much insight that I am not worried about the development of the internet. It is still a great place to be.
As the internet grew, blogging became a popular format to write long form and publish it. There was a golden window where search was still new and hadn't yet been gamified, and before the platforms providing what veidr here called quick dopamine hits[1].
Seeing blogging expand and at the same time be instantly searchable was great... but didn't last.
Eventually a whole group of users wanted the benefits of exposure of their thoughts & content, without the hassle of writing long form. And I would say, for those users, social media is indeed the perfect medium. Those who do write in long form can still do so, it's just that discoverability has somewhat taken a step back.
I contend that it's not a huge deal, as a long form fosters a more thoughtful pace instead of rewarding instant gratification. Links between blogs do help with discoverability, it just that it's an organic process that takes time. Of course, the upside is once a blog is discovered, one can easily go back and read the previous articles.
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…
Yes, I think is a need for some platform that provides blog+microblog on your domain, and that automatically forwards the content to social platforms so that you get the best of both worlds: 1 - owning your blog is too big of a barrier of entry, there is a need for a platform: look at the success at medium for tech writers, despite that we hate it. 2 - we need the return of the domain name based blog. This helps with…
I've made 4 phone calls this year: to a buddy, to my wife, to an old friend, and to my fax/voicemail provider (JConnect) which decided to terminate voicemail service on the phone number I've used since the 1990s. (So I may be part of the problem I am describing — that number didn't ring any device, it only accepted voice messages and faxes, which it forwarded to me via email.)
Of those 4 phone 2021 phone calls:
1.) My buddy no longer has voicemail on his phone, and a recording just told me he was not available and to try again later. (Head kinda exploded.)
2.) My wife also no longer has voicemail! How tf did that happen? No idea but it was 2 months after the above call so I was less surprised.
3.) My old friend is old-school (hence the phone call), and still does have voicemail — but it was full. I assume because he never checks it.
4.) JConnect support's touch-tone B.S. support system did disconnect me a couple of times, requiring that I call them back... but it did eventually connect me to a support rep who helped me cancel my account. But: only because they are the kind of asshole company that engages in the common-but-should-be-illegal practice of letting you sign up on the web but only cancel by phone, as a method of retaining "customers" who no longer want their product.
So n=1 sample, might not be typical, etc. but I suspect the phone is getting less universal and less reliable over time.
Never any locking them out because you noticed suspicious activity or anything bogus like that and making them provide personal details. That is abuse of trust and abuse of people
This misses why companies do this: to prevent account hijacking. It sucks to be locked out of your account, but it also sucks for someone to steal it. Various companies have made mistakes here, and some amount of false positives will happen with any detection system, but going all the way to "do not protect accounts" is not going to give a better experience for users on balance.
no one is writing them because there's no platform for them
Why not https://wordpress.com, or one of the many sites that hosts WordPress?
Blogger was shut down by Google years ago
Blogger is still running: https://blogger.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blogger_(service)
Nowadays people won't share content simply because they don't trust the internet to share content to it. You have to provide for them to be anonymous and protected forever, which means letting people create accounts easily with just an email or something similar ... They have to be able to blog without thinking someone is going to bring it up and file it away forever and maybe they won't get a job because of it, or their tyrannical government will think they're an agitator and attack them or an adversary will use it for selective characger defamation sometime.
This just isn't something that a blogging platform is going to be able to promise its users. Defending against countries is really hard, especially when your users are doing things that are (wrongly) against the law in those countries.