I agree with this so much. I miss reading thoughts by independent people on semi-esoteric things instead of filtered conversations on filtered topics had in vote-based sites like reddit, HN, and pretty much any other news aggregator. And I miss the blog rabbit hole you can go into. That was half the excitement of blogs.
It still exists (although reduced) but the trouble is breaking in. For economics my favorite is http://economistsview.typepad.com/ which has a huge blogroll, and those blogs, say http://crookedtimber.org/ have their own blogrolls and so on. What are some of your guys' favorites?
I used to read language log (http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/) a lot. I get why they disabled comments for most of their posts but I kind of lost interest after they did that. I am not really sure but I feel like popularity of sites like reddit increased after a lot of blogs and news sites disabled comments.
More importantly is the death of two key resources: mybloglog & technorati which enabled bloggers to publicly keep track of trackbacks. I used it all the time and ended up with sizeable audiences!
I don't know ... I feel like those aggregation sites ended up killing the golden goose. People stopped visiting individual sites (and adding them to their browser favorites) because they could just visit the aggregator, and eventually they became the primary destination ... so maintaining your own blog was merely a way to get onto the aggregator.
Technorati had terrible management. I was very frustrated trying to deal with them. In 2006 myself and friends were trying to build a startup that would rely heavily on Technorati's "Authority" ranking. Technorati supposedly had an API, but to use it we were supposed to write to the company and negotiate a price. I wrote to them 20 times. No one ever wrote back. Out of frustration, I tracked down some of the top people online, found other email addresses for them, and wrote to them. No one ever wrote me back. We were desperate to give them money, but they did not want our money.
Can't answer for parent, but I have settled for Feedbro, and it actually works really well. I have a couple of hundred feeds, OPML'ed across several readers over the years. Mercifully never the Google one, though.
The best I’ve found for Apple platforms is News Explorer. It costs a little but works quite well and syncs read items between devices via iCloud so you aren’t shown old items when you switch devices.
I switched to Newsblur after the shutdown of Google Reader. It's paid, but after what happened with Reader I realized how important a good RSS feed was to me and that it was worth paying for. The cost is also reasonable.
The web is missing something between reddit and HN comments, and long form articles.
It’s difficult to have a good discussion in the comments. And if you do, it’s quickly lost to time.
For example, I can’t have a discussion about why I think the Amazon Alexa is “Making a Dent in the Universe” without being drowned out by the privacy debate,
So, I started a blog where I can [attempt to] write my thoughts in a short piece.
I just got downvoted because someone didn’t like what I said. Happens all the time. I’ve gone several levels deep explaining why I disagree with the common opinion.
This brings up one of the other benefits of writing out your thoughts and opinions in a blog, you don’t have to waste FU karma trying to explain yourself.
Getting a lot of nostalgia as well ... for most people, social media has 100% replace the "need" for maintaining their own individual blog. They can post their thoughts to facebook well enough, and their friend list (when shared) essentially functions as their blogroll ... you can see who anyone follows on twitter, and (when allowed) on FB, so you can traipse through an interesting person's friend list and see what else you can find.
That's in no way excusing the state of affairs. As I mentioned, I fully agree that _something_ has been lost since those halcyon days. The blogs that existed (there was definitely a higher barrier to entry than opening a social media account) each went their own individually quirky ways (at least, until the staggering conformity of everyone using blog engines like Wordpress (<3 ya WP, but you made the world bland)). It was great when a contributor had their own little corner, and would actively customize it (in much more interesting ways than the MySpace pages of yore).
A major barrier is the hassle of maintaining and updating your own server, or alternately the restrictions and awful UX of most shared hosting. Shared hosting is generally overpriced too.
But I think that’s what made it better. Only people with something to say would jump through the hoops. Now anyone and everyone shares their opinions on everything and it’s just a ton of noise. I really think it’s ruining society in some way (social media)
I'll suggest that there's a delicate dance to be had here ... you're right, anyone willing to go through setting up and managing their own server, will probably have "more to say", and dedicate more time and effort to doing so.
It's not a bad thing that social media brings down the barriers to sharing your thoughts ... what's bad is how those same platforms have, over time, gone above and beyond in measures to keep you on their site and stop you from actually clicking on the link and visiting the other site
> They can post their thoughts to facebook well enough
I don't know if Americans are this much different than Canadians, but I have 200+ FB "friends" and outside of the occasional complaining about various social injustices, no one ever posts anything of substance, I have a strong feeling that most people would consider it weird.
I've been hiding any page that anyone shares: memes, animals, jokes, fails, vines, overly-partisan political, bad pop-science ("OMG look at this projector in a wristband that lets you use your iPhone in the tub!"), stupid "quizzes" that prove you're a genius, ad nauseum -- all the garbage that swamps one's FB feeds -- for the last few weeks. It's improved the quality of my feed dramatically! People do post things, it's just that you never see it because shares are so highly prioritized in the feed (anecdotal, but that's how it seems).
I restarted my blog a few months ago after a seven year hiatus and I couldn't be happier about it: it's been incredibly rewarding. If you're thinking "maybe I should (re)start my blog" I strongly recommend doing it!
Welcome back Simon. I am really, really glad to hear that you are blogging again. The internet as a whole lost something precious in the move to "social".
Neocities has this kind of functionality. With a normal host you get 0 traffic, my coming soon prelaunch page for my podcast has gotten close to 10k hits through the neocities network with no cost or effort on my part.
Isn't this the nature of wanting to be special? If you fancy yourself Mr. Bespoke Blog Reader, than you gotta go look where others don't. This feels like one of the conflicting desires of the open web crowd: the view that decentralized content can exist without a cost.
That's a good point. Habit probably gets in the way, too: Many of us have conditioned ourselves to continually check the same mainstream sources/walled gardens. These places have no blogrolls, of course. Thanks for your comment, it's good food for thought.
Can someone justify me a blog that shows a blank page when JS is disabled with noscript (and, therefore, <noscript> tag is triggered, unlike with umatrix and ublock disabled scripts)?
I never stopped reading blogs using feedly. I don't like feedly a lot, but it works and it allows me to follow nice blogs, which, from my point of view, is a much better use of my time than using social networks, which I almost don't use anymore.
I've recently moved to this model too. I follow mailing lists and blog feeds via emacs gnus. I don't use fb or twitter bc I don't think the (content value)/(time) ratio is too low
Moved to Feedly from Google Reader (I miss Google Reader). But likewise, I get more value from that than social media. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the instant gratification of someone-liked-and-shared-my-post just as much as the next person, but if I'm going to learn anything over the course of the day, it's more likely to be in my Feedly time than Facebook time.
I keep thinking of starting a blog under a false name. My current blog: https://jamesadam.me, is full of mostly vanilla tech articles, conveying nothing particularly unique in perspective nor noteworthy in content.
I have ideas for more "interesting" articles I'd like to write (still mostly about software development, my industry, etc), but I fear they would either cause offense (and we all know there is no greater sin) or at the very least be off-putting to potential employers. Thus, I keep thinking about adopting a 'pen' name and throwing up a second blog to serve as an outlet for some of the more insane ramblings I'd like to inflict on the world.
One of my friends' throw-away blog articles ended up being be be. one in a non-english search for "butt cramps". It has something like 1.2 million page views and 1000 comments.
I think that’s a good idea. :) I’ve considered doing the same thing, although I currently don’t even have a blog under my REAL name. It’s very easy to self-censor, especially if you’re not famous or powerful enough not to have to care.
I first did this years ago with a science blog under a nom de plume and ended up with a decent audience relative to no promotion (40-60k~ readers per article). It was pretty satisfying and I would highly recommend doing it. The only downside may have been that it deeply inflamed my generalist yearnings for multiple careers.
Blogs had blogrolls ofc (some even had web-rings) but for the most parts: a bunch of years ago it was normal for people to link to freshly found blogs from their articles. That kind of flatery was often returned and repeated. The big search engines picked up and send in a good amount of traffic if your article covered the exact topic searched for and at one time you were even allowed to link your blog from the comments you posted on other blogs. While the later doesn't seem like much you would by nature comment on blogs in the areas you are interested in which strongly tends to matches the topic of your own blogs. This process scaled perfectly with how impressive your comment was. I ended up reading countless blogs because their author 1) knew their shit and 2) knew how to write. The [say] 40 k hits could be a huge % of regulars who kept coming back for more. Much more valuable than getting 40 single page view zombies out of google, visitors who may or may not have liked your shit. (Google eventually decided for them that they didn't)
I one time did a rather dull blog with tiny posts describing new blogs I found. (preferably using their own words) It wasn't a serious effort but got over 3 million hits. People didn't stick around but it was seriously cross pollinating readers between similar blogs. The other [proverbial] stay at home mum into baking cakes was just that much more interesting to the one.
I had amazing amounts of fun sending the "motherload" of traffic into 2 article blogs that started days ago. (If you knew me you would laugh how stereotypical that joke is.)
The proverbial mum was like, uhhh okay, I suppose I have to bake more cakes now?
Then when the blog matured other blogs would start to publish (much better) Articles about those awesome cakes. Even interviews happened.
I added 1-5 (usually 3) blog posts per day for a few years. Today there is ONLY ONE out of all of those blogs left that I know of. My blog died naturally, I just got bored with gazing over stale blogs and deleting postings referring to dead ones then deleted the entire thing.
Focused on a niche subject. Wrote with humor, brevity and (unearned) authority. Was strategic with visual and verbal tone: styled the blog to reference institutions like NYT, wrote with the voice of authors I respect and/or enjoyed.
Most important, I think, was writing for being pleasurable and nourishing to the reader rather than egoistically trying to impress with wit, domain knowledge, and, worst of all, personal anecdotes – the boring, herpetic poison that oozes from most blogs.
Like art, you're assembling a puzzle with no preordained point of completion. It didn't come easily but seemed clear when it was done.
I tend to write my blog posts under my own name. Then tend to guest post on other peoples blogs under different names if I don't want something linked to me (I actually did that for a couple years).
Now, I'm at the - I really don't care if I cause some offense level. I don't want to blow anything too out of the water I guess. However, doing an actually analysis about how violence isn't caused or even made worse by guns isn't going to be too bad in my own name.
You're welcome to guest blog on some of my other blogs (if it's a related topic lol):
I've been thinking about reblogging articles on my blog. I want to set up separate article listings with and without reblogs, and separate RSS feeds. I wouldn't rehost the content, just put a link to the article in my feed.
I do exactly that with a /links.html page. Unfortunately it requires js because it's just pulling in my latest shares from Pinboard. (But the link to that page gets added to the navigation with js, so non-js user agents don't see the link to it.) Pinboard provides a RSS feed I can link to for my shares as well.
I've been thinking about moving from Pinboard and setting something up myself and compiling it into my site's static html instead of syndicating from a third-party.
I love the idea of more and more people trying to get away from platforms. But for the love of all things good, please:
1. Don't use wordpress, you'll catch a virus.
2. Don't use scroll-jackers, your OS/Browser combination should provide the best scrolling experience for your user, if you hate your own scroll experience, get a better browser/OS, don't FK with the one I have it's perfect.
3. Don't use pop-ups that cover content to sign up - EVERYONE I know immediately closes the page and never returns when that happens... it's kinda the opposite of what you want right?
Maybe, but you're still using a platform, they'll pull your SEO towards them every way they can. I kept my wife's wordpress site updated all the time... when the virus hit it was a PAID FOR Theme that was targeted. Seriously the surface area of Wordpress self-install is crazy bad, not to mention many of the themes you select install scroll-jackers and email-signup cover the page crap that I'm talking about.
So should we all start from scratch and build our own CMS? WordPress is like Windows. It works great for a large majority of users. Some people catch malware because being the most popular tool will result in it being the most targeted.
I definitely agree with your point about everyone creating a CMS. I wish I had an answer for you - and like Windows yes I wish more people would migrate to a different OS too. There is Ghost, but I think more recently they are becoming more corporate too. However Ghost, unlike Wordpress is built on Node, which is more secure by default. It's similar to Java, in that the request handling is done by passing specific things around - in PHP everything has access to the request - every bit of code is able to do whatever it wants. So when you build a plugin system in PHP, you're giving your plugins a HUGE surface area. In non-PHP CMS's you have the ability to build a better system. You can isolate what the code is allowed to do. It's not perfect either, but there is a big different between Facebook writing PHP where the corporate can control the rules and its coding standards and Wordpress where people across a large spectrum of coding experience are providing a plugin that can, basically hose the entire website. (And edit to clarify - yes Ghost would have plugins with a wide range of coding experience, too, but remember there is a very different exploitable surface area here.)
I do think it's fair to criticize WordPress for its design being such that themes are inherent security vulnerabilities.
Not that I don't see the trade-offs. They chose flexibility and ease-of-implementation early on, and are somewhat stuck with the security issue because of the huge theme ecosystem.
Personally, I like to have to control of my own comment system, as well as a user login setup and a bunch of other things that can't be done in plain HTML and CSS.
A static site is good too (and for many people it'll work fine), but a CMS built site is also the way to go for many other people. It's all about what they want from a site or blog really.
For blogs, it mostly suffices to have static HTML pages served from a basic/stripped-down HTTP server. The only way to "roll your own" would be to write your own HTTP server, which I agree would be a security concern, but I don't think it's what the parent had in mind.
For security I would much rather use WordPress than any other open-source CMS. There are hundreds of people around the world trying to find security holes in the core CMS every single day and any ones that are found are quickly patched. There is a reason it's used by many enterprise users.
> The WordPress Security Team is made up of approximately 50 experts including lead developers and security researchers — about half are employees of Automattic (makers of WordPress.com, the earliest and largest WordPress hosting platform on the web), and a number work in the web security field. The team consults with well-known and trusted security researchers and hosting companies.
(Disclaimer: I work for Automattic on WooCommerce)
I think the fallacy here is that if you want a blog, you need a full-blown CMS like Wordpress (or Drupal, or whatever). If you have some baseline technical skills, you're probably better off using a static site generator like Jekyll and hosting it on GitHub Pages or something like that. Then you just don't have any security worries at all. If you really want commenting, you can embed Disqus or FB or something.
I certainly wouldn't recommend this for your average non-technical person who just wants to write a blog (hosted WP is a fine solution there), but for most of the people who post on HN, it seems silly to go for a CMS.
(Yes, I know that a static site generator will not give you a lot of the dynamic features and whatnot that a CMS will give you, but I'd expect that a very small percentage of the "I want to write articles and publish them" set of people really needs any of them.)
As someone who's used WordPress for years as both a developer and a website owner, no you won't get a virus from it. If you use it as it is out of the box (or with vetted, popular plugins from the official directory) and update whenever necessary, it's just as secure as any other CMS can be.
What causes some people to have security problems on the other hand is usually either:
A: They've not updated for years/not at all, hence security vulnerability stick around right under their nose.
B: Their theme is poorly built and from some shady site trying to insert backdoors or what not for whatever reason.
C: They're using poorly made plugins (this questionable third party product quality issue is always the trade off for using open software/anything that lets you run your own code, and can be migitated by not downloading anything from dodgy looking websites).
D: Or perhaps that they've annoyed someone/some organisation with way more technical ability than you can practically guard against. Which again, is an issue with almost any script or program. A site based around 'hacking' could be run on the digital equivalent of Fort Knox, and it'd still probably be hacked every few weeks or so.
If you're reasonable about the software and don't do anything too silly, it's about as safe as any of its alternatives.
Can't disagree with the latter two points though. The latter's why reading Medium is basically a chore nowadays.
Use a good static site generator. I stopped using Wordpress years ago. Life has been better. I don't get rando's trying to leave spammy, weird comments on my site trying to sell drugs. Nobody is constantly trying to hijack my Wordpress install. I'm not constantly being nagged to upgrade it.
I just write locally in markdown and a script picks up the changes and re-publishes. I preview it on a locally running web server. When I'm happy I just run a small rsync script and boom.
Statically served sites are super fast.
Try GatsbyJS, Jekyll, Mynt; take your pick.
It's funny... when I first started writing online I wrote some perl scripts that hacked together text files into an HTML template. Then when people started calling it blogging and sticking a database behind everything became the norm I eventually ceded to wordpress... but after a bunch of years doing that it's back to scripts hacking text files into HTML.
Don't forget to check out the indieweb movement and start building links.
Curation for discovery has been the most difficult problem for information since access exploded with the internet. Netflix had prize money behind algorithmic improvement here. Public libraries and physical bookstores use experts and physical placement. Most digital content services use humans to curate new content. The last chapter in James Gleick's book "The Information" identifies this as the next problem in information - now that access is no longer a barrier, how do we decide what's useful? The combination of wikipedia and Google has largely solved search for most internet-available content, but not discovery or trust of what you don't yet know to search for.
This curation problem isn't only about blog content - it also contributes to the proliferation of fake news and conspiracy theories. Comment curated by many people's networks has become limited to their tribal connections, and some tribes exclude information sources that value scientific or journalistic standards.
What we already know about and read daily is what we trust, and helps define our tribe. Our tribe uses HN. Other tribes (which may intersect with ours) use Reddit, Digg, 4Chan, forums, newspapers, blogrolls, and many other systems. When we get content from our tribe - the concept of 'social media' - someone else is sharing their trust in content with us, in ways we can categorize.
Each content system on the internet is rooted in a point source, the owner, who shares their trust with varying levels of directness: Newspapers don't have a pattern of trust sharing, though some experiment. Blogrolls' owners share trust directly - 'direct owner trust sharing'. Small forums (where content is only ranked by time, not votes) use 'direct user trust sharing' because users are treated equally; Reddit posts use 'indirect user trust sharing' through voting. Facebook and Twitter use both 'direct user trust sharing' (what your friends post) and 'indirect owner trust sharing', (the owner algorithms).
It seems clear that there are serious manipulation problems with indirect trust sharing systems open across tribes - Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter all struggle with this. Innovation in social media seems to focus on curating direct user trust sharing to guide indirect user trust sharing. To fix trust sharing, we'll have to curate new direct relationships. I believe this will be much along the lines of blogrolls - direct trust sharing from identified tribal members, rather than only from your direct network.
Work has been done to map the internet through linking. Some of this, such as Jonathan Albright's coverage of the 2016 US Presidential election, has begun to identify tribes in those maps. I believe the next major algorithmic innovation will triangulate your tribe, using content you've already trusted yourself (by sharing with others), and curate discovery of new tribal members based on the nodes in and near that tribe. A network-wide blogroll, across content types, which links you to new direct trust sharing relationships. This would help democratize curation, and could result in a clearer understanding of tribal boundaries and how disinformation spreads.
Back in 1989, when Byte Magazine was warning us of "infoglut", I decided that the most valuable job was the editor. I've seen no reason to change my mind since.
I ran the hub of a BBS network, moderated numerous forums, have run a few user / study groups, published a few zines / newsletters, was a (terrible) radio DJ, etc. I even work on recommenders for my day job.
I remain unimpressed. I've tried to be open minded about automated curation. But I've decided recommenders, as we know them, have topped out.
I feel like there is a legitimate market for "the old ways" (TM).
Social media is "great", in the same way that the invention of alcohol was "great" - the bad part of it is that it is literally designed to drive clicks and addict us, and we have no way of turning it off (temporarily) that we can't just switch right back on (yes, I have seen all your handy scripts and tricks).
You know what was awesome about walking into a brick and mortar building and buying a piece of software? It almost certainly would not contain a virus due to the prohibitive cost of getting it on a shelf, and it was not flogged to a state of near-death by app store restrictions. Yeah we killed some trees, and we liked it that way! (shakes fist at sky).
Writing impressive code used to be a highly valued skill, limited to the few who put in the time to piecing together arcane knowledge. Now we are just surfing on the backs of giants and locked into their ecosystems. So long as you can write a laggy javascript app and google how to do something you are safe in this world. (shakes fist at sky again, why not)
I'm a 30s fellow and I do this as well. I'm all calls/text message + video calls via Signal/Wire/Skype.
I don't understand the desire to publicly broadcast things and none of my friends have had an issue with it. Of course, my friends are mostly technical or privacy-oriented folks.
A broadcast may be worthwhile when it carries measurable value and: produces unsigned side effects [0]; produces manageable signed side effects [1].
I’m 24, deleted Facebook at 18, WhatsApp last year, and I too am all calls (and emails for longform or bit sharing). I still observe HN, Twitter [2], domain-specific newsletters for value, and occasionally share when there’s value to be added.
They are indeed. I prefer to act within the boundaries of bare reality and leverage technology for value-oriented scenarios. I feel business-driven, cognition-altering escape palaces are wrathful, detrimental environments.
What is the problem your friends have with you not being on Big Social Media? Is it that they want to be able to message you over those platforms? Or do they want you to see things they post? Or something else?
My only form of contact is Twitter for many people (they do not have my email). I posted my email publicly though when I tried to leave Twitter. Twitter is (to its benefit) an extremely low-friction form of communication that is not quite the same as email or a phone call. For example, I can say something on Twitter without demanding a given person's attention - rather, they can read it if they want to.
Anyhow, it was more a philosophical problem that brought me back. I said, in so many words, that I wanted to be more "zen" (whatever that means) and eliminate distractions. They argued that I was not in a "zen" place if I let distractions bother me in the first place. So I took it as a challenge (which I failed). I think it easier to turn things off permanently than to master one's own willpower.
Sounds like a fallacy. If I choose to not play a TV in the background on full volume in my office all day while I work, is this a result of my lacking willpower?
Also, different people have different sensitivities. Don’t be so quick to write sensitivities off as weaknesses. To illustrate: the nervous system (and most other things) depends on sensing, and would simply fail if it were rendered too insensitive. Your sensitivities are often strengths when managed accordingly. Practicing and challenging them has it’s benefits, but we want to be strategic with this rather than simply withstanding to no end.
> I think it easier to turn things off permanently than to master one's own willpower.
That's one reason I left Reddit; too much coming down the pipe, even when my subscriptions were pared down to a few technical groups. It was easiest just to completely stop going.
For what it's worth, here's my take: turning off social media is far and away more "zen" than having it, no matter how infrequently you use it. Being unplugged from that culture has helped me spend more time thinking about and doing things that have lasting impact on my life. Like learning and building. In my experience, caring about staying up to date on pop culture keeps people from actually doing things they say they want to do.
"almost certainly" does leave room for some cases.
Also, that was a music CD with malware, not a software application. I'm sure the DRM for many games was comparable, but they still had to mind their manners somewhat.
I'm old enough to remember when a 'blog' was called a 'zine' and was traded for stamps in the mail. Then the 'aggregator' was the awesome Factsheet Five. Can you imagine trying trying to do a FF for blogs? It's almost enough to make me go out get a mimeograph machine.
I'm not sure if you're referring to Scott Hansleman's approach:
> This stemmed from listening to a podcast on The Changelog about ‘Open Source at Microsoft, Inclusion, Diversity, and OSCON’ with Scott Hansleman. In the interview, Scott mentions how he receives questions via email fairly regularly. Interestingly, instead of replying to the email directly he instead writes a blog post and then replies to the email with a link to the post. Scott goes on to describe how he is constantly aware of the number of keypresses he has left in his life and therefore has taken the approach to not want to waste a single one of them.
I think the issue with blogs is things like Twitter solved: making it low effort to publish and promote content.
I've recently thought that maybe a blog should really be a timeline (or similar) where you can tweet and posts simply exist as pages and show up on category/tag pages. You'd "tweet" your posts to a timeline and this would be what would normally appear on the home page and rss feed. You could re-promote an old post with a small blurb why it's relevant again. You could link to other sites with a blurb why. All the while you're not clogging up twitter and others since they can go to the website and see the information there (pull vs push).
I used to work very hard to produce low quality content and post it on hn twitter and whatnot. It was depressing to see very little traffic.
So i reduced the number of post, stopped posting on HN. Suddenly i have more traffic then ever. Though google is mostly responsible for it.
What i started doing more often is link to people i find interesting in my articles, that's the new blog roll replacement, and somehow it has pushed those to link back to me.
Ps: don't give up because no one likes your content, the majority will not like it anyway.
The fact that almost all the traffic to my personal blog are just one-hit wonders from google actually made me feel a lot less pressure to "grow" the blog or to even keep to any kind of coherent theme.
These days, I post about whatever I feel like. With greatly varied degrees of quality. All knowing that a small handful of posts on some oddball niche will continue to garner tons of Google traffic while the vast majority of pages lay fallow.
ditto.
That's why on WP, I feel more connected. I get various followers and I can search WP for blogs I'm interested in, but that leaves out everyone not on WP. :(
139 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 199 ms ] threadThe only thing I can think of that I want and isn't included are:
Auto sampling based on pages I visit (like old Google Desktop Search)
and auto following (not sure exactly how) of issues etc that I interact with on github etc.
[0] https://en.support.wordpress.com/reader/
https://github.com/miniflux/miniflux-legacy
It’s difficult to have a good discussion in the comments. And if you do, it’s quickly lost to time.
For example, I can’t have a discussion about why I think the Amazon Alexa is “Making a Dent in the Universe” without being drowned out by the privacy debate,
So, I started a blog where I can [attempt to] write my thoughts in a short piece.
http://h4labs.org/the-amazon-echo-made-a-dent-in-the-univers...
My musings can go in place that I can revisit:
http://h4labs.org/category/musings/
I actually started a few years ago but I wanted off the ugly WordPress ads:
https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2015/07/28/in-the-future-everyo...
[UPDATE]
I just got downvoted because someone didn’t like what I said. Happens all the time. I’ve gone several levels deep explaining why I disagree with the common opinion.
This brings up one of the other benefits of writing out your thoughts and opinions in a blog, you don’t have to waste FU karma trying to explain yourself.
That's in no way excusing the state of affairs. As I mentioned, I fully agree that _something_ has been lost since those halcyon days. The blogs that existed (there was definitely a higher barrier to entry than opening a social media account) each went their own individually quirky ways (at least, until the staggering conformity of everyone using blog engines like Wordpress (<3 ya WP, but you made the world bland)). It was great when a contributor had their own little corner, and would actively customize it (in much more interesting ways than the MySpace pages of yore).
It's not a bad thing that social media brings down the barriers to sharing your thoughts ... what's bad is how those same platforms have, over time, gone above and beyond in measures to keep you on their site and stop you from actually clicking on the link and visiting the other site
I don't know if Americans are this much different than Canadians, but I have 200+ FB "friends" and outside of the occasional complaining about various social injustices, no one ever posts anything of substance, I have a strong feeling that most people would consider it weird.
https://simonwillison.net/
But I noticed it doesn't have a license. Are you okay with people adopting the backend for their own blog?
Hi, Simon. :-)
EDIT especially after looking at the source: it's a CSS blanking to show signup for newsletters. Once the CSS is disabled, the text is there.
I have ideas for more "interesting" articles I'd like to write (still mostly about software development, my industry, etc), but I fear they would either cause offense (and we all know there is no greater sin) or at the very least be off-putting to potential employers. Thus, I keep thinking about adopting a 'pen' name and throwing up a second blog to serve as an outlet for some of the more insane ramblings I'd like to inflict on the world.
Proctalgia fugax is apparently pretty common.
This is how geocities used to be.
I one time did a rather dull blog with tiny posts describing new blogs I found. (preferably using their own words) It wasn't a serious effort but got over 3 million hits. People didn't stick around but it was seriously cross pollinating readers between similar blogs. The other [proverbial] stay at home mum into baking cakes was just that much more interesting to the one.
I had amazing amounts of fun sending the "motherload" of traffic into 2 article blogs that started days ago. (If you knew me you would laugh how stereotypical that joke is.)
The proverbial mum was like, uhhh okay, I suppose I have to bake more cakes now?
Then when the blog matured other blogs would start to publish (much better) Articles about those awesome cakes. Even interviews happened.
I added 1-5 (usually 3) blog posts per day for a few years. Today there is ONLY ONE out of all of those blogs left that I know of. My blog died naturally, I just got bored with gazing over stale blogs and deleting postings referring to dead ones then deleted the entire thing.
Most important, I think, was writing for being pleasurable and nourishing to the reader rather than egoistically trying to impress with wit, domain knowledge, and, worst of all, personal anecdotes – the boring, herpetic poison that oozes from most blogs.
Like art, you're assembling a puzzle with no preordained point of completion. It didn't come easily but seemed clear when it was done.
Now, I'm at the - I really don't care if I cause some offense level. I don't want to blow anything too out of the water I guess. However, doing an actually analysis about how violence isn't caused or even made worse by guns isn't going to be too bad in my own name.
You're welcome to guest blog on some of my other blogs (if it's a related topic lol):
https://austingwalters.com/
Have one for my company related to NLP, Sentiment, etc:
https://blog.projectpiglet.com/
Finance (haven't used in a while):
http://topfinancialadvisor.org/
And some others I guess, DM me if interested.
I've been thinking about moving from Pinboard and setting something up myself and compiling it into my site's static html instead of syndicating from a third-party.
1. Don't use wordpress, you'll catch a virus.
2. Don't use scroll-jackers, your OS/Browser combination should provide the best scrolling experience for your user, if you hate your own scroll experience, get a better browser/OS, don't FK with the one I have it's perfect.
3. Don't use pop-ups that cover content to sign up - EVERYONE I know immediately closes the page and never returns when that happens... it's kinda the opposite of what you want right?
https://klezlab.it
EDIT: damn, I just noticed the date on the most recent post. I should give the blog some more love...
But yes, you should really write something new!
?!? First, you're talking about a self installed wordpress, not wordpress.com. Second: just keep it updated.
Not that I don't see the trade-offs. They chose flexibility and ease-of-implementation early on, and are somewhat stuck with the security issue because of the huge theme ecosystem.
The famous 5-minute install is still by far the simplest I've seen.
It has by far the widest use of translating.
If you love your tech then sure install something else, but if you just want to blog then WordPress is your friend.
But similar to using Windows you do indeed have to be careful because of it's popularity so it's a target.
Almost entirely it's the plugins that are the problem. Just be careful with those.
I used to use a pretty heavyweight system, and was forever installing updates, monitoring logs, fighting spam comments, etc.
I now have a static site, and it's mostly just fire and forget. In fact that's exactly the case for the IPFS mirror (since it's immutable)!
Personally, I like to have to control of my own comment system, as well as a user login setup and a bunch of other things that can't be done in plain HTML and CSS.
A static site is good too (and for many people it'll work fine), but a CMS built site is also the way to go for many other people. It's all about what they want from a site or blog really.
For security I would much rather use WordPress than any other open-source CMS. There are hundreds of people around the world trying to find security holes in the core CMS every single day and any ones that are found are quickly patched. There is a reason it's used by many enterprise users.
From https://wordpress.org/about/security/ :
> The WordPress Security Team is made up of approximately 50 experts including lead developers and security researchers — about half are employees of Automattic (makers of WordPress.com, the earliest and largest WordPress hosting platform on the web), and a number work in the web security field. The team consults with well-known and trusted security researchers and hosting companies.
(Disclaimer: I work for Automattic on WooCommerce)
I certainly wouldn't recommend this for your average non-technical person who just wants to write a blog (hosted WP is a fine solution there), but for most of the people who post on HN, it seems silly to go for a CMS.
(Yes, I know that a static site generator will not give you a lot of the dynamic features and whatnot that a CMS will give you, but I'd expect that a very small percentage of the "I want to write articles and publish them" set of people really needs any of them.)
What causes some people to have security problems on the other hand is usually either:
A: They've not updated for years/not at all, hence security vulnerability stick around right under their nose.
B: Their theme is poorly built and from some shady site trying to insert backdoors or what not for whatever reason.
C: They're using poorly made plugins (this questionable third party product quality issue is always the trade off for using open software/anything that lets you run your own code, and can be migitated by not downloading anything from dodgy looking websites).
D: Or perhaps that they've annoyed someone/some organisation with way more technical ability than you can practically guard against. Which again, is an issue with almost any script or program. A site based around 'hacking' could be run on the digital equivalent of Fort Knox, and it'd still probably be hacked every few weeks or so.
If you're reasonable about the software and don't do anything too silly, it's about as safe as any of its alternatives.
Can't disagree with the latter two points though. The latter's why reading Medium is basically a chore nowadays.
I just write locally in markdown and a script picks up the changes and re-publishes. I preview it on a locally running web server. When I'm happy I just run a small rsync script and boom.
Statically served sites are super fast.
Try GatsbyJS, Jekyll, Mynt; take your pick.
It's funny... when I first started writing online I wrote some perl scripts that hacked together text files into an HTML template. Then when people started calling it blogging and sticking a database behind everything became the norm I eventually ceded to wordpress... but after a bunch of years doing that it's back to scripts hacking text files into HTML.
Don't forget to check out the indieweb movement and start building links.
This curation problem isn't only about blog content - it also contributes to the proliferation of fake news and conspiracy theories. Comment curated by many people's networks has become limited to their tribal connections, and some tribes exclude information sources that value scientific or journalistic standards.
What we already know about and read daily is what we trust, and helps define our tribe. Our tribe uses HN. Other tribes (which may intersect with ours) use Reddit, Digg, 4Chan, forums, newspapers, blogrolls, and many other systems. When we get content from our tribe - the concept of 'social media' - someone else is sharing their trust in content with us, in ways we can categorize.
Each content system on the internet is rooted in a point source, the owner, who shares their trust with varying levels of directness: Newspapers don't have a pattern of trust sharing, though some experiment. Blogrolls' owners share trust directly - 'direct owner trust sharing'. Small forums (where content is only ranked by time, not votes) use 'direct user trust sharing' because users are treated equally; Reddit posts use 'indirect user trust sharing' through voting. Facebook and Twitter use both 'direct user trust sharing' (what your friends post) and 'indirect owner trust sharing', (the owner algorithms).
It seems clear that there are serious manipulation problems with indirect trust sharing systems open across tribes - Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter all struggle with this. Innovation in social media seems to focus on curating direct user trust sharing to guide indirect user trust sharing. To fix trust sharing, we'll have to curate new direct relationships. I believe this will be much along the lines of blogrolls - direct trust sharing from identified tribal members, rather than only from your direct network.
Work has been done to map the internet through linking. Some of this, such as Jonathan Albright's coverage of the 2016 US Presidential election, has begun to identify tribes in those maps. I believe the next major algorithmic innovation will triangulate your tribe, using content you've already trusted yourself (by sharing with others), and curate discovery of new tribal members based on the nodes in and near that tribe. A network-wide blogroll, across content types, which links you to new direct trust sharing relationships. This would help democratize curation, and could result in a clearer understanding of tribal boundaries and how disinformation spreads.
Back in 1989, when Byte Magazine was warning us of "infoglut", I decided that the most valuable job was the editor. I've seen no reason to change my mind since.
I ran the hub of a BBS network, moderated numerous forums, have run a few user / study groups, published a few zines / newsletters, was a (terrible) radio DJ, etc. I even work on recommenders for my day job.
I remain unimpressed. I've tried to be open minded about automated curation. But I've decided recommenders, as we know them, have topped out.
Machine learning-based recommenders are just feedback loops, automated groupthink.
---
Aha. It's worse than that. Today's recommenders are merely accelerated preferential attachment. aka Fads.
Thanks, articulating myself has been a useful exercise.
Social media is "great", in the same way that the invention of alcohol was "great" - the bad part of it is that it is literally designed to drive clicks and addict us, and we have no way of turning it off (temporarily) that we can't just switch right back on (yes, I have seen all your handy scripts and tricks).
You know what was awesome about walking into a brick and mortar building and buying a piece of software? It almost certainly would not contain a virus due to the prohibitive cost of getting it on a shelf, and it was not flogged to a state of near-death by app store restrictions. Yeah we killed some trees, and we liked it that way! (shakes fist at sky).
Writing impressive code used to be a highly valued skill, limited to the few who put in the time to piecing together arcane knowledge. Now we are just surfing on the backs of giants and locked into their ecosystems. So long as you can write a laggy javascript app and google how to do something you are safe in this world. (shakes fist at sky again, why not)
...continues muttering/ranting...
i solved this problem by convincing myself that i don't actually want to turn it back on
What I've done to replace it is email and call people. I'm 42 so many of my friends are receptive to calls that younger people may not be so ymmv.
I'm sure you know this, but your true friends will be there offline whether you see them online or not.
Good luck!
I don't understand the desire to publicly broadcast things and none of my friends have had an issue with it. Of course, my friends are mostly technical or privacy-oriented folks.
I’m 24, deleted Facebook at 18, WhatsApp last year, and I too am all calls (and emails for longform or bit sharing). I still observe HN, Twitter [2], domain-specific newsletters for value, and occasionally share when there’s value to be added.
While I might have to manage debris, I see value.
[0] https://arxiv.org/rss/cs
[1] https://twitter.com
[2] A meticulously curated, filtered stream.
Anyhow, it was more a philosophical problem that brought me back. I said, in so many words, that I wanted to be more "zen" (whatever that means) and eliminate distractions. They argued that I was not in a "zen" place if I let distractions bother me in the first place. So I took it as a challenge (which I failed). I think it easier to turn things off permanently than to master one's own willpower.
Also, different people have different sensitivities. Don’t be so quick to write sensitivities off as weaknesses. To illustrate: the nervous system (and most other things) depends on sensing, and would simply fail if it were rendered too insensitive. Your sensitivities are often strengths when managed accordingly. Practicing and challenging them has it’s benefits, but we want to be strategic with this rather than simply withstanding to no end.
That's one reason I left Reddit; too much coming down the pipe, even when my subscriptions were pared down to a few technical groups. It was easiest just to completely stop going.
Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Note that they also ask you not to use uppercase like that; it's basically yelling.
Boop
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
Edit: But yes, I too miss "the old ways".
Also, that was a music CD with malware, not a software application. I'm sure the DRM for many games was comparable, but they still had to mind their manners somewhat.
I miss when my money mattered.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dishwasher_Pete
The simplest point was if you've written a long email to someone explaining a tech topic - write it up as a blog post.
But there were a couple of other equally valid reasons for writing a blog post, but I can't remember them now.
> This stemmed from listening to a podcast on The Changelog about ‘Open Source at Microsoft, Inclusion, Diversity, and OSCON’ with Scott Hansleman. In the interview, Scott mentions how he receives questions via email fairly regularly. Interestingly, instead of replying to the email directly he instead writes a blog post and then replies to the email with a link to the post. Scott goes on to describe how he is constantly aware of the number of keypresses he has left in his life and therefore has taken the approach to not want to waste a single one of them.
Extract from an article I wrote on the subject, under the term Blogumentation https://jvt.me/posts/2017/06/25/blogumentation/
It sounds almost exactly like it though and I have read quite a bit of Hanselman's stuff. Bloody good find. Thank you :)
edit: I've added three... https://ianchanning.wordpress.com/
I've recently thought that maybe a blog should really be a timeline (or similar) where you can tweet and posts simply exist as pages and show up on category/tag pages. You'd "tweet" your posts to a timeline and this would be what would normally appear on the home page and rss feed. You could re-promote an old post with a small blurb why it's relevant again. You could link to other sites with a blurb why. All the while you're not clogging up twitter and others since they can go to the website and see the information there (pull vs push).
Fact is, I'm fairly confident with the greater and greater pull of social media and walled gardens, indie writers are simply fading away.
I know I stopped writing because it's hard as hell to both rank and share content.
So i reduced the number of post, stopped posting on HN. Suddenly i have more traffic then ever. Though google is mostly responsible for it.
What i started doing more often is link to people i find interesting in my articles, that's the new blog roll replacement, and somehow it has pushed those to link back to me.
Ps: don't give up because no one likes your content, the majority will not like it anyway.
https://idiallo.com
These days, I post about whatever I feel like. With greatly varied degrees of quality. All knowing that a small handful of posts on some oddball niche will continue to garner tons of Google traffic while the vast majority of pages lay fallow.