Fully agreed. When the blogs died one of the richest and most interesting parts of the internet died with it. The good news is that Wordpress.com and Blogspot still exist so the information was not lost, but almost all of the blogs haven't been updated in 5+ years. I'd love to see a concerted effort to have them rebooted -- maybe Google could up-rank them, or CPMs could increase, or Patreon-like models could be built in, who knows.
fwiw I don't see Medium as being a replacement for blogs. It's gotten quite bad from a user standpoint and kills the relationship with the reader in the same way that "blogging" on Linkedin or Facebook does (not quite as bad because at least it's findable on the open web).
I don't think blogs are dead, just hidden from view. That's why I obsessively bookmark blogs when I see them posted to HN or Reddit, since I know I'll never be able to find them again if I lose the link.
Well you can have a link to my unsuccessful unfocused blog. I have posted fairly recently though. Software music mountaineering etc http://omnisplore.wordpress.com
...though when I say unsuccessful I should clarify I'm being tongue in cheek. Sharing ideas makes me happy whether or not it brings me any material benefit :)
Same here. It may be basic and crappy, but if you want to read an unsuccessful blog with no attempt at monetization or ads or even visitor counting, mine[1] is where you should feel right at home.
But I guess the author means a platform, not loose websites without a collective 'new' feed. I remember looking for one when wanting to make a new blog and I haven't found a platform that felt right, at least back then (probably ~2015). Heck, I couldn't even find software to install: everything is either super heavy stuff that requires caching or at least a beefy CPU to survive the HN homepage (with custom software, HN can be survived on an ancient Atom CPU even if you use PHP (also pre-PHP7) and do multiple SQL queries per pageload) or some static generators that I wasn't looking for.
Edit: While we're at it, another blog I read is Robert Heaton's one[2], and I'm subscribed to a few others but they don't seem to post anymore since I stopped getting email notifications. I remember Coding Horror[3] was also nice to read but he posts very infrequently now (for those who don't know, that's by the co-founder of Stack Overflow). Finally, Cryptography Engineering[4] might be nice if you're into that sort of thing. But I suppose those can all be mostly considered successful in that they all have a following.
I moved mine from Wordpress to GitHub pages, and basically stopped using it; I could either pay Wordpress to not show gross ads, or host a mostly static site on GitHub.
If you don't mind sharing, why did you stop using your blog on GitHub?
I went from Drupal based blog to Hugo and then I stopped blogging. I used to write a post every six months or so. This was long enough to forget how to use Hugo, so I stopped. Lame excuse I know.
I stopped blogging because I don't think the world needs - or wants - my hot takes. I re-posted some things[0] that I refer to in the outside world; right now I'm digging into Honda Telematics[1]. That might end up on the blog, or I might leave it as a gist.
> The other day I searched for an hour and couldn't find even one. They used to be endless.
Oh there are still endless blogs. There are definitely a lot of defunct ones - but many have become active again recently. I review the unknown ones I come across here: https://www.kickscondor.com/hrefhunt/ (I skip software and startup blogs, because they are so numerous.)
You just can’t use the old avenues (Google searches, casual social media mentions) to find them. HN is a good source, Indieweb circles are good, and Pinboard and Are.na are other good catalogs. Once you find a few blogs you like, you’ll find your way to many more.
Hi kicks! I didn’t know you were on HN, ever since discovering it I’ve been promoting the IndieWeb, and yours was the first site I came across; to me the IndieWeb and microformats is the web we should have gotten instead of one dominated by platforms.
...on a platform (it was a tweet), ironically. I tore my jekyll-based site down earlier this year because I have a bad habit of redesigning it every other Tuesday.
it’s a strange compulsion, but your site and a few others I found on indieweb.xyz have been some good motivation to work towards some degree of content permanence that I own and control (plus a general frustration and growing loss of patience with the platform)
Twitter is fine by me. The Indieweb is a cool ideal. But I’ve still made great discoveries through Twitter as well. (Perhaps that speaks to the ingenuity of humans despite the platform tho...)
Two weeks ago I decided to set up one for myself as I have all these conversations where I instructed someone to do some obscure thing so thought to package them into public tutorials I could easily share.
Wanted my own domain, didn't want to deal with content moderation by someone else, wanted the ability to easily customize things, didn't want to show crappy ads, didn't want editors being able to hold up things, etc.
I spent a good 10 hours configuring all the basics for that between SSL certificates, DNS, domain name, etc. The barrier to entry seems to be substantial if you just want a simple clean interface that you yourself control and that is still building everything on top of WordPress.
I found something called WordOps (.org I think) and they make that trivial. Even win set up the letsencrypt. I don’t even use my own scripts any more- just theirs.
Today’s vlogs are similar to the blogs of 10 years ago. They’re day-in-the-life snippets from normal people doing mundane or semi-interesting things. Some of them are famous and are run like businesses with financial motives, but most aren’t. And you can find vlogs on all kinds of topics: travel, parenting, running, and even unicycling.
If you miss the old days of blogging I think you’ll enjoy watching vlogs.
The main problem I have with vlogs (and podcasts for that matter) is that they are linear, and they are long. When I read a blog, I can skim, scan for keywords, I can take it at my own pace. It's a very different experience, even if the raw content is the same.
There is just a problem with self curated content in general. There used to be a lot of experts making their own sites with information that was never available before. It was easy to just upload some HTML files somewhere. Now this information is being put in inaccessible areas like Facebook Groups. Then people tried running their own sites with wordpress and stuff but that becomes hard as you are usually on a crappy shared host, and get hacked the minute an exploit comes out.
As technologists, I think we could help by making it easier for people to publish to the open web with just plain HTML. Static site generators like Hugo go a long way there. CDNs like cloudfront are cheap now so no servers needed. We should make it easy for people by having something that can do it all for them. Get a domain, CDN, and SSL cert then a simple local editing tool and one button publish.
> Now this information is being put in inaccessible areas like Facebook Groups.
I hate that Facebook groups hide a lot of info this way. Back then google found blog posts and forum posts about a particular subject. Now if they are in a closed facebook group (is this the default?) then google won't see it.
I don't know if google indexes public facebook groups.
I'd suspect not. I sometimes will get a FB result for businesses (with nagging box for me to join Facebook taking up 33% of the screen). I Google a lot of stuff and never get results for FB groups public or private as a non Facebook user.
I agree and have personally found it quite easy to setup small websites hosted on AWS using Route53, Certificate Manager, S3, and CloudFront. They cost nearly nothing at low scale and are quite cost efficient until you hit serious scale, which few personal website ever achieve.
Yet, I don't think most people are going to want to go this route and it would take a fair amount of tooling to automate everything. It's not sufficient to just abstract away the cloud provider, people also need tools for creating and managing content. In theory you could run such tools locally, but I think most people would expect a web interface similar to that provided by Wordpress and medium.
Further, there's a big difference between free and essentially zero cost. How many people are going to be motivated to pull out their credit card to create blog when free alternatives already exist? Not only are existing blogging sites free, but they also promise the opportunity to actually make money through their affiliate program if the site becomes popular.
The layman has blogger/wordpress.com for free and one-click wordpress installer at any hosting provider of choice, so the tooling is a done thing (mostly Softaculous now but it's not a monopoly).
My blog does this. Not because I want to hide it. Since RSS is a standard, I expect anyone wanting to add my blog to their RSS would just use the current URL and the reader will grab the alt meta tag. I have multiple feeds, one for each tag, so if a reader uses a blog post URL they'll be given a choice on what tag to subscribe to (or everything). Having separate RSS links on the page for this would add clutter.
Before, Firefox used to show the RSS icon but they killed it. It really should be a browser-level thing, it's no different from favicons, rather than requiring users to hunt down a link somewhere on the page.
Blogs exist, they just morphed. People with things to say moved to platforms, like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, Twitch, or Medium.
This is because there's no point in self-hosting; using a platform is free and gives you some degree of discoverability.
Nobody wants to self-host on their own domain because it costs money and you need at least some rudimentary tech/sysadmin skills. Self-hosting doesn't solve the biggest problem of blogging - which is that nobody will read your work.
Facebook makes your content virtually inaccessible and discoverable from those outside Facebook. They are the opposite of the way things were on the open web. Medium "is easy" but they are gradually asking more and more of people visiting too. Twitter is a good platform for streams of thought but it is a terrible "blogging" platform. Having "a series of tweets" does not make for a blog. It is hard to read and terrible.
But you are right. People feel they don't need to self host because these things are there. The problem is you then no longer own your content distribution and are at the whim of them walling it off or shutting down.
I’d really like to see a “Medium minus the bullshit” service. Those pages are so full of js garbage they just feel awful to read and most of the interactions Medium tries to lead you toward are even more painful.
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 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.
This was the model back in the 2000s before monetization was big on the internet. This is really the key issue, not whether RSS feeds or dead or if it is too hard for people to self-host blogs.
The internet has changed a lot in the last ten years. People have realized that popular content has a big monetary potential, and it is far easier now to get compensated (remember when YouTube content creators couldn't monetize?). More content is created as a income source, than out of passion or interest. Search results are gamed by commerical blogs. The average hobby blogger can't compete with that.
>I'm actually working on something with that spirit.
Sincere question, not trying to be snarky. Since much (though not all) of the bullshit in Medium is their weak attempts at monetization, what's the bullshit-free alternative business plan to sustain and scale pluma over the long term?
Since we won't track users, sell data, or use ads... the only ethical option is having paying customers.
If you look at Ghost, WPEngine, etc, there are a lot of people willing to pay for being able to blog independently. We are betting that within that market there is a niche of people that want to do it as easily as possible, which I think is Medium's best feature.
Right but this creates a new issue, those platforms can moderate what you can say, and not every controversial statement is wrong or bad, but to avoid liability these platforms moderate it away. Then the other related issue is on the chance that what wasn't previously controversial becomes controversial they can go back and scrub older posts. Hosting your own blog protects you from this.
They have offered a lot of benefits but they also have the ability to censor.
Self-hosting doesn't solve the biggest problem of blogging - which is that nobody will read your work.
I started blogging in 1999 (and sadly there are the Wayback Machine archives to prove how juvenile I was!) and it was either self host or use Blogger.
Discoverability was pretty interesting. Most blogs' traffic didn't come from search engines (Google existed but it was pretty much geeks only) or platforms, but from other blogs whether by being referenced in a post, via a sidebar link, or via a webring or similar device. Getting over 100 visitors a day to your blog would be a big deal! Getting other bloggers' attention via linking to them was a big part of things or leaving comments on their blog. These things barely move the needle anymore.
While I have a lot of nostalgia for those days, I think there's actually a lot of other ways to be discovered now. Sites like Hacker News, Reddit, Lobsters, Designer News, etc. provide opportunities to be found within various sub-communities. Most people have Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social profiles on which they can share their links, often findable via hashtags people are monitoring. There are 1001 email newsletters that are always seeking out interesting things to link to.
So, I dunno, is discovery really a problem nowadays? I don't think it is, but maybe I'm too "in the game" to see the problems people are having with it. If anything, I think there's just too much to do nowadays and we're really competing with there being 100x more people online than 20 years ago.
You bring up a good point I hadn't really thought about. I was thinking purely about discoverability in terms of the blogger's perspective rather than the reader. You're right, unless you're already following the people who are broadcasting their blogs in all of these various places or live on Reddit/Hacker News/etc., you're going to struggle to find them more now than ever before.
To me it's more that Blogs vanished and the people that spent time with it moved their attention onto different media, especially Twitter. Both exploring and maintaining blogs is an effort, and I think what's left are tech blogs and blogs attached to news or magazine websites that are written by professional Journalists. Medium and Youtube also seems more like something for people who spent a lot of effort on this.
I think most people resorted to platforms for hosting the blogs. Not sure if it's so important if many people read something as long as it's interesting for some people.
The bloggers went to places where the eyeballs are. If you read a good book, make photo and post it with a comment on instagram. You will get much more reaction than with a blogpost on your private blog. Same for forums. If you are looking for a community with a special interest you will have more luck to find an active facebook group than a independent forum/message board somewhere else.
The challenge with platforms is that they have big incentives to push small, regular updates and posts, to increase impressions. Thoughtful, considered content and engaged responses are lost in the noise.
If you think the biggest problem of blogging is that nobody will read your work, you're not blogging, you're angling for popularity (or ad dollars, which comes out to the same in the end). If you have something interesting to write, write it in a blog. If you care more about having people read it, write on social media.
I would bring back RSS. The good parts of twitter (you can follow what lots of people have to say and aggregate it in a single feed) without the bad parts (character limits, "you stink" and other snarky comments, control of a centralised platform over who can say what, etc).
Yeah, I don't get what people mean when they say "bring back RSS"—-it's still around. The thing that disappeared was Google Reader, which I guess was a signal of super mainstream popularity of RSS.
Feedly is a great app that I use regularly to keep up with RSS, and there are other RSS readers too. It's not like we're talking about a dead protocol like Gopher, here.
I'd even say it's working much better than in the golden days as pretty much everyone is using an off-the-shelf blog engine which does RSS just fine, whereas in the old times a good half of the blogs were something homegrown/obscure/opt-in rss.
RSS feeds are still widely generated, but they are not encouraged and overt links to them have been removed. I know that many proprietors of monetized blogs keep RSS feed generation turned on because they think it is important for SEO, but they don't want readers using it because it clashes with their monetization strategy -- users are supposed to be drawn straight to the main website where they can then be upsold through popup modals and shit. I recall one blog where even mentioning in the comments feed that you subscribe to the site through RSS would lead to a permaban.
I use RSS everyday, and follow several hundred sites using it. One thing that gets overlooked when discussing RSS is that the nature of feeds themselves lends to scripting. I have one single source of aggregated data that I can run queries against, automate scripts with, generate alerts from etc. It's nice.
Blogs died when blog specific search engines disappeared, particularly 'Google Blog search' which was quietly killed off in 2014.
Technorati the other popular option for searching blogs, also went dark in 2014.
This is so weird to read. As a rare language native (Hungarian) I was never part of The Glorious Blogsphere That One Day Disappeared. I ran my blog because I wanted to make it, to tinker with it, to write, to create.
Those that went dark only because search engines now don't find them feel like they never done it for these values.
Blogs are too monetised today. For example, if you need some solution for Django (+ORM) - as of today it’s much easier to end up on some mediocre blog website than on official docs.
All authors tend to do so to re-create the same content in a different form and publish it. I assume taking most popular answer from Stack Overflow and writing a blog post about could be one of their strategies.
Basically blogging today is all race to infinite splits of the initial pie.
I have to admit I often true to keep blogs published on Hacker News because they usually do contain some unique content. However that is no longer the majority. An average blog today is equivalent to an average Facebook profile - it has nothing interesting per se.
I've had a blog for 5+ years but typically it had one or two intro articles then nothing. I found that I wanted to write perfection before publishing. Lately I've just been putting up information that I have found helpful in short form and found my visitors went from flat to several dozens a day getting utility.
It force content creators to write it in a certain way that in many cases might be way too long and not ’to the point’.
I dont remember the last time I searched for something on Google and it showed me a high quality opinion article in a random blog.
nowadays everything is around SEO and blogs, as much as I understand why google does that, I think it's the main reason for why blogs are not that popular anymore
I would argue Google also focuses on large corporations. I have a post on my blog that ranks really high (currently spot 3 for its keyword) in the bing/yahoo/ddg world but ranks after stack overflow, medium, reddit, youtube, etc. on google for the same keyword. (I did nothing to on this post for SEO it just organically showed up high on bing/yahoo/ddg)
I should also mention I have no ads of any kind on my blog.
Instead of an introduction and a recipe, you get a massive wall of text, such that you have to scroll for what seems like an eternity until you get to the actual recipe. Drives me nuts!
everything honestly has become elongated garbage. youtube videos are the same. 20+ minutes of rambling for 2 minutes of quality because thats the only way youtubers actually make any money. the internet is still a much more efficient tool than reading a textbook to find some information, but its getting to the point that it might be more interesting to sift through a textbook to find the info I want because at least im sifting through useful/more or less accurate info, instead of just pure filler nonsense that exists on the web today
Recipes aren't good either. I noticed good sites like serious eats almost never come up. The same sites always come up, nytimes, all recipes, food.com.
I guess search engines aren't the best place to get recipes, you need someone to vet and review them.
Actually.. that might be an interesting thing to do heh
For a long, long time, I have blogged without worrying about SEO or Google or even traffic. I write what I want. I don't look at analytics, and for my self-hosted sites, I don't have any analytics to look at.
Writing for SEO and trying to game Google is not interesting to me. There comes a point where the only think that keeps you going is the desire/compulsion to write.
I miss the days where Google would give me a relevant result with a minimal query, these days it's not helping me find what I'm looking for, it's 90% businesses trying to tell me something and low on content, high on SEO results. I guess this is how they do monetization but I often feel I'm unable to find content that must be out there.
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 list slowly grows.
I find that all Google results are increasingly useless spam. Even searching for programming Q&A is becoming less viable and I end up landing on one of those "you need to upgrade your flash player" phishing sites at least once or twice a week.
The open web has had a great run but it too is being brought to its knees by spam just like every other open platform.
I never realized how bad Google spam could be for technical content until I had to start searching for solution to some Windows issues. Almost without fail, the first page would be littered would spam sites posing as informative answers. Many of them were just duplicating content from official Windows documentation with minor modification. The more sophisticated ones would provide enough real content to entice you into thinking the page had the solution only to reveal you had to sign up to access the full content of the page.
I've never encountered this before when searching for linux or programming topics. In those cases, Google results always include relevant stack overflow postings and links to the appropriate section of documentation.
I'm surprised Google hasn't penalized these spam pages, but I'd imagine there are some perverse incentives to keep them around. Wouldn't surprise me if many of these sites show adds through a Google-owned affiliate program or are in another way tied into Google's ad tech empire.
Imho, try to keep it from going mainstream. If there aren't enough viewers to make advertising profitable, then many of the problems filling the current internet would not appear in the first place.
Either that, or have separate webs for different disciplines (maybe one for academia, one for arts, one for jounralism, one for programming, etc.) that are kept separate from each other. I'm not sure how it could be implemented, but a forced partitioning like that could probably serve the same purpose without gatekeeping (if the partitions are small enough).
Not gatekeeping, I phrased my idea badly before, and I'm sorry about that. I would like to make it clear that I feel very strongly against gatekeeping, and against censorship.
More like not pushing for more acceptance. Allow a community to form, but do not try to market your way into a larger community.
Obviously this approach is not sustainable, at least on the first try, as the Internet itself shows.
However, now that the internet already exists, a parallel internet so to speak would not have as much/any appeal to the average consumer/corporation, which ideally would lead to only those who are interested in the community/content arriving there.
How is that different from subreddits - Or communities like HN? Those aren't technical decisions, but social ones, so why do we need a new internet to implement them?
We don't necessarily need a new internet. However, it could provide another line of "defense" against corporate interests.
If the only barrier to joining is a technical one, than anyone who wanted to could join, but the majority of people would not have interest in joining. Ideally, this would prevent AdTech from taking an interest.
As for the fact that these are primarily social issues, I agree. A social solution is going to be much longer lasting and effective then any technical solution. However, it is also much more difficult to implement.
>What do you do in the next internet to try to avoid the spam and SEO problems on this internet?
Ads blocked by default on all browsers. The original sin with a lot of these comes from the fact that incentives drive towards maximizing clicks over building a subscriber base. Ads themselves aren't really the problem either. Magazine style ads, where you just buy space on the strength of a subscriber/distribution reach rather than paying per click, wouldn't be perfect but they'd align incentives between readers and writers much better than the current situation does.
The core problem is that the metrics are too granular, so there's too much room to game them at the margins.
Not sure you need a whole new internet. Maybe a search engine aggressively excluding commercial results. Even blogs with ads. Anything with ads or selling something would not be listed.
> What do you do in the next internet to try to avoid the spam and SEO problems on this internet?
Ban (yes, legally) collecting & monetizing most information about users. But do that generally, not just for the Internet. Or at least make holding such data incredibly risky (enormous company-ending fines for leaks or misuse).
No loading third-party domain content in browsers. At all. No images, no scripts. You can link to it. That’s it.
Limit scripting to defining custom sorts for tables, custom regexes for form fields, and... that’s about it. Too easy to spy or do shit without the user’s express permission otherwise.
That should take care of the worst of the bad incentives that have made the web so hostile and shitty.
You are forgetting the other half of the equation. The web must have a first class payment system. Nothing is free; money will be made overtly or covertly. If there is no honest overt method, there will be a dishonest covert method.
Maybe. Most of the best parts of the web are totally free, donationware (wikipedia), or illegal to begin with (library genesis). Ads served 1st party and aimed at a reading demographic, not at individuals, like all ads except junk mail before the web, would be possible regardless.
But yes some kind of payment flow that is just about entirely controlled by the browser—special UI pages cannot mimic, a “you’ll find a way to accept what this form sends you, or you won’t take payments” attitude from the spec—might be OK. I’d have to think it through some more. It’d be easy to screw up in a way that let the Nu Web become overrun with bad incentives and dangerous garbage again (watch the “non-computer-literate”, which is a lot of people and yes that includes the next generation now entering adulthood, not just old folks, try to use the web to accomplish any task at all if you don’t get what I mean by “dangerous”)
Ban advertising. Users could pay for the websites they use by proportion of time spent per billing cycle for their internet plan. Popular sites with more demanding server requirements would be paid for by the very users who induce that demand directly, rather than through more dubious advertising.
Google has an unusual situation where search now only needs to be good enough. They are much more focused on the knowledge engine of providing direct answers and the advertising business.
With such a dominant market share, search has certainly lowered in quality
I would argue that the public internet has lowered in quality, and the lowering quality of search results simply reflects that the information you're looking for often isn't out there.
A good chunk of that is that more and more info is locked into walled gardens (in some App, on Facebook/Instagram/TicTok), but also a lot of what people want to find in todays world just isn't on the internet anymore, except places like the web archive, where Google isn't allowed to venture...
> I would argue that the public internet has lowered in quality, and the lowering quality of search results simply reflects that the information you're looking for often isn't out there.
I think that's not the case: There's a lot more people with more diverse backgrounds, from different locations and cultures online now than it was the case 10 years ago. It's just harder to find the places through a "globalized" search that is mostly aiming at commercial offers. From time to time I stumble upon absolute niche blogs (Example from my feed reader: https://singapore60smusic.blogspot.com) and it reminds me that there's a lot of good resources out there if you find them somehow).
>I would argue that the public internet has lowered in quality, and the lowering quality of search results simply reflects that the information you're looking for often isn't out there.
Isn't think kind of a feedback loop though? Search gets bad, so people don't bother putting useful, relevant, and high effort content since nobody will find it. Thus, search gets worse since there is less useful content to crawl. Thus even more of the content out there starts leaning towards clickbait and SEO rather than thoughtful writing. And so on and so forth.
RSS is truly a blessing, and it's such a shame that the side effect of Google is to essentially corrupt a vast portion of the internet such that most of the stuff you see and read has the sole purpose of pleasing the search engine, not the reader. That relationship is the wrong way round.
I'm just re-setting up my own blog (to complement a Youtube channel). Without designing one from scratch (with a static site generator or some such), it's quite difficult to get an off the shelf one that isn't bloated as hell though. I should suck it up but design isn't my strong-suit, and I'd rather just get straight to writing and recording.
Whatever you do, just don't use Medium. Ghost or Hugo (With Netlify, https://gohugo.io/hosting-and-deployment/hosting-on-netlify/) are both very low effort solutions and most of them come with themes that don't look too bad from the get go. It's very quick to get something up and running even though it's technically a static site generator.
There’s a lot of non nerd solutions. Ghost, Wordpress, Medium, Blogger, Tumblr are all very easy to Süd- platforms. There’s a variety of free and paid platforms. The existing solutions are not the problems.
I do have a Hugo blog, and I agree that pretty much all static-site generators are too nerdy for most potential users.
WordPress is still around, and I recommend it. It's more "social" than ever in some ways, and the built-in comments are looking better and better as the years go by. (I use Disqus to moderate the comments for more than a dozen blogs in one network, but for an individual blog, I prefer the native WP comments.)
About a year ago I started blogging, and wanted something really simple, flexible and that didn't require any sort of server/database maintenance.
After some reasearch I decided to go with Jekyll + GitHub Pages, forked a theme that seemed Ok and made some style changes, nothing fancy. Must say I'm really happy with my choice.
There's one thing though, I'm writing posts using markdown in an IDE. Don't really consider that a disadvantage though, and I guess most developers would be really fine with that.
Here's the link to the repository in case you'd like to take a look and try it out: https://github.com/TCGV/blog
Is this your site? It's really nice! I have something similar (although without all of the features on this site). I also scrape a bunch of blogs that doesn't have rss.
One thing, people really like https, especially when sending form data such as the signup.
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 fashion, BB.com for health and wellness (ignoring misc), Something Awful also comes to mind.
Reddit was supposed to become the trusted alternative, but it just really hasn't happened.
I characterize Reddit as true neutral. It has the potential to be any alignment, but it's mostly the will of the moderator to impose what alignment any subreddit will be. It's the only place on the Internet that still has the feel occaisionally of the 90s/00s.
I think where it breaks down is when you have to run plugins that identify the kind of person a user is. I find that reduces the crapiness of the interactions if I can see someone is a POS without investing much time in finding that out. It's a step that shouldn't be necessary, but the faster that can be discerned the less I find myself second guessing their intent.
You could say that the current karma system is sort of supposed to be that, but at least it does not affect comments visibility as far as I know.
Having a parallel unofficial social credit system looks like one thing that would just create unnecessary conflicts in communities that do not have a strong troll problem.
Reddit is a waste of time with its "answers locked after 6 months" policy. This also violates netiquette for those situations when necroposting is the appropriate thing to do.
Reddit is almost unreadable now, though. You have to click and click and click to expand things, and be careful not to click on the wrong thing which will take you to a different topic.
I much, much, much prefer Reddit when it was more like HN, back when HN was modelled after Reddit & Digg. Today, any time I see a Reddit link, I exit immediately after I've gotten whatever information I require - and even that is rare.
I’m not sure if the premise is correct here. What metric is Reddit being judged by? What if the various fashion subreddits, in aggregate, have more users, more content (both good and bad), and more innovation than websites like AskAndy?
I suspect what you’re looking for is:
1. The intimate small town feel of the early internet, and
2. The higher average post quality (because of the type of person that both had internet and used forums back then) as measured by intellectuality, domain specificity, and demonstrated expertise.
Reddit doesn’t display those qualities because of the tragedy of the commons phenomenon. Great content is interspersed with what is essentially “noob spam.” Even if it has a greater aggregate amount of quality content, it doesn’t have the same feel as older forums.
Reddit can try to fix this by grouping people together into social clusters. If there is a subreddit with 2 million people, why not create many smaller “breakout” groups that coexist with the main thread? Of course, this is easier said than done, but I’m sure it’s possible to execute this idea well.
I think VR meeting rooms will be the ultimate solution. They will be intimate by definition, and people will sort into their favorite social groups. An American scientist might join an international “scientist salon” and socialize with scientists everywhere from Germany to Japan. A bulletin would contain and display static text posts by the members of the salon. It would also display things like plebiscites and summaries of important meetings. You’d be able to bounce around different groups with a different subject matter any time you want. Some will have barriers to entry and identity verification, most won’t. Some groups will be purely social and defined more by the members than by any subject matter. Altogether that would make the internet feel more like a collection of physical spaces inhabited by communities of people.
What I’m describing ideally shouldn’t be run by one corporation like Facebook or Reddit. The communities should be strung together by a shared backbone under an Internet 3.0. Visiting one should be like visiting a different website. We can use the formation of the original 2D internet as a template for how to proceed in creating a VR internet.
1) there is no real "tragedy of the commons" in the general case. Google Elinor Ostrum to verify. Even Garret Hardin (originator of the concept) has conceded this, at least in part. The crux is that the "commons" as described by Hardin has essentially never existed in the form that he wrote about - things that are "commons"-like are actually always a complex mixture of law, tradition, culture and social sanctions governing their use. When people screw up "the commons", it's not because there are no mechanisms to prevent it, it is because these people have chosen to ignore them, and have made extra effort to do so.
2) You're seriously claiming that Reddit, a privately held company with sysadmins, subreddit moderation and user voting, could be a venue in which what happens is "a tragedy of the commons" (should such a thing actually exist)?
Reddit is privately held but has quite of an impact on the public. Facebook is the same, as are other notable walled garden/social networks. There’s a term for that: utility company.
> Reddit doesn’t display those qualities because of the tragedy of the commons phenomenon.
I find Reddit is still one of my favorite resources to search for help. If I need help on how to do some home DIY thing or help on making a particular decision, I'll Google for "how to decide blah Reddit" and I'll get much, much better signal than just Googling for "how to decide blah". In the latter case I'll get a bunch of ad-filled garbage and an article that was probably written by an algorithm.
Reddit is great when the original poster or one or two of the immediate replies are insightful and informative. It's awful when either the original post isn't that great to begin with, or if a knowledgeable comment comes too late or happens to be a reply of a reply of a reply.
Case in point, my original post, which was one of the first ten-fifteen comments, has a bunch of up votes. There's no way this would be true if I missed the original post by an hour or if it was the n'th response in a large comment chain.
Stack Exchange is even better, for sites with sufficiently large communities. Stack Overflow and Ask Different are amazing.
But low-traffic SE sites just don't compete. I wish SE would change their account system and/or design so that their smaller sites became a better resource.
I edit and improve hundreds of posts on Stack Overflow.
I want to edit posts on SuperUser too... but SE won't let me. Despite having enough rep for complete trust on SO, I'm a bit short of 2000 on Super User.
If I try to edit a post, it goes into a queue for review by high-rep SU users. But there aren't enough of those, because the site is lower-traffic. So it takes hours to review. High-rep SO users, of which there are MANY, cannot contribute to this queue.
The questions and answers and culture between Stack Overflow, Super User, Ask Different, and their other "tech" sites are essentially exactly the same. There's no reason I couldn't contribute to any of those sites. But their multiple account system makes it impossible.
The issue with Reddit is that there's little to no user engagement with older content. Comments on posts older than a day in pretty much every reasonably active subreddit are ignored. This is also an issue on HN.
This kills informed discussion - some topics need more than one or two minutes of thought for a thoughtful and articulated response. This simply isn't possible when you know that the person you're replying to likely won't respond if you take more than a couple of hours to reply, that the conversation thread will be hidden behind a 'read more' button after one or two responses, and that the post itself will be buried shortly thereafter.
The average post quality on most forums was awful, as much or more so than what you see now on Reddit or HN. The difference is that it was possible for informed posts to persist as the center of discussion for years, if needed.
As an example, I don't see how a group of people can become interested and collaboratively participate in something like designing an amplifier circuit on Reddit without moving to a third party site, and in doing so cutting off contact and visibility with potential collaborators who happen to find the discussion a couple of hours too late. That's the level of connectivity and cooperation that was possible through forums and bulletin boards for a bunch of different niche topics, and it's basically been lost now that the 2chan/Digg style format (Reddit) has taken over.
With modern forums the flow of discussion is different. If you have something for a dated discussion, you just open a new thread. Here on HN you often see those indirect responses happening.
Reddit on the other side used to have a better response-interface. You get a message for new responses and can discuss things over weeks and months if it just happen so. New redfit-interface killed yhis a bit.
> The issue with Reddit is that there's little to no user engagement with older content. Comments on posts older than a day in pretty much every reasonably active subreddit are ignored. This is also an issue on HN.
This is even worse with communities using live chat platforms like Discord and IRC. Live chat is an atrocious medium for community building as you constantly have to be involved to keep up or if you just check it for 5 mins you don't actually get anything if there is no conversation at the moment or the conversation isn't interesting.
For a discussion site, Reddit's a really shitty discussion site. Good conversations rarely even begin, and die rapidly. I've discussed this a few times and places.
It was a problem I'd identified when first trialing a Reddit-as-blog dynamic:
The Reddit Notifications dynamic is proving to be a very strong negative. Something Google+ got right is to keep re-engaging people with active, productive, posts. Days, weeks, months, even years later. This isn't something you want in _all cases (and can opt out of), but it is often useful, and means that conversations can develop. Reddit, sadly (after some five years or so of trying) is proving to be a Flying Purple Conversation Eater. This is a major site frustration.
This is super awful when you’re trying to have a potentially controversial discussion with someone. Even if both of you are interested in the discussion it gets to a point where why bother continuing because no one is going to see it when they have to click “load more comments” and follow the thread for hours or days. Forums like Reddit and HN actively encourage short pithy sound bites that sound interesting but are actually shallow so they’re easy to write and easy to consume and also uncontroversial so your comment(and the following discussion) isn’t hidden after one or two downvotes.
Reddit, at least, has an active reply notification system, so while this is rare, at least it's possible to have a conversation, even if it's probably only visible to its participants.
HN's lack of an active reply notification means that, unless you're checking the [threads] link obsessively, replies can easily go unnoticed, so writing here is more performative.
How that intersects with the rest of the site's dynamics, I'm not sure.
Yes, though it operates at the post level only. There's absolutely no indication that a post in which you've already indicated strong interest by participating in it has ongoing discussion. If you've received a reply notification to your comment, my own, immediately adjacent, receives no such notice: the tpost is effectively dead. Visiting a subreddit gives no clues as to recently-active posts.
Mind, inbox replies for any activity on, say, /r/funny or /r/politcs would get old fast. But some indication of 'this thread is still live* would be tremendously useful. Again, from Google+, I (and other) users frequently "lived" in the Notifications pane. I'd customised that through CSSso that it was large and functional enough to do that.
Twitter's TweetDeck and the similar Mastodon web client similarly feature a Notifications pane as a principle feature, and much engagement can be transacted from it. One of Ello's iterations had a similar and incredibly fluid design making following up very lightweight, unfortunately later abandoned.
HN's "Threads" view is ... similar, but crippled (lack of context within the subthread I'm replying to being a constant annoyance). Reddit's notifications suffer similarly.
You're fortunate to even get to. this stage. In my experience, on both large and small subs, even this very rarely happens.
Part of this is the fault of threaded presentation -- very useful for following a specific subthread, but horrible for seeing where a discussion remains live. HN suffers from this as well. Unless you can alternate flexibly between various threaded vs. flat time-ordered presentations, or even randomly-selected contributions, you're not going to break out of this.
A real challenge is that as conversation, functional scale is low. At least one person, more usually at least 2. I've noticed that panels with more than three participants (live, radio, TV), and usually as host/moderator + two guests, do poorly, often due to the timeslicing problem -- an "airtime hour" is effectively ony 50 minutes, with a Q&A and after introductions, speaking time is often only 20-40 minutes. Divide that among participants, and by the time you're at 4-8 minutes per participant with 5 panelists, fewer still with more. Usually the form devolves to a loosely coupled set of short serial speeches or lectures rather than actual engagement.
With more time -- hours at a symposium, Socratic lectures, a long dinner discussion, an academic seminar -- it might be possible to bump the size up slightly -- there's more time to discuss, or (academic) more focus. But even here the ideal size is 5-15 participants (see for example: https://sites.google.com/site/entelequiafilosofiapratica/aco...).
Text gives the potential for expanding this ... slightly. Maybe about 50 people, possibly double that with an excellent moderator. Yonatan Zunger at Google+ is among the best I've personally witnessed. Sadly the archived conversations at the Internet Archive preserve only a small number of comments.
Group size, intragroup relations (do participants know and respect one another, even where they disagree?), avoiding perils of groupthink (self-selection, unconscious group bias, self-censorship, privilege, cultual mythologies, etc.), and a fair-but-firm moderation, are all critical. And you're still lucky to apprach, let alone exceed, Dunbar's number (about 150).
Last I checked, there were slightly more than 150 people online. This means that there'd have to be on the order of 10^7 individual conversations, minimum, more likely 10^8. FOMO much? Group concesus and information sharing are ... profoundly limited.
HN has, as I understand, has on the order of 10,000 registered users. (A very rough guesstimate.) As of 2013, daily uniques was about 200,000 (see, with interesting discussion of some site-design parameters: https://techcrunch.com/2013/05/18/the-evolution-of-hacker-ne...). Looking over the list of just the top 100 users (https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders), I recognise many, a few personally, and shave one, but ... really can't say I've got a relationship with the vast majority. And that's ~0.01% of registered users, 0.0005% of daily visitors.
And just to note: I'm agreeing with your comments. I just see them as the tip of the iceberg and part of a problem that goes far deeper than mere technical aspects.
You're definitely right, although a day of reply-time is pretty good by internet standards. Back when I used Facebook, I noticed that the only way for a comment to get noticed was if it was added in the first 10 - 20 minutes of a post's lifetime. Once an hour has elapsed, anything you write will probably be never seen by anyone. This is the big problem with online communication; it's reduced everything to small tidbits that nobody has time to have nuanced discussions about. You've got to be quick and to the point, or you're out.
Forums were crap for that, too. If you commented on an ancient thread, a moderator might flame you at best, ban you at worst, for necroposting. Most forums were ran like North Korea and people just dealt with it, heatedly defended the absolute authoritarianism even.
HN intentionally makes it worse by forcing you to choose between only starting new conversations (or participating in currently-live existing conversations), or obsessively checking all your posts for replies.
> The higher average post quality (because of the type of person that both had internet and used forums back then) as measured by intellectuality, domain specificity, and demonstrated expertise.
But this should be easy to get back in the same way blogs always did -- have individual blogs. Even if there are now a million blogs full of "noob spam" the good ones should still exist because their authors are the same people they ever were.
You still have the discovery problem, but that's kind of the OP's point -- it all falls apart if you can no longer separate the wheat from the chaff because of SEO and anti-SEO.
While the discoverability issue may have accelerated the decline of blogs, I suspect that it’s not the main problem. It takes more cognitive overhead to follow and visit multiple blogs as opposed to following multiple subreddits. Even if you are willing to expend that cognitive overhead, most people aren’t nowadays. Because of that, bloggers are less likely to publish (smaller audience + less engagement = smaller incentive to publish). That lowers the average quality of blogs, turning away even their most ardent advocates.
This was all inevitable. The mere existence of a popular meta-forum attenuates traditional blogs and forums.
Not to mention after a certain number of 'followed' subreddits, Reddit will actually only show you a subset each day on your front page. It allows for smaller subreddits to bubble up occasionally, but you're never guaranteed to see the latest from everything you've subscribed to.
> Even if you are willing to expend that cognitive overhead, most people aren’t nowadays.
Shouldn't this cancel out against there being more people though? If people are 90% less likely to want to read long blog posts but there are ten times more people on the internet, you should still have about the same number of readers, all else equal.
> Because of that, bloggers are less likely to publish (smaller audience + less engagement = smaller incentive to publish). That lowers the average quality of blogs, turning away even their most ardent advocates.
This conclusion may be right but it's also explained by the discoverability problem. If people can't find you then your audience is too small and you give up.
> This was all inevitable. The mere existence of a popular meta-forum attenuates traditional blogs and forums.
Don't discount Instagram killing many of those communities.
So much easier to take a picture on your phone and post it to your Instagram page or story. Better dopamine rush, too, from a bunch of Like/Comment notifications rather than maybe a single forum reply hours later.
Social media in general -- Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc. -- have made it easier than a blog to get your thoughts onto the internet, and the extremely social nature of those services and the instant feedback and conversation they encourage (the social part) is very compelling.
Even though the major blog platforms (Movable Type, WordPress, Blogger/Blogspot, etc.) had a social component in the form of comments, the big social media sites -- including Reddit -- took it up quite a few notches. People like the feedback and the conversation. Blogs can be much more of an island. Some like that, too.
I think Reddit getting big also killed a lot of the old forums. The frictionlessness of joining a community made it hard to compete. And the general lack of personality to user profiles in Reddit avoided the "cool kid's clique" issue that happens with a lot of forums where everyone knows each other.
I remember in the "dying days" of some of the forums I was on the conversation had largely devolved into reposting and discussing memes and things that were happening on Reddit. From there it's just a matter of time before the discussion moved to Reddit too. This fate perhaps could have been avoided if "Sign in with Google" type capabilities were more widely available at the time, or if we had a more universal login/forum scheme like Disqus back then, but they all came around too late.
> I remember in the "dying days" of some of the forums I was on the conversation had largely devolved into reposting and discussing memes and things that were happening on Reddit.
I get the same sad feeling from Sasha Chua's weekly Emacs News these days, where half of the entries are now links to posts on Reddit's r/emacs. You can see the dwindling of any diverse ecosystem for discussion.
Yep, that seems about right. I have had two forums since 2002, and while they still have a small user base, everybody switched to Facebook and the like. Not sure if I blame Google as much in the case of forums. I have enjoyed seeing notifications in the browser added, as the browser is starting to have similar powers to apps. Of course, Apple is having none of that, as they love apps and the app store sales.
This is exactly right. I had a blog for many months, shared it from my website and social media accounts, and it never showed up in Google search. After a couple months of speaking to an audience of 20 people, I decided it wasn't worth it. Meanwhile everything else I have tried shows up on the first page of results: Facebook page, Twitter account, Soundcloud, etc.
Google heavily biases their results to two things: the top 1000 sites on the internet, and clickbait (callout posts and threads slandering someone rank like you wouldn't believe; no backlinks required). Maybe if you keep at your blog for 2+ years, manage to land a few HN frontpage story links, it might eventually show up. But who is going to invest that time and effort instead of just setting up a Facebook page instead?
I've been thinking. It might be an interesting experiment to build an "average" search engine. Put average websites first. Drop down websites that get too popular.
Many thousands (maybe even millions) of still-relevant older posts on my company's forum are simply no longer even indexed by Google. I guess it's a part of the deep web now.
One forum that seems to have bucked many trends is for music software: kvraudio.com[0]
Started about 20 years ago, It’s totally vibrant, despite an old school UI. Some threads keep going for years.
Sure, the signal to noise ratio isn’t always perfect either, but there’s still a continuing flow of golden nuggets of deeper industry information, helpful howto answers, and thoughtful commentary and feedback around music software.
In some ways it’s a little like HN, but in some ways I find it superior, like baked in notifications and being able to mute those that are too annoying. It probably helps that it’s adjunct to arguably the best music software directory, with imperfect, yet useful taxonomy, and old school advertising that’s highly relevant to the community.
Yep. I ran a great little community cycling forum from 2005 - met so many friends (real and virtual) over those years - then about 2011 or 2012 Google just dropped it. Our traffic fell off a cliff - now - the regulars stayed on for quite a while, but without an influx of new members and questions and discussions, things just died out - regular members need the stimulus of new members, even if it can be taxing moderating etc... Was actually a really disappointing decline in many ways. It really opened my eyes up to how much control we gave away, and how much content is now in these big walled garden silos. I can't help but get nostalgic.
> 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"?
I'm increasingly running into blogs that sadly don't have RSS, but just today I discovered a cool open source project to generate RSS based on visual scraping: https://politepol.com/en/
I wrote a tool to do something similar a while ago for sites that didn't work with these ready-made tools, it's a bit more effort as you'd have to implemented a custom scraping plugin for the target website: https://github.com/dewey/feedbridge
Grumpy is amazing! We very much enjoy their content and actually got inspired by that site in the first place. Theres a link to them on our About page:
Thanks, that's awesome, just spent 20 minutes reading on there.
But quite frequently as I was trying to read, everything on screen jumped upwards, by a few lines or half a page, apparently because stuff below it was loading. Normally I wouldn't complain, the site has taught me not to put up silently with such things. Don't think I've seen that behaviour before. (Am using latest version of FF)
I've been collecting blogs I'm interested in via. HN, lobste.rs, reddit, or just random links all around, and am now at around 50 feeds, all of which at least have once had content that I'm genuinely interested in. Then I use `newsboat` for reading and keeping track of what I've seen.
Overall I'm very happy with this extremely simple setup, and am almost annoyed that I didn't spend those few seconds it is to set something like this up years ago.
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As to the original link posted, blogs obviously never went anywhere, but they aren't (anymore) in the places that you are.
I feel this comes close to the frustration some people have that "nobody is reading books anymore because everyone are streaming movies and series instead". Books never went anywhere, and they're probably more accessible than ever. If you're not reading books now, that's on you.
Similarly with blogs: if you're not reading and/or following blogs, it's just because you don't want to.
I just searched for some relatively focused topics I’ve written about years ago, and Google found my blog posts just fine (mostly among the top results). I don’t know how popular those posts are (I don’t use analytics at all and since the blog has been hosted on GitHub Pages since forever ago I don’t even have server logs to analyze) but I do know quite a few were never discussed elsewhere.
I guess it’s hard to find blogs these days when you just type “blog” into the search engine, or search for a keyword that a million people compete on in order to sell you stuff. But if you have actual, say technical questions, you’ll land on interesting blog posts in no time, sometimes not even on the dumpster fire that is Medium, and written by people who aren’t writing merely to bolster their online presence.
From my (subjective) perspective, I also feel like something strange happened with Google search when it comes to blogs.
My tech/programming blog has 1.4K subscribers and used to reliably get between 100 to 200 views per day, then in the space of 2 days from 6 March to 7 March this year it suddenly dropped down to around 10 to 20 views per day. The drop was extremely sudden and hasn't recovered since. Nothing changed on my side; I just started publishing more blockchain articles (since I work in that industry) but the drop badly affected my non-blockchain articles too (especially the ones which used to get a lot of recurring visitors from Google).
I wasn't relying on my blog financially though (just a hobby) so it hasn't hurt me too bad.
Many of my past articles were related to my open source project (I've been maintaining it for many years and it is not blockchain related): https://socketcluster.io/
I feel that Google has always been working against open source software when it comes to search; maybe because their algorithm figured out that Google can't monetize open source projects (OSS projects don't tend to promote on Adwords). They tend to drive organic traffic mostly to paid SaaS solutions instead.
Strangely enough though, my open source project is now getting starred at a higher rate than ever before, it has almost 6K stars on GitHub and seems to be consistently getting several per week now even though I do no marketing and my Google organic traffic is terrible - The faster rate of stars is also strange because Google Analytics shows me flat traffic (has been around the same number of daily users for the past couple of years).
That's the first time I'm hearing that problem, are you sure it's from the site? It's basically just a generated static html site with no JS except a tiny analytics snippet.
Speaking of discoverability, I found the author's writing interesting and wanted to subscribe to new articles. I usually do this by following the author's twitter account. Sadly, the one that he links to does not exist: twitter.com/TTTThiscom
SEO is the problem. Most authors figure out at some point that nobody goes to their website. So, they move to different channels (linkedin, facebook, medium, etc.) and at best might cross post to their blog and those channels.
When it comes to reaching people, the odds are stacked against you on your personal website because of multi billion dollar companies optimizing for ad revenue and vastly preferring directing people to ad equipped channels of their choice rather than your website. This is also the real reason Google killed Google Reader: they wanted to capture the ad revenue and instead force content producers to use those. Which is why all news publishers bend over backwards to ensure their news shows up in Google news.
It's that simple. Any click that goes to your website directs the user away from their money making channels. So, they don't. With RSS readers, most of your potential audience will never find you unless they subscribed to your article or it randomly shows up as a link in some channel they follow. Getting lucky on HN helps. But most people don't get that lucky.
So-called influencers basically try to manipulate the odds by doing what they think yields the best results. That's why clickbait exists, why your twitter and facebook feeds are filled with crap, and why it is so hard to find channels that contain curated content. That's also why we all love HN.
I made a website that does as the article mentions: you can immediately blog with just an e-mail. It also supports HTML, CSS and Javascript for instant hosting.
This is the reason platforms are far more popular than blogs - people don't have this knowledge of setting up web servers that we take for granted. And even if they did, there's no benefit.
I blog on Facebook and it works really well for me because I have a built in audience that is interested in what I have to say. I can tell stories about my life that my kids and parents enjoy. I have no need for NSFW posts. I avoid politics. I keep it fun and interesting. Hot takes on local issues sometimes. I have 60 followers who I don't know and don't understand why they follow me, although I do try to explain the latest technology trends to my immediate family, being the lone geek, and maybe other people find that helpful.
I'm not sure how you define a blog. Could you clarify? I often delete or edit posts, so I have control. I download my FB data so I have an archive. I have a link to my FB on my Twitter and all my posts are public and I get people from Twitter reading it. I have 60 followers I don't know who read it. Not sure what else it needs to be to meet your definition of a blog.
I don't expect a free site to be available for eternity. That's why I archive it. The archive is a pretty nice format. I can load it up in a browser from an index file and browse my entire history. I could host it somewhere else if I wanted. I could use a parser to extract the content and repost it in a new format. I still maintain it is a blog.
636 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 238 ms ] threadfwiw I don't see Medium as being a replacement for blogs. It's gotten quite bad from a user standpoint and kills the relationship with the reader in the same way that "blogging" on Linkedin or Facebook does (not quite as bad because at least it's findable on the open web).
[0] https://plurrrr.com/
[1] http://johnbokma.com/blog/
[2] https://github.com/john-bokma/tumblelog
But I guess the author means a platform, not loose websites without a collective 'new' feed. I remember looking for one when wanting to make a new blog and I haven't found a platform that felt right, at least back then (probably ~2015). Heck, I couldn't even find software to install: everything is either super heavy stuff that requires caching or at least a beefy CPU to survive the HN homepage (with custom software, HN can be survived on an ancient Atom CPU even if you use PHP (also pre-PHP7) and do multiple SQL queries per pageload) or some static generators that I wasn't looking for.
Edit: While we're at it, another blog I read is Robert Heaton's one[2], and I'm subscribed to a few others but they don't seem to post anymore since I stopped getting email notifications. I remember Coding Horror[3] was also nice to read but he posts very infrequently now (for those who don't know, that's by the co-founder of Stack Overflow). Finally, Cryptography Engineering[4] might be nice if you're into that sort of thing. But I suppose those can all be mostly considered successful in that they all have a following.
[1] https://lucgommans.nl/blog
[2] https://robertheaton.com
[3] https://blog.codinghorror.com
[4] https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com
I went from Drupal based blog to Hugo and then I stopped blogging. I used to write a post every six months or so. This was long enough to forget how to use Hugo, so I stopped. Lame excuse I know.
[0]: https://blog.ryjones.org/
[1]: https://gist.github.com/ryjones/73739f6a7e662b9ed9ba64d9141f...
Oh there are still endless blogs. There are definitely a lot of defunct ones - but many have become active again recently. I review the unknown ones I come across here: https://www.kickscondor.com/hrefhunt/ (I skip software and startup blogs, because they are so numerous.)
You just can’t use the old avenues (Google searches, casual social media mentions) to find them. HN is a good source, Indieweb circles are good, and Pinboard and Are.na are other good catalogs. Once you find a few blogs you like, you’ll find your way to many more.
...on a platform (it was a tweet), ironically. I tore my jekyll-based site down earlier this year because I have a bad habit of redesigning it every other Tuesday.
it’s a strange compulsion, but your site and a few others I found on indieweb.xyz have been some good motivation to work towards some degree of content permanence that I own and control (plus a general frustration and growing loss of patience with the platform)
If you get your own site up, let me know!
Wanted my own domain, didn't want to deal with content moderation by someone else, wanted the ability to easily customize things, didn't want to show crappy ads, didn't want editors being able to hold up things, etc.
I spent a good 10 hours configuring all the basics for that between SSL certificates, DNS, domain name, etc. The barrier to entry seems to be substantial if you just want a simple clean interface that you yourself control and that is still building everything on top of WordPress.
Netlify static hosting has a very low barrier of entry (just drop a folder if you don't have a git repo).
You get a fast SSL enabled site.
Adding your own domain is just going to your domain registrar as usual and pointing to the appropriate address.
Now, if you go over 100GB a month it could get pricey. https://www.netlify.com/pricing/
Still for a simple text oriented blog that could be a fantastic option.
If you miss the old days of blogging I think you’ll enjoy watching vlogs.
As technologists, I think we could help by making it easier for people to publish to the open web with just plain HTML. Static site generators like Hugo go a long way there. CDNs like cloudfront are cheap now so no servers needed. We should make it easy for people by having something that can do it all for them. Get a domain, CDN, and SSL cert then a simple local editing tool and one button publish.
I hate that Facebook groups hide a lot of info this way. Back then google found blog posts and forum posts about a particular subject. Now if they are in a closed facebook group (is this the default?) then google won't see it.
I don't know if google indexes public facebook groups.
Yet, I don't think most people are going to want to go this route and it would take a fair amount of tooling to automate everything. It's not sufficient to just abstract away the cloud provider, people also need tools for creating and managing content. In theory you could run such tools locally, but I think most people would expect a web interface similar to that provided by Wordpress and medium.
Further, there's a big difference between free and essentially zero cost. How many people are going to be motivated to pull out their credit card to create blog when free alternatives already exist? Not only are existing blogging sites free, but they also promise the opportunity to actually make money through their affiliate program if the site becomes popular.
Before, Firefox used to show the RSS icon but they killed it. It really should be a browser-level thing, it's no different from favicons, rather than requiring users to hunt down a link somewhere on the page.
This is because there's no point in self-hosting; using a platform is free and gives you some degree of discoverability.
Nobody wants to self-host on their own domain because it costs money and you need at least some rudimentary tech/sysadmin skills. Self-hosting doesn't solve the biggest problem of blogging - which is that nobody will read your work.
But you are right. People feel they don't need to self host because these things are there. The problem is you then no longer own your content distribution and are at the whim of them walling it off or shutting down.
I think something does exist in Ethereum platform but why it doesn’t exist out there anywhere else.
Svbtle is also good if you don’t mind mandatory Google Analytics that you can’t disable (I left the platform because of that).
Squarespace can also be used as a blog although it’s more general-purpose than just blogging and a bit more expensive as a result.
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.
The internet has changed a lot in the last ten years. People have realized that popular content has a big monetary potential, and it is far easier now to get compensated (remember when YouTube content creators couldn't monetize?). More content is created as a income source, than out of passion or interest. Search results are gamed by commerical blogs. The average hobby blogger can't compete with that.
I'm actually working on something with that spirit.
https://pluma.cloud/
We will put a "subscribe for updates!" form at some point. You can follow us on Twitter though:
https://twitter.com/plumacloud
Sincere question, not trying to be snarky. Since much (though not all) of the bullshit in Medium is their weak attempts at monetization, what's the bullshit-free alternative business plan to sustain and scale pluma over the long term?
If you look at Ghost, WPEngine, etc, there are a lot of people willing to pay for being able to blog independently. We are betting that within that market there is a niche of people that want to do it as easily as possible, which I think is Medium's best feature.
They have offered a lot of benefits but they also have the ability to censor.
I started blogging in 1999 (and sadly there are the Wayback Machine archives to prove how juvenile I was!) and it was either self host or use Blogger.
Discoverability was pretty interesting. Most blogs' traffic didn't come from search engines (Google existed but it was pretty much geeks only) or platforms, but from other blogs whether by being referenced in a post, via a sidebar link, or via a webring or similar device. Getting over 100 visitors a day to your blog would be a big deal! Getting other bloggers' attention via linking to them was a big part of things or leaving comments on their blog. These things barely move the needle anymore.
While I have a lot of nostalgia for those days, I think there's actually a lot of other ways to be discovered now. Sites like Hacker News, Reddit, Lobsters, Designer News, etc. provide opportunities to be found within various sub-communities. Most people have Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social profiles on which they can share their links, often findable via hashtags people are monitoring. There are 1001 email newsletters that are always seeking out interesting things to link to.
So, I dunno, is discovery really a problem nowadays? I don't think it is, but maybe I'm too "in the game" to see the problems people are having with it. If anything, I think there's just too much to do nowadays and we're really competing with there being 100x more people online than 20 years ago.
I think most people resorted to platforms for hosting the blogs. Not sure if it's so important if many people read something as long as it's interesting for some people.
Blogs - permanent, can explore at depth
RSS - Multiple chances to go back and read something if you don't right away
Feedly is a great app that I use regularly to keep up with RSS, and there are other RSS readers too. It's not like we're talking about a dead protocol like Gopher, here.
Those that went dark only because search engines now don't find them feel like they never done it for these values.
Kinda weird reading a blog post about no blog posts, like it being read disproves its point a little bit.
I think they are there as long as you know where to look.
All authors tend to do so to re-create the same content in a different form and publish it. I assume taking most popular answer from Stack Overflow and writing a blog post about could be one of their strategies.
Basically blogging today is all race to infinite splits of the initial pie.
I have to admit I often true to keep blogs published on Hacker News because they usually do contain some unique content. However that is no longer the majority. An average blog today is equivalent to an average Facebook profile - it has nothing interesting per se.
It force content creators to write it in a certain way that in many cases might be way too long and not ’to the point’.
I dont remember the last time I searched for something on Google and it showed me a high quality opinion article in a random blog.
nowadays everything is around SEO and blogs, as much as I understand why google does that, I think it's the main reason for why blogs are not that popular anymore
I should also mention I have no ads of any kind on my blog.
This is a huge problem and google definitely makes it worse, but this has always been a problem.
From magazine writers who are paid by the word to technical books that are padded out to be 400 pages when they could have been 50.
Instead of an introduction and a recipe, you get a massive wall of text, such that you have to scroll for what seems like an eternity until you get to the actual recipe. Drives me nuts!
I guess search engines aren't the best place to get recipes, you need someone to vet and review them.
Actually.. that might be an interesting thing to do heh
Writing for SEO and trying to game Google is not interesting to me. There comes a point where the only think that keeps you going is the desire/compulsion to write.
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 list slowly grows.
Wrote a tiny bit about my setup on my blog: https://blog.notmyhostna.me/posts/rss-is-luckily-not-dead-ye...
I also recently started a new blog where a friend and me are blogging about annoying things: https://annoying.technology
The open web has had a great run but it too is being brought to its knees by spam just like every other open platform.
I've never encountered this before when searching for linux or programming topics. In those cases, Google results always include relevant stack overflow postings and links to the appropriate section of documentation.
I'm surprised Google hasn't penalized these spam pages, but I'd imagine there are some perverse incentives to keep them around. Wouldn't surprise me if many of these sites show adds through a Google-owned affiliate program or are in another way tied into Google's ad tech empire.
You're rebuilding the internet, if not from the ground up, then {UDP,TCP}/IP up.
What do you do in the next internet to try to avoid the spam and SEO problems on this internet?
More like not pushing for more acceptance. Allow a community to form, but do not try to market your way into a larger community.
Obviously this approach is not sustainable, at least on the first try, as the Internet itself shows.
However, now that the internet already exists, a parallel internet so to speak would not have as much/any appeal to the average consumer/corporation, which ideally would lead to only those who are interested in the community/content arriving there.
If the only barrier to joining is a technical one, than anyone who wanted to could join, but the majority of people would not have interest in joining. Ideally, this would prevent AdTech from taking an interest.
As for the fact that these are primarily social issues, I agree. A social solution is going to be much longer lasting and effective then any technical solution. However, it is also much more difficult to implement.
Ads blocked by default on all browsers. The original sin with a lot of these comes from the fact that incentives drive towards maximizing clicks over building a subscriber base. Ads themselves aren't really the problem either. Magazine style ads, where you just buy space on the strength of a subscriber/distribution reach rather than paying per click, wouldn't be perfect but they'd align incentives between readers and writers much better than the current situation does.
The core problem is that the metrics are too granular, so there's too much room to game them at the margins.
Mostly by putting some cost to having an ID in the network.
Ban (yes, legally) collecting & monetizing most information about users. But do that generally, not just for the Internet. Or at least make holding such data incredibly risky (enormous company-ending fines for leaks or misuse).
No loading third-party domain content in browsers. At all. No images, no scripts. You can link to it. That’s it.
Limit scripting to defining custom sorts for tables, custom regexes for form fields, and... that’s about it. Too easy to spy or do shit without the user’s express permission otherwise.
That should take care of the worst of the bad incentives that have made the web so hostile and shitty.
But yes some kind of payment flow that is just about entirely controlled by the browser—special UI pages cannot mimic, a “you’ll find a way to accept what this form sends you, or you won’t take payments” attitude from the spec—might be OK. I’d have to think it through some more. It’d be easy to screw up in a way that let the Nu Web become overrun with bad incentives and dangerous garbage again (watch the “non-computer-literate”, which is a lot of people and yes that includes the next generation now entering adulthood, not just old folks, try to use the web to accomplish any task at all if you don’t get what I mean by “dangerous”)
With such a dominant market share, search has certainly lowered in quality
I would argue that the public internet has lowered in quality, and the lowering quality of search results simply reflects that the information you're looking for often isn't out there.
A good chunk of that is that more and more info is locked into walled gardens (in some App, on Facebook/Instagram/TicTok), but also a lot of what people want to find in todays world just isn't on the internet anymore, except places like the web archive, where Google isn't allowed to venture...
I think that's not the case: There's a lot more people with more diverse backgrounds, from different locations and cultures online now than it was the case 10 years ago. It's just harder to find the places through a "globalized" search that is mostly aiming at commercial offers. From time to time I stumble upon absolute niche blogs (Example from my feed reader: https://singapore60smusic.blogspot.com) and it reminds me that there's a lot of good resources out there if you find them somehow).
https://www.google.com/search?q=1960s+music+blog+from+singap...
I'd guess the issue is simply people aren't looking for it.
Isn't think kind of a feedback loop though? Search gets bad, so people don't bother putting useful, relevant, and high effort content since nobody will find it. Thus, search gets worse since there is less useful content to crawl. Thus even more of the content out there starts leaning towards clickbait and SEO rather than thoughtful writing. And so on and so forth.
[1] https://github.com/asciimoo/searx
As with TFA, the notion that Google has some death grip on data is premature at best.
Go to Wordpress and start a blog. The fascists have blown up much of the rest of social media.
I'm just re-setting up my own blog (to complement a Youtube channel). Without designing one from scratch (with a static site generator or some such), it's quite difficult to get an off the shelf one that isn't bloated as hell though. I should suck it up but design isn't my strong-suit, and I'd rather just get straight to writing and recording.
WordPress is still around, and I recommend it. It's more "social" than ever in some ways, and the built-in comments are looking better and better as the years go by. (I use Disqus to moderate the comments for more than a dozen blogs in one network, but for an individual blog, I prefer the native WP comments.)
After some reasearch I decided to go with Jekyll + GitHub Pages, forked a theme that seemed Ok and made some style changes, nothing fancy. Must say I'm really happy with my choice.
There's one thing though, I'm writing posts using markdown in an IDE. Don't really consider that a disadvantage though, and I guess most developers would be really fine with that.
Here's the link to the repository in case you'd like to take a look and try it out: https://github.com/TCGV/blog
http://handlr.sapico.me
One thing, people really like https, especially when sending form data such as the signup.
I'm currently the only one that can add RSS-feeds though.
It has custom actions also, eg. https://handlr.sapico.me/Item/Details?id=ab43c38d-3d96-ea11-... where comments by HN are loaded in the post.
( Custom tag that adds a form field to input the HN Id )
Eg. CommentsByHackernews is the tag.
I also have a variation for the city were I live in ( Bruges / Belgium )
https://brugge.sapico.me/
It's just a static page that gets rendered on the server after each scraping round (every half hour).
Eg. check http://handlr.sapico.me/Item/Create on top right (The bookmarklet).
On mobile ( Android), I share websites to Tasker that then open handlr.sapico.me/Item/Create?Title=%1&Url=%2
I then add the tags and then create the item. I think it's the only way to easily bookmark websites.
Note: If a url is filled in, but not a title. Then on focus-out the title is fetched from the page and filled in.
Although RSS is an "easy" content crawl feature, i wouldn't be able to miss the "bookmarking" functionality that makes the site more usefull.
When you want to save a page, you then click on the bookmark ( which contains JavaScript)
It will get the information of the current page and execute it ( check the js code behind the bookmarklet)
Ps. HN has this too
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 fashion, BB.com for health and wellness (ignoring misc), Something Awful also comes to mind.
Reddit was supposed to become the trusted alternative, but it just really hasn't happened.
You could say that the current karma system is sort of supposed to be that, but at least it does not affect comments visibility as far as I know.
Having a parallel unofficial social credit system looks like one thing that would just create unnecessary conflicts in communities that do not have a strong troll problem.
I much, much, much prefer Reddit when it was more like HN, back when HN was modelled after Reddit & Digg. Today, any time I see a Reddit link, I exit immediately after I've gotten whatever information I require - and even that is rare.
I suspect what you’re looking for is:
1. The intimate small town feel of the early internet, and
2. The higher average post quality (because of the type of person that both had internet and used forums back then) as measured by intellectuality, domain specificity, and demonstrated expertise.
Reddit doesn’t display those qualities because of the tragedy of the commons phenomenon. Great content is interspersed with what is essentially “noob spam.” Even if it has a greater aggregate amount of quality content, it doesn’t have the same feel as older forums.
Reddit can try to fix this by grouping people together into social clusters. If there is a subreddit with 2 million people, why not create many smaller “breakout” groups that coexist with the main thread? Of course, this is easier said than done, but I’m sure it’s possible to execute this idea well.
I think VR meeting rooms will be the ultimate solution. They will be intimate by definition, and people will sort into their favorite social groups. An American scientist might join an international “scientist salon” and socialize with scientists everywhere from Germany to Japan. A bulletin would contain and display static text posts by the members of the salon. It would also display things like plebiscites and summaries of important meetings. You’d be able to bounce around different groups with a different subject matter any time you want. Some will have barriers to entry and identity verification, most won’t. Some groups will be purely social and defined more by the members than by any subject matter. Altogether that would make the internet feel more like a collection of physical spaces inhabited by communities of people.
What I’m describing ideally shouldn’t be run by one corporation like Facebook or Reddit. The communities should be strung together by a shared backbone under an Internet 3.0. Visiting one should be like visiting a different website. We can use the formation of the original 2D internet as a template for how to proceed in creating a VR internet.
2) You're seriously claiming that Reddit, a privately held company with sysadmins, subreddit moderation and user voting, could be a venue in which what happens is "a tragedy of the commons" (should such a thing actually exist)?
I find Reddit is still one of my favorite resources to search for help. If I need help on how to do some home DIY thing or help on making a particular decision, I'll Google for "how to decide blah Reddit" and I'll get much, much better signal than just Googling for "how to decide blah". In the latter case I'll get a bunch of ad-filled garbage and an article that was probably written by an algorithm.
Case in point, my original post, which was one of the first ten-fifteen comments, has a bunch of up votes. There's no way this would be true if I missed the original post by an hour or if it was the n'th response in a large comment chain.
But low-traffic SE sites just don't compete. I wish SE would change their account system and/or design so that their smaller sites became a better resource.
I want to edit posts on SuperUser too... but SE won't let me. Despite having enough rep for complete trust on SO, I'm a bit short of 2000 on Super User.
If I try to edit a post, it goes into a queue for review by high-rep SU users. But there aren't enough of those, because the site is lower-traffic. So it takes hours to review. High-rep SO users, of which there are MANY, cannot contribute to this queue.
The questions and answers and culture between Stack Overflow, Super User, Ask Different, and their other "tech" sites are essentially exactly the same. There's no reason I couldn't contribute to any of those sites. But their multiple account system makes it impossible.
This kills informed discussion - some topics need more than one or two minutes of thought for a thoughtful and articulated response. This simply isn't possible when you know that the person you're replying to likely won't respond if you take more than a couple of hours to reply, that the conversation thread will be hidden behind a 'read more' button after one or two responses, and that the post itself will be buried shortly thereafter.
The average post quality on most forums was awful, as much or more so than what you see now on Reddit or HN. The difference is that it was possible for informed posts to persist as the center of discussion for years, if needed.
As an example, I don't see how a group of people can become interested and collaboratively participate in something like designing an amplifier circuit on Reddit without moving to a third party site, and in doing so cutting off contact and visibility with potential collaborators who happen to find the discussion a couple of hours too late. That's the level of connectivity and cooperation that was possible through forums and bulletin boards for a bunch of different niche topics, and it's basically been lost now that the 2chan/Digg style format (Reddit) has taken over.
Reddit on the other side used to have a better response-interface. You get a message for new responses and can discuss things over weeks and months if it just happen so. New redfit-interface killed yhis a bit.
This is even worse with communities using live chat platforms like Discord and IRC. Live chat is an atrocious medium for community building as you constantly have to be involved to keep up or if you just check it for 5 mins you don't actually get anything if there is no conversation at the moment or the conversation isn't interesting.
For a discussion site, Reddit's a really shitty discussion site. Good conversations rarely even begin, and die rapidly. I've discussed this a few times and places.
On HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16865105
It was a problem I'd identified when first trialing a Reddit-as-blog dynamic:
The Reddit Notifications dynamic is proving to be a very strong negative. Something Google+ got right is to keep re-engaging people with active, productive, posts. Days, weeks, months, even years later. This isn't something you want in _all cases (and can opt out of), but it is often useful, and means that conversations can develop. Reddit, sadly (after some five years or so of trying) is proving to be a Flying Purple Conversation Eater. This is a major site frustration.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/wiki/faq#wiki_so.2C_red...
That's from 5-6 years ago.
True conversation is fragile, rare, and scales poorly.
And, as noted in both links, Google+ managed this surprisingly well.
HN's lack of an active reply notification means that, unless you're checking the [threads] link obsessively, replies can easily go unnoticed, so writing here is more performative.
How that intersects with the rest of the site's dynamics, I'm not sure.
Mind, inbox replies for any activity on, say, /r/funny or /r/politcs would get old fast. But some indication of 'this thread is still live* would be tremendously useful. Again, from Google+, I (and other) users frequently "lived" in the Notifications pane. I'd customised that through CSSso that it was large and functional enough to do that.
Twitter's TweetDeck and the similar Mastodon web client similarly feature a Notifications pane as a principle feature, and much engagement can be transacted from it. One of Ello's iterations had a similar and incredibly fluid design making following up very lightweight, unfortunately later abandoned.
HN's "Threads" view is ... similar, but crippled (lack of context within the subthread I'm replying to being a constant annoyance). Reddit's notifications suffer similarly.
Part of this is the fault of threaded presentation -- very useful for following a specific subthread, but horrible for seeing where a discussion remains live. HN suffers from this as well. Unless you can alternate flexibly between various threaded vs. flat time-ordered presentations, or even randomly-selected contributions, you're not going to break out of this.
A real challenge is that as conversation, functional scale is low. At least one person, more usually at least 2. I've noticed that panels with more than three participants (live, radio, TV), and usually as host/moderator + two guests, do poorly, often due to the timeslicing problem -- an "airtime hour" is effectively ony 50 minutes, with a Q&A and after introductions, speaking time is often only 20-40 minutes. Divide that among participants, and by the time you're at 4-8 minutes per participant with 5 panelists, fewer still with more. Usually the form devolves to a loosely coupled set of short serial speeches or lectures rather than actual engagement.
With more time -- hours at a symposium, Socratic lectures, a long dinner discussion, an academic seminar -- it might be possible to bump the size up slightly -- there's more time to discuss, or (academic) more focus. But even here the ideal size is 5-15 participants (see for example: https://sites.google.com/site/entelequiafilosofiapratica/aco...).
Text gives the potential for expanding this ... slightly. Maybe about 50 people, possibly double that with an excellent moderator. Yonatan Zunger at Google+ is among the best I've personally witnessed. Sadly the archived conversations at the Internet Archive preserve only a small number of comments.
Group size, intragroup relations (do participants know and respect one another, even where they disagree?), avoiding perils of groupthink (self-selection, unconscious group bias, self-censorship, privilege, cultual mythologies, etc.), and a fair-but-firm moderation, are all critical. And you're still lucky to apprach, let alone exceed, Dunbar's number (about 150).
Last I checked, there were slightly more than 150 people online. This means that there'd have to be on the order of 10^7 individual conversations, minimum, more likely 10^8. FOMO much? Group concesus and information sharing are ... profoundly limited.
HN has, as I understand, has on the order of 10,000 registered users. (A very rough guesstimate.) As of 2013, daily uniques was about 200,000 (see, with interesting discussion of some site-design parameters: https://techcrunch.com/2013/05/18/the-evolution-of-hacker-ne...). Looking over the list of just the top 100 users (https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders), I recognise many, a few personally, and shave one, but ... really can't say I've got a relationship with the vast majority. And that's ~0.01% of registered users, 0.0005% of daily visitors.
And just to note: I'm agreeing with your comments. I just see them as the tip of the iceberg and part of a problem that goes far deeper than mere technical aspects.
HN intentionally makes it worse by forcing you to choose between only starting new conversations (or participating in currently-live existing conversations), or obsessively checking all your posts for replies.
But this should be easy to get back in the same way blogs always did -- have individual blogs. Even if there are now a million blogs full of "noob spam" the good ones should still exist because their authors are the same people they ever were.
You still have the discovery problem, but that's kind of the OP's point -- it all falls apart if you can no longer separate the wheat from the chaff because of SEO and anti-SEO.
This was all inevitable. The mere existence of a popular meta-forum attenuates traditional blogs and forums.
This is the problem solved by RSS.
Didn't used to be an issue really. Then Google killed off Reader and nothing filled the void fast enough.
Shouldn't this cancel out against there being more people though? If people are 90% less likely to want to read long blog posts but there are ten times more people on the internet, you should still have about the same number of readers, all else equal.
> Because of that, bloggers are less likely to publish (smaller audience + less engagement = smaller incentive to publish). That lowers the average quality of blogs, turning away even their most ardent advocates.
This conclusion may be right but it's also explained by the discoverability problem. If people can't find you then your audience is too small and you give up.
> This was all inevitable. The mere existence of a popular meta-forum attenuates traditional blogs and forums.
Blogs and forums are completely different things.
https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/
https://www.popehat.com/
https://www.schneier.com/blog
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/
Reddit has its uses but it is not a substitute for these.
So much easier to take a picture on your phone and post it to your Instagram page or story. Better dopamine rush, too, from a bunch of Like/Comment notifications rather than maybe a single forum reply hours later.
Even though the major blog platforms (Movable Type, WordPress, Blogger/Blogspot, etc.) had a social component in the form of comments, the big social media sites -- including Reddit -- took it up quite a few notches. People like the feedback and the conversation. Blogs can be much more of an island. Some like that, too.
I remember in the "dying days" of some of the forums I was on the conversation had largely devolved into reposting and discussing memes and things that were happening on Reddit. From there it's just a matter of time before the discussion moved to Reddit too. This fate perhaps could have been avoided if "Sign in with Google" type capabilities were more widely available at the time, or if we had a more universal login/forum scheme like Disqus back then, but they all came around too late.
I get the same sad feeling from Sasha Chua's weekly Emacs News these days, where half of the entries are now links to posts on Reddit's r/emacs. You can see the dwindling of any diverse ecosystem for discussion.
Google heavily biases their results to two things: the top 1000 sites on the internet, and clickbait (callout posts and threads slandering someone rank like you wouldn't believe; no backlinks required). Maybe if you keep at your blog for 2+ years, manage to land a few HN frontpage story links, it might eventually show up. But who is going to invest that time and effort instead of just setting up a Facebook page instead?
Your reasons were wrong. Blogs, the old blogs and hobby websitrs the OP is talking about were made for fun, not for followers.
Started about 20 years ago, It’s totally vibrant, despite an old school UI. Some threads keep going for years.
Sure, the signal to noise ratio isn’t always perfect either, but there’s still a continuing flow of golden nuggets of deeper industry information, helpful howto answers, and thoughtful commentary and feedback around music software.
In some ways it’s a little like HN, but in some ways I find it superior, like baked in notifications and being able to mute those that are too annoying. It probably helps that it’s adjunct to arguably the best music software directory, with imperfect, yet useful taxonomy, and old school advertising that’s highly relevant to the community.
[0] https://www.kvraudio.com/about-kvr
Are you suggesting Google had a plan to promote reddit? or what do you mean by "was supposed to"?
https://annoying.technology/colophon/
But quite frequently as I was trying to read, everything on screen jumped upwards, by a few lines or half a page, apparently because stuff below it was loading. Normally I wouldn't complain, the site has taught me not to put up silently with such things. Don't think I've seen that behaviour before. (Am using latest version of FF)
Overall I'm very happy with this extremely simple setup, and am almost annoyed that I didn't spend those few seconds it is to set something like this up years ago.
---
As to the original link posted, blogs obviously never went anywhere, but they aren't (anymore) in the places that you are. I feel this comes close to the frustration some people have that "nobody is reading books anymore because everyone are streaming movies and series instead". Books never went anywhere, and they're probably more accessible than ever. If you're not reading books now, that's on you.
Similarly with blogs: if you're not reading and/or following blogs, it's just because you don't want to.
I guess it’s hard to find blogs these days when you just type “blog” into the search engine, or search for a keyword that a million people compete on in order to sell you stuff. But if you have actual, say technical questions, you’ll land on interesting blog posts in no time, sometimes not even on the dumpster fire that is Medium, and written by people who aren’t writing merely to bolster their online presence.
My tech/programming blog has 1.4K subscribers and used to reliably get between 100 to 200 views per day, then in the space of 2 days from 6 March to 7 March this year it suddenly dropped down to around 10 to 20 views per day. The drop was extremely sudden and hasn't recovered since. Nothing changed on my side; I just started publishing more blockchain articles (since I work in that industry) but the drop badly affected my non-blockchain articles too (especially the ones which used to get a lot of recurring visitors from Google).
I wasn't relying on my blog financially though (just a hobby) so it hasn't hurt me too bad.
Here is my blog: https://medium.com/@jonathangrosdubois
Many of my past articles were related to my open source project (I've been maintaining it for many years and it is not blockchain related): https://socketcluster.io/
I feel that Google has always been working against open source software when it comes to search; maybe because their algorithm figured out that Google can't monetize open source projects (OSS projects don't tend to promote on Adwords). They tend to drive organic traffic mostly to paid SaaS solutions instead.
Strangely enough though, my open source project is now getting starred at a higher rate than ever before, it has almost 6K stars on GitHub and seems to be consistently getting several per week now even though I do no marketing and my Google organic traffic is terrible - The faster rate of stars is also strange because Google Analytics shows me flat traffic (has been around the same number of daily users for the past couple of years).
For me it's really quick and lightweight.
But certainly the more the merrier
When it comes to reaching people, the odds are stacked against you on your personal website because of multi billion dollar companies optimizing for ad revenue and vastly preferring directing people to ad equipped channels of their choice rather than your website. This is also the real reason Google killed Google Reader: they wanted to capture the ad revenue and instead force content producers to use those. Which is why all news publishers bend over backwards to ensure their news shows up in Google news.
It's that simple. Any click that goes to your website directs the user away from their money making channels. So, they don't. With RSS readers, most of your potential audience will never find you unless they subscribed to your article or it randomly shows up as a link in some channel they follow. Getting lucky on HN helps. But most people don't get that lucky.
So-called influencers basically try to manipulate the odds by doing what they think yields the best results. That's why clickbait exists, why your twitter and facebook feeds are filled with crap, and why it is so hard to find channels that contain curated content. That's also why we all love HN.
Currently it's linking to the "edit" page.
https://podesta.pizza/
This is the reason platforms are far more popular than blogs - people don't have this knowledge of setting up web servers that we take for granted. And even if they did, there's no benefit.
https://dev.opera.com/blog/taking-the-web-into-our-own-hands...
Current attempts:
DAT: https://dat.foundation/
Zeronet: https://zeronet.io/
Secure Scuttlebutt: https://scuttlebutt.nz/
That is not a blog.
You don't have control over it, you don't have archives, and it's not world readable.
None of what you listed is a reason to not to use a real blog.
Ohh boy, right here why blogs might not be best suited for this hyper-connected global world we live in... HN Hug of death is real I guess