Both are very good for finding blogs about topics like diet, exercise, mindfulness and other topics which have been SEO’d to death on the major search engines.
You can also search personal websites on https://searchmysite.net/ - kind of like wiby.me, but searching whole sites rather than individual pages, a little more transparent about what is in the index (e.g. queries to list all indexed domains), and with a moderation layer.
For mobile users, I couldn't see the search form on the website until I enabled "Desktop Mode"/"Desktop site" in my mobile browser. Cool site and helpful!
Wiby has been my new tab page for a few months now. Occasionally if I'm bored, i'll hit the "surprise me" button and dig into some weird obscure web page on a very specific topic. You can find some neat stuff!
> You'll check the analytics. Abysmal. Nobody is reading!
> You may write a few more posts, but it's always the same story. A lot of work goes in, but not much comes out.
I never understood this sentiment. Who cares if no one is reading? You blog because you have something to express on the internet, not because you're seeking attention from others. Content creation for the sole purpose of views is incredibly superficial.
The goal might not be to maximise "views", but if nobody reads it, why bother? No need to be popular by whatever metrics, but with no readers you might just not publish at all. (Unless you see writing itself as valuable in itself.)
The vast majority of blogs during the "golden age" of blogging went almost entirely, if not entirely, unread. In hindsight, I don't know why people bothered, but they did. I blogged on my own domain for years and I don't think anyone read any of it, but I still enjoyed it.
Of course a lot of blogs were hosted on services like Blogger or Livejournal (which I also had,) and being able to create networks and friend/interest groups definitely increased visibility, but even then most things went unread and uncommented on.
Maybe views are not the sole purpose, but isn't it a bit depressing to think that no-one ever reads or cares about what you put up? Surely you want someone to witness that expression and perhaps even engage with it.
I totally agree. I have been writing on the internet since 1995 and I do not care about the number of visitors, because I primarily write due my urge to write and record my life. Most of what I write is just trivia about what I did. It primarily serves as my memory and it is interesting to look back on what I did a few years ago.
my kids should "dad, look at me" before they do anything. the desire for external validation runs deep. If no-one hears a tree falling, does it make a sound?
Why would you write, if not for other people? Unless you are just taking notes, that is the entire point of writing: To present your thoughts or knowledge to other people.
I do think there's a middle road. I do indeed think it's incredibly toxic to write for the reactions, but at the same time, it's extremely lonely to find your only readers are the bots that probe for compromised wordpress installs.
It's great to have a community of sorts. I've found that in gemini space, there's a small number of active bloggers that run in the same circles and occasionally make replies on each posts they feel interesting (because almost virtually all pages are static, almost no comment fields).
It's not so much about the attention as it is about the sense of community and belonging.
Well, blogs are still very much there. I began blogging in 2006 and I still continue to write blog posts, mostly to take notes, share my thoughts, etc. I still follow my favourite bloggers via RSS feeds. I don't think the culture of blogging ever went away. The blogosphere along with its tag clouds are still very much there.
I think what has changed in the last two decades or so is that a lot of new users have come on the Internet and this new generation of users spend most of their time in walled gardens thereby making the bloggers look like a small minority.
I think many (personal) blogs were killed by social media. You don't blog about your last weekend anymore, you just post some pictures on instagram or in your whatsapp groups.
Which means - whether we like it or no - that social media were and are superior products when it comes to this specific use case, otherwise people won't be using it.
Most people didn't blog in order to produce great art or advance human knowledge. Those who did, they tend to still blog.
But most regular Joe bloggers just wanted to share ideas or experiences with other people, connect with them, and hear _their_ ideas and experiences. Writing a 500-word blog post was just the means to start a chat in the comments section. For them, Facebook or Twitter do it better.
I remember when Tumblr started (it didn't have a specific culture yet). Some of my blogging friends opened a Tumblr just to share links and pictures, and kept to WordPress for long-form posts. Eventually, they quickly started spending more times in link exchanging and commenting on Tumblr than on WP.
I don't think our average Carl will use a blog instead of Instagram to share his thoughts.
Yes, inferior products prevail from time to time, especially when those negative externalities you mention help consolidate a dominant position.
But social networks do not charge money. People are free to open as many blogs as they want. If they didn't when they were raging in the early 2000s there must a reason.
Reality is complex, especially human motivations. But to argue that blogs are a superior for the mainstream public to share themselves to an audience is a bit intellectually unfair.
Only if you think within the structures of a particular ideology based on the notions that people are rational actors and that the market produces the most effective solutions for any given use case.
Killed or just appear pale in comparison? How many traffics were there for blogs in before 2010? Its not like people suddenly don't have anything interesting to share.
I used to discover blogs via the Yahoo Directory, blog rolls (where we mention others' blogs as external links to follow up), Live Journal's listing, and cross-referencing of blog posts. Google search used to surface blog posts too.
Now it's all on Medium - where I don't grudge those who want reliable hosting+discoverability and want to get paid for content, and where Medium charges for this. But I dislike that the content is "locked up" at Medium. I don't quite know how to explain this dislike, and I welcome any points of view that might help make this dislike go away.
I’ve got one topic that gets a lot of referral traffic, and then people follow the other more rambling personal stories. Twitter and YouTube drive a lot of traffic too.
I had the same experience. Have a few very popular posts that rank quite high even on Google (with absolutely no SEO bullshit done to them) but they represent maybe 5% of what I wrote about.
People find me through those posts and end up sticky around for the more personal/rambly stuff.
typically in the comments sections of other blogs, when someone links them. Slatestarcodex, Ecosophia, and Charles Eisenstein are my current favourites.
I like to start with a blog I already know and like, and then I use a tool I built to spider the RSS feed to find links to sites that also have RSS feeds. I figure that if I find a blog interesting, they'll probably link to other blogs that I'll find interesting.
The tool is hosted on heroku: https://rdengine.herokuapp.com/
I give a rationale for it here: https://quakkels.com/posts/rss-is-wonderful/
I don't think you have to justify or challenge your dislike for Medium. It's pretty reader-hostile. I get why authors write on it but I personally click away every time I get hit with the paywall.
I've built a service that lets you create a micro-blog from a paper journal: https://paperwebsite.com/
It's given me great joy just publishing my unfiltered thoughts on the internet straight from my pen, which sounds similar to the "unfocused blogs" the author was talking about.
Perhaps in this highly edited, Instagram world we now live in - the raw, unedited nature of a blog is a bit more scary. I still love them though.
I think we've gotten curiously bad at linking to other websites in the last 20 years. It's really bad for discoverability. I don't know why it is, it's like everyone goes "oh, i've got a precious visitor at last, better not link anywhere so they'll stick around forever!"
I think if my website contains interesting links, it makes people more likely to come back later, because they associate it with good feelings of discovery, and not bad feelings of being trapped.
I've been at it for over 6 years and there's around 350 posts. It's a mixture of written blog posts and YouTube videos. The general focus is on building and deploying web applications as well as dev environment tweaks. Basically everything I encounter as a developer.
I'll bite and submit mine. Las year, during lockdown, I read the Rolling Stone 100 greatest metal albums list. As I was stuck at home most of the time and had nothing better to do I decided to listen to all 100 albums and write my thoughts on each one. I originally posted them to Facebook, but as Facebook is a crap environment to write longer form content I wrote each one into a text note and pasted it to Facebook when I had finished writing it. When I had finished I thought it would be good to put them into a blog so it would be easier to revisit them later if I wanted to.
I remember reading your 8-bit MMO post a few years ago and loved it, and frequently come back to it when I feel like a project is running out of control
Love the look of paper website as well, right now I use bearblog but I would like to use paper a bit more
Their about page talks about using reddit to post hate speech, then just link to it from their blog, to get around censorship on blogging platforms.
I honestly cannot tell if this author is wanting that because they are truly passionate about freedom of speech, or if they are feeling personally stifled in expressing their opinions.
Either way, this post feels like an attempt to say they want a blogging platform where they can post whatever they want, whether it be NSFW content, hate speech, or anything else.
Yeah blogs are still here, BUT: (like email (sob) and telephone-calling (hooray)) a lot of people that once did blog don't anymore.
Not in the "I had kids so my blog went dark for a few years" sense, but in the sense of "ooh twitter was invented and now I just emit a halfassed one-sentence brainfart or 5-second tiktok cellphone video and get way more dopamine hits".
I've been reading blogs and perusing my self-curated NetNewsWire RSS feeds for 20+ years, and blogs never went away, RSS never died, Google Reader getting googled didn't really matter, etc.
And there are probably technically more blogs now than ever before.
But still, the blog kinda died, in the sense that it would be a lot more surprising to learn your friend's 80-year-old grandma has a blog today than it would have been in 2011.
It went from an increasingly-mainstream thing to a decreasingly-mainstream thing.
Yes - and all the people the author remembers with nostalgia are probably on Twitter now, doing more or less the same thing but with worse quality overall. Twitter gets a bad rap because of the hive mind (and it deserves every bit of that reputation), but there are tons of just normal people on there talking about their lives. In a way, Twitter made blogging much more accessible - most people couldn't sit down and write a 500-1000 word post, even one or two a year, but they can tweet every detail about their day, their projects, what they're thinking about and so on.
Of course, it's not the same as a blog. I think the length "requirement" of a blog made it so only people with the time, dedication and skills (or lack of self-awareness) would keep them going, so if you were reading an established blog a bit of selection bias was at play. On Twitter you can tweet garbage day in day out and still be on the platform for years. Heck, you'd probably gain a significant following.
I might be coming off as a Twitter fan or something but just to be clear: the site is cancer. It's impossible to stay on for longer than a year and not have your brain melt off by how it works, and they're becoming more and more closed and restrictive by the day. It's a shame because there's clearly something about the site that interests a mass audience, but I wish there was a service that was like Twitter but better. I know Mastodon exists but outside specific niche audiences it's never gained traction, but I hope it does take off eventually.
Maybe the same applies to Facebook/Instagram/Other major social media provider as well, but I don't have any experience with platforms outside Twitter and Reddit so I couldn't say.
Edit to expand on something: I mentioned that Twitter is interesting to mass audiences, and that's actually more important than you'd think. Speaking personally, before I went on twitter, I don't think I'd ever consistently read content posted by women. It's a natural result of being in a male-dominated industry and following male-dominated interests. On Twitter, though, because there were so many people of all walks of life I quickly followed a lot of interesting women who posted great content: women who were activists, historians, academics, homemakers and so on. That really was why I stuck around for so long on Twitter despite how awful the site is, and why I think any serious contender has to appeal to the normies, so to speak.
There are more blogs out there today. But with a focus on SEO the quality of blogs has dropped.
To meet some arbitrary SEO goal like, longer articles do better we have people filling in the top 1/3 with unneeded filler. Then we have companies trying to plug their product in a "10 best tools for X" article. Even if their product is crap for that feature, along with the content mills, the quality has dropped.
Yep, "SEO" killed the internet. As have "Accept Cookies" prompts, "Do you want notifications" prompts, "Subscribe to our newsletter" prompts and "Why are you leaving our page" prompts. Content farms, click-bot-like farms, fake-review farms. The free internet is dead.
> Not in the "I had kids so my blog went dark for a few years" sense, but in the sense of "ooh twitter was invented and now I just emit a halfassed one-sentence brainfart or 5-second tiktok cellphone video and get way more dopamine hits".
Most blog-entries were never much more than that anyway, especially since the free blog-services started appearing and setting up a blog was effortless. There is a reason why Twitter were named micro-blogging-service in the beginning. And the other side was blogging being a primitive form of social network, till better social networks appeared. So it made sense for people who were more interested in the social aspect to moved to the optimized services.
> I've been reading blogs and perusing my self-curated NetNewsWire RSS feeds for 20+ years, and blogs never went away, RSS never died, Google Reader getting googled didn't really matter, etc.
In both cases, the hype died down, and was replaced by other hypes. The remaining people use them now for the dedicated reasons where both can shine their best. But the danger remains that loosing support will long term lead to them dying for real. In case of RSS it's already happening slowly. Though blogs are more resistant to this, as your blogging does not depend much on external support, as long as you do not care about money or reader-stats.
(a) Basically just a bunch of glorified retweets, but
(b) Free of the moronic 280-character limit, and
(c) Immune to Twitter's moronic "jail" algorithm (all I have to do is delete the IFTTT tweet, not my "blog post")
And I think that's fine. And, yes, I do have opinions on the moronicity of Twitter, how did you know?
Yes, I think is a need for some platform that provides blog+microblog on your domain, and that automatically forwards the content to social platforms so that you get the best of both worlds:
1 - owning your blog is too big of a barrier of entry, there is a need for a platform: look at the success at medium for tech writers, despite that we hate it.
2 - we need the return of the domain name based blog. This helps with independence, censorship, and the like. You can always move from the platform, and the platform can claim they can't censor you since it's your domain, so DMCA should be sent to you directly.
3 - this platform should do blog + microblog. You don't always have something long to say, announcement, though and quick tips are very well suited to tweets. But only this format leads to quality deficiency. Being able to write a big article easily is equally important.
4 - forwarding all posts to your social networks is essential. Yes, your blog should be the original source (so you get ref, credit, independence and not the duplicate content ban from google). But the discovery problem cannot be solved easily, and those networks already exist.
EDIT: unrelated, but I love phone calls. I mean, I hate doing them, but I love having the ability to do them. It's a universal reliable tech, it works in the country side, it works when the wifi is down, it works well in the car, and I don't have to have the app du jour installed or insist that the other party does.
I do think the ability to do phone calls is waning, though.
I've made 4 phone calls this year: to a buddy, to my wife, to an old friend, and to my fax/voicemail provider (JConnect) which decided to terminate voicemail service on the phone number I've used since the 1990s. (So I may be part of the problem I am describing — that number didn't ring any device, it only accepted voice messages and faxes, which it forwarded to me via email.)
Of those 4 phone 2021 phone calls:
1.) My buddy no longer has voicemail on his phone, and a recording just told me he was not available and to try again later. (Head kinda exploded.)
2.) My wife also no longer has voicemail! How tf did that happen? No idea but it was 2 months after the above call so I was less surprised.
3.) My old friend is old-school (hence the phone call), and still does have voicemail — but it was full. I assume because he never checks it.
4.) JConnect support's touch-tone B.S. support system did disconnect me a couple of times, requiring that I call them back... but it did eventually connect me to a support rep who helped me cancel my account. But: only because they are the kind of asshole company that engages in the common-but-should-be-illegal practice of letting you sign up on the web but only cancel by phone, as a method of retaining "customers" who no longer want their product.
So n=1 sample, might not be typical, etc. but I suspect the phone is getting less universal and less reliable over time.
You should tell your old school friend that their voicemail is full. At least with my carrier, I can only have like ~20 voicemails sitting around. I listen to every voicemail I get but my voicemail inbox filled up and I didn't realize it was full for years (there was no notification or anything). To make space I had to actively go delete voicemails. Of course, deleting them just sent them to a "deleted" folder, which I had to go clear as well.
You should realize that some people intentionally allow or cause their voicemail to fill so that callers can't leave additional messages.
I certainly do. I have no intention of EVER checking my voicemail, so why would I want to leave callers with a false impression that their message will be heard?
I agree that phone calls are waning, but I don't personally see the connection to voice mails. I never liked the concept so I've never left a voice mail, nor have I ever enabled it for myself. In my opinion voice calls can only get better if answering machines and voice mails die out.
I live in Germany and for whatever reason I have literally never received a spam call here. I can go months without receiving a single call these days. I'm not exactly sure if spam calls are not a thing here or if I've just been lucky. But yeah I see how that can lead to different preferences when it comes to voice mail.
Spam's ruined phone calls, like it ruined email. No coincidence those are the two worst ways to reach me. Email's almost exclusively for receiving messages that I'm expecting from machines, now (password reset, order confirmation, whatever). It's not even any good for unexpected notices from machines, let alone communication with humans. Sure, I could migrate to another address and it'd be more usable for a while, or I could spend a Saturday crafting rules to fix my inbox, but why bother? 99% of what I care about comes in via WhatsApp or (less often) text.
[EDIT] Except for work. My work email is still sorta useful. But in part that's because it's much newer. It's also getting more and more junked up with garbage, without active management and rule-setting.
I feel like medium doesn't even care about tech writers -- don't people still have to host github gists for code snippets? The biggest middle finger to tech bloggers, and yet they keep flocking to the platform.
> forwarding all posts to your social networks is essential.
I've been talking to businesses for years about this same thing. Using a blog as a way to broadcast to social media but keep the blog/site as the main source of information for your audience.
And it never works because it is far too simple to just use social media directly and even if you don't, your audience still comments on social media and so your discussion remains there.
> your audience still comments on social media and so your discussion remains there.
Discussion should remain on social media. This avoids the problems of moderation and spam that plagued blogs.
> it is far too simple to just use social media directly
Yes to succeed the blog platform should be super easy to setup and to link.
There are benefits that can then attract people:
- if you have several social accounts, on the same or different platforms, then having a centralized way of publishing on all of them is a nice perk
- social media platform impose a lot of rules, but on your blog, you can do whatever you want. So for problematic content, you can tease on social networks, and bring people on your blog for the real uncensored thing.
- the source of truth that the blog would be is a fine touch in this era of fake news
- you can add paid sections to the blog and make money directly with your biggest fans
I got distracted by all of the other great comments on this thread and made a mess of my point.
What I was trying to say is that I think that ultimately social media will eat your traffic and blog. I think that the peril of using social media to promote your own content is that you will ultimately depend on social media.
I think that the best route to take is to find a way to promote your content without it.
It's possible, but the alternative is to depend on google for traffic, which is an abusive relationship at this point.
At least if you have are on several platform, there are multiple entre points for your content. And your blog would allow you to offer things that the platform don't, like code snippets, easy media download, or something more innovative.
With your own domain name and branding, maybe we can play a different game provided the platform is willing to forward complaints to the user and step back.
After all, I'm responsible for my vps content, not my hosting. What's the difference ?
Setting a blog is easier than ever: Medium has a close to zero barrier of entry. With all its criticism here, it helped many people start blogging in the first place.
I don't know if bloggers turned to Twitter, TikTok, and similar goldfish attention span media. (Maybe. I don't have data.)
I think it is more likely that high-quality blog posts drown in the sea of tweets. More people do the latter, and the cost of doing a single one is orders of magnitude lower than writing even an average-quality blog post.
I agree with the ease of use, but I won't author or read Medium articles anymore. I am sure Medium feels that it is providing a valuable service by providing a platform for authors to monetize their content. I would prefer to pay an author directly and have no desire to support a service that sits between me and the content provider.
I realize I am being utopian, but providing a facility like Medium that uses open standards, allows bloggers to blog and doesn't skim profits should be a public service.
Blogs were never mainstream when they were a healthy ecosystem. Before search engines, the only real way to find new blogs was to follow links from other blogs — either people talking near each other, or webrings, or whatever. This was swell, and served as essentially a perfect defense against outside abuse. If we'd kept that model then we wouldn't really have trouble with spammers and scammers.
Google downloaded all that curation effort and then claimed we didn't have to do it anymore, and that we just need to "be indexed", but that opens the door for spammers and scammers, and there's no fix for it. Without curation, blogs are no better than strangers on a street corner.
I think the only way to restore the health of the blog ecosystem is to go back to webrings, except with an RSS accumulator added^, so that we can follow everyone in a webring and report abuse to the webring curators.
^ OPML subscriptions would be a workable model, except that many feed readers only support "import OPML one-time", not "poll and refresh".
EDIT: It isn't sufficient to implement RSS or OPML support. The missing piece is webrings that curate their membership lists, with a human sanity limit of 25 or 50 sites per webring. That was a real limit back in the day, but it's still worth keeping to keep humans honest. You can't replace this effort with technology, but you can support it. We just choose not to, because search is lazy and somewhat effective, and so blogs suffer.
I’d agree but from a different perspective. I never used RSS and didn’t care about following any particular blogger. However, blogs were a constant top hits for successfully getting answers/info on things I was searching for. I would see the same blog as my search on a topic expanded. Eg, I recall learning rails back around v0.7 and there was not many docs around and only a few bloggers. I didn’t care about the rest of their blogs, but when I saw theirblog.com in my search results, I knew they had authority on the matter.
The platform effect means there’s just less quality content and it’s more difficult to surface.
Like everyone else responding, I think there's so so many blogs and personal sites around. Once you start looking and actually exploring the internet you'll find plenty. There's been a bit of resurgency with "indie web", digital gardens, etc. If anything there's probably more blogs now than there were before.
> If anything there's probably more blogs now than there were before
There's more everything than there was before. Despite popular opinion, the rest of the web didn't shrivel up and die when Twitter, Facebook and Youtube got popular.
Do you have any evidence for that? The message boards/blogs that I frequented a decade ago are all either gone or are a lot less active than they were before, and certainly have a lot fewer users. So it's not just activity per user that has gone way down, but the number of users as well.
Medium, in an attempt to monetise blogging and give financial incentives to writing with paywalling, has absolutely damaged my perception of blogging. It was the perfect platform, and so nice to find interesting blogs and articles that only wanted to share information and stories.
But then it started eating away the blog platform space, and then took all that hostage with paywalls. There's not that many companies I really dislike, but Medium is starting to be up there in the list.
I think the blog space was dead prior to Medium showing up. Medium seemed to be a way to try to get the better writers still out there into a single space. Then they realised they had to pay all those folks and killed the site with their paywall.
Medium and Twitter siloed blogs into a 'recommended for you' type of delivery medium. Blogger was agnostic in that regard, it only showed your content, and the blogroll was set by the user.
Wow, I guess I am really old. I can remember the time before blogs. This is like "If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be instagram" to me.
Why would I use this instead of my own domain and a website hosted for free on Netlify or GitHub Pages?
I can get quite a lot of views by posting my latest posts to the relevant forums (HN, Reddit, programming forums)... if there's any advantage I am not seeing, I actually do want to know.
I follow a bunch of people on substack. Things I've noticed as a reader:
- It's both an email newsletter and a very nicely designed, clean web page
- There's an easy-to-use payments system (I pitch in a few bucks to my favorite blogs). The writer can control on a per-post basis how much extra content paid subs get -- whole post, whole post but no ability to comment, or just a preview of the post.
- They've actively recruited excellent writers, offering them contracts with minimum $ guarantees.
There's nothing mind-blowing about it, but it's really well and tastefully done, which is more than you can say about 99% of the commericial web offerings.
some blogs that are available on domain etc have form with email subscription (for example by using Convertkit service). i did this on my blog website.
Ah ok, but when I talk about blogging in the sense we're talking here, I think of it mostly as a non-professional activity as it used to be... just people sharing their thoughts/knowledge.
I agree with the high-quality niche part, but the same was said about Medium in its early days. They're on borrowed time like every other SV funny-money-funded company.
Well it is for professional writers. I think that the initial wave of blogs lead to a lot of people getting work as paid writers and now Substack is helping those people build their own market outside of the declining magazine and newspaper industries.
The problem with Substack (and Revue) is their publisher policy. The moment you turn on payments, you either bend to the ambiguity and only get your income from them, or you risk it with a Patreon or an online store for a purpose that isn't well-served by a newsletter.
Of course social media hit blogs hard on its day. I miss the times when a blogger would publish how bad her morning went, pictures of his new dog, or how great was the latest TV launch. This is basically all gone to social media.
But I also think that the coffin in the nail was given by people like myself subscribing to too many sites that provide RSS feeds. Seems like a good idea, having all that info in your newsreader, but after all The Verge, Hacker News and a few other media can dwarf any personal blogs so your reader basically is infoxicated.
The best way to discover blogs is... also reading blogs.
I used to love photo-blogs. Not just single images like IG and the like, but just random photo-blogs where the people who took the pictures share a bit of thoughts/stories behind the pictures no matter how trivial. My biggest inspiration back in the day was probably Jon Olsson before he started video blogging instead.
So I have started doing so myself and really enjoy the process of putting them together and sharing just because it is the kind of content I like to consume myself.
If any of you have good recommendations on photo-blogs then please let me know. I will sure try some of the search-engines and discovery tools shared in this thread already.
Don't know why sibling is dead; perfectly good points about discoverability of podcasts. To which I reply: I have had success discovering podcasts when they had transcriptions on the page. Google for some words, hit upon page, say "I can't read all this now but hey there's a link to audio", download the entire series, transcode to 16kbps Opus using ffmpeg, put it on my phone, listen in the car.
(The two examples I have in mind are https://www.psymposia.com/podcasts/plusthree/ and https://www.organism.earth/library/document/conversations-on..., which would suggest that posting transcriptions with your audio is something that occurs to people after consuming a certain quantity of mushrooms, or maybe it's just that the stuff those people tend to say happens to match stuff I'm googling for. Something something "hierarchical power structures".)
Of course it’s possible to blog over HTTP. (I mirror my gemlog to my website.) But it’s so much more enjoyable to write and browse in an ecosystem that’s designed for it.
How do you mirror the gemlog to HTTP? I've found a lot of methods for like active proxies, but I'd really like something that could create a static site from my gem text files.
Back in the mid-to-late 90s when it was (somewhat) popular for game developers to use .plan files, there were some gaming news sites like Shacknews and Blues News aggregating that content for you.
As a minor counterpoint: I've come to dread blogs and newsletters because so many of them are written by grind culture freaks who only write faux-insightful SEO'd content as a way to build an audience to sell snake oil to. These days the only blogs I trust are the ones I see on the top of HN or lobsters, which is unfortunate because I have interests beyond tech and I find it very, very difficult to find good blogs I can read about those interests.
I think that shows there is a problem with blogging that goes beyond just the medium. Consider that blogging is a decentralised ecosystem, so you have no central place for discovery outside of Google specifically and search generally. Being on the top of Google is an attractive proposition because it means many eyeballs and lots of ad revenue. Therefore it is natural that many new blogs exist to game the search engine, hence the term "blogspam".
Some of the same incentives exist with large social media sites as well, but on Twitter and the like if you mute/block enough big people and follow only those you care about, your feed will eventually become clean enough to look at every day. So I think it is much more important to solve the discovery problem with blogs if you want them to get more traction.
> I've come to dread blogs and newsletters because so many of them are written by grind culture freaks who only write faux-insightful SEO'd content as a way to build an audience to sell snake oil to.
My way around that is to pay. I find paid newsletters/blogs tend to evade SEO crap, for good reason: no one actually likes writing or reading that shit. Also, usually by forgoing the SEO crap they can focus on niche topics and content because they focus on retaining subscriptions.
The subscription also allows the writers to be more human for lack of a better description. They actually use their voice when writing instead of the generic SEO salesman pep, and they feel more comfortable with offering their real opinions and views.
I’ve found the opposite: Switching to a paid/subscription model has ruined some of the writers I previously enjoyed.
When they wrote for fun, not profit, the writings came out whenever they had something interesting enough to share. Now that it’s for-profit, the content is forced to come out faster and more frequently with posts that feel unnecessarily long to justify the cost. One author I previously enjoyed for well-researched topics that debunked popular opinions has been firing off un-researched posts with claims that can be debunked in 30 seconds of Googling.
The topics feel like they’re being chosen to produce the most interesting teaser (to convince non-subscribers to subscribe) or SEO juice. It feels like the clickbait factor went way up overnight.
Much of the magic of the past blogging era was that people were writing because they wanted to, not because they were fishing for clicks or subscriptions or pandering to future employers with every word. The move to paid takes some of that away.
I'm experimenting with a once every other month newsletter using Revue + the Twitter integration.[0] Tweeting is about the only way I've found to get views on stuff I write nowadays, and Twitter's analytics say I get tens to hundreds of profile views a month. Now there's a big signup button on there that pre-fills the email address.
I have a theory that 99% of blog posts could fit in a tweet's worth of text or a short thread. Most things that need more length probably don't need SEO-friendly length (500+ words) and are better bundled up in a traditional newsletter. And the stuff that does need that length can just be the main part of the newsletter.
The lack of central discovery is one of the main appeals of blogs imho. I don't want to discover blogs via a directory. I want to discover them through links from blogs I already read or recommendations from friends.
I think blogs started dieing when they optimized for maximizing their audience instead of being locations where people write about stuff that interests them without an expectation of "making it".
I actually think I would like a directory, because I fear the link-only propagation method would lead to echo chambers. But then how do you have a trustworthy directory, and how does it not also become an echo chamber. Reddit could almost be that, but clearly they don't have a handle on being not-an-echo-chamber yet.
Handmade directories, like blogrolls, are a sweet spot IME: I keep mine at https://maya.land/blogroll.opml (human or machine-readable) and I've found a huge portion of what's on it via other people's recommendations.
My whole site was inspired by https://marijn.uk/linkroll/ and https://href.cool/ , so while not everything they link to has an associated feed, I gotta shout them out as worth a look. :)
The tragedy of the commons would be people chewing up a limited resource in a way that prevents other people from doing better things with it.
What is the common resource that you think is being used up?
If it's the brainpower of the people writing SEO blogs, it doesn't prevent other people using their own brains.
If you think they are polluting the infosphere with crap, I can't really argue with that, but I can point out that it's generally ignorable and self-curing: when you don't make money at it, you stop.
So if anything, it resembles a late-stage ponzi where people aren't paying in much but are getting nothing back.
Discovery of good sources of information such as blogs is hard. And I think the biggest problem is the lack of trust. Everyone wants to grab your attention [1]. So how do you know that others won't waste your attention?
To solve this problem I am building https://linklonk.com that cultivates trust as you rate content. When you upvote a link you connect stronger to the feed that posted it (which could be a blog's feed) and to other users that upvoted this link before you. When you downvote - your connections to those who upvoted become weaker.
The strength of your connections to other feeds and users represents how useful their content recommendations have been to you in the past and they could be used as a measure of how likely their future recommendations will be worth your time (ie, trust that they won't waste your time).
The content is ranked according to the connection weights - so you get information from the sources that have shown to be content curators for you.
> Discovery of good sources of information such as blogs is hard. And I think the biggest problem is the lack of trust. Everyone wants to grab your attention [1]. So how do you know that others won't waste your attention?
> To solve this problem I am building https://linklonk.com that cultivates trust as you rate content. When you upvote a link you connect stronger to the feed that posted it (which could be a blog's feed) and to other users that upvoted this link before you. When you downvote - your connections to those who upvoted become weaker.
> The strength of your connections to other feeds and users represents how useful their content recommendations have been to you in the past and they could be used as a measure of how likely their future recommendations will be worth your time (ie, trust that they won't waste your time).
> The content is ranked according to the connection weights - so you get information from the sources that have shown to be content curators for you.
> [1] - like my comment here tries to draw your attention to my hobby project.
I find this so interesting. OP complains about people constantly trying to sell him something which is why he was turned off of blogs. And what happens? Someone tries to sell him something for his problem of too much selling.
Ah. What a world. Solution to too much selling is more selling.
LinkLonk is free, and it solves the problem. I've only used it for about 15 minutes, because in that time it fed me enough interesting stuff that I overwrote (and then closed) the tab.
This isn't somebody trying to sell something. It's somebody trying to help.
HN is a place full of people working on solutions to problems shared by a lot of people on HN, so it's common and normal to to offer that thing up to someone with the same problem.
I don't think trust can be reliably built with elements of gamification like this. The deal with gamification is that people learn to game it out, which erodes the kinds of sincere or honest interactions you're trying to cultivate.
In the olden times blogs earned trust by cultivating a reputation. The reputation was earned by having an audience that trusted them and recommended them. Cross-linking content to other blogs, guest blogging, being included on a blogger's 'blogroll,' etc. were all ways they expanded their audience.
It was slower and had much less reach, but it also focused more on "building an audience" rather than
"driving traffic." We, fundamentally, don't trust content, so mechanisms that operate on validating atomized bits of content are going to fall flat. We trust people and institutions. If you want to build trust it has to work on the agents producing the content rather than the content itself. Segmenting content up into atomized bits is what creates the erosion of trust in the first place. It's something timeline driven social media feeds do specifically because it makes it difficult to parse genuine buzz from advertising, which makes the ads more effective. But that's the opposite of trustworthiness.
This is sort of a perfectionist perspective. Search engines use the same “gamification” and suffer the same problems you’re “predicting” but that doesn’t mean you don’t use search. It does mean it’s an arms race between the engine and the abusers. Weighting the agents instead of the content is no different than a popularity contest and is essentially an “appeal to authority” (or a lot like cancel culture). Just because someone has weird opinions about X doesn’t mean they can’t be brilliant about Y. If you ranked the content then their X content can sink and their Y content can rise. The problem with Twitter, etc. is that their incentives are not as aligned with their users’ goals as we would like. Probably the best part about blogging was that it wasn’t centralized and so wasn’t subject to one person’s definition of what those trade-offs should be. But, of course, now we’re trying to discuss fixing one of its weaknesses without losing too many of its strengths.
> If you want to build trust it has to work on the agents producing the content...
LinkLonk's algorithm works that way. It builds trust in sources of information (including users who rate content). And it does not and will not try to understand the individual pieces of content.
Unlike the social media feeds that are powered by black box neural networks, LinkLonk's algorithm is transparent. You know how your interactions with it will be interpreted. I hope that this transparency will help build trust in the system and in the sources of information you are connecting to.
Yes, bad actors will try to game any system to gain the attention that they don't deserve. I'm not claiming that LinkLonk is game-proof, but I think it has better feedback loops and incentives than other systems such as popularity based ranking (please don't take it as a challenge).
I like the idea. I have a sort of feature request premised on the assumption you end up having weights attached to the index to determine the priority of output. Could you make these weights exportable?
In that way, you could have curated content. Like if I find someone that has really similar interests to me I could import their weights and see the web via their prioritisation. Similarly, (countering a problem I always have with google search bubbles) I could explain to my friend how to navigate to a site I found via search if they import my weights.
Edit: being able to manually modify my own weights would probably be helpful as well to decay sell outs.
I had an idea similar to this as well - to help people kickstart recommendations for their friends. I'm thinking of creating a personal url for each user (e.g., linklonk.com/u/lonk). If someone upvotes that url - they establish connections to the sources that user is connected to.
When you want to introduce someone to LinkLonk you could share with them your personal url.
As for decaying sellouts, wouldn't downvoting the content they upvoted do what you want?
By the way, every time someone you are connected to upvotes something, your connection to them becomes slightly weaker. So if you simply ignore recommendations from sources with a lower signal-to-noise ratio (or high volume) - their recommendations will eventually fade away from the "For you" page.
We need a standard API to subscribe to blogs on other sites, that will appear on our blog feed as news feed -- like how facebook or tweeter feeds work. RSS is too personal, too much outside the flow.
I didn't get that comment either. I've doubled-down on RSS for this purpose in my side-project Haven[1]. Write your own private blog, share it with people who can then subscribe with personal http-basic-auth RSS links (or view it on the web), and I've recently built in (still a WIP) a feed reader so you can create your own facebook-style news feed of anything on the web or things your friends write privately on their own Haven.
Maybe they mean that since there are many different feed readers a person could use, a blog can't have a "Click here to subscribe via RSS" link? Most feed readers will have a bookmarklet for 1-click subscribing, but the blog owner doesn't have the ability to make a prominent "call to action"-style button.
Sure they can, well they can have a link that brings up the feed anyway. What the browser does with it is a different story, and that depends on whether RSS preview extensions are installed. Copying and pasting that URL wherever it needs to go isn't all that complicated.
Back in the old Web 2.0 days we used OPML files to publish and exchange blog rolls, Dave Winer even had a site you could log into and share, in a sort of social-networking way, your blog/RSS subscriptions via OPML.
I have no idea about "too personal" mean, but the only reason you would consider RSS "outside of the flow" is due to the concerted effort by Google, Twitter, Facebook and Apple to reduce support. Even Mozilla(!) has been involved in removing support.
RSS is a perfectly good, tested and usable mechanism. Coming up with yet another syndication mechanism would be a huge waste of time and effort, most likely resulting in insignificance.
Your connections to feeds and other users on LinkLonk evolve over time as you rate content. If you start upvoting tuna-related content then LinkLonk will connect you to other tuna lovers and your connections will gradually "forget" your past hate for it.
> The strength of your connections to other feeds and users represents how useful their content recommendations have been to you in the past and they could be used as a measure of how likely their future recommendations will be worth your time (ie, trust that they won't waste your time).
Your intention is noble, but this is still based on network effects and a positive feedback loop. I doubt you can beat the social medias in their own game.
True, the network effects of the traditional social media are strong. LinkLonk needs a critical mass of users for network effects to kick in.
To make it worthwhile for the users before the project reaches that point, I am trying to make LinkLonk a better tool that helps you keep track of the content you liked (kind of a bookmarking service) and helps you follow RSS feeds in (kind of a feed reader).
If you have other ideas of how to make it more useful before we have enough users - let me know.
> If you have other ideas of how to make it more useful before we have enough users - let me know.
I have an idea; maybe you can enable people to publish a list of links that are curated by themselves, in the form of a RSS feed. This way your user can have a sense of ownership.
Thanks for the idea! LinkLonk already has a concept of a "list of links" - collections. When you upvote a link you put it into one (or more) of your collections.
What you are suggesting is similar to another idea I had (https://linklonk.com/item/9146000221282140160):
"An option to generate a publicly visible url for any of your collections. This could help you share your collection of liked items with other people. And it could help LinkLonk get new users."
Adding an RSS feed for these publicly accessible collections would be a natural extension.
This is a really nice idea. If I may make a suggestion, scrolling down takes a lot of scrolling because each link takes up so much vertical screen space on account of really big whitespace gutters, size of the thumbnail, and the general layout. I wind up being able to see only 3 on a screen compared 16 on HN! I would be much more likely to adopt this regularly if you changed the layout to pack more previews in to a vertical screen of space. HTH
Would it work if we had an option for a "compact" mode that shows items without no thumbnail and description?
Or would you change something else?
I don't know if I can get rid of the bottom part with the buttons since this is where the collection selector is - where you pick what collection the item you like should go to.
You are still going get splash damage from people who trust people who fall for plausibly non-clickbait clickbait, as is the top item for me right now [1]. As this system gets larger and more overlapping you are going to have to work more diligently to undo bad follows to get tinier amounts of content referrals.
The discovery problem should be solved on page and spread that way, to remain decentralised and free from the all the centralised incentives that lead to clickbait. You almost have to punish hosts that appear anywhere centralized lest they get a taste for clickblood.
If you see content that is not worth your time recommended to you then you can downvote it to stop trusting those who found it useful. It is all in your control as a user.
I didn't quite get what are the centralized incentives that lead to clickbait. Is it a comment about LinkLonk or centralized systems in general?
Centralization and decentralization have trade-offs. Right now the downvotes on LinkLonk are private. The upvotes are semi-public, but not available in raw form. If you wanted to implement the LinkLonk's algorithm in a decentralized manner then you would need all hosts to make the upvote and downvote data available to all other participants. Maybe homomorphic encryption can solve this problem.
My goal is to build a proof of concept in my spare time and the centralized approach seems to be the right option in my situation.
I've always wanted to blog because I love to write. However, I've been very hesitant to do so because of exactly what you described: the grind culture. I've felt immense pressure to make every post academic, but I realized that the blog should be for me first and foremost. In fact, my first blog post ever is describing the purpose behind my blog and _why_ I started it. It will help keep me accountable.
However — I do wonder about this hypothetical: my blog (for whatever reason) blows up. Would I start to feel pressure to deliver content that starts trending towards "grind culture"? Or would I still be able to blog _for me_? I'm sure this is what some other content creators have faced before, especially in the YouTube community. If anybody has had this experience, I'd be curious to hear what you did.
If you'd like to blog and write, maybe just write for yourself, don't put any trackers on it, don't put any ads on it.
The grind culture thing comes from people trying to make money off of their blogs. So, don't do it for the money :)
If you get to a point where your hosting provider comes knocking because you're generating too much traffic, you'll have a good inflection point to determine if there's some way to get the blog to pay for its own hosting without you having to change your approach (tip services are cool for this).
Unfortunately, if you are quietly producing quality text content on a topic and not monetising it, someone else will steal it.
I've seen this a few times in very non-technical domains, eg Fishing hardware and ceramic glazing.
https://www.alanhawk.com/reviews/reviews.html has frequently had content stolen and republished on seo gamed listicle sites or used verbatim in youtube videos.
This is some serious premature optimization you are doing.
The fact is nobody is going to read your blog post about why you are starting a blog, so you are basically just writing it for yourself. Which is fine - but you need to be aware that if you are writing for yourself there is basically a 0% chance your blog will ever get any amount of traffic.
So keep writing for yourself and leave it at that but don't stress about problems you aren't going to have and calling yourself a content creator
I understand, which is why I mentioned it being a hypothetical. Maybe I shouldn't have used myself as an example. It's not something I'm worried about. I've only shared the blog with close friends. That's my intention moving forward.
From experience, no, but your 5th-least-favorite post may somehow make it to the front page of HN over many more interesting ones, where it will be nitpicked to death by some guy who thinks the solution to the world's problems is XSLT. That can be a tad demotivating.
The content marketing / grind thing - as far as I can tell, those people are born (decanted?) that way. It's a whole other value system.
You misunderstand blogs: you can find the good ones only by personal referral or by actively trying. If you have to search Google, then you'll, by definition, find only the ones that are optimizing for search engines. There is no way to solve this problem, and I think the same is true for other forms of social interaction.
btw does anyone have invite to lobste.rs? i have technical blog (not great but i try to improve it) and i'd like to share content on lobsters to have feedback.
The way to find good blogs is to start by asking technical questions in whatever subject you are interested in.
If you want to read about barbeque, you need to start with a technical question about barbeque; if you want to read about Greek history, you need a question about that.
Eventually you will find somebody knowledgeable who is writing about that subject. They will in turn link to others, or comment on others, and so forth.
great advice, and I'd add that it doesn't even have to be a particularly intelligent question. I found bret devereaux's excellent blog by googling "game of thrones historical accuracy" and got far more than I expected.
Discussion groups and forums used to be useful, but now they're dying out and being replaced by undiscoverable walled garden facebook groups and discord servers...
This was my immediate response. The number of forums available has plummeted. And as @maskros says, they are all in private Facebook groups now. Private because no-one wants their personal life trickling into their Facebook feed in case someone from work sees it.
On Facebook, you don't need to use a private group for privacy. You set up a different audience group that isn't public and change the audience to one that is non-public.
This, pseudonymous de-centralized discussion groups and forums, is what I would pick as the one thing I would like to bring back to the internet. There used to be a forum about everything, each one it's own community, most of which didn't require ties to a real-world identity.
I'm sure they exist, but they are really hard to find.
Big forums can cost a lot of money to run and managing the spam can be a mess these days. Not only that the boards that have enough proper tools to deal with the spam aren't free. Sure there are plugins for some forum software that fix a few things, but often you have to install 6 plugins and that still isnt enough, plus then you have to do updates and hope it doesnt break those un-official plugins.
The Internet is a dark forest. As soon as there is money to be made or power to be gained by exploiting something, the barbarian hordes will burn it to the ground unless it's behind towers and walls.
There are specific content bloggers and life bloggers. Someone may have a great bbq post but the blog is filled with other subjects. The people who write only about bbq usually are part of a sales funnel process.
I have installed a Chrome extension to remove certain "data science" blogs from my search results because they just dominate, but allow posts from practically anyone. I'm not interested in the teachings of a data virgin on machine learning.
I have muted and blocked accounts on Twitter as well because of that: people clearly never having touched real data talking about ML projects, recommending libraries to manage lifecycle, etc. All that "audiencing" doesn't suit me, especially when it's clearly BS with no value, not even an entertainment value.
The UX/UI area is just as bad. It's nearly impossible to find authoritative discussions outside of conference slide decks, which aren't ideal for reading as standalone documents, as they only have bullet points.
However there is no shortage of useless "app redesign" case studies from complete amateurs. And it's always the same ones too: Starbucks, Netflix, Snapchat, Instagram and Spotify.
How about a public health website? Or a university application system? Or something "boring" that's much more realistic for a case study than a billion dollar corp's app?
It's one point I make whenever I get the chance to talk with students who ask me on how to work on portfolio to demonstrate skills. I tell them to try and solve a problem for real and make a product. They'll learn so much more than playing house. Databsases, the language, front-end, sales, getting users, killing hypotheses, product design, product management, prioritization, making tradeoffs, etc.
I'm working on a hypothesis that there is something I call the "AM radio effect," which, roughly speaking, is "As communication technologies progress in comfort and convenience, the older generation will become dominated by hucksters who try to take advantage of those who cannot or will not switch." It's my explanation for
- what happened to AM radio as FM, satellite, and podcasting came to dominate the American driving experience
- what happened to landline telephone as point-to-point communication became dominated by cellphones, smartphones, and increasingly non-phone-voice-network audio and videoconferencing technologies
I wouldn't be surprised if blogs suffer the same problem in the era of microblogging and centralized microblogging services.
What I witness was that innovation stopped. For instance landlines could have been upgraded to support text messaging (just as they use a modem to send caller ID they could use a modem to send and receive texts.) Cordless phones, answering machines and such could have all gotten better but they didn't.
Most irksome, landlines don't support deliverability features such as STIR/SHAKEN so if you live in a place where cell phones don't work you might have trouble getting people to pick up when you ring them.
That's different from AM radio which, driving across upstate NY, I came to the impression that the only program you could expect to get reliably was the Rush Limbaugh show. If you were lucky around sunset you might catch a black power show from Philadelphia...
The majority of incoming calls on landlines now are people trying to scam the callee. [https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/almost-half-your-phone-ca...]. And the majority of AM radio content now is low-audience long-tail content (or mass-commodified syndicated content, like Rush Limbaugh) that is a medium for pushing low-quality bulk advertising for questionable products.
To expand upon the hypothesis (and this is half-baked and incomplete, so take it with several grains of salt): as technology evolves, people move to more comfortable / more convenient technology. AM is not comfortable or convenient; it's interfered with by too many EM flux sources in the modern world. Landline is not comfortable or convenient for the reasons you noted relative to modern alternatives.
The people who do not move off these technologies are various flavors of captive audiences: people who can't buy FM radios or don't want to adopt new stations / find content in new locations, people who can't use a cellphone, etc. As mainstream content creation leaves these channels, the vacuum is taken over by hucksters trying to take advantage of these captive audiences. The incentives to do so are lack of alternative content and a "softer" target audience (easier to fool, especially since these technologies were once mainstream and trusted so many of their users still believe they are, even after the hucksters have taken them over). I have relatives who still believe "They wouldn't call me if they didn't have business with me; how would they know my number?" And I still have relatives who believe AM news radio is news.
They do. I believe it's less common than landline spam right now, but more importantly: people see it less because modern smartphone (really, modern smartphone phone apps) have features to do aggregate spam-signal detection and sharing. A phone number that originates a lot of calls that people flag as "spam" eventually gets picked up in Google or Apple's top-level filter and preemptively flagged as "Probably spam" when they call other people.
The problem with social media sites is their algorithms are focused on profitability. If you follow a local restaurant and then move to another city they will push ads and show content tied to your geolocation (which makes sense—not saying that’s bad per se). But they dictate what you should see and when.
With blogs it used to be about the RSS feed, which had one job: to nudge users when new content is available. But ultimately users (or news aggregators) had control over what the algorithm does.
The problem with blogs as pointed out is content discovery. How can content be discoverable without commercial interests? Social media platforms make content discovery simple and effective. On top of that, the barrier to entry is low—a two or three step on boarding process which is free (as in beer) to-boot.
Anyone know of good content-discovery platforms?
Podcasts are interesting because multiple platforms support them so they exist somewhat in the borderland. Might be an interesting case study being podcast discover ability vs blogs vs social media.
All that being said, I think we simply have to go beyond the first page of search engine results to find the good stuff. Not finding stuff is a form of laziness when we are used to getting a quick info-fix on Wikipedia. But standardized P2P protocols might be nice too—good incentive for a crypto currency?
“Most books should have been an article, most articles should’ve been a tweet.”
Blogging just for the sake of blogging is what caused their decline in the first place. If the blogpost can’t be easily understood within first few lines, it’s a wasted opportunity. The a reason Morgan House, Derek Sivers are still relevant.
I really enjoy The Browser[0] newsletter for this reason. They find very very good articles that often also end up on the front page of HN. I’ve found a lot of great new blogs / magazines this way.
—-
0: https://thebrowser.com/
> Being on the top of Google is an attractive proposition because it means many eyeballs and lots of ad revenue
Hence the proliferation of 'splogs' or Spam-Blogs. Also in terms of social media, most people who experience a viral blogpost that spreads like wildfire throughout the net, invariably try to recreate that past success. It's the sole motivation of clickbait and sensationalist articles. More eyeballs, more AD revenue and also fake Internet Points in general to be had.
I get the Thinking About Things newsletter [1], which focuses on sending out articles by lesser known blogs. I don't know how they do it but they seem to know about all the fascinating blogs before they make it big. It's been a great way to discover interesting but not sponsored, SEO'd-to-death content.
I wish there was some way to "undo" my contribution to a site's advertising revenue when I start reading and discover the page is just SEO garbage (e.g. when I see a sentence that starts with "many reviewers noted that ...").
This is a “feature”. There’s so much content out there whose sole purpose is to drive advertising revenue, either with complicity of the brand being advertised or incidentally (as targeting is never 100% reliable, there’s always a bit of “leakage” where an ad would be displayed next to irrelevant or content that the advertiser would normally object to - at scale that leakage is money someone can capitalise on).
A lot of people rightfully mention that we lack a proper micropayments system for the web and while that’s true, I don’t think it’s the only problem. A lot of people’s careers and companies are built on this parasitic model where they don’t actually provide any tangible value and only profit off leftover scraps, which wouldn’t be sustainable in a completely paid-for model because the end-user doesn’t actually get any value out of it and thus would never willingly pay money for this “service”.
> faux-insightful SEO'd content as a way to build an audience to sell snake oil to
This cracked me up good lol. Btw, another big problem is people writing "blogs" as if they were experts without having expertise e.g. machine learning medium articles making wild unsubstantiated. It's so misleading, especially because ML is already not particularly rigorous due to black box models.
I don't even think a good chunk of what's at the top of HN is anything other than "SEO'd content". The quality is definitely diminishing in recent months.
> I've come to dread the internet and social media because so many of is written by grind culture freaks who only write faux-insightful SEO'd content as a way to build an audience to sell snake oil.
It's the nature of the attention economy and ubiquitous ad tech.
I was disappointed that the author never mentioned ownership. A lot of the problems discussed there are caused by not owning your own content. It's still super easy to register a domain and roll your own content using Ghost, Hugo, or 11ty.
What was once a "Ingredients:" .... "Instructions:" ... "Tip: goes well with sour cream", is now a whole story, how the author woke up one day, when the were 7, and noticed they peed their bed, and then their mother came to check on them, and started cleaning the pee, and the dog was barking, and the dog also pooped that day, and there was wheel of fortune on tv, and a friend came over for a lunch, but they ordered pizza for lunch, and then there was a rerun of mission impossible on tv, and then daddy had a beer or five, and mommy made sandwiches, and those sanwiches remind the author of this chicken tikka masala recipe, that was converted to a non-spicy vegan variant.
Your comment shows you didn’t read the page fully. I miss when people had time to read a whole page.
The author already wrote about blogs that are trying to get views with various tactics vs old proper blogs that were just people rambling about their quirky interests or bad day.
The number of blogs that try and stretch out a simple “how much <X> is <good/bad/enough>“ into a few hundred words by defining every <explicative deleted> term is infuriating. Just tell me the number already! I know what all the terms mean, I just forgot what the right number is!
I've been personal blogging since 2003, and I still do so, although a lot shorter form these days. Not everyone blogs just for SEO purposes, I couldn't care any less about SEO. In fact, I don't even pay attention to analytics.
video and podcasts killed blogs. When we figured out it the spoken world has truly dismal bandwidth compared to reading, it was already too late, blogs were dead.
Also, SEO trickery completely drowned the honest blogger, not to mention rampant plagiarism from the same SEO farms.
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https://wiby.me/
HN history goes as far as 4 years ago claiming it's "new": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15394126.
(I just emailed the site about this.)
they make up a smaller % of the internet, but that's because the use-base has increased.
Rarely updated, but I write about gridbeam and software at http://www.nuke24.net/plog/. If you like reading about people's dreams, on the other hand, http://www.nuke24.net/dlog/
> You'll check the analytics. Abysmal. Nobody is reading!
> You may write a few more posts, but it's always the same story. A lot of work goes in, but not much comes out.
I never understood this sentiment. Who cares if no one is reading? You blog because you have something to express on the internet, not because you're seeking attention from others. Content creation for the sole purpose of views is incredibly superficial.
Of course a lot of blogs were hosted on services like Blogger or Livejournal (which I also had,) and being able to create networks and friend/interest groups definitely increased visibility, but even then most things went unread and uncommented on.
It's great to have a community of sorts. I've found that in gemini space, there's a small number of active bloggers that run in the same circles and occasionally make replies on each posts they feel interesting (because almost virtually all pages are static, almost no comment fields).
It's not so much about the attention as it is about the sense of community and belonging.
I think what has changed in the last two decades or so is that a lot of new users have come on the Internet and this new generation of users spend most of their time in walled gardens thereby making the bloggers look like a small minority.
Most people didn't blog in order to produce great art or advance human knowledge. Those who did, they tend to still blog.
But most regular Joe bloggers just wanted to share ideas or experiences with other people, connect with them, and hear _their_ ideas and experiences. Writing a 500-word blog post was just the means to start a chat in the comments section. For them, Facebook or Twitter do it better.
I remember when Tumblr started (it didn't have a specific culture yet). Some of my blogging friends opened a Tumblr just to share links and pictures, and kept to WordPress for long-form posts. Eventually, they quickly started spending more times in link exchanging and commenting on Tumblr than on WP.
Yes, inferior products prevail from time to time, especially when those negative externalities you mention help consolidate a dominant position.
But social networks do not charge money. People are free to open as many blogs as they want. If they didn't when they were raging in the early 2000s there must a reason.
Reality is complex, especially human motivations. But to argue that blogs are a superior for the mainstream public to share themselves to an audience is a bit intellectually unfair.
Like... distribution?
Exhibit A being the QWERTY keyboard most of us are typing on right now.
I used to discover blogs via the Yahoo Directory, blog rolls (where we mention others' blogs as external links to follow up), Live Journal's listing, and cross-referencing of blog posts. Google search used to surface blog posts too.
Now it's all on Medium - where I don't grudge those who want reliable hosting+discoverability and want to get paid for content, and where Medium charges for this. But I dislike that the content is "locked up" at Medium. I don't quite know how to explain this dislike, and I welcome any points of view that might help make this dislike go away.
danluu.com, plover.com, ciechanow.ski, essays by pg and many others have very high quality writing and are insightful.
I don't accept there is a shortage of blogs.
People find me through those posts and end up sticky around for the more personal/rambly stuff.
https://web.eecs.utk.edu/~azh/blog/favblogs.html
It's given me great joy just publishing my unfiltered thoughts on the internet straight from my pen, which sounds similar to the "unfocused blogs" the author was talking about.
Perhaps in this highly edited, Instagram world we now live in - the raw, unedited nature of a blog is a bit more scary. I still love them though.
Here's my blog if you're interested: https://daily.tinyprojects.dev/
- https://slightknack.dev/blog
Here are some others:
- https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com
- https://www.gwern.net/index
- https://danluu.com
- https://tonsky.me/
- https://lemire.me/blog/
- https://waitbutwhy.com/
- https://www.kalzumeus.com/archive/
- https://blog.codinghorror.com/
- https://franz.hamburg
- https://www.project-daily.com
Some blogs I follow via RSS (using the awesome NetNewsWire app):
- https://brendangregg.com
- https://brandur.org/
- https://ferd.ca/
https://memex.marginalia.nu/links/bookmarks.gmi
I think we've gotten curiously bad at linking to other websites in the last 20 years. It's really bad for discoverability. I don't know why it is, it's like everyone goes "oh, i've got a precious visitor at last, better not link anywhere so they'll stick around forever!"
I think if my website contains interesting links, it makes people more likely to come back later, because they associate it with good feelings of discovery, and not bad feelings of being trapped.
I've been at it for over 6 years and there's around 350 posts. It's a mixture of written blog posts and YouTube videos. The general focus is on building and deploying web applications as well as dev environment tweaks. Basically everything I encounter as a developer.
Here's some lists of blogs (mostly programming oriented):
* https://jvns.ca/blogroll/
* https://blogsurf.io/blogs
https://iquilezles.org/www/index.htm
https://www.pandelon.co.uk/blog
Love the look of paper website as well, right now I use bearblog but I would like to use paper a bit more
I honestly cannot tell if this author is wanting that because they are truly passionate about freedom of speech, or if they are feeling personally stifled in expressing their opinions.
Either way, this post feels like an attempt to say they want a blogging platform where they can post whatever they want, whether it be NSFW content, hate speech, or anything else.
Not in the "I had kids so my blog went dark for a few years" sense, but in the sense of "ooh twitter was invented and now I just emit a halfassed one-sentence brainfart or 5-second tiktok cellphone video and get way more dopamine hits".
I've been reading blogs and perusing my self-curated NetNewsWire RSS feeds for 20+ years, and blogs never went away, RSS never died, Google Reader getting googled didn't really matter, etc.
And there are probably technically more blogs now than ever before.
But still, the blog kinda died, in the sense that it would be a lot more surprising to learn your friend's 80-year-old grandma has a blog today than it would have been in 2011.
It went from an increasingly-mainstream thing to a decreasingly-mainstream thing.
Of course, it's not the same as a blog. I think the length "requirement" of a blog made it so only people with the time, dedication and skills (or lack of self-awareness) would keep them going, so if you were reading an established blog a bit of selection bias was at play. On Twitter you can tweet garbage day in day out and still be on the platform for years. Heck, you'd probably gain a significant following.
I might be coming off as a Twitter fan or something but just to be clear: the site is cancer. It's impossible to stay on for longer than a year and not have your brain melt off by how it works, and they're becoming more and more closed and restrictive by the day. It's a shame because there's clearly something about the site that interests a mass audience, but I wish there was a service that was like Twitter but better. I know Mastodon exists but outside specific niche audiences it's never gained traction, but I hope it does take off eventually.
Maybe the same applies to Facebook/Instagram/Other major social media provider as well, but I don't have any experience with platforms outside Twitter and Reddit so I couldn't say.
Edit to expand on something: I mentioned that Twitter is interesting to mass audiences, and that's actually more important than you'd think. Speaking personally, before I went on twitter, I don't think I'd ever consistently read content posted by women. It's a natural result of being in a male-dominated industry and following male-dominated interests. On Twitter, though, because there were so many people of all walks of life I quickly followed a lot of interesting women who posted great content: women who were activists, historians, academics, homemakers and so on. That really was why I stuck around for so long on Twitter despite how awful the site is, and why I think any serious contender has to appeal to the normies, so to speak.
Best thing about blogs at the beginning was that they were not mainstream. They were specialized and interesting.
When they were mainstream in the internet only short period between internet becoming mainstream and social networks and platforms gaining popularity.
Today blogs are back in the golden age of not being mainstream. It's easier to find quality content by following them and their links to other blogs.
To meet some arbitrary SEO goal like, longer articles do better we have people filling in the top 1/3 with unneeded filler. Then we have companies trying to plug their product in a "10 best tools for X" article. Even if their product is crap for that feature, along with the content mills, the quality has dropped.
Most blog-entries were never much more than that anyway, especially since the free blog-services started appearing and setting up a blog was effortless. There is a reason why Twitter were named micro-blogging-service in the beginning. And the other side was blogging being a primitive form of social network, till better social networks appeared. So it made sense for people who were more interested in the social aspect to moved to the optimized services.
> I've been reading blogs and perusing my self-curated NetNewsWire RSS feeds for 20+ years, and blogs never went away, RSS never died, Google Reader getting googled didn't really matter, etc.
In both cases, the hype died down, and was replaced by other hypes. The remaining people use them now for the dedicated reasons where both can shine their best. But the danger remains that loosing support will long term lead to them dying for real. In case of RSS it's already happening slowly. Though blogs are more resistant to this, as your blogging does not depend much on external support, as long as you do not care about money or reader-stats.
or worse, a 10/ sequential message "magnum tweetus"
(a) Basically just a bunch of glorified retweets, but (b) Free of the moronic 280-character limit, and (c) Immune to Twitter's moronic "jail" algorithm (all I have to do is delete the IFTTT tweet, not my "blog post")
And I think that's fine. And, yes, I do have opinions on the moronicity of Twitter, how did you know?
1 - owning your blog is too big of a barrier of entry, there is a need for a platform: look at the success at medium for tech writers, despite that we hate it.
2 - we need the return of the domain name based blog. This helps with independence, censorship, and the like. You can always move from the platform, and the platform can claim they can't censor you since it's your domain, so DMCA should be sent to you directly.
3 - this platform should do blog + microblog. You don't always have something long to say, announcement, though and quick tips are very well suited to tweets. But only this format leads to quality deficiency. Being able to write a big article easily is equally important.
4 - forwarding all posts to your social networks is essential. Yes, your blog should be the original source (so you get ref, credit, independence and not the duplicate content ban from google). But the discovery problem cannot be solved easily, and those networks already exist.
EDIT: unrelated, but I love phone calls. I mean, I hate doing them, but I love having the ability to do them. It's a universal reliable tech, it works in the country side, it works when the wifi is down, it works well in the car, and I don't have to have the app du jour installed or insist that the other party does.
I've made 4 phone calls this year: to a buddy, to my wife, to an old friend, and to my fax/voicemail provider (JConnect) which decided to terminate voicemail service on the phone number I've used since the 1990s. (So I may be part of the problem I am describing — that number didn't ring any device, it only accepted voice messages and faxes, which it forwarded to me via email.)
Of those 4 phone 2021 phone calls:
1.) My buddy no longer has voicemail on his phone, and a recording just told me he was not available and to try again later. (Head kinda exploded.)
2.) My wife also no longer has voicemail! How tf did that happen? No idea but it was 2 months after the above call so I was less surprised.
3.) My old friend is old-school (hence the phone call), and still does have voicemail — but it was full. I assume because he never checks it.
4.) JConnect support's touch-tone B.S. support system did disconnect me a couple of times, requiring that I call them back... but it did eventually connect me to a support rep who helped me cancel my account. But: only because they are the kind of asshole company that engages in the common-but-should-be-illegal practice of letting you sign up on the web but only cancel by phone, as a method of retaining "customers" who no longer want their product.
So n=1 sample, might not be typical, etc. but I suspect the phone is getting less universal and less reliable over time.
Twitter is getting more and more universal, but reliable does not apply.
I guess no, we are living through a breaking of communications.
I certainly do. I have no intention of EVER checking my voicemail, so why would I want to leave callers with a false impression that their message will be heard?
I never answer those on the first go - only if they left a voicemail or a text message...
[EDIT] Except for work. My work email is still sorta useful. But in part that's because it's much newer. It's also getting more and more junked up with garbage, without active management and rule-setting.
I feel like medium doesn't even care about tech writers -- don't people still have to host github gists for code snippets? The biggest middle finger to tech bloggers, and yet they keep flocking to the platform.
I've been talking to businesses for years about this same thing. Using a blog as a way to broadcast to social media but keep the blog/site as the main source of information for your audience.
And it never works because it is far too simple to just use social media directly and even if you don't, your audience still comments on social media and so your discussion remains there.
Discussion should remain on social media. This avoids the problems of moderation and spam that plagued blogs.
> it is far too simple to just use social media directly
Yes to succeed the blog platform should be super easy to setup and to link.
There are benefits that can then attract people:
- if you have several social accounts, on the same or different platforms, then having a centralized way of publishing on all of them is a nice perk
- social media platform impose a lot of rules, but on your blog, you can do whatever you want. So for problematic content, you can tease on social networks, and bring people on your blog for the real uncensored thing.
- the source of truth that the blog would be is a fine touch in this era of fake news
- you can add paid sections to the blog and make money directly with your biggest fans
What I was trying to say is that I think that ultimately social media will eat your traffic and blog. I think that the peril of using social media to promote your own content is that you will ultimately depend on social media.
I think that the best route to take is to find a way to promote your content without it.
At least if you have are on several platform, there are multiple entre points for your content. And your blog would allow you to offer things that the platform don't, like code snippets, easy media download, or something more innovative.
Not if it's on a platform - see part 2 of GP's ramblings.
After all, I'm responsible for my vps content, not my hosting. What's the difference ?
Micro.blog does this!
I don't know if bloggers turned to Twitter, TikTok, and similar goldfish attention span media. (Maybe. I don't have data.)
I think it is more likely that high-quality blog posts drown in the sea of tweets. More people do the latter, and the cost of doing a single one is orders of magnitude lower than writing even an average-quality blog post.
I realize I am being utopian, but providing a facility like Medium that uses open standards, allows bloggers to blog and doesn't skim profits should be a public service.
Google downloaded all that curation effort and then claimed we didn't have to do it anymore, and that we just need to "be indexed", but that opens the door for spammers and scammers, and there's no fix for it. Without curation, blogs are no better than strangers on a street corner.
I think the only way to restore the health of the blog ecosystem is to go back to webrings, except with an RSS accumulator added^, so that we can follow everyone in a webring and report abuse to the webring curators.
^ OPML subscriptions would be a workable model, except that many feed readers only support "import OPML one-time", not "poll and refresh".
EDIT: It isn't sufficient to implement RSS or OPML support. The missing piece is webrings that curate their membership lists, with a human sanity limit of 25 or 50 sites per webring. That was a real limit back in the day, but it's still worth keeping to keep humans honest. You can't replace this effort with technology, but you can support it. We just choose not to, because search is lazy and somewhat effective, and so blogs suffer.
The platform effect means there’s just less quality content and it’s more difficult to surface.
There's more everything than there was before. Despite popular opinion, the rest of the web didn't shrivel up and die when Twitter, Facebook and Youtube got popular.
But then it started eating away the blog platform space, and then took all that hostage with paywalls. There's not that many companies I really dislike, but Medium is starting to be up there in the list.
The first two are about the reputation of blogging and the third about lower levels of entry for most people. Sad but true.
See, for example, https://antonhowes.substack.com/ (I'm not affiliated with the writer, though I am considering switching from free to paid)
I can get quite a lot of views by posting my latest posts to the relevant forums (HN, Reddit, programming forums)... if there's any advantage I am not seeing, I actually do want to know.
- It's both an email newsletter and a very nicely designed, clean web page
- There's an easy-to-use payments system (I pitch in a few bucks to my favorite blogs). The writer can control on a per-post basis how much extra content paid subs get -- whole post, whole post but no ability to comment, or just a preview of the post.
- They've actively recruited excellent writers, offering them contracts with minimum $ guarantees.
There's nothing mind-blowing about it, but it's really well and tastefully done, which is more than you can say about 99% of the commericial web offerings.
Email subscriptions made easy enough for a non-techie audience to subscribe.
But I also think that the coffin in the nail was given by people like myself subscribing to too many sites that provide RSS feeds. Seems like a good idea, having all that info in your newsreader, but after all The Verge, Hacker News and a few other media can dwarf any personal blogs so your reader basically is infoxicated.
The best way to discover blogs is... also reading blogs.
So I have started doing so myself and really enjoy the process of putting them together and sharing just because it is the kind of content I like to consume myself.
If any of you have good recommendations on photo-blogs then please let me know. I will sure try some of the search-engines and discovery tools shared in this thread already.
And for shameless self-promotion here is a link to where I will post going forward: https://jesperreiche.com/category/photography/
There's a couple of problems with blogs.
- Sometimes I only want to subscribe to an author's certain topics
- There's still no good RSS reader; I use feedly, but its load-time puts me off it big time (I've tried plenty of others)
- The tendency to sign up for walled garden platforms rather than platforms, or simply use normal websites, that federate well
- The practical death of web rings for discoverability
I've been thinking about the last point more: I don't really want to submit to a search engine's algorithm; I want someone's curated recommendations.
Once I've have those curated recommendations I want something that lets me aggregate and interact.
If you want a fast, in browser RSS reader I don't think anything can beat mine in load time: https://airss.roastidio.us
I recently have a show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28585353
I'm sure much of that is blogs, right?
Printing press -> Radio -> Television
Evolution of online information networks:
Blogs -> Podcasts -> Videos
What is interesting is that:
1. Podcasts > Videos since they can be consumed in more places than Videos
2. People love and consume long forms podcasts (>1 hour)
Blogs can be easily indexable and searchable while podcasts are definitely not.
Also, the vast majority of podcasts rely on 3rd party services to distribute their content on podcast apps.
Which makes the entire infrastructure a lot more fragile than a simple self hosted blog IMO.
They’re still an awesome medium though, especially for long conversations.
(The two examples I have in mind are https://www.psymposia.com/podcasts/plusthree/ and https://www.organism.earth/library/document/conversations-on..., which would suggest that posting transcriptions with your audio is something that occurs to people after consuming a certain quantity of mushrooms, or maybe it's just that the stuff those people tend to say happens to match stuff I'm googling for. Something something "hierarchical power structures".)
We used them in college, but I guess folks would need shell accounts on unix systems to do that today?
I miss lightweight internet stuff. Maybe gemini will bring some of that back?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)
Of course it’s possible to blog over HTTP. (I mirror my gemlog to my website.) But it’s so much more enjoyable to write and browse in an ecosystem that’s designed for it.
None of your business. Go away. You have mail.
These were definitely proto-blogs.
I think that shows there is a problem with blogging that goes beyond just the medium. Consider that blogging is a decentralised ecosystem, so you have no central place for discovery outside of Google specifically and search generally. Being on the top of Google is an attractive proposition because it means many eyeballs and lots of ad revenue. Therefore it is natural that many new blogs exist to game the search engine, hence the term "blogspam".
Some of the same incentives exist with large social media sites as well, but on Twitter and the like if you mute/block enough big people and follow only those you care about, your feed will eventually become clean enough to look at every day. So I think it is much more important to solve the discovery problem with blogs if you want them to get more traction.
My way around that is to pay. I find paid newsletters/blogs tend to evade SEO crap, for good reason: no one actually likes writing or reading that shit. Also, usually by forgoing the SEO crap they can focus on niche topics and content because they focus on retaining subscriptions.
The subscription also allows the writers to be more human for lack of a better description. They actually use their voice when writing instead of the generic SEO salesman pep, and they feel more comfortable with offering their real opinions and views.
When they wrote for fun, not profit, the writings came out whenever they had something interesting enough to share. Now that it’s for-profit, the content is forced to come out faster and more frequently with posts that feel unnecessarily long to justify the cost. One author I previously enjoyed for well-researched topics that debunked popular opinions has been firing off un-researched posts with claims that can be debunked in 30 seconds of Googling.
The topics feel like they’re being chosen to produce the most interesting teaser (to convince non-subscribers to subscribe) or SEO juice. It feels like the clickbait factor went way up overnight.
Much of the magic of the past blogging era was that people were writing because they wanted to, not because they were fishing for clicks or subscriptions or pandering to future employers with every word. The move to paid takes some of that away.
I have a theory that 99% of blog posts could fit in a tweet's worth of text or a short thread. Most things that need more length probably don't need SEO-friendly length (500+ words) and are better bundled up in a traditional newsletter. And the stuff that does need that length can just be the main part of the newsletter.
[0] https://twitter.com/ViewfinderFox / https://newsletter.viewfinderfox.com/
I think blogs started dieing when they optimized for maximizing their audience instead of being locations where people write about stuff that interests them without an expectation of "making it".
Sure, you can do that. It will even work for that. But the tool has many, many more uses than that.
The blogs are in a race to the bottom in terms of quality because there is huge incentive to write for long-tail SEO rather than humans.
This is a lot closer to tragedy of the commons.
What is the common resource that you think is being used up?
If it's the brainpower of the people writing SEO blogs, it doesn't prevent other people using their own brains.
If you think they are polluting the infosphere with crap, I can't really argue with that, but I can point out that it's generally ignorable and self-curing: when you don't make money at it, you stop.
So if anything, it resembles a late-stage ponzi where people aren't paying in much but are getting nothing back.
To solve this problem I am building https://linklonk.com that cultivates trust as you rate content. When you upvote a link you connect stronger to the feed that posted it (which could be a blog's feed) and to other users that upvoted this link before you. When you downvote - your connections to those who upvoted become weaker.
The strength of your connections to other feeds and users represents how useful their content recommendations have been to you in the past and they could be used as a measure of how likely their future recommendations will be worth your time (ie, trust that they won't waste your time).
The content is ranked according to the connection weights - so you get information from the sources that have shown to be content curators for you.
I did a Show HN recently for this project that has more details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28405643
[1] - like my comment here tries to draw your attention to my hobby project.
> To solve this problem I am building https://linklonk.com that cultivates trust as you rate content. When you upvote a link you connect stronger to the feed that posted it (which could be a blog's feed) and to other users that upvoted this link before you. When you downvote - your connections to those who upvoted become weaker.
> The strength of your connections to other feeds and users represents how useful their content recommendations have been to you in the past and they could be used as a measure of how likely their future recommendations will be worth your time (ie, trust that they won't waste your time).
> The content is ranked according to the connection weights - so you get information from the sources that have shown to be content curators for you.
> I did a Show HN recently for this project that has more details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28405643
> [1] - like my comment here tries to draw your attention to my hobby project.
I find this so interesting. OP complains about people constantly trying to sell him something which is why he was turned off of blogs. And what happens? Someone tries to sell him something for his problem of too much selling.
Ah. What a world. Solution to too much selling is more selling.
This isn't somebody trying to sell something. It's somebody trying to help.
In the olden times blogs earned trust by cultivating a reputation. The reputation was earned by having an audience that trusted them and recommended them. Cross-linking content to other blogs, guest blogging, being included on a blogger's 'blogroll,' etc. were all ways they expanded their audience.
It was slower and had much less reach, but it also focused more on "building an audience" rather than "driving traffic." We, fundamentally, don't trust content, so mechanisms that operate on validating atomized bits of content are going to fall flat. We trust people and institutions. If you want to build trust it has to work on the agents producing the content rather than the content itself. Segmenting content up into atomized bits is what creates the erosion of trust in the first place. It's something timeline driven social media feeds do specifically because it makes it difficult to parse genuine buzz from advertising, which makes the ads more effective. But that's the opposite of trustworthiness.
LinkLonk's algorithm works that way. It builds trust in sources of information (including users who rate content). And it does not and will not try to understand the individual pieces of content.
Unlike the social media feeds that are powered by black box neural networks, LinkLonk's algorithm is transparent. You know how your interactions with it will be interpreted. I hope that this transparency will help build trust in the system and in the sources of information you are connecting to.
Yes, bad actors will try to game any system to gain the attention that they don't deserve. I'm not claiming that LinkLonk is game-proof, but I think it has better feedback loops and incentives than other systems such as popularity based ranking (please don't take it as a challenge).
In that way, you could have curated content. Like if I find someone that has really similar interests to me I could import their weights and see the web via their prioritisation. Similarly, (countering a problem I always have with google search bubbles) I could explain to my friend how to navigate to a site I found via search if they import my weights.
Edit: being able to manually modify my own weights would probably be helpful as well to decay sell outs.
When you want to introduce someone to LinkLonk you could share with them your personal url.
As for decaying sellouts, wouldn't downvoting the content they upvoted do what you want?
By the way, every time someone you are connected to upvotes something, your connection to them becomes slightly weaker. So if you simply ignore recommendations from sources with a lower signal-to-noise ratio (or high volume) - their recommendations will eventually fade away from the "For you" page.
[1]: https://havenweb.org
[1] http://drummer.scripting.com/
I have no idea about "too personal" mean, but the only reason you would consider RSS "outside of the flow" is due to the concerted effort by Google, Twitter, Facebook and Apple to reduce support. Even Mozilla(!) has been involved in removing support.
RSS is a perfectly good, tested and usable mechanism. Coming up with yet another syndication mechanism would be a huge waste of time and effort, most likely resulting in insignificance.
Your intention is noble, but this is still based on network effects and a positive feedback loop. I doubt you can beat the social medias in their own game.
To make it worthwhile for the users before the project reaches that point, I am trying to make LinkLonk a better tool that helps you keep track of the content you liked (kind of a bookmarking service) and helps you follow RSS feeds in (kind of a feed reader).
If you have other ideas of how to make it more useful before we have enough users - let me know.
I have an idea; maybe you can enable people to publish a list of links that are curated by themselves, in the form of a RSS feed. This way your user can have a sense of ownership.
What you are suggesting is similar to another idea I had (https://linklonk.com/item/9146000221282140160): "An option to generate a publicly visible url for any of your collections. This could help you share your collection of liked items with other people. And it could help LinkLonk get new users."
Adding an RSS feed for these publicly accessible collections would be a natural extension.
RSS would be the next step.
Or would you change something else?
I don't know if I can get rid of the bottom part with the buttons since this is where the collection selector is - where you pick what collection the item you like should go to.
The discovery problem should be solved on page and spread that way, to remain decentralised and free from the all the centralised incentives that lead to clickbait. You almost have to punish hosts that appear anywhere centralized lest they get a taste for clickblood.
[1] https://linklonk.com/item/2226616383778586624
I didn't quite get what are the centralized incentives that lead to clickbait. Is it a comment about LinkLonk or centralized systems in general?
Centralization and decentralization have trade-offs. Right now the downvotes on LinkLonk are private. The upvotes are semi-public, but not available in raw form. If you wanted to implement the LinkLonk's algorithm in a decentralized manner then you would need all hosts to make the upvote and downvote data available to all other participants. Maybe homomorphic encryption can solve this problem.
My goal is to build a proof of concept in my spare time and the centralized approach seems to be the right option in my situation.
However — I do wonder about this hypothetical: my blog (for whatever reason) blows up. Would I start to feel pressure to deliver content that starts trending towards "grind culture"? Or would I still be able to blog _for me_? I'm sure this is what some other content creators have faced before, especially in the YouTube community. If anybody has had this experience, I'd be curious to hear what you did.
The grind culture thing comes from people trying to make money off of their blogs. So, don't do it for the money :)
If you get to a point where your hosting provider comes knocking because you're generating too much traffic, you'll have a good inflection point to determine if there's some way to get the blog to pay for its own hosting without you having to change your approach (tip services are cool for this).
I've seen this a few times in very non-technical domains, eg Fishing hardware and ceramic glazing. https://www.alanhawk.com/reviews/reviews.html has frequently had content stolen and republished on seo gamed listicle sites or used verbatim in youtube videos.
The fact is nobody is going to read your blog post about why you are starting a blog, so you are basically just writing it for yourself. Which is fine - but you need to be aware that if you are writing for yourself there is basically a 0% chance your blog will ever get any amount of traffic.
So keep writing for yourself and leave it at that but don't stress about problems you aren't going to have and calling yourself a content creator
The content marketing / grind thing - as far as I can tell, those people are born (decanted?) that way. It's a whole other value system.
If you want to read about barbeque, you need to start with a technical question about barbeque; if you want to read about Greek history, you need a question about that.
Eventually you will find somebody knowledgeable who is writing about that subject. They will in turn link to others, or comment on others, and so forth.
Discussion groups and forums and such are useful.
Or don't trust Facebook to just change the way 'privacy' works
(Never mind the overlays which take up about a third of the viewport height and beg you to login / sign-up - Twitter have started doing this recently)
Discoverability is deliberately hampered by the lack of pagination and reliance on infinite scrolling.
I'm sure they exist, but they are really hard to find.
I have muted and blocked accounts on Twitter as well because of that: people clearly never having touched real data talking about ML projects, recommending libraries to manage lifecycle, etc. All that "audiencing" doesn't suit me, especially when it's clearly BS with no value, not even an entertainment value.
However there is no shortage of useless "app redesign" case studies from complete amateurs. And it's always the same ones too: Starbucks, Netflix, Snapchat, Instagram and Spotify.
How about a public health website? Or a university application system? Or something "boring" that's much more realistic for a case study than a billion dollar corp's app?
I really wonder, is the money from ads good enough that publishing content like this profitable, even with all the blogspam competition?
- what happened to AM radio as FM, satellite, and podcasting came to dominate the American driving experience
- what happened to landline telephone as point-to-point communication became dominated by cellphones, smartphones, and increasingly non-phone-voice-network audio and videoconferencing technologies
I wouldn't be surprised if blogs suffer the same problem in the era of microblogging and centralized microblogging services.
What I witness was that innovation stopped. For instance landlines could have been upgraded to support text messaging (just as they use a modem to send caller ID they could use a modem to send and receive texts.) Cordless phones, answering machines and such could have all gotten better but they didn't.
Most irksome, landlines don't support deliverability features such as STIR/SHAKEN so if you live in a place where cell phones don't work you might have trouble getting people to pick up when you ring them.
That's different from AM radio which, driving across upstate NY, I came to the impression that the only program you could expect to get reliably was the Rush Limbaugh show. If you were lucky around sunset you might catch a black power show from Philadelphia...
The majority of incoming calls on landlines now are people trying to scam the callee. [https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/almost-half-your-phone-ca...]. And the majority of AM radio content now is low-audience long-tail content (or mass-commodified syndicated content, like Rush Limbaugh) that is a medium for pushing low-quality bulk advertising for questionable products.
To expand upon the hypothesis (and this is half-baked and incomplete, so take it with several grains of salt): as technology evolves, people move to more comfortable / more convenient technology. AM is not comfortable or convenient; it's interfered with by too many EM flux sources in the modern world. Landline is not comfortable or convenient for the reasons you noted relative to modern alternatives.
The people who do not move off these technologies are various flavors of captive audiences: people who can't buy FM radios or don't want to adopt new stations / find content in new locations, people who can't use a cellphone, etc. As mainstream content creation leaves these channels, the vacuum is taken over by hucksters trying to take advantage of these captive audiences. The incentives to do so are lack of alternative content and a "softer" target audience (easier to fool, especially since these technologies were once mainstream and trusted so many of their users still believe they are, even after the hucksters have taken them over). I have relatives who still believe "They wouldn't call me if they didn't have business with me; how would they know my number?" And I still have relatives who believe AM news radio is news.
With blogs it used to be about the RSS feed, which had one job: to nudge users when new content is available. But ultimately users (or news aggregators) had control over what the algorithm does.
The problem with blogs as pointed out is content discovery. How can content be discoverable without commercial interests? Social media platforms make content discovery simple and effective. On top of that, the barrier to entry is low—a two or three step on boarding process which is free (as in beer) to-boot.
Anyone know of good content-discovery platforms?
Podcasts are interesting because multiple platforms support them so they exist somewhat in the borderland. Might be an interesting case study being podcast discover ability vs blogs vs social media.
All that being said, I think we simply have to go beyond the first page of search engine results to find the good stuff. Not finding stuff is a form of laziness when we are used to getting a quick info-fix on Wikipedia. But standardized P2P protocols might be nice too—good incentive for a crypto currency?
Blogging just for the sake of blogging is what caused their decline in the first place. If the blogpost can’t be easily understood within first few lines, it’s a wasted opportunity. The a reason Morgan House, Derek Sivers are still relevant.
Hence the proliferation of 'splogs' or Spam-Blogs. Also in terms of social media, most people who experience a viral blogpost that spreads like wildfire throughout the net, invariably try to recreate that past success. It's the sole motivation of clickbait and sensationalist articles. More eyeballs, more AD revenue and also fake Internet Points in general to be had.
[1] http://thinking-about-things.com/
A lot of people rightfully mention that we lack a proper micropayments system for the web and while that’s true, I don’t think it’s the only problem. A lot of people’s careers and companies are built on this parasitic model where they don’t actually provide any tangible value and only profit off leftover scraps, which wouldn’t be sustainable in a completely paid-for model because the end-user doesn’t actually get any value out of it and thus would never willingly pay money for this “service”.
This cracked me up good lol. Btw, another big problem is people writing "blogs" as if they were experts without having expertise e.g. machine learning medium articles making wild unsubstantiated. It's so misleading, especially because ML is already not particularly rigorous due to black box models.
> I've come to dread the internet and social media because so many of is written by grind culture freaks who only write faux-insightful SEO'd content as a way to build an audience to sell snake oil.
It's the nature of the attention economy and ubiquitous ad tech.
What was once a "Ingredients:" .... "Instructions:" ... "Tip: goes well with sour cream", is now a whole story, how the author woke up one day, when the were 7, and noticed they peed their bed, and then their mother came to check on them, and started cleaning the pee, and the dog was barking, and the dog also pooped that day, and there was wheel of fortune on tv, and a friend came over for a lunch, but they ordered pizza for lunch, and then there was a rerun of mission impossible on tv, and then daddy had a beer or five, and mommy made sandwiches, and those sanwiches remind the author of this chicken tikka masala recipe, that was converted to a non-spicy vegan variant.
The author already wrote about blogs that are trying to get views with various tactics vs old proper blogs that were just people rambling about their quirky interests or bad day.
SEO content farming is really destroying the web.
Also, SEO trickery completely drowned the honest blogger, not to mention rampant plagiarism from the same SEO farms.
Well it makes it impossible to find any good information about a topic.
I wonder if stackoverflow would be as popular if there weren't 101 content farm articles for every subject you want to search for.