6. Entities on the internet either copy your work and claim credit, harass you because of your opinions, or use your works against you(mining, social engineering, marketing).
2. Money happened pretty much. First people started monetising their blogs, then they turned into books, which turned into multiple books and youtube channels and then it was no longer a blog and more of a company.
and additionally:
6. The younger generation is used to having their actual face plastered all over the internet and thus feel more natural making videos with their own face and voice.
--
I, and I think a good part of the HN crowd, are in the generation where we had actual friends we only knew by their handle/nickname and never saw their face unless there was a meetup of some sort and we actually went there.
For me, using my own face, or even name, to present any sort of content just feels wrong in a visceral way.
People didn't have much interesting to say before, but they didn't have much else to do. Now with #3, other platforms, they spend a lot of time on those other places writing short quips all day.
There is no way to know what people will find interesting. There is a healthy gap between someones content being absolutely not worth reading and being professional. I think more people should have hobbies and they should write about their experiences even without it necessarily being interesting. I also don't think it needs to be about making money. Once you start trying to get paid for your hobbies it becomes work and not fun.
With an online blog rather than an offline journal you can easily share it with friends. I think the main difference here between TikTok and other huge social media is that less is more. I don't see much point in a million anonymous strangers looking at my posts. I don't think there is anything "natural" about these huge social media platforms. This kind of socialization feels very unnatural to me. Mostly do to the parasocial relationships that occur from the million people to one person style interactions.
I started blogging [1] in 2012 as a kind-of documentation of my work and thought processes (especially with raspberry pi projects) because when after a year on not working with a specific technology I forgot many aspects or challenges I had to overcome and I was sick of re-googling fixes for problems I have already fixed in the past.
Blogging has been a blessing for me and I have hit the top of hacker news a few times and even though I don't monitize my blog in any way (not even affiliate links) I still feel good about other people learning things from my projects or mistakes.
I started a random blog of my own for no particular reason recently. Even if nobody reads it I think I enjoy the whole 90s internet vibe of people having individual personal websites. Everyone being on Twitter, Facebook, Mastodon or wherever has no personality to it.
When LiveJournal first launched my friends and I all got one. We treated it as a sanitized for public consumption diary, and we all posted regularly. It was really neat and really fun. I miss when the internet was more care free.
I like writing blog posts about things which interest me, have no comments, and no ads. I post links to it on Mastodon, where I have exactly zero followers. Nothing wrong with just putting it out there.
I did that for awhile, almost as a notepad - I still get a few comments here and there randomly because someone finds just what they wanted in a search.
I also started a random blog out of no where recently. I had been thinking about for a while because I post random thoughts all over the Internet and felt like I should have a place where they are collected.
Also started a few tech hobbies and actually putting stuff out into the world is how the hobby grows. I've benefited from the writings and videos of others and wanted to pay that forward.
Great read. I think the shift in internet culture towards everyone being an “expert” in their domain as opposed to sharing their experience (or sharing “vibes” if you will) has been very toxic.
One example: was talking to my cousin the other day, there was a YouTube feature she misses called video replies. Around the 2010s, that feature was used in hair and makeup communities to share videos purely about an experience or journey. So you wouldn’t necessarily be reviewing a product for general purpose, just saying “this is how I used this thing and how it worked for me.”
Now? It is so (potentially) lucrative to be an influencer making normative statements that not doing so seems pointless, even looked down upon as possibly spreading misinformation. Something critical has been lost.
And now we have "reaction videos" where a more famous internet celebrity with millions of followers watches random funny videos and gets paid for it - while the actual creators don't get anything.
But it is well known that these "reaction videos" are largely fake, and the creators are operating an advanced ad revenue scam, and somehow producing fake views on YouTube and not getting caught (or at least, YouTube is not publicly speaking about this, and most likely knows internally).
Either YouTube is going to ban them and try to claw back literally years of money from them, or this is going to explode in the news in the next 2-3 years and Google is going to have to explain to their largest advertisers where their money went.
There's some really interesting Youtube drama going on where a literal multimillionaire Twitch streamer/Youtuber doxxed another Youtuber by streaming their actual home while standing on their front yard.
Something that's extremely illegal by Californian law.
But the offending internet-celebrity has a habit of not being affected by any kind of lawsuits because they bring in millions of viewers (34M viewers on Youtube) and are too good for business to actually kick off the platform.
My blog is for the purpose of just having a blog. I love to write medium-long stuff there.
I’ll go from life updates to some technical thing I learned or am learning. I have various topics like keyboards, photography, typography, and other interests that I will write 2 or 3 posts about and then move onto a different topic.
I find it impressive that people can have just one topic to write about but I can’t stick to one.
I also don’t have a lot of readers. Anything between 100-200 unique visitors a month, nothing to monetize off of.
Actually, posts on HN routinely lead me to several fantastic blogs! So yes, there are people writing interesting stuff in a blog as opposed to byte-sized nibbles on social media, and I enjoy them.
The blogging-SEO connection is also so unnatural to the way capital thinks, yet it's developed because it works.
I mean, tell a Realtor that nobody gives a f2k about a Realtor in their town and you'll never get a link to a plain ordinary web site and that they should blog if they want attention and the vast majority of them will think you're insane. Except for the Realtor who runs a blog about your town and ranks #1.
If the author is not trying to make money, but rather “write creatively and have fun,” then why consult startpage.com or other online lists? Those are written for people who want to make money.
If you want to blog for the hell of it, then just do it. Write about whatever you want. Baldur’s Gate, whatever. I have a two-post blog about some esoteric math I thought was cool. Very few people care and that’s fine.
I've blogged on and off for many years. Personal, work, and in between. Maybe it's just me, but I find blogs have a lifespan. There's a period wherein they provide fulfillment as well as value, followed by a period where one or both of those tends to slip away. When both have left, it's time to stop.
Right now my only blog is for my freelance consulting biz (blueferret.consulting). I've debated a Substack for a different project as well...something of a philosophy discussion, wherein I'd clarify a set of ideas out in public. Because I can, and because I think others would enjoy seeing it too.
To answer the headline, nothing happened to it. Writing about stuff for writings sake and just to get it out of your head into some form is still very much a thing. That said, it is possible to make (varying amounts) of money writing a blog, and so it attracted a huge number of people who wanted to do that, and as a ready market various "corpo" types sprung up to "feed their dreams" for a small fee. And this is where the disaster happens.
When companies that index the web make 99.9% of their money selling ads on that index, and the index is a place where wannabes ask the question "how do I make money on a blog" ask that question, you gets something not unlike unconstrained algae growth in a badly maintained aquarium of things "popping out of the woodwork" to fill that demand. As a result, if you used that to measure "What happened" you would easily come to the conclusion that nobody does this any more, after all wouldn't it be great to have a reliable way to "collect" the blogs of interest and be notified that they had said something new?
Yeah, that would be a really cool thing but apparently the corpo types could not figure out any way to make money on that and so decided to cancel that part of their offering.
Aren't there places away from the conventional protocols where people still blog and the world is innocent?
I'm serious. I came across some of these communities nearly a year ago while reading about solar powered servers. And after I forgot how I found them, I've thought of them about once a month and wondered what the hell is wrong with me for forgetting.
They were incredibly neat and niche spaces, full of very idiosyncratic websites and things that had no commercial point. It was fantastic.
They exist and they're hard to find - but if you find one, you often find a few, and you can follow the chain as far down the rabbit hole as you want.
Of course you have the interesting side effect that you only get linked to them now and then, and often it's almost "invite only" for something that's entirely public.
> To answer the headline, nothing happened to it. Writing about stuff for writings sake and just to get it out of your head into some form is still very much a thing.
What happened was directing people to websites put up for free with all the information they need doesn't make Google any money, as compared to a bloated POS on SquareSpace that downloads 80 MB of JavaScript to checks notes... render fucking text alongside a few dozen AdSense slots, or, perhaps more commonly, a Facebook group that has six hundred people asking the same questions in a format that doesn't allow going back to actually find the goddamn answers, which also shows ads.
The wide, weird internet still exists, but none of our corporate overlords make shit on it so it gets zero attention in the mainstream.
> after all wouldn't it be great to have a reliable way to "collect" the blogs of interest and be notified that they had said something new? Yeah, that would be a really cool thing...
> but apparently the corpo types could not figure out any way to make money on that [other than ways that cut into their ads] and so decided to cancel that part of their offering.
All we have to do is pay for it (and so I ask everyone to):
Wait I thought reddit prohibits using personal API on third party client, that's one of main complain of the protest. Otherwise 3PA will still be running around just with asking each user for their API keys. Of course there are ways to circumvent that (cough, revanced, cough) but of course it's not official and your api key may suddenly be blocked.
I remember when the blogging world became "obsessed with this corpo nonsense", and it was a very strange experience. Blogs had been a kind of distributed social media, global conversation among creative weirdos, but eventually some tipping point of public awareness happened and seemingly overnight people just would not shut up about the idea of making money writing a blog, making a living as a blogger, which made about as much sense to me as the idea of going into business as a dinner-party guest, or a book club participant. But they were persistent, they were noisy, there were eventually more of them than there were of us, and... well. That was a long time ago now, and I wouldn't even know where to start looking for interesting blogs of the old style, if they still exist.
"token white person as a service" is a thing in China. It's apparently a very big deal in business circles that you have SOMEONE non-Asian in your party.
As a white person who has spent some time in China. It definitely is a thing. I have not been paid (also not interested), but have definitely been invited places for no reason other than to add a foreigner.
One time I ended up at a lunch with some manager people from the local tv station. One of my friends was trying to sell him some tea and he asked that I attend his lunch event as a favor. It was interesting.
Another example more recently - I wanted to visit a tea factory and while I was there they asked if I could put on a uniform and pose for some photos for them.
How would it not be? "I refuse cookies" is not a protected class, thus a private business may discriminate it at will. Same way a business could refuse to admit patrons not wearing shoes or carrying a firearm.
European courts have jurisdiction in the EU, and CNBC is accessible in the EU unlike some other US websites, so they have to follow GDPR at least for EU visitors. And as far as I know cookie rejection must not influence the basic functionality of the site.
GDPR does not regulate cookies, it regulates usage of PII (personally identifiable information). So blocking cookies on principle is not against it, but collecting PII without consent is. Forcing the user into accepting, such as saying "click accept or pay" also is.
I'm not an expert on the GDPR (and I'm frankly sick of hearing about it) but surely what it bans is tracking cookies, and not cookies necessary for the proper function of the website?
Exactly, it regulates collection of PII, which includes most tracking cookies.
It doesn't really regulate "refusing service due to disabling of browser features", but then again it's a complex law, so someone (even a court) might argue otherwise, but it's doubtful.
"Moxley said they were told they were working for a U.S. company based in California, a story that later turned out to be untrue. It was really just a ruse to impress the workers and the entire community — they even had the mayor at the opening — that they were some fancypants American company.
Moxley said being a fake executive has become a lucrative source of income for expats living in China. Though, sorry ladies, this is China after all — they’re only hiring men.
Moxley said he knows a half dozen men who’ve done this type of work, and since he wrote an article about his experience in The Atlantic magazine, dozens more have written to him sharing their experiences. He was recruited by a friend of a friend — a headhunter for white guys in suits, if you will — but said sometimes you can also find ads in the local classifieds for this type of work."
I recently finished reading Chesterton's "The Club of Queer Trades", and one of the jobs in there was a paid dinner guest who even set up the conversation so the client could make witty remarks.
isn't that just the internet (and in many ways our societies) in a nutshell?
All the people today saying the internet and content wouldnt survive without advertising and payments and some of us remember that actually the internet and content came first, then the corporations and profit seekers arrived. everyone was originally just excited to get their stuff out there and talk to other people who were passionate and knowledgeable about their stuff as well. then the corps, advertisers, seos came.
sharers -> profit seekers
remember when uber was supposed to be about being able to car share on your way to and from work and cut down on car use?
sharers -> profit seekers
remember when airbnb was about being able to share your home with someone else while you were away at someone else's so you wouldn't have to pay for hotels?
sharers -> profit seekers
remember when hackers were people who set up share drives in university halls with free music and movies, fighting for open access to books and software and info and publications? now we have saas, Steve jobs bios and hacker news is run by a startup venture capitalist firm...
i wonder what the next thing they can destroy will be...
i guess if the pattern repeats look for anything anywhere people are sharing or doing something of value amongst each other for free. they will climb on board try to expand the audience and swamp out the signal of the original community and change the narrative to entrepreneurship and making money from this was always the point, then they will lock it down with network effects and strap on parasitic payments or revenue streams, then they will optimise until they destroy the original with universal enshitification.
There is nothing stopping you from making and sharing the old style of internet stuff right now. There's never been anything stopping people from just continue to make 90s style web sites or 2000s style blogs. Many people still do.
But you can't demand to have an audience if you do that. Likewise, you as a hacker can not demand that people produce more of that style of content for your convenience.
There is no limit to the real estate of cyber space, so there is no reason to complain about the stuff online that you personally don't fancy. That stuff is not taking away any space from the stuff that you do fancy.
Let's say there's a nice old family restaurant on the corner, that you've always visited every weekend. Then a huge shopping mall opens down the street, with unappetizing fast food and non-durable consumer crap. So then you go and walk around inside that mall every day and complain how bad it is, instead of just continue to go to the nice restaurant on the corner, that still is there. Does that make sense?
Content marketing ruined blogging, just like SEO ruined search.
I used to work with a lot of content marketers when it started to get hot. SEO was doing particularly poorly for a period (Google used to resist seo rather than reward it) and people realized that if you started writing "authentic" content, then people would organically link to it and it would increase your ranking.
Then social media furthered this problem by people mindlessly sharing content they never read but just looked engaging.
Marketing robots where just churning out content on blogs because eventually you would just hit search engine gold by nail the correct topic for some long tail search term. In my own domain, the atrocious "Towards Data Science" is a great example of this (except their "brilliant" innovation was to replace marketing robots with people eager to pad their resume). The content is largely garbage, but it looks about right and is easily shareable.
Today, whether you like it or not, if you want to make people to see your blog at all you have to think at least a bit like a content marketer to get seen at all. Consider Jay Alammar's fantastic blog [0], which is very high quality content, but still requires a tremendous amount of polish and marketing to survive. All of this has made it impossible to create the network required for a "global conversation among creative weirdos". Real content does get made, but has to be produced with the effort of a real marketer.
Before I toned it down, my blog post about SSR rendering was called "SSR sucks and you (probably) shouldn't use it", tons of views.
Boring "History of " posts, meh.
But it also depends who I am writing for. Ideally if I am writing for myself, I shouldn't care about the views, right?
Counter argument to that is I am writing for people who may want to read it, and with all the noise out there, if I don't try and elevate my posts to some extent, the people who want to read them may not be able to find them.
You basically don’t exist unless you hustle like crazy as if you want to be a famous influencer. Like, imagine your goal is just to get people to read your work and get some feedback: good luck with that unless you’re first willing to invest a year into growing an audience from scratch. The seo and content marketing spam has buried almost all organic content and google seems to reward it instead of blacklisting those sites
I think something similar happened to forums: they stopped showing up in search results over time, and gradually died from there
I would add also that after the 2008 crisis, the precariat grew, and some bloggers found themselves in it. Once your living standard is precarious, it is a lot harder to resist the temptation to include affiliate links and get at least some material reward out of your blogging, even if you don't turn it into a full-fledged business. The shift in the culture was due to a little quiet desperation, too, not just greed.
> “ people just would not shut up about the idea of making money writing a blog, making a living as a blogger, which made about as much sense to me as the idea of going into business as a dinner-party guest, or a book club participant.”
At the same time blogging was on the rise and "making it as a blogger" was a thing, the print media was getting absolutely torched by downsizing, layoffs, forced retirements, and private equity buyouts.
So there was probably some vain hope that independent blogging could be a sustainable revenue stream for the reporter class. Alas, it has not.
There’s a lot of things we can complain about but the destruction of the blogosphere had a very specific individual cause. The death of Google Reader.
Google Reader came onto the scene and essentially destroyed all incumbents. Even if you used an independent client, the syncing was almost certainly based on your Google Reader account.
And Google Reader also provided a social discovery component which no one even tried competing with because how could you.
The sudden death of Google Reader was followed by a glut of rushed alternatives, which meant no specific alternative could get sufficient acceptance.
There were a lot of things that hurt the blogosphere but most of them would either have naturally withered away (for instance, the commercial crowd would almost certainly have migrated to social media), or could have been figured out (spam blogs could have easily been beaten if the likes of Google were interested).
The death of Google Reader, which also happened to coincide with the rise of social media (not a coincidence since Google Reader was killed in order to promote Google’s social media offering), was something the blogosphere could not recover from.
Honestly it doesn’t strike me as too different from a paid dungeon master. I guess the horror is when it goes from explicitly compensation to some sort of product placement.
> I wouldn't even know where to start looking for interesting blogs of the old style, if they still exist.
If you're looking for any sources, not necessarily massive volumes, Gemini and Gopher still host written content produced without any hope for monetary gain. gemini://medusae.space/index.gmi is a good starting point.
He wants to put his bachelor's degree to use that he paid X amount of money for. He has the same blogging-as-a-job mindset.
Why is (for example) Raymond Chen's blog interesting? Because he has a real job that gives him stories to blog about and occasionally vent his frustration, and the result is entertaining but real, useful information. He doesn't spend time pondering what to write about next.
You don't need a degree in creative writing to blog. You need a real job or hobby to have something to blog about. I don't care about some rando's opinion on some video game, whether he writes like Shakespeare or not.
Hi Mike! It’s cool if you didn’t enjoy my post, but there are some rather strange assumptions about me in here just because I happen to enjoy computer games, and was at a bit of a loss as to what I wanted to write about that day. I have a full-time job that I think is pretty cool (I’m a librarian) but I prefer to keep my work life at work, and my internet life on the internet. Never the twain shall meet. I am also a she who has many other hobbies. :) I know there’s a bit of a stereotype that anyone who likes computer games must be a male NEET living in their mom’s basement, but it’s pretty inaccurate to reality!
Indeed. Searching for phrases like that are exactly why he got some many not-just-for-the-hell-of-it hits. The people who are most in need of ideas about what to blog about are those that are doing it just because they heard their company's site needs a blog. So those are the kind of answers most people searching for "blog post ideas" are looking for. People who are blogging just for the hell of it don't typically need to search for ideas, since they just post about whatever they want.
This is a fair point! My search became a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts…I had been hoping to find some cool blogging challenges or prompts on some small community, but of course it’s only the SEO optimized stuff coming up in the search, and that SEO optimized stuff will tell you to blog like they do. Lessons learned!
I do blog about whatever thing I'm working on. I know that what gets hits are the tutorials... but I also like to thought dump but I give any readers a warning ahead of time.
Somewhat unfortunately I have been lazy/writing under some platform, which it does mean having an audience.
Short form video happened. I reach more people for non-commercial posts about software development that way. There are a few topics that are hard to cover that way, but very few that can't be shortened to fit. Like tweets were, it's a discipline.
I suppose most people want to monetize everything. Articles about how you can monetize writing articles, so you write these articles about how you would monetize and the cycle never ends and the web because harder to navigate.
Now you need a clever app that filters through the BS.
Nobody here has mentioned the real reason public blogging has died off, which is that with the modern public Internet, the risk of being attacked - doxxing, harassment, or simply the grind of moderating comments - has completely eliminated any desire any normal person would have to interface publicly (or anything more than pseudonymously) with the world apart from a profit motive.
I turned off comments a long time ago because the effort required to get a signal-to-noise ratio I liked was more than the value I got from the good comments. I'm glad I did it. If you want to comment on a blog post, drop me an email.
I have a few websites dedicated to some old microcomputers. They are niche and very few people care. I work on them in bursts and then they sit there for years before the next bout of updates. It is often an excuse to take advantage of the latest CSS or whatever.
Anyway, many years ago I added a message board to most of them so passersby could share their recollections and nostalgia. At first it was a PITA to keep out the spam. But message boards are so passe that not only is it rare to get a new comment, but it is rare to get spam too.
Good old "security through not being a big enough target to make it worth the time to write an exploit". The rtl-sdr.com blog uses this sort of captcha.
Unfortunately I suspect someone will break this whole category of captcha soon enough by throwing an LLM at it.
LLM cracks into your blog: "interesting blog post today about the 8088, thank you! that 8/16 architecture, with some 32 bit ops and, through segmentation, a 20 bit address space really expanded the possibilities for this chip. These PoTeNcY pIlLs will expand your possiblities even more!"
I to some extent agree. A blog can be an attack surface for someone wishing to doxx you, a point of failure for potential employers, or perhaps an opportunity to open yourself up to criticism for the local equivalent of your knitting community when they're having a purity spiral.
You could, of course, keep to the driest topics, the most tamed opinions, nothing spicier than an animal cracker, but for some this self-censorship of "your most honest, primitive, real thoughts" (to quote Naked Lunch) is tantamount to a sin, just one step up from lying to your diary.
If you are trying to keep it safe, are you truly communicating what is on your mind, or are you pasteurizing your output, homogenizing it, adding a touch of gamma radiation and a run through the freeze-drier, until the final result is palatable pablum, certainly inoffensive and low-residue, but ultimately unworth either consumption or production?
Blogging seems to have shifted on the risk/reward scale and people have responded as such. A pity.
I think this is it. Of course you could blog anonymously? Though it kind of defeats half the purpose and feels like shouting into the void. At that point, it's easier to just be another random user on hn and reddit.
I think this has contributed to my life-long mental health problems, as I've purposely separated myself into 2 personas. To paraphrase Agent Smith...
Jelly 1 has a job and a mortgage and a Facebook, is made of matter and occupies space, and is openly lesbian, and isn't shy to talk a little about politics or her old schizophrenia diagnosis.
Jelly 2 exists only on the dark web, never grew out of enjoying hentai, delights in posting political hot takes like "gasoline should cost more, actually", lies about absolutely everything to shake off doxxers, and doesn't even use the same username on any 2 forums.
Both Jellies are miserable most of the time, since they take turns hiding the other one from one social circle or another. Jelly 2 can never hold a job. Jelly 1 isn't convinced that there's enough stuff in the real world to kill off Jelly 2 and live alone.
It's still good to lie about everything to keep stalkers off your trail. Furthermore, it contributes to the erosion of trust that everything online is literally true. People have gotten complacent in that regard.
I have set up anonymous websites before, long ago, over a trivial bit of local politics that might almost be described as minutae. I have no idea how difficult it would be now.
The reasons for blogging are varied. Part of me would like to post the odd bit of how-to on an obscure technical topic, that kind of thing. And then there's writing reviews. No expectation is had of reward, but that does not preclude the kind of risk I run if some gibbering nutjob decides I am a fascist or someone else dehumanizable because the Devil's Advocate in me might want to point out that this person was not given a fair shake in this instance, or that something else is a bigger deal than we are making it, and so on.
Of course, I would like to know that there is someone who is catching my signal besides Grim Entropy and the Inverse Square Falloffs, but then you're back to moderating comments which are largely linkback blogspam.
Another poster once mentions that there's an eerie comfort in the thought that even if no one ever reads their blog, it's probably still crawled and ingested by various LLMs. Even when you're dead, your ideas may still live on in AIs of the future.
> You could, of course, keep to the driest topics, the most tamed opinions, nothing spicier than an animal cracker, but for some this self-censorship of "your most honest, primitive, real thoughts" (to quote Naked Lunch) is tantamount to a sin, just one step up from lying to your diary.
Um, I guess. It seems to me like most of the "controversial" stuff that people get attacked for is just lame vomit about current-events political junk. No one needs yet another clueless nobody ejecting that crap on the Internet. Go write about something interesting, like old computers, or music, or I don't know, your favorite species of grass. You'll be contributing something of value, instead of more mindless current-events garbage, and you won't get attacked for it. Win-win.
One would think, but again, the bar is now very, very low. Like I said, a purity spiral on a knitting forum.
I used to be on a once-popular forum which has slowly skewed to the left, and then farther, and farther. Now everything there is politicized because the Red Guard types remaining are on the continual hunt for anything at which they might take offense. These are people who go wild for the opportunity to talk about the racist origins of steampunk.
Sure, but that's about a community drifting to topics you're not interested in, not about your being attacked for maintaining a personal blog about a hobby. I'm not saying it can't or never has happened, but I'm skeptical that this problem is widespread enough that it should deter anyone from writing about their interests (again, provided their interests are something other than current-events trash).
Yeah. I'm saying if you're digging a hole for no reason and going "man it's a lot of work digging this hole and there's no reward at the end," then you should stop digging the hole and go do something else. Writing about current-events political junk is a waste of your time. If you're not finding it fun then do something else with your life. There's a whole universe of interesting stuff!
I'm not sure this is it. Twitter and Mastodon has loads of people who turned some details that would previously been considered intimate or controversial -- transness, sexual preference, polyamory, stance on American partisan politics or Israel vs. Palestine, etc. -- into a major part of their online persona, and are posting either under their own names or pseudonyms that aren't impossible to discover, but without a profit motive.
Only when those details/stances are obviously protected, IME. Consciously or unconsciously, they may be concluding that being visibly a member of a protected class makes you safer from being fired than not being so.
Akismet is great. It's baked into every WordPress blog (but needs to be activated separately) so it's widely adopted. You can also use it via their REST API. It's not limited to WordPress.
I'm not convinced normal people have ever interfaced publicly with the world via the Internet in a way apart from a profit motive, actually. Most of what you read on the Internet is written by insane people [1].
For me it is partially that for sure. There's plenty of stuff I would - in theory - not mind to post publicly. E.g. my personal notes about interesting stuff I stumble on, want to read up on, how to troubleshoot stuff etc. But the issue is a) I don't feel like investing the time to individually post only subsets and b) posting all of it makes me feel way too vulnerable. At a quick glance suddenly everyone would just know all my interests, my expertise and lack thereof in areas and so on. Just not worth it in the current internet and societal discourse.
In the early 2000s there was a ton of bloggers publishing under their real name, what fear would they have for doxxing? Comments can be turned off, or set to only appear after admin approval.
These people now mostly publish stuff under their own profile on Facebook, because that's where the audience is. Soon to be was.
I blog just for the hell of it. No client side trackers, no ads, just the spew of thoughts I need to get out of my head by vocalizing them. It costs me money every month and brings in no revenue and I fucking love it.
bruh, that loads WAY too fast. you gotta slow that role, have a splash, prompt for signing up for newsletter, display some ads, prompt to disable ad blocker, etc etc.
I'll stick with my throwback to what websites used to be like when they were simple, quick to load and asked visitors only for their attention and not much else ;)
> Utilized Low Code Tools at Client’s Request for the Web Front End Work
Oof!
Nice to find someone else who recognises explicitly that management is in no way a natural career progression path, it may have been decades ago, but in the current market we often see seniority / value confused with team management when the two need have little relation.
I'm not sure about commentors being able to preserve the spirit. I'll be charitable and not name the blog, but I still RSS-follow one blog that is one of the oldest, most respectable, and once most-read in its subject area. It still gets comments regularly, but always by the same handful of people who are 1) obviously on the autistic spectrum, and 2) all getting on in years, because younger generations no longer follow blogs. The effect is sad, it makes the blogging feel even more declassé. In fact, its image would only improve by the owner turning off comments entirely and perhaps moving to a static site generator.
I have been blogging since 2004. I have four blogs that I currently write to regularly. Many others are more like archives. Three of the active blogs are public and two of them are similar, about dancing, but in different languages, one IT related.
The private blogs have been the most useful for my thinking. The active private blog has no readers at the moment.
I kind of miss the period from 2004 to perhaps 2009 when there was a community around blogging. But even then I was intentionally very marginal. I have never tried to attract readers, more the opposite.
There may be benefits from writing, such as publicity. But I dom’t think that is necessary a very useful motivation on the long term.
It seems to me that the only reasonable reason for writing is that you have this internal urge to write, to understand whst you think. You will know what you want to write. It does not matter if people do not read it, because you are writing for yourself.
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[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 203 ms ] thread2. People who do have interesting things to say deserve to get paid for their work.
3. Other platforms (e.g. TikTok) provide a more natural medium for interaction and response.
4. If you're just aiming to write, there's always journals. I journal and I find it very satisfying.
5. Obviously, people still blog, even if the scene is dominated by capital's obsession with SEO.
2. Money happened pretty much. First people started monetising their blogs, then they turned into books, which turned into multiple books and youtube channels and then it was no longer a blog and more of a company.
and additionally:
6. The younger generation is used to having their actual face plastered all over the internet and thus feel more natural making videos with their own face and voice.
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I, and I think a good part of the HN crowd, are in the generation where we had actual friends we only knew by their handle/nickname and never saw their face unless there was a meetup of some sort and we actually went there.
For me, using my own face, or even name, to present any sort of content just feels wrong in a visceral way.
People didn't have much interesting to say before, but they didn't have much else to do. Now with #3, other platforms, they spend a lot of time on those other places writing short quips all day.
With an online blog rather than an offline journal you can easily share it with friends. I think the main difference here between TikTok and other huge social media is that less is more. I don't see much point in a million anonymous strangers looking at my posts. I don't think there is anything "natural" about these huge social media platforms. This kind of socialization feels very unnatural to me. Mostly do to the parasocial relationships that occur from the million people to one person style interactions.
I couldn't disagree more. People are /fascinating/.
There's definitely a skill in figuring out what you can say that's most likely to interest other people, but that's a learnable skill.
One of the skills of a great communicator is being able to help pull the interesting stuff out of people.
I started blogging [1] in 2012 as a kind-of documentation of my work and thought processes (especially with raspberry pi projects) because when after a year on not working with a specific technology I forgot many aspects or challenges I had to overcome and I was sick of re-googling fixes for problems I have already fixed in the past.
Blogging has been a blessing for me and I have hit the top of hacker news a few times and even though I don't monitize my blog in any way (not even affiliate links) I still feel good about other people learning things from my projects or mistakes.
For me this is the truest form of blogging
[1] https://blog.haschek.at
Also started a few tech hobbies and actually putting stuff out into the world is how the hobby grows. I've benefited from the writings and videos of others and wanted to pay that forward.
One example: was talking to my cousin the other day, there was a YouTube feature she misses called video replies. Around the 2010s, that feature was used in hair and makeup communities to share videos purely about an experience or journey. So you wouldn’t necessarily be reviewing a product for general purpose, just saying “this is how I used this thing and how it worked for me.”
Now? It is so (potentially) lucrative to be an influencer making normative statements that not doing so seems pointless, even looked down upon as possibly spreading misinformation. Something critical has been lost.
Either YouTube is going to ban them and try to claw back literally years of money from them, or this is going to explode in the news in the next 2-3 years and Google is going to have to explain to their largest advertisers where their money went.
There's some really interesting Youtube drama going on where a literal multimillionaire Twitch streamer/Youtuber doxxed another Youtuber by streaming their actual home while standing on their front yard.
Something that's extremely illegal by Californian law.
But the offending internet-celebrity has a habit of not being affected by any kind of lawsuits because they bring in millions of viewers (34M viewers on Youtube) and are too good for business to actually kick off the platform.
I’ll go from life updates to some technical thing I learned or am learning. I have various topics like keyboards, photography, typography, and other interests that I will write 2 or 3 posts about and then move onto a different topic.
I find it impressive that people can have just one topic to write about but I can’t stick to one.
I also don’t have a lot of readers. Anything between 100-200 unique visitors a month, nothing to monetize off of.
Thanks for these recommendations. :)
I mean, tell a Realtor that nobody gives a f2k about a Realtor in their town and you'll never get a link to a plain ordinary web site and that they should blog if they want attention and the vast majority of them will think you're insane. Except for the Realtor who runs a blog about your town and ranks #1.
If you want to blog for the hell of it, then just do it. Write about whatever you want. Baldur’s Gate, whatever. I have a two-post blog about some esoteric math I thought was cool. Very few people care and that’s fine.
Right now my only blog is for my freelance consulting biz (blueferret.consulting). I've debated a Substack for a different project as well...something of a philosophy discussion, wherein I'd clarify a set of ideas out in public. Because I can, and because I think others would enjoy seeing it too.
When companies that index the web make 99.9% of their money selling ads on that index, and the index is a place where wannabes ask the question "how do I make money on a blog" ask that question, you gets something not unlike unconstrained algae growth in a badly maintained aquarium of things "popping out of the woodwork" to fill that demand. As a result, if you used that to measure "What happened" you would easily come to the conclusion that nobody does this any more, after all wouldn't it be great to have a reliable way to "collect" the blogs of interest and be notified that they had said something new?
Yeah, that would be a really cool thing but apparently the corpo types could not figure out any way to make money on that and so decided to cancel that part of their offering.
Yes, I'm still mad about it :-)
I'm serious. I came across some of these communities nearly a year ago while reading about solar powered servers. And after I forgot how I found them, I've thought of them about once a month and wondered what the hell is wrong with me for forgetting.
They were incredibly neat and niche spaces, full of very idiosyncratic websites and things that had no commercial point. It was fantastic.
Of course you have the interesting side effect that you only get linked to them now and then, and often it's almost "invite only" for something that's entirely public.
What happened was directing people to websites put up for free with all the information they need doesn't make Google any money, as compared to a bloated POS on SquareSpace that downloads 80 MB of JavaScript to checks notes... render fucking text alongside a few dozen AdSense slots, or, perhaps more commonly, a Facebook group that has six hundred people asking the same questions in a format that doesn't allow going back to actually find the goddamn answers, which also shows ads.
The wide, weird internet still exists, but none of our corporate overlords make shit on it so it gets zero attention in the mainstream.
See:
https://blog.kagi.com/small-web
> but apparently the corpo types could not figure out any way to make money on that [other than ways that cut into their ads] and so decided to cancel that part of their offering.
All we have to do is pay for it (and so I ask everyone to):
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/plan-types.html
This is my take with Social Media now as well, and cloud hosted LLMs.
I pay my own OpenAI API usage fee, which is less than the $20 for their official program.
I plan to pay Reddit via their API to use an open source client as well so I can consume the content (ad free) in the way I prefer.
I lol'd and now would like to see these work somehow
"Uber for dinner guests" if your social circle isn't sufficiently cool and there are people you are inviting you want to impress.
I have to ask, what were your primary incentives and what did you hope to get our of it?
Helping a close friend? Bored? Finding a SO? Networking? All/None of the above?
Another example more recently - I wanted to visit a tea factory and while I was there they asked if I could put on a uniform and pose for some photos for them.
How is this legal?
You mean like this? https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59909647
[0] “Consent should not be regarded as freely given if the data subject has no genuine or free choice or is unable to refuse or withdraw consent without detriment.” – Example: https://noyb.eu/en/pay-or-okay-beginning-end#:~:text=No%20%2....
I am in the EU
It doesn't really regulate "refusing service due to disabling of browser features", but then again it's a complex law, so someone (even a court) might argue otherwise, but it's doubtful.
"Moxley said they were told they were working for a U.S. company based in California, a story that later turned out to be untrue. It was really just a ruse to impress the workers and the entire community — they even had the mayor at the opening — that they were some fancypants American company.
Moxley said being a fake executive has become a lucrative source of income for expats living in China. Though, sorry ladies, this is China after all — they’re only hiring men.
Moxley said he knows a half dozen men who’ve done this type of work, and since he wrote an article about his experience in The Atlantic magazine, dozens more have written to him sharing their experiences. He was recruited by a friend of a friend — a headhunter for white guys in suits, if you will — but said sometimes you can also find ads in the local classifieds for this type of work."
(fascinating book, Naples 44)
Just like blogging, it relies on already having an audience and an air of being an authority on something.
All the people today saying the internet and content wouldnt survive without advertising and payments and some of us remember that actually the internet and content came first, then the corporations and profit seekers arrived. everyone was originally just excited to get their stuff out there and talk to other people who were passionate and knowledgeable about their stuff as well. then the corps, advertisers, seos came.
sharers -> profit seekers
remember when uber was supposed to be about being able to car share on your way to and from work and cut down on car use?
sharers -> profit seekers
remember when airbnb was about being able to share your home with someone else while you were away at someone else's so you wouldn't have to pay for hotels?
sharers -> profit seekers
remember when hackers were people who set up share drives in university halls with free music and movies, fighting for open access to books and software and info and publications? now we have saas, Steve jobs bios and hacker news is run by a startup venture capitalist firm...
i wonder what the next thing they can destroy will be...
i guess if the pattern repeats look for anything anywhere people are sharing or doing something of value amongst each other for free. they will climb on board try to expand the audience and swamp out the signal of the original community and change the narrative to entrepreneurship and making money from this was always the point, then they will lock it down with network effects and strap on parasitic payments or revenue streams, then they will optimise until they destroy the original with universal enshitification.
thinking emoji
That’s literally capitalism
But you can't demand to have an audience if you do that. Likewise, you as a hacker can not demand that people produce more of that style of content for your convenience.
There is no limit to the real estate of cyber space, so there is no reason to complain about the stuff online that you personally don't fancy. That stuff is not taking away any space from the stuff that you do fancy.
Let's say there's a nice old family restaurant on the corner, that you've always visited every weekend. Then a huge shopping mall opens down the street, with unappetizing fast food and non-durable consumer crap. So then you go and walk around inside that mall every day and complain how bad it is, instead of just continue to go to the nice restaurant on the corner, that still is there. Does that make sense?
I used to work with a lot of content marketers when it started to get hot. SEO was doing particularly poorly for a period (Google used to resist seo rather than reward it) and people realized that if you started writing "authentic" content, then people would organically link to it and it would increase your ranking.
Then social media furthered this problem by people mindlessly sharing content they never read but just looked engaging.
Marketing robots where just churning out content on blogs because eventually you would just hit search engine gold by nail the correct topic for some long tail search term. In my own domain, the atrocious "Towards Data Science" is a great example of this (except their "brilliant" innovation was to replace marketing robots with people eager to pad their resume). The content is largely garbage, but it looks about right and is easily shareable.
Today, whether you like it or not, if you want to make people to see your blog at all you have to think at least a bit like a content marketer to get seen at all. Consider Jay Alammar's fantastic blog [0], which is very high quality content, but still requires a tremendous amount of polish and marketing to survive. All of this has made it impossible to create the network required for a "global conversation among creative weirdos". Real content does get made, but has to be produced with the effort of a real marketer.
0. https://jalammar.github.io/
Tell me about it. The most outrageous the titles on my blog (https://meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev/), the more views articles get.
Before I toned it down, my blog post about SSR rendering was called "SSR sucks and you (probably) shouldn't use it", tons of views.
Boring "History of " posts, meh.
But it also depends who I am writing for. Ideally if I am writing for myself, I shouldn't care about the views, right?
Counter argument to that is I am writing for people who may want to read it, and with all the noise out there, if I don't try and elevate my posts to some extent, the people who want to read them may not be able to find them.
I think something similar happened to forums: they stopped showing up in search results over time, and gradually died from there
Thanks for teaching me a new word!
Thanks for this quote - brilliant.
So there was probably some vain hope that independent blogging could be a sustainable revenue stream for the reporter class. Alas, it has not.
I thought escorts were generally considered to have a fairly solid business model.
Google Reader came onto the scene and essentially destroyed all incumbents. Even if you used an independent client, the syncing was almost certainly based on your Google Reader account.
And Google Reader also provided a social discovery component which no one even tried competing with because how could you.
The sudden death of Google Reader was followed by a glut of rushed alternatives, which meant no specific alternative could get sufficient acceptance.
There were a lot of things that hurt the blogosphere but most of them would either have naturally withered away (for instance, the commercial crowd would almost certainly have migrated to social media), or could have been figured out (spam blogs could have easily been beaten if the likes of Google were interested).
The death of Google Reader, which also happened to coincide with the rise of social media (not a coincidence since Google Reader was killed in order to promote Google’s social media offering), was something the blogosphere could not recover from.
We're laughing about this concept right now. That makes me fear that we're going to actually see people doing this professionally in the future.
If you're looking for any sources, not necessarily massive volumes, Gemini and Gopher still host written content produced without any hope for monetary gain. gemini://medusae.space/index.gmi is a good starting point.
gemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/
Why is (for example) Raymond Chen's blog interesting? Because he has a real job that gives him stories to blog about and occasionally vent his frustration, and the result is entertaining but real, useful information. He doesn't spend time pondering what to write about next.
You don't need a degree in creative writing to blog. You need a real job or hobby to have something to blog about. I don't care about some rando's opinion on some video game, whether he writes like Shakespeare or not.
Somewhat unfortunately I have been lazy/writing under some platform, which it does mean having an audience.
Anyway, many years ago I added a message board to most of them so passersby could share their recollections and nostalgia. At first it was a PITA to keep out the spam. But message boards are so passe that not only is it rare to get a new comment, but it is rare to get spam too.
Unfortunately I suspect someone will break this whole category of captcha soon enough by throwing an LLM at it.
You could, of course, keep to the driest topics, the most tamed opinions, nothing spicier than an animal cracker, but for some this self-censorship of "your most honest, primitive, real thoughts" (to quote Naked Lunch) is tantamount to a sin, just one step up from lying to your diary.
If you are trying to keep it safe, are you truly communicating what is on your mind, or are you pasteurizing your output, homogenizing it, adding a touch of gamma radiation and a run through the freeze-drier, until the final result is palatable pablum, certainly inoffensive and low-residue, but ultimately unworth either consumption or production?
Blogging seems to have shifted on the risk/reward scale and people have responded as such. A pity.
I think this has contributed to my life-long mental health problems, as I've purposely separated myself into 2 personas. To paraphrase Agent Smith...
Jelly 1 has a job and a mortgage and a Facebook, is made of matter and occupies space, and is openly lesbian, and isn't shy to talk a little about politics or her old schizophrenia diagnosis.
Jelly 2 exists only on the dark web, never grew out of enjoying hentai, delights in posting political hot takes like "gasoline should cost more, actually", lies about absolutely everything to shake off doxxers, and doesn't even use the same username on any 2 forums.
Both Jellies are miserable most of the time, since they take turns hiding the other one from one social circle or another. Jelly 2 can never hold a job. Jelly 1 isn't convinced that there's enough stuff in the real world to kill off Jelly 2 and live alone.
"One of these lives has a future..."
It's still good to lie about everything to keep stalkers off your trail. Furthermore, it contributes to the erosion of trust that everything online is literally true. People have gotten complacent in that regard.
The reasons for blogging are varied. Part of me would like to post the odd bit of how-to on an obscure technical topic, that kind of thing. And then there's writing reviews. No expectation is had of reward, but that does not preclude the kind of risk I run if some gibbering nutjob decides I am a fascist or someone else dehumanizable because the Devil's Advocate in me might want to point out that this person was not given a fair shake in this instance, or that something else is a bigger deal than we are making it, and so on.
Of course, I would like to know that there is someone who is catching my signal besides Grim Entropy and the Inverse Square Falloffs, but then you're back to moderating comments which are largely linkback blogspam.
Um, I guess. It seems to me like most of the "controversial" stuff that people get attacked for is just lame vomit about current-events political junk. No one needs yet another clueless nobody ejecting that crap on the Internet. Go write about something interesting, like old computers, or music, or I don't know, your favorite species of grass. You'll be contributing something of value, instead of more mindless current-events garbage, and you won't get attacked for it. Win-win.
I used to be on a once-popular forum which has slowly skewed to the left, and then farther, and farther. Now everything there is politicized because the Red Guard types remaining are on the continual hunt for anything at which they might take offense. These are people who go wild for the opportunity to talk about the racist origins of steampunk.
https://akismet.com/
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/s/ad9kNJLyl3
That 1% is getting massively underpaid.
Dogmatically chasing the phantom of life... disconnected from substance of life.
How easy it is to find an abuse or deprivation worth filling in with the chase for life's sensory phantom.
These people now mostly publish stuff under their own profile on Facebook, because that's where the audience is. Soon to be was.
https://jaylittle.com/
The personal, honest and vulnerable (emotionally, not security-wise) internet is still out there, ya just got to look a bit harder for it nowadays.
I'll stick with my throwback to what websites used to be like when they were simple, quick to load and asked visitors only for their attention and not much else ;)
Oof!
Nice to find someone else who recognises explicitly that management is in no way a natural career progression path, it may have been decades ago, but in the current market we often see seniority / value confused with team management when the two need have little relation.
Even one-two commenters a week can keep the spirit of a blog up.
But usually not one per year.
The private blogs have been the most useful for my thinking. The active private blog has no readers at the moment.
I kind of miss the period from 2004 to perhaps 2009 when there was a community around blogging. But even then I was intentionally very marginal. I have never tried to attract readers, more the opposite.
There may be benefits from writing, such as publicity. But I dom’t think that is necessary a very useful motivation on the long term.
It seems to me that the only reasonable reason for writing is that you have this internal urge to write, to understand whst you think. You will know what you want to write. It does not matter if people do not read it, because you are writing for yourself.
Once your employers became aware of your blog, they became sedated online portfolios.
Social media has obviously taken people away from long-form, too.