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Ask HN: I miss old days of blogging without promotions

8 points by throwaw12 ↗ HN
I miss days when people were writing articles to share what they have learned, people are still doing it, but signal to noise ratio increased so much that it feels like most articles are to promote something, either promote their product, or promote their personal brand or just get more traffic to their website to sell ads.

What's even worse, a lot of those articles are generated by AI, I just dont want to spend even 15 seconds to read it.

Problem is, it is also difficult to detect if it is written by AI or not.

Where are the genuine knowledge sharing, human written blogs?

9 comments

[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 25.1 ms ] thread
onaclov2000
I don't use AI to post to my blog nor am I selling things, they exist...I think, dunno, as I find interesting blogs that seem readable I just add them to a list of sites I occasionally hit if I get bored of hacker news front page (and didn't feel like checking new posts like this)
mmarian
Plenty of blogs still out there doing that. What's worked for me, ironically, is asking an LLM to find blog posts on the topics I'm interested in.
tolciho
Try the smolnet, which would be the web before it went all "the 'Akira' stadium scene", or gopher, or gemini (no, not the google twaddle).
nacozarina
Fewer readers, fewer writers, it’s a constructively deprecated medium.

A lot of the people who would’ve blogged fifteen years ago only make patreon/yootoob/ig videos now.

Yet I agree with you, the slow death of good prose is a sad thing to see.

chistev
They exist.

Check out these HN threads -

Ask HN: Favorite text heavy blogs that are a joy to read?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48466488

Ask HN: What programming blogs do you follow?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14842276

Show HN: I built a frontpage for personal blogs

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47625952

Hacker News but for independent blogs

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48567155

Show HN: Blogs.hn – tiny blog directory

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36613727

And then, here's mine. Haha -

https://www.rxjourney.net/

jamesli233
Perhaps we should blame the SEO mechanism of Google Chrome or the GEO mechanism of GPT. If it weren't for the fact that they needed to extensively reference structured textual materials to recommend or organize their responses, perhaps blogs wouldn't have become so cheap.
thepeoplebook
Agreed, and it's not just blogs. Amazon KDP is full of AI kids' books, junk self-help, novels run through a model.

I think the most valuable content still comes from people’s real-world experience.

firefax
I see a lot of essays on noncommercial self hosted blogs on HN.