The best way to bring back blogs is to start with your own. It looks like this is the author's fourth post and s/he hit a home run with the top post on HN.
But that's rarely how things work.
The thing few people tell you when you start blogging is how futile it will seem - for a long, long time. You'll start by posting something you put a lot of work into. You'll publish, thinking of all the comments and emails you'll get.
Then, nothing. 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.
And this is the point at which most bloggers stop. After all, how can you justify more time spent on something that doesn't pay back?
The problem is that with a blog you need to think in terms of years. You have to write regularly over the course of years before you'll get any kind of reliable following.
In the meantime, you'll notice how blogging regularly changes you. You'll notice patterns you never noticed before, especially if you stick to a particular "beat." You'll get better at choosing topics. You'll figure out ways to write faster. You'll get better at pushing through mental fog and procrastination that keeps so many others from writing.
You may also discover that you really, really hate writing. Nothing wrong with that, but understand that many people also dislike writing anything longer than a tweet. And that's why good blogs are kind of scarce. And therein lies the opportunity.
Those blogs from the time before were written for the purpose of writing, not for the purpose of getting lots of viewership. The blogs the author misses aren't written to make money off of ad traffic, they were just written to put down ideas. Today that need is filled with Facebook/Twitter/... and even there with the currency of likes/comments those motivations get twisted.
Some of the internet has also shifted to a privacy centric attitude. The whole world is a big place to share intimate stories which will be indexed and used against you in job interviews or by oppressive governments.
I still think there's value in private blogging, writing just to keep your friends and family informed. Blogging doesn't always have to be sharing with the whole world. I wish there were more platforms to make this easy to do.
> Those blogs from the time before were written for the purpose of writing, not for the purpose of getting lots of viewership.
Or, to put that another way: blogs are/were effectively people publicizing their diaries. (Or, in the case of a work blog, publicizing the contents of their https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventor%27s_notebook).
> Today that need is filled with Facebook/Twitter/
Not really? Facebook/Twitter/etc. are for "what you're thinking right now." Incomplete, out-of-context thoughts. Maybe conversations, where the thought plus access to the author for further questioning can "add up to" a complete, legible text.
I've never seen Facebook/Twitter used for "a breakthrough in understanding you've had, and want to preserve for posterity and your own future reference; where enough context is given that you (or someone else) can recapture the whole of the idea just from the words on the page, 10+ years down the line." That's the sole province of blogging. (Or of books, journal papers, and open letters. But blogs are a lot lower-overhead than any of those.)
>> Those blogs from the time before were written for the purpose of writing, not for the purpose of getting lots of viewership.
Exactly this. Im not sure if my experience was typical, but i recall lots of small mini communities of bloggers, where each blog would have less than a dozen real followers, but everyone would read the other peoples content. Thats why you had the "follows" tab on the sidebar of the blog.
I also recall a distinction between homepages (IE where useful static information collected in one place) and blogs (personal stories not with the goal of teaching). Homepages could have lots of traffic but little real interaction (like FB today). Blogs would have lots of detailed interaction but but very little viewership.
Well, this is why I don’t have a blog. I have a lot of strong opinions that might be interesting to some people, but I don’t want to miss opportunities because some HR person googled my name and found a post they disagreed with. Or, in the future, not a real person but an algorithm.
>Those blogs from the time before were written for the purpose of writing, not for the purpose of getting lots of viewership.
This right here. You all need to calm down like you're all so unique you are all owed 1000s of views a day. Write for the sake of writing- it's rewarding in and of itself.
Facebook/Twitter is terrible for putting down ideas. You don’t control what happens to your content. Posts get lost in the sea of millions of other posts. These companies constantly change policies.
Writing is a public act. You might still be expecting some readership without the expectation of ad money or promotion of something.
What I miss most about the blogs in 90s and early 00s is the conversation between blogs by linking, quoting and commenting each other. Reading blogs involved going from one blog to another, and reading blogs of 10 people about a single issue. It was a conversation. And you would constantly discover new blogs this way.
The thing I miss most is LiveJournal. Sure, over time it kind of failed, and later having data owned by possibly nefarious new owners didn't help reputationally, but what I loved was having a small, approved set of people who could read, and getting to know other people in long form, where writing was the primary draw, rather than links, brags, and ads, like social media has become. I miss the very internal nature that the platform allowed, but it was a more naive time, where the idea that whatever was there would inevitably become public wasn't a barrier to intimacy.
> written for the purpose of writing, not for the purpose of getting lots of viewership
I've never really bought this line of argument. People who "write just for writing" don't publish. They write it in One Note or Evernote or Tiddlywiki or plain old text files on their laptop. They don't sign up for Wordpress accounts (or even worse, spend hours configuring some static site generator) and publish it.
People publish things because they want them to be read. Having no indication that they are being read is, understandably, discouraging for people who are publishing things.
This is so true... Youtube is kind of the new blog because so many people don't like writing but they love seeing themselves on screen. This made it too commercial. All the top youtubers do it just for the sponsorship. People like Linus Tech Tips etc, all this "check this out from our sponsors" crap. It really put me off Youtube. The only ones I still watch are zero punctuation and EEVBlog. Dave is also doing it as a job but at least he didn't become annoying.
Besides, I really prefer to read over watching videos as I can do it at my own pace. Except in cases where a lot is shown like EEVBlog, it makes sense there.
But easy platforms exist. Wordpress is still there :) You just have to keep it up to date like a hawk.
I wouldn't put an idea on Twitter or Facebook. That's where I put a short joke, or a pun, or some political troll meme. Then I watch the mentions and likes roll in. That's not to say that it never happens, but they aren't really well made platforms for it, outside posting a link to an actual blog.
Personally, I think the blogosphere is covered pretty well for me by the likes of Medium. I'm not sure how I feel about that, but they've made a damn good job at cornering that part of the market for those more serious posts that were previously relegated to the blogosphere. That's a place I'd put a more well-formed idea. A great example is the article, "Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now" by Thomas Pueyo.[1]
Outside that, blogs still exists! I still even have my own. I think the complaint is rather that they're hard to index or search. And to that end, there are many solutions and ways around it that still exist, such as syndication or even RSS.
I blog about my electronics project. It's public in that it's online and accessible but it is for me, both to ensure I think things through well enough to write them down coherently and to have a reference for decisions.
I blog my work activities on an internal wiki for similar reasons. Major decisions need to be gathered in project documentation but small decisions and daily challenges are good to have written down.
Yes - when I was overseas I kept a "blog" in the form of a website hosted at my university. I'd update it with a few pictures and some text about new things I was experiencing.
It was more of a journal and something maybe if my friends and family wanted to read, they could. A slightly extroverted way of showing your inner thoughts and life.
I often notice when I start writing on a particular topic, I learn more about my thoughts and opinions of it and realize my thoughts are wrong or not really novel. Halfway in I give up since I feel like, "oh, this actually isn't really adding anything new to the conversation". Then I leave with a new humbleness about my beliefs but also a sense of "when am I actually going to know enough to warrant writing about it?".
That's awesome! If only most people would do that, I think the internet would be a much more entertaining and enlightening place.
Here's the thing: write that. Go meta, just a little, and write about your journey. "I thought this, but then I found out that, and now my questions have evolved thus..."
I think it was Orson Welles who, when somebody asked him if they could write his biography, said, "No, because it will be false. You may write the story of your attempt to discover the truth of my life."
I struggle with this too, but then I think on how many of the blogs I read basically say the same thing over and over again, or just rephrase ideas from other places.
When you're familiar with an idea, it seems to you like it's obvious and it's mentioned everywhere, but there are also lots of people out there for whom it will be new. Maybe you aren't the first one to say it, but you're the first one they heard it from. You'll inevitably put your own spin on it, too. I've been working on convincing myself that it's not necessary to come up with some completely novel thought that nobody ever thought before in order to just post something. Practically nobody does that.
I am similar but I would suggest that you could reframe your post. "I started this post with the intention of... and then realised that... (The idea is not a new one/I was wrong/changed my mind because/the idea doesn't make sense etc)." You could even link back to more informative resources on the topic.
Not everything has to be new or novel. You may add to the discussion and enhance it by writing about what informed your change of heart.
thats a great mindset, but its also funny because a lot of blog posts that do well are about rehashing basic things like "why open offices suck", or "why i chose node instead of ruby"
I have this happen too. What this means at least for me, is that I have dozens of little ideas of things to write about, usually after I’ve seen that I’ve encountered it multiple times, I really think I have a position on it, and I want to really see where they would go (those who know me on the site may have some good guesses as to what I currently have stashed for this). And then I stick that idea in a little list I call “future blog posts” and slowly add ideas to them over months (note I have not actually written anything for the blog post yet!) until they are polished the key points I really want to include and a coherent story that I want to tell with them. Then I sit down and write them, and by that time I’m very confident of which way I’m going, the rebuttals and my responses to those just flow naturally, and I generally keep that position in the future.
That happens to me too. You really thing you have something interesting to tell, and then bam, just a silly thought... good that I realized that before publishing it.
I'm the same way, I remember getting that feeling of sudden understanding right at the end of writing an essay in school. But I no longer had any time left to actually present my new found understanding.
> You'll check the analytics. Abysmal. Nobody is reading!
And that, right there, is the best reason to remove all analytics from your blog/website[1]. At the risk of being held guilty of self-promotion, I wrote a little blog post about just this a couple of weeks ago: https://one.mikro2nd.net/2020/05/why-no-web-analytics-are-to... (Thing is, if anybody here does go and read it, I won't even know.)
At the root of the unease is the question, "Why are you blogging?" If it's something you do for yourself, then analytics -- specifically: who is reading which posts -- is a distraction, and sure to lead you astray into the thickets and quagmire of writing mere clickbait.
If you're writing to establish "thought leadership" in some sphere, then display leadership, not followership (i.e. chasing the analytics.) It's a strange and uncomfortable feeling at first (perhaps always!) but at least you'll always know who you're writing for (yourself). If you're writing for some "payback" then I'd suggest that submitting articles to magazines is a better path/platform than blogging.
Personally I am more interested in inciting thought and discussion through my blog, so mere visitor statistics are of little interest. What would validate what I do there would be someone who reaches out to talk about something I've written. That's the real payback.
I started my own blog last month and I am following this advice 100%. I'm not using analytics or trackers of any sort, not only for believing they create they same delusion you mention in your post, but also because I try to block all types of trackers when visiting other sites.
Why would I use the very thing I'm trying so hard to avoid when surfing the web? It's basically a matter of respect to the reader. So I designed my site following the values I consider so important for websites in general: no trackers, no mandatory javascript, no obstacles between the user and the content.
Note that you can’t actually get rid of all knowledge of which blog posts of yours are popular, because you’ll find out in other ways: it’ll be on the front page of Hacker News or people will email you about it, or a friend will link it back to you. If you’re looking for privacy-preserving analytics, this is the ultimate in that. If you want nothing at all…yeah, there’s really no way to run away from the world after you publish something.
The publish or perish nature of blogs is one of the many reasons why I feel they're generally inferior to the personal web pages that were popular during the early web. It seems that there has been a general trend towards a constant churning of output in order to keep up the dopamine hits for users. The quality of a lot of online content reflects this.
Yeah. The antithesis of the blog is the evergreen page, where you collect and systematize information about one thing you're interested in, and keep improving it over the years. A great example is Robin Whittle's page about pink noise algorithms: http://www.firstpr.com.au/dsp/pink-noise/ It covers the topic from more angles than any single blogpost. Then at some point your page can become a collection of pages, like Bill Beaty's electricity stuff: http://amasci.com/miscon/whatis.html I think these are some of the most valuable things on the internet.
> It seems that there has been a general trend towards a constant churning of output in order to keep up the dopamine hits for users.
my first thought when reading this was "yeah, that's because users don't know how to RSS". it's not that i know how to RSS that well, but i do have friends who use RSS in the style of masters. my favorite strategy that i have heard of, and what i will try to replicate in a few months, is: rss subscription >> local mail service >> inbound mail folders filled with articles from my RSS feed.
i've been practicing my own ability to use "the computer" in a way that makes me feel like a master... and we'll see if i ever get there. surely though, we are all missing out on the oldschool internet that was swallowed by the walled gardens.
I've been steadily plugging away at a semi-regular schedule (I post when I hit a milestone, but that can vary in time itself) on my writing blog. I post all my short stories there, as well as progress on the novel I'm writing. I know no one here really cares about non-tech stuff (I'm a tech guy, but I've sort of gotten more interested in philosophy and writing lately — all I used to care about was tech, so I get it), but shameless plug: https://indifferentuniverse.christopherdumas.org/?m=1.
I've only been doing it for less than a year, so I haven't reached the stuff you're talking about. I haven't even really branched out into talking about general topics yet, but I plan to soon. I'm just slowly feeling my way around, seeing what I can do and what I have time for and whatever. I don't get (m)any views that aren't myself yet though, lol.
There is a good advice for writers (bloggers are essentially writers) - write only if you can't NOT write. If you write because you can't not write, then you don't care about the number of readers.
Blogs haven't gone anywhere, now they're just "posts" on major platforms.
That's what people chose, because it's easier. They gave up content rights and many, many possibilities for the ease of posting and the near instant views and feedback.
I was thinking about this the other day - trying to come up with an idea for a way to aggregate or recommend blogs to people based on what they'd previously enjoyed or the topics they were interested in. It took me several minutes to realize I was mentally describing Medium to myself.
Still, something doesn't feel quite right about Medium to me.
I have a blog which I've maintained for a long time and continue to publish on. But for a lot of the material I write on a day to day basis, I can publish at online pubs/sites where I have editorial support, an established audience, and promotional machinery. I'm not limited--I can always publish by myself--but for many of the things I write about I might as well choose an existing publication.
> Then, nothing. You'll check the analytics. Abysmal. Nobody is reading!
Open source software development can be like this as well. Most of my projects ended up being useful to me alone. I started some just to see if some fundamental idea was possible: lost all motivation to actually finish the project once I proved to myself that it was.
I contributed some features to an existing project and they got a lot more attention. Interacting with fellow developers and users is a great experience. Made me care a lot more about the end result and whether it got merged.
Perhaps a personal wiki would be better than a blog. As long as the articles are useful to their writers, they should have enough motivation to keep writing.
I have some blogs that played the long game, and I must say the years thing is a fantasy for most that will likely not be realized.
Sure it's fine to do like art that could get popular after you die, or you could be found as an unknown amazing author on day..
However things with the publishing and PR industry are such that I think it would be best to get some eyeballs and feedback before you spend years writing hoping to get discovered, much like launching a product or service too late after spending too much time in pre-production.
Sadly I think it's multiple changes in google that killed blogs over the years and I don't see blogs coming back into the top search results (or blog link rolls not being penalties that scare people into never using them) and changing things.
I love blogs, and blogging - but I must admit that more success is found by tweeting or even making a meme that is shared. If you can't hope for google to give you results and never know if fbook is going to block your blog, then I don't suggest people put eggs in that basket - unless there is another side reason for doing so, like your posts are auto-added to instagram or something somehow.
Maybe if you're only doing it for fame and fortune and PR and success. But trying to do that without actually having anything interesting to get famous and successful about was always just a con-man's game.
Real blogging is about sharing your thoughts and ideas on whatever niche topic interests you with people who have the same interests, and the conversations that arise out of that. Like the friendships that form from participating in BBSes and forums over the years, the value is in the fun you have and the interesting discussions and bouncing ideas off others' viewpoints. It doesn't need to be a business to be fulfilling.
I have run my blog on joelx.com for 14 years and have thousands of posts. Very few people actually read them, but it's nice to have a history my kids could one day read.
I've been blogging on and off for the past few years now (not going to publish the link here in case it is seen as self promotion). Mainly as a way of leaving my life story and thoughts for my family to have something to remember my life when I am no longer around (My dad had some incredible life stories, and I wish we had recorded them in some form before he passed).
I think what is missing now is the rich set of tools around the ecosystem. Posterous was a great service to let you email your thoughts directly to a blog post. I am amazed there was no other competitor that sprung up when they got bought out and shut down by Twitter nearly a decade ago.
I really miss Google Reader, which was where I used to keep a curated list of the top blogs I used to read regularly. Even now, some mornings I wish I could just open my Google Reader home page and check out the latest updates from some of my favourite bloggers.
https://feedly.com/ is a good free alternative. I too miss Reader and my experience with that and Google+ made me extremely wary of Google, I frequently back up my data in case they decide to abandon Google Docs or Google Photos or who knows what else.
I gave my father a journal for the entire family to share, pass around, and make notes in when he turned 50. With the idea if our grandfather had used such a tool how cool it would be.
It’s hard getting the ideas down, but having lived long enough to lost a few email accounts from
My childhood, and other such content.
When you want to preserve for future generations I think there’s really something to be said for paper. I think Nassim Taleb had ideas about papers longevity too, the longer a technology had been around the longer it will likely stay around. As in email will likely outside Facebook simply because it’s already been around longer.
I once wrote up something that interested me at the moment and figured I'll post it on medium so people get to actually read it.
To my surprise, medium doesn't let you publish (write yes, not publish) anything, unless you jump through several obscure loops like "engaging with the platform for a while".
My article wasn't particularly important, so I am not too heartbroken about it. But what this tells me is that there seems to be a lot of demand for publishing posts of different nature.
I feel that rather than blogging, more people should write comments. I’ve never written one blog article, but I’ve written a novel worth of comments over the years. A comment IMO is more pure and true, and is created out of a strong desire to say something, rather than for some other extrinsic motivation.
My problem with blogging is that I can’t just write in a vacuum, I must always write in response to something and when I have something worth responding too I can write more usefully.
You can just blog a comment. Read something that moves your mind longer than the first barfed out comment? Blog it. Write down your thought process, discuss with yourself, do something thoughtful witout the stress of a public discussion.
As someone who writes a lot of comments but also now blogs a bit: blog posts for me are just long, thought out comments; often they’re an amalgamation of comments I might have left, or little bits on a topic that I keep around but have never had a place to write as a comment so I put them all together into one big one and polish it.
I agree with a lot of this. Writing for yourself is the best advice: if you write about things that interest you, maybe people with similar interests will read your blog. Also, your own understanding of the subjects you write about will grow.
I've been blogging for eight years now, and it has been very rewarding. It's great to get readers, and it is great to end up on the front page of Hacker News. But it is also really good to have a blog to point people to when you look for a job.
One thing that is still true is how much work it is to write even a short blog post. It still takes me hours of concentrated work. But I am still doing it, becuase the value outweighs the cost.
That is true even for entertainment videos on Youtube. Some people have the delusion it's effortless. PewDiePie said he was for at least 2 years posting videos for ~100 followers and a regular ~1mil views/video youtuber often spends ~12 hours for editing a 5 minute video.
I think that six months is enough time to commit. At the end of that period you'll either have the bug and want to keep blogging or know the format is not for you.
I honestly got a lot more traffic on my blogs than I thought. Mostly from Google. Writing clear answers to things I’ve ran into during my daily work seems to work pretty well
Exactly. As a 20 years blogger, I would say I wish people posted more blog posts than shitty tuits. But Twitter format made possible distribute the message better than the blogs. Back then, we used RSS aggregators and other things, nowadays its kinda rare. I still visit blogs and i still post on my own blog, though i do it everytime i need to do a longer explanation post.
Lmao.. Literally the only time I've gotten a flood of emails was from when I described my experience applying to a FAANG company. Quite sad actually, as I'd been shouting into the void about far more interesting things for years.
this is true, though with the assumption of blogging as it is in today's world where it is lonely and only a search engine can find you. if blogging was done inside a supportive community and network it could be less lonely and you could get frequent feedback and interactions.
If I was to make an analogy using your perspective on blogging with facebook or instagram - you post about yourself or post personal photos for a long time. It is futile, for a long long time, nobody sees your content... you post photos for years, and you realize it changes you. You will notice patterns, you will get better at posting photos ...
I am exaggerating to make a point and it is this, you may find yourself needing to perfect your content strategy(blog, photos or facebook-style posts) for years and the main reason it doesn't pay back is there is no network or community anymore. You shouldn't have to be a pro to get noticed.
People tried decentralized networks and that didn't work so well, because one - you need modern blogging software (newsfeed, real time comments, spam moderation, good recommendation algorithms) and it has to be managed by a centralized authority that offers a great user experience. Today, closest thing to this is facebook and twitter (and instagram). All in all you must have these for a great blogging experience: first, good software and central authority, then network. It must be focused on serving authentic bloggers, and it must be backed by a commercial solution.
That in turn means, a paid service, whose customers are bloggers. That means, how badly do you want an amazing blogging experience, where you blog with great writing tools, search, discover, and interact with others (and probably in today's world, be able to hop on a video chat with your viewers and share that in comments). Yes, so how much do you desire to have it, would you pay $5/month? $30/month? $100/month? It comes down to this.
If there was monetary backing, this problem could be solved with a 'solution'. Chances are that not enough many people want it, and people are content with free posting on instagram, twitter, or facebook, and happy to live with ads. If this was a high demand service, chances are that it would have already been built, or existing ones would already be prospering (tumblr didn't make money and got acquired, blogger shut down, medium serving writers looking to make money, recreational blogging is not their target and so on). So is this a real problem to solve or not?
Maybe people don't know they want it and aren't organized enough to support it, - if you built an amazing experience maybe lots of bloggers will pay for it, then it will become another, facebook where the network is funded by its users.
You appear to be describing Medium in the latter half of your post, which seems to have gone through multiple business models at this point.
As for a network and aggregation, back in the day there were decentralized solutions. We had RSS and pingbacks and Google News, which in the early days was largely a blog search engine. There were things like Reddit and StumbleUpon for finding new blogs, in addition to slashdot and Hacker News. Many of these sites have changed in terms of content since then, but originally a lot of what they linked to was blogs.
Blogs are still there, just not easily findable through Google as most of the ones you find are low-value SEO blogs aiming at search engine traffic.
Discovery is a problem but I just subscribe to blogs when I find them via RSS (Blogs still have RSS, it's hard to find one without which is surprising but I'm glad that's the case), over time I build up my list of blogs I like and they usually link to other blogs and the list slowly grows.
Blogs and forums stopped being a thing when Google flushed them out sometime between 2009-2012 (with the Panda update? I'm not an SEO guy so I wasn't really following it at the time).
Anyway, it felt like a bunch of places went from having active communities to stagnating or dying outright overnight. People forget just how much general innovation was being driven by these sites - Styleforum and AskAndy for men's fashion, BB.com for health and wellness (ignoring misc), Something Awful also comes to mind.
Reddit was supposed to become the trusted alternative, but it just really hasn't happened.
I’m not sure if the premise is correct here. What metric is Reddit being judged by? What if the various fashion subreddits, in aggregate, have more users, more content (both good and bad), and more innovation than websites like AskAndy?
I suspect what you’re looking for is:
1. The intimate small town feel of the early internet, and
2. The higher average post quality (because of the type of person that both had internet and used forums back then) as measured by intellectuality, domain specificity, and demonstrated expertise.
Reddit doesn’t display those qualities because of the tragedy of the commons phenomenon. Great content is interspersed with what is essentially “noob spam.” Even if it has a greater aggregate amount of quality content, it doesn’t have the same feel as older forums.
Reddit can try to fix this by grouping people together into social clusters. If there is a subreddit with 2 million people, why not create many smaller “breakout” groups that coexist with the main thread? Of course, this is easier said than done, but I’m sure it’s possible to execute this idea well.
I think VR meeting rooms will be the ultimate solution. They will be intimate by definition, and people will sort into their favorite social groups. An American scientist might join an international “scientist salon” and socialize with scientists everywhere from Germany to Japan. A bulletin would contain and display static text posts by the members of the salon. It would also display things like plebiscites and summaries of important meetings. You’d be able to bounce around different groups with a different subject matter any time you want. Some will have barriers to entry and identity verification, most won’t. Some groups will be purely social and defined more by the members than by any subject matter. Altogether that would make the internet feel more like a collection of physical spaces inhabited by communities of people.
What I’m describing ideally shouldn’t be run by one corporation like Facebook or Reddit. The communities should be strung together by a shared backbone under an Internet 3.0. Visiting one should be like visiting a different website. We can use the formation of the original 2D internet as a template for how to proceed in creating a VR internet.
This is exactly right. I had a blog for many months, shared it from my website and social media accounts, and it never showed up in Google search. After a couple months of speaking to an audience of 20 people, I decided it wasn't worth it. Meanwhile everything else I have tried shows up on the first page of results: Facebook page, Twitter account, Soundcloud, etc.
Google heavily biases their results to two things: the top 1000 sites on the internet, and clickbait (callout posts and threads slandering someone rank like you wouldn't believe; no backlinks required). Maybe if you keep at your blog for 2+ years, manage to land a few HN frontpage story links, it might eventually show up. But who is going to invest that time and effort instead of just setting up a Facebook page instead?
I think Reddit getting big also killed a lot of the old forums. The frictionlessness of joining a community made it hard to compete. And the general lack of personality to user profiles in Reddit avoided the "cool kid's clique" issue that happens with a lot of forums where everyone knows each other.
I remember in the "dying days" of some of the forums I was on the conversation had largely devolved into reposting and discussing memes and things that were happening on Reddit. From there it's just a matter of time before the discussion moved to Reddit too. This fate perhaps could have been avoided if "Sign in with Google" type capabilities were more widely available at the time, or if we had a more universal login/forum scheme like Disqus back then, but they all came around too late.
Don't discount Instagram killing many of those communities.
So much easier to take a picture on your phone and post it to your Instagram page or story. Better dopamine rush, too, from a bunch of Like/Comment notifications rather than maybe a single forum reply hours later.
Yep. I ran a great little community cycling forum from 2005 - met so many friends (real and virtual) over those years - then about 2011 or 2012 Google just dropped it. Our traffic fell off a cliff - now - the regulars stayed on for quite a while, but without an influx of new members and questions and discussions, things just died out - regular members need the stimulus of new members, even if it can be taxing moderating etc... Was actually a really disappointing decline in many ways. It really opened my eyes up to how much control we gave away, and how much content is now in these big walled garden silos. I can't help but get nostalgic.
I characterize Reddit as true neutral. It has the potential to be any alignment, but it's mostly the will of the moderator to impose what alignment any subreddit will be. It's the only place on the Internet that still has the feel occaisionally of the 90s/00s.
One forum that seems to have bucked many trends is for music software: kvraudio.com[0]
Started about 20 years ago, It’s totally vibrant, despite an old school UI. Some threads keep going for years.
Sure, the signal to noise ratio isn’t always perfect either, but there’s still a continuing flow of golden nuggets of deeper industry information, helpful howto answers, and thoughtful commentary and feedback around music software.
In some ways it’s a little like HN, but in some ways I find it superior, like baked in notifications and being able to mute those that are too annoying. It probably helps that it’s adjunct to arguably the best music software directory, with imperfect, yet useful taxonomy, and old school advertising that’s highly relevant to the community.
Many thousands (maybe even millions) of still-relevant older posts on my company's forum are simply no longer even indexed by Google. I guess it's a part of the deep web now.
Yep, that seems about right. I have had two forums since 2002, and while they still have a small user base, everybody switched to Facebook and the like. Not sure if I blame Google as much in the case of forums. I have enjoyed seeing notifications in the browser added, as the browser is starting to have similar powers to apps. Of course, Apple is having none of that, as they love apps and the app store sales.
> Blogs and forums stopped being a thing when Google flushed them out sometime between 2009-2012… Reddit was supposed to become the trusted alternative,
Are you suggesting Google had a plan to promote reddit? or what do you mean by "was supposed to"?
RSS is truly a blessing, and it's such a shame that the side effect of Google is to essentially corrupt a vast portion of the internet such that most of the stuff you see and read has the sole purpose of pleasing the search engine, not the reader. That relationship is the wrong way round.
I'm just re-setting up my own blog (to complement a Youtube channel). Without designing one from scratch (with a static site generator or some such), it's quite difficult to get an off the shelf one that isn't bloated as hell though. I should suck it up but design isn't my strong-suit, and I'd rather just get straight to writing and recording.
Whatever you do, just don't use Medium. Ghost or Hugo (With Netlify, https://gohugo.io/hosting-and-deployment/hosting-on-netlify/) are both very low effort solutions and most of them come with themes that don't look too bad from the get go. It's very quick to get something up and running even though it's technically a static site generator.
About a year ago I started blogging, and wanted something really simple, flexible and that didn't require any sort of server/database maintenance.
After some reasearch I decided to go with Jekyll + GitHub Pages, forked a theme that seemed Ok and made some style changes, nothing fancy. Must say I'm really happy with my choice.
There's one thing though, I'm writing posts using markdown in an IDE. Don't really consider that a disadvantage though, and I guess most developers would be really fine with that.
Here's the link to the repository in case you'd like to take a look and try it out: https://github.com/TCGV/blog
I just searched for some relatively focused topics I’ve written about years ago, and Google found my blog posts just fine (mostly among the top results). I don’t know how popular those posts are (I don’t use analytics at all and since the blog has been hosted on GitHub Pages since forever ago I don’t even have server logs to analyze) but I do know quite a few were never discussed elsewhere.
I guess it’s hard to find blogs these days when you just type “blog” into the search engine, or search for a keyword that a million people compete on in order to sell you stuff. But if you have actual, say technical questions, you’ll land on interesting blog posts in no time, sometimes not even on the dumpster fire that is Medium, and written by people who aren’t writing merely to bolster their online presence.
SEO is the problem. Most authors figure out at some point that nobody goes to their website. So, they move to different channels (linkedin, facebook, medium, etc.) and at best might cross post to their blog and those channels.
When it comes to reaching people, the odds are stacked against you on your personal website because of multi billion dollar companies optimizing for ad revenue and vastly preferring directing people to ad equipped channels of their choice rather than your website. This is also the real reason Google killed Google Reader: they wanted to capture the ad revenue and instead force content producers to use those. Which is why all news publishers bend over backwards to ensure their news shows up in Google news.
It's that simple. Any click that goes to your website directs the user away from their money making channels. So, they don't. With RSS readers, most of your potential audience will never find you unless they subscribed to your article or it randomly shows up as a link in some channel they follow. Getting lucky on HN helps. But most people don't get that lucky.
So-called influencers basically try to manipulate the odds by doing what they think yields the best results. That's why clickbait exists, why your twitter and facebook feeds are filled with crap, and why it is so hard to find channels that contain curated content. That's also why we all love HN.
Grumpy is amazing! We very much enjoy their content and actually got inspired by that site in the first place. Theres a link to them on our About page:
Thanks, that's awesome, just spent 20 minutes reading on there.
But quite frequently as I was trying to read, everything on screen jumped upwards, by a few lines or half a page, apparently because stuff below it was loading. Normally I wouldn't complain, the site has taught me not to put up silently with such things. Don't think I've seen that behaviour before. (Am using latest version of FF)
I'm increasingly running into blogs that sadly don't have RSS, but just today I discovered a cool open source project to generate RSS based on visual scraping: https://politepol.com/en/
I wrote a tool to do something similar a while ago for sites that didn't work with these ready-made tools, it's a bit more effort as you'd have to implemented a custom scraping plugin for the target website: https://github.com/dewey/feedbridge
Google has an unusual situation where search now only needs to be good enough. They are much more focused on the knowledge engine of providing direct answers and the advertising business.
With such a dominant market share, search has certainly lowered in quality
I would argue that the public internet has lowered in quality, and the lowering quality of search results simply reflects that the information you're looking for often isn't out there.
A good chunk of that is that more and more info is locked into walled gardens (in some App, on Facebook/Instagram/TicTok), but also a lot of what people want to find in todays world just isn't on the internet anymore, except places like the web archive, where Google isn't allowed to venture...
I find that all Google results are increasingly useless spam. Even searching for programming Q&A is becoming less viable and I end up landing on one of those "you need to upgrade your flash player" phishing sites at least once or twice a week.
The open web has had a great run but it too is being brought to its knees by spam just like every other open platform.
I never realized how bad Google spam could be for technical content until I had to start searching for solution to some Windows issues. Almost without fail, the first page would be littered would spam sites posing as informative answers. Many of them were just duplicating content from official Windows documentation with minor modification. The more sophisticated ones would provide enough real content to entice you into thinking the page had the solution only to reveal you had to sign up to access the full content of the page.
I've never encountered this before when searching for linux or programming topics. In those cases, Google results always include relevant stack overflow postings and links to the appropriate section of documentation.
I'm surprised Google hasn't penalized these spam pages, but I'd imagine there are some perverse incentives to keep them around. Wouldn't surprise me if many of these sites show adds through a Google-owned affiliate program or are in another way tied into Google's ad tech empire.
I've been collecting blogs I'm interested in via. HN, lobste.rs, reddit, or just random links all around, and am now at around 50 feeds, all of which at least have once had content that I'm genuinely interested in. Then I use `newsboat` for reading and keeping track of what I've seen.
Overall I'm very happy with this extremely simple setup, and am almost annoyed that I didn't spend those few seconds it is to set something like this up years ago.
---
As to the original link posted, blogs obviously never went anywhere, but they aren't (anymore) in the places that you are.
I feel this comes close to the frustration some people have that "nobody is reading books anymore because everyone are streaming movies and series instead". Books never went anywhere, and they're probably more accessible than ever. If you're not reading books now, that's on you.
Similarly with blogs: if you're not reading and/or following blogs, it's just because you don't want to.
From my (subjective) perspective, I also feel like something strange happened with Google search when it comes to blogs.
My tech/programming blog has 1.4K subscribers and used to reliably get between 100 to 200 views per day, then in the space of 2 days from 6 March to 7 March this year it suddenly dropped down to around 10 to 20 views per day. The drop was extremely sudden and hasn't recovered since. Nothing changed on my side; I just started publishing more blockchain articles (since I work in that industry) but the drop badly affected my non-blockchain articles too (especially the ones which used to get a lot of recurring visitors from Google).
I wasn't relying on my blog financially though (just a hobby) so it hasn't hurt me too bad.
Many of my past articles were related to my open source project (I've been maintaining it for many years and it is not blockchain related): https://socketcluster.io/
I feel that Google has always been working against open source software when it comes to search; maybe because their algorithm figured out that Google can't monetize open source projects (OSS projects don't tend to promote on Adwords). They tend to drive organic traffic mostly to paid SaaS solutions instead.
Strangely enough though, my open source project is now getting starred at a higher rate than ever before, it has almost 6K stars on GitHub and seems to be consistently getting several per week now even though I do no marketing and my Google organic traffic is terrible - The faster rate of stars is also strange because Google Analytics shows me flat traffic (has been around the same number of daily users for the past couple of years).
Is this your site? It's really nice! I have something similar (although without all of the features on this site). I also scrape a bunch of blogs that doesn't have rss.
One thing, people really like https, especially when sending form data such as the signup.
Speaking of discoverability, I found the author's writing interesting and wanted to subscribe to new articles. I usually do this by following the author's twitter account. Sadly, the one that he links to does not exist: twitter.com/TTTThiscom
That's the first time I'm hearing that problem, are you sure it's from the site? It's basically just a generated static html site with no JS except a tiny analytics snippet.
This article makes... no sense to me. Blogs are still around, everywhere, and show up easily in search results if a post matches a relevant query. And bloggers still list other blogs in sidebars.
I genuinely don't understand the author's complaint. The only thing I can imagine is that there are a lot more alternatives for self-expression on the internet now, e.g. Instagram, Twitter, podcasts, etc. So blogs are perhaps a smaller percentage.
But given that you could never read even 0.1% of all the blog posts ever written, the percentage is irrelevant. There are more unique, quirky, individualist blogs out there than the author could ever get to the end of.
So I don't understand what the problem is. It's not even factual. The author claims Blogger was shut down... but it still exists. The author claims there's no way to find blogs... but it's pretty easy. The author claims nobody is writing blogs... but obviously they are.
I guess the main complaint is that you can't find quirky random blogs by searching Google for the search term "blog"? Not much of a complaint to me. If you want a curated list of quirky blogs, there are lots of lists out there of people's favorites.
> Blogs ... show up easily in search results if a post matches a relevant query.
No, they don't. This comes down to two main changes in how Google operates: 1) Google no longer respects search operators so that users can get fine-grained results, and 2) Google has chosen to progressively delist old content, even if many blog posts from the early millennium remain just as relevant today because no one has posted at length on the subject in the years since.
Thus, people are unable to find a great deal of content through Google even if they search for the exact strings which appear in those posts. You might see some blogs in search results, but they are a miniscule representation of the whole blog ecosystem.
Not that I don't believe you, but that just hasn't been my experience with Google at all, and I use it extensively for research tracking down fairly obscure sources with presumably close-to-zero traffic by putting in quoted sentence fragments.
Do you have an example of a website that is linked to from other sites (so Google can find it) where a quoted search for a unique sentence fragment from it doesn't list it as a result?
I've just never heard authoritatively of Google removing old content from results, especially since it seems antithetical to the company's mission of organizing all the world's information. And seeing how so much of the value of search (and purchasing and content and so much else) is in the "long tail", it seems like it would be an extremely counterproductive strategy.
Essentially the author is longing for a day before social media existed, but the world has changed fast - and that's ok.
The medium has diversified away from just blogs, but the amount mediums and creators has exploded.
Many of those people who used to blog on Blogspot have moved on to YouTube, TikTok Twitter, Instagram, Medium, WordPress, Shopify, Webflow, and more.
So the whole premise is bunk. "Blogs" in their 2005 term may have changed. But the amount of people publishing 280+ character content on Twitter, Instagram (as video or image descriptions), and all others is more than ever.
Instagram and YouTube are where many of the eyeballs are.
The author longs for self-expression in blog format, the self-expression is there more than ever, just not in the one strict format that existed that way for a brief moment.
Part of it is where the eyeballs are, and part of it is what the content creators are using.
Blogs were written and read on computers. Now people consume, and increasingly produce, on phones. Hence blogs (long-form text) -> social media (short-form text) -> vlogs (long-form video) -> tiktok (short-form video)
Author's point about blogs is that Twitter, Instagram, etc aren't blogs and that's what he wants. Author's failure is that he is wrong, as blogs do still exist, including the Blogger service.
People publishing blogs were not “creators”. They were ordinary people publishing their personal, not-fashionable, unfiltered ramblings. That’s what we lost. It’s obvious that with the growth of internet access “variety” has grown exponentially, but it’s the same kind of variety you get from supermarket products, not real life experiences.
> just not in the one strict format
It’s exactly the other way around. 95% of all “content” on the platforms you mentioned looks the same today. The goal is now success, not sharing for the sake of sharing, and that severely limits how much you express yourself.
Yep I'm also very confused when I hear people talk about how blogs and rss readers are dead. I get more articles in my rss reader each day than I can keep up with and always have to go pare down my subscriptions. There is so much stuff to read out there.
Thank you, I'm glad I'm not the only one to think this. I have a blog on blogspot (formerly blogger), and I had to go check it to make sure it wasn't wiped... definitely still there lol.
> The other day I searched for an hour and couldn't find even one. They used to be endless.
Oh there are still endless blogs. There are definitely a lot of defunct ones - but many have become active again recently. I review the unknown ones I come across here: https://www.kickscondor.com/hrefhunt/ (I skip software and startup blogs, because they are so numerous.)
You just can’t use the old avenues (Google searches, casual social media mentions) to find them. HN is a good source, Indieweb circles are good, and Pinboard and Are.na are other good catalogs. Once you find a few blogs you like, you’ll find your way to many more.
Hi kicks! I didn’t know you were on HN, ever since discovering it I’ve been promoting the IndieWeb, and yours was the first site I came across; to me the IndieWeb and microformats is the web we should have gotten instead of one dominated by platforms.
It force content creators to write it in a certain way that in many cases might be way too long and not ’to the point’.
I dont remember the last time I searched for something on Google and it showed me a high quality opinion article in a random blog.
nowadays everything is around SEO and blogs, as much as I understand why google does that, I think it's the main reason for why blogs are not that popular anymore
Instead of an introduction and a recipe, you get a massive wall of text, such that you have to scroll for what seems like an eternity until you get to the actual recipe. Drives me nuts!
Recipes aren't good either. I noticed good sites like serious eats almost never come up. The same sites always come up, nytimes, all recipes, food.com.
I guess search engines aren't the best place to get recipes, you need someone to vet and review them.
Actually.. that might be an interesting thing to do heh
everything honestly has become elongated garbage. youtube videos are the same. 20+ minutes of rambling for 2 minutes of quality because thats the only way youtubers actually make any money. the internet is still a much more efficient tool than reading a textbook to find some information, but its getting to the point that it might be more interesting to sift through a textbook to find the info I want because at least im sifting through useful/more or less accurate info, instead of just pure filler nonsense that exists on the web today
I would argue Google also focuses on large corporations. I have a post on my blog that ranks really high (currently spot 3 for its keyword) in the bing/yahoo/ddg world but ranks after stack overflow, medium, reddit, youtube, etc. on google for the same keyword. (I did nothing to on this post for SEO it just organically showed up high on bing/yahoo/ddg)
I should also mention I have no ads of any kind on my blog.
For a long, long time, I have blogged without worrying about SEO or Google or even traffic. I write what I want. I don't look at analytics, and for my self-hosted sites, I don't have any analytics to look at.
Writing for SEO and trying to game Google is not interesting to me. There comes a point where the only think that keeps you going is the desire/compulsion to write.
I miss the days where Google would give me a relevant result with a minimal query, these days it's not helping me find what I'm looking for, it's 90% businesses trying to tell me something and low on content, high on SEO results. I guess this is how they do monetization but I often feel I'm unable to find content that must be out there.
I think news aggregators are more responsible for a changed blogging culture than Google with its search results and Reader killing.
I think the primary discovery mechanism should be blogrolls but few blogs have that today. My website does not have one either. Why? Because I don't follow my feed reader that deeply anymore. Instead I rely on Hacker News and other aggregators. The advantage of aggregators are that a human filter further reduces the noise.
A secondary mechanism should be links in articles. This requires articles to be comments on other articles. However, commenting mostly happens on the aggregators these days. When did you see a blog post which was a response to another blog post?
A healthy blogging culture requires a web of relationships between bloggers. Unfortunately, these relationships are mostly replaced by more efficient aggregator platforms.
In some sense blogging is dead: I see no discussions between bloggers anymore. On the other hand blogging is still alive: Lots of people write blogs but the intended audience is usually an anonymous community of aggregator commentators.
In short: Discussions do not happen in the blogosphere anymore but on aggregators and thus the relations between blogs have nearly disappeared.
I agree with you. That’s what I like about HN. I often read comments here that would be detailed and interesting enough to be blog articles. Most of the time the comments are even better than the original content.
As for content discovery I find that Google is irrelevant. Most of the time I want to read on topics I don’t know much about. Hence I would not even know what to search for. I rely on the power of the community to bring to light the best pieces of content. If I was still using RSS I would need to be subscribed to specific websites and would not read anything outside that bubble.
On a final note I think blogging is alive and well. This community proves it as much of the top posts are from blogs.
The degree to which my blogging gets so much hostility from people does not mesh with articles like this one claiming they wish blogs still existed. I can't get traffic for my blogs. No one shares them but me and then I get crap for doing that.
If you want that kind of internet, foster it. Look in the mirror. It's not just choices made by big companies or whatever that shape this space.
You shape it with your actions. And I get a fuck ton of accusations that if I advocate for something, it's "content marketing" and not my actual opinion. And the many people who know I'm dirt poor and most of my blogs have no ads, etc, usually don't bother to come forward to defend me or make sure to post first before some random internet stranger can thread shit.
Downvotes: Ironic evidence of the veracity of my claims.
Readit News
But that's rarely how things work.
The thing few people tell you when you start blogging is how futile it will seem - for a long, long time. You'll start by posting something you put a lot of work into. You'll publish, thinking of all the comments and emails you'll get.
Then, nothing. 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.
And this is the point at which most bloggers stop. After all, how can you justify more time spent on something that doesn't pay back?
The problem is that with a blog you need to think in terms of years. You have to write regularly over the course of years before you'll get any kind of reliable following.
In the meantime, you'll notice how blogging regularly changes you. You'll notice patterns you never noticed before, especially if you stick to a particular "beat." You'll get better at choosing topics. You'll figure out ways to write faster. You'll get better at pushing through mental fog and procrastination that keeps so many others from writing.
You may also discover that you really, really hate writing. Nothing wrong with that, but understand that many people also dislike writing anything longer than a tweet. And that's why good blogs are kind of scarce. And therein lies the opportunity.
Some of the internet has also shifted to a privacy centric attitude. The whole world is a big place to share intimate stories which will be indexed and used against you in job interviews or by oppressive governments.
I still think there's value in private blogging, writing just to keep your friends and family informed. Blogging doesn't always have to be sharing with the whole world. I wish there were more platforms to make this easy to do.
Or, to put that another way: blogs are/were effectively people publicizing their diaries. (Or, in the case of a work blog, publicizing the contents of their https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventor%27s_notebook).
> Today that need is filled with Facebook/Twitter/
Not really? Facebook/Twitter/etc. are for "what you're thinking right now." Incomplete, out-of-context thoughts. Maybe conversations, where the thought plus access to the author for further questioning can "add up to" a complete, legible text.
I've never seen Facebook/Twitter used for "a breakthrough in understanding you've had, and want to preserve for posterity and your own future reference; where enough context is given that you (or someone else) can recapture the whole of the idea just from the words on the page, 10+ years down the line." That's the sole province of blogging. (Or of books, journal papers, and open letters. But blogs are a lot lower-overhead than any of those.)
Exactly this. Im not sure if my experience was typical, but i recall lots of small mini communities of bloggers, where each blog would have less than a dozen real followers, but everyone would read the other peoples content. Thats why you had the "follows" tab on the sidebar of the blog.
I also recall a distinction between homepages (IE where useful static information collected in one place) and blogs (personal stories not with the goal of teaching). Homepages could have lots of traffic but little real interaction (like FB today). Blogs would have lots of detailed interaction but but very little viewership.
This is what I've been pointing out for years as the lost core of the internet.
This right here. You all need to calm down like you're all so unique you are all owed 1000s of views a day. Write for the sake of writing- it's rewarding in and of itself.
Writing is a public act. You might still be expecting some readership without the expectation of ad money or promotion of something.
What I miss most about the blogs in 90s and early 00s is the conversation between blogs by linking, quoting and commenting each other. Reading blogs involved going from one blog to another, and reading blogs of 10 people about a single issue. It was a conversation. And you would constantly discover new blogs this way.
I've never really bought this line of argument. People who "write just for writing" don't publish. They write it in One Note or Evernote or Tiddlywiki or plain old text files on their laptop. They don't sign up for Wordpress accounts (or even worse, spend hours configuring some static site generator) and publish it.
People publish things because they want them to be read. Having no indication that they are being read is, understandably, discouraging for people who are publishing things.
Besides, I really prefer to read over watching videos as I can do it at my own pace. Except in cases where a lot is shown like EEVBlog, it makes sense there.
But easy platforms exist. Wordpress is still there :) You just have to keep it up to date like a hawk.
Don't they all work like this by default? You don't have to share what you write everywhere. You also don't need to use FB or Twitter to blog.
Personally, I think the blogosphere is covered pretty well for me by the likes of Medium. I'm not sure how I feel about that, but they've made a damn good job at cornering that part of the market for those more serious posts that were previously relegated to the blogosphere. That's a place I'd put a more well-formed idea. A great example is the article, "Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now" by Thomas Pueyo.[1]
Outside that, blogs still exists! I still even have my own. I think the complaint is rather that they're hard to index or search. And to that end, there are many solutions and ways around it that still exist, such as syndication or even RSS.
[1]: https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-peop...
I blog my work activities on an internal wiki for similar reasons. Major decisions need to be gathered in project documentation but small decisions and daily challenges are good to have written down.
It was more of a journal and something maybe if my friends and family wanted to read, they could. A slightly extroverted way of showing your inner thoughts and life.
I used to think blogging come as complementary to your skills. How will anyone use them against you?
Here's the thing: write that. Go meta, just a little, and write about your journey. "I thought this, but then I found out that, and now my questions have evolved thus..."
I think it was Orson Welles who, when somebody asked him if they could write his biography, said, "No, because it will be false. You may write the story of your attempt to discover the truth of my life."
When you're familiar with an idea, it seems to you like it's obvious and it's mentioned everywhere, but there are also lots of people out there for whom it will be new. Maybe you aren't the first one to say it, but you're the first one they heard it from. You'll inevitably put your own spin on it, too. I've been working on convincing myself that it's not necessary to come up with some completely novel thought that nobody ever thought before in order to just post something. Practically nobody does that.
Not everything has to be new or novel. You may add to the discussion and enhance it by writing about what informed your change of heart.
And that, right there, is the best reason to remove all analytics from your blog/website[1]. At the risk of being held guilty of self-promotion, I wrote a little blog post about just this a couple of weeks ago: https://one.mikro2nd.net/2020/05/why-no-web-analytics-are-to... (Thing is, if anybody here does go and read it, I won't even know.)
At the root of the unease is the question, "Why are you blogging?" If it's something you do for yourself, then analytics -- specifically: who is reading which posts -- is a distraction, and sure to lead you astray into the thickets and quagmire of writing mere clickbait.
If you're writing to establish "thought leadership" in some sphere, then display leadership, not followership (i.e. chasing the analytics.) It's a strange and uncomfortable feeling at first (perhaps always!) but at least you'll always know who you're writing for (yourself). If you're writing for some "payback" then I'd suggest that submitting articles to magazines is a better path/platform than blogging.
Personally I am more interested in inciting thought and discussion through my blog, so mere visitor statistics are of little interest. What would validate what I do there would be someone who reaches out to talk about something I've written. That's the real payback.
[1] Nor any trackers of any sort.
Why would I use the very thing I'm trying so hard to avoid when surfing the web? It's basically a matter of respect to the reader. So I designed my site following the values I consider so important for websites in general: no trackers, no mandatory javascript, no obstacles between the user and the content.
my first thought when reading this was "yeah, that's because users don't know how to RSS". it's not that i know how to RSS that well, but i do have friends who use RSS in the style of masters. my favorite strategy that i have heard of, and what i will try to replicate in a few months, is: rss subscription >> local mail service >> inbound mail folders filled with articles from my RSS feed.
i've been practicing my own ability to use "the computer" in a way that makes me feel like a master... and we'll see if i ever get there. surely though, we are all missing out on the oldschool internet that was swallowed by the walled gardens.
but it seems that we're headed for a renaissance
I've only been doing it for less than a year, so I haven't reached the stuff you're talking about. I haven't even really branched out into talking about general topics yet, but I plan to soon. I'm just slowly feeling my way around, seeing what I can do and what I have time for and whatever. I don't get (m)any views that aren't myself yet though, lol.
That's what people chose, because it's easier. They gave up content rights and many, many possibilities for the ease of posting and the near instant views and feedback.
Still, something doesn't feel quite right about Medium to me.
I have a blog which I've maintained for a long time and continue to publish on. But for a lot of the material I write on a day to day basis, I can publish at online pubs/sites where I have editorial support, an established audience, and promotional machinery. I'm not limited--I can always publish by myself--but for many of the things I write about I might as well choose an existing publication.
Open source software development can be like this as well. Most of my projects ended up being useful to me alone. I started some just to see if some fundamental idea was possible: lost all motivation to actually finish the project once I proved to myself that it was.
I contributed some features to an existing project and they got a lot more attention. Interacting with fellow developers and users is a great experience. Made me care a lot more about the end result and whether it got merged.
Perhaps a personal wiki would be better than a blog. As long as the articles are useful to their writers, they should have enough motivation to keep writing.
However things with the publishing and PR industry are such that I think it would be best to get some eyeballs and feedback before you spend years writing hoping to get discovered, much like launching a product or service too late after spending too much time in pre-production.
Sadly I think it's multiple changes in google that killed blogs over the years and I don't see blogs coming back into the top search results (or blog link rolls not being penalties that scare people into never using them) and changing things.
I love blogs, and blogging - but I must admit that more success is found by tweeting or even making a meme that is shared. If you can't hope for google to give you results and never know if fbook is going to block your blog, then I don't suggest people put eggs in that basket - unless there is another side reason for doing so, like your posts are auto-added to instagram or something somehow.
Real blogging is about sharing your thoughts and ideas on whatever niche topic interests you with people who have the same interests, and the conversations that arise out of that. Like the friendships that form from participating in BBSes and forums over the years, the value is in the fun you have and the interesting discussions and bouncing ideas off others' viewpoints. It doesn't need to be a business to be fulfilling.
Think this is NOT his fourth post. It may be a new front end: Check out the other blogs: http://tttthis.coolstuffinterestingstuffnews.com
Their site is http://tttthis.com
I remember it because I sometimes try to find it. I quite liked a post of theirs called "Remember websites" or something to that effect.
I think what is missing now is the rich set of tools around the ecosystem. Posterous was a great service to let you email your thoughts directly to a blog post. I am amazed there was no other competitor that sprung up when they got bought out and shut down by Twitter nearly a decade ago.
I really miss Google Reader, which was where I used to keep a curated list of the top blogs I used to read regularly. Even now, some mornings I wish I could just open my Google Reader home page and check out the latest updates from some of my favourite bloggers.
It’s hard getting the ideas down, but having lived long enough to lost a few email accounts from My childhood, and other such content.
When you want to preserve for future generations I think there’s really something to be said for paper. I think Nassim Taleb had ideas about papers longevity too, the longer a technology had been around the longer it will likely stay around. As in email will likely outside Facebook simply because it’s already been around longer.
You might want to check it out.
https://www.inoreader.com/
To my surprise, medium doesn't let you publish (write yes, not publish) anything, unless you jump through several obscure loops like "engaging with the platform for a while".
My article wasn't particularly important, so I am not too heartbroken about it. But what this tells me is that there seems to be a lot of demand for publishing posts of different nature.
My problem with blogging is that I can’t just write in a vacuum, I must always write in response to something and when I have something worth responding too I can write more usefully.
[0]https://www.jwz.org/blog/
I've been blogging for eight years now, and it has been very rewarding. It's great to get readers, and it is great to end up on the front page of Hacker News. But it is also really good to have a blog to point people to when you look for a job.
One thing that is still true is how much work it is to write even a short blog post. It still takes me hours of concentrated work. But I am still doing it, becuase the value outweighs the cost.
More on my blogging here: https://henrikwarne.com/2017/11/26/6-years-of-thoughts-on-pr...
> After all, how can you justify more time spent on something that doesn't pay back?
If you think that the value of your writing is measured by the attention it attracts, you are set for a really rough and sad career as a writer.
> But that's rarely how things work.
Totally agree. I've written a fair bit about blogging, but when I started a new blog aimed at helping new developers, for the first month I wrote more posts than I had visitors (!): https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/2019/10/14/how-to-start-b...
I think that six months is enough time to commit. At the end of that period you'll either have the bug and want to keep blogging or know the format is not for you.
If I was to make an analogy using your perspective on blogging with facebook or instagram - you post about yourself or post personal photos for a long time. It is futile, for a long long time, nobody sees your content... you post photos for years, and you realize it changes you. You will notice patterns, you will get better at posting photos ...
I am exaggerating to make a point and it is this, you may find yourself needing to perfect your content strategy(blog, photos or facebook-style posts) for years and the main reason it doesn't pay back is there is no network or community anymore. You shouldn't have to be a pro to get noticed.
People tried decentralized networks and that didn't work so well, because one - you need modern blogging software (newsfeed, real time comments, spam moderation, good recommendation algorithms) and it has to be managed by a centralized authority that offers a great user experience. Today, closest thing to this is facebook and twitter (and instagram). All in all you must have these for a great blogging experience: first, good software and central authority, then network. It must be focused on serving authentic bloggers, and it must be backed by a commercial solution.
That in turn means, a paid service, whose customers are bloggers. That means, how badly do you want an amazing blogging experience, where you blog with great writing tools, search, discover, and interact with others (and probably in today's world, be able to hop on a video chat with your viewers and share that in comments). Yes, so how much do you desire to have it, would you pay $5/month? $30/month? $100/month? It comes down to this.
If there was monetary backing, this problem could be solved with a 'solution'. Chances are that not enough many people want it, and people are content with free posting on instagram, twitter, or facebook, and happy to live with ads. If this was a high demand service, chances are that it would have already been built, or existing ones would already be prospering (tumblr didn't make money and got acquired, blogger shut down, medium serving writers looking to make money, recreational blogging is not their target and so on). So is this a real problem to solve or not?
Maybe people don't know they want it and aren't organized enough to support it, - if you built an amazing experience maybe lots of bloggers will pay for it, then it will become another, facebook where the network is funded by its users.
As for a network and aggregation, back in the day there were decentralized solutions. We had RSS and pingbacks and Google News, which in the early days was largely a blog search engine. There were things like Reddit and StumbleUpon for finding new blogs, in addition to slashdot and Hacker News. Many of these sites have changed in terms of content since then, but originally a lot of what they linked to was blogs.
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Discovery is a problem but I just subscribe to blogs when I find them via RSS (Blogs still have RSS, it's hard to find one without which is surprising but I'm glad that's the case), over time I build up my list of blogs I like and they usually link to other blogs and the list slowly grows.
Wrote a tiny bit about my setup on my blog: https://blog.notmyhostna.me/posts/rss-is-luckily-not-dead-ye...
I also recently started a new blog where a friend and me are blogging about annoying things: https://annoying.technology
Anyway, it felt like a bunch of places went from having active communities to stagnating or dying outright overnight. People forget just how much general innovation was being driven by these sites - Styleforum and AskAndy for men's fashion, BB.com for health and wellness (ignoring misc), Something Awful also comes to mind.
Reddit was supposed to become the trusted alternative, but it just really hasn't happened.
I suspect what you’re looking for is:
1. The intimate small town feel of the early internet, and
2. The higher average post quality (because of the type of person that both had internet and used forums back then) as measured by intellectuality, domain specificity, and demonstrated expertise.
Reddit doesn’t display those qualities because of the tragedy of the commons phenomenon. Great content is interspersed with what is essentially “noob spam.” Even if it has a greater aggregate amount of quality content, it doesn’t have the same feel as older forums.
Reddit can try to fix this by grouping people together into social clusters. If there is a subreddit with 2 million people, why not create many smaller “breakout” groups that coexist with the main thread? Of course, this is easier said than done, but I’m sure it’s possible to execute this idea well.
I think VR meeting rooms will be the ultimate solution. They will be intimate by definition, and people will sort into their favorite social groups. An American scientist might join an international “scientist salon” and socialize with scientists everywhere from Germany to Japan. A bulletin would contain and display static text posts by the members of the salon. It would also display things like plebiscites and summaries of important meetings. You’d be able to bounce around different groups with a different subject matter any time you want. Some will have barriers to entry and identity verification, most won’t. Some groups will be purely social and defined more by the members than by any subject matter. Altogether that would make the internet feel more like a collection of physical spaces inhabited by communities of people.
What I’m describing ideally shouldn’t be run by one corporation like Facebook or Reddit. The communities should be strung together by a shared backbone under an Internet 3.0. Visiting one should be like visiting a different website. We can use the formation of the original 2D internet as a template for how to proceed in creating a VR internet.
Google heavily biases their results to two things: the top 1000 sites on the internet, and clickbait (callout posts and threads slandering someone rank like you wouldn't believe; no backlinks required). Maybe if you keep at your blog for 2+ years, manage to land a few HN frontpage story links, it might eventually show up. But who is going to invest that time and effort instead of just setting up a Facebook page instead?
I remember in the "dying days" of some of the forums I was on the conversation had largely devolved into reposting and discussing memes and things that were happening on Reddit. From there it's just a matter of time before the discussion moved to Reddit too. This fate perhaps could have been avoided if "Sign in with Google" type capabilities were more widely available at the time, or if we had a more universal login/forum scheme like Disqus back then, but they all came around too late.
So much easier to take a picture on your phone and post it to your Instagram page or story. Better dopamine rush, too, from a bunch of Like/Comment notifications rather than maybe a single forum reply hours later.
Started about 20 years ago, It’s totally vibrant, despite an old school UI. Some threads keep going for years.
Sure, the signal to noise ratio isn’t always perfect either, but there’s still a continuing flow of golden nuggets of deeper industry information, helpful howto answers, and thoughtful commentary and feedback around music software.
In some ways it’s a little like HN, but in some ways I find it superior, like baked in notifications and being able to mute those that are too annoying. It probably helps that it’s adjunct to arguably the best music software directory, with imperfect, yet useful taxonomy, and old school advertising that’s highly relevant to the community.
[0] https://www.kvraudio.com/about-kvr
Are you suggesting Google had a plan to promote reddit? or what do you mean by "was supposed to"?
I'm just re-setting up my own blog (to complement a Youtube channel). Without designing one from scratch (with a static site generator or some such), it's quite difficult to get an off the shelf one that isn't bloated as hell though. I should suck it up but design isn't my strong-suit, and I'd rather just get straight to writing and recording.
After some reasearch I decided to go with Jekyll + GitHub Pages, forked a theme that seemed Ok and made some style changes, nothing fancy. Must say I'm really happy with my choice.
There's one thing though, I'm writing posts using markdown in an IDE. Don't really consider that a disadvantage though, and I guess most developers would be really fine with that.
Here's the link to the repository in case you'd like to take a look and try it out: https://github.com/TCGV/blog
I guess it’s hard to find blogs these days when you just type “blog” into the search engine, or search for a keyword that a million people compete on in order to sell you stuff. But if you have actual, say technical questions, you’ll land on interesting blog posts in no time, sometimes not even on the dumpster fire that is Medium, and written by people who aren’t writing merely to bolster their online presence.
When it comes to reaching people, the odds are stacked against you on your personal website because of multi billion dollar companies optimizing for ad revenue and vastly preferring directing people to ad equipped channels of their choice rather than your website. This is also the real reason Google killed Google Reader: they wanted to capture the ad revenue and instead force content producers to use those. Which is why all news publishers bend over backwards to ensure their news shows up in Google news.
It's that simple. Any click that goes to your website directs the user away from their money making channels. So, they don't. With RSS readers, most of your potential audience will never find you unless they subscribed to your article or it randomly shows up as a link in some channel they follow. Getting lucky on HN helps. But most people don't get that lucky.
So-called influencers basically try to manipulate the odds by doing what they think yields the best results. That's why clickbait exists, why your twitter and facebook feeds are filled with crap, and why it is so hard to find channels that contain curated content. That's also why we all love HN.
https://annoying.technology/colophon/
But quite frequently as I was trying to read, everything on screen jumped upwards, by a few lines or half a page, apparently because stuff below it was loading. Normally I wouldn't complain, the site has taught me not to put up silently with such things. Don't think I've seen that behaviour before. (Am using latest version of FF)
With such a dominant market share, search has certainly lowered in quality
I would argue that the public internet has lowered in quality, and the lowering quality of search results simply reflects that the information you're looking for often isn't out there.
A good chunk of that is that more and more info is locked into walled gardens (in some App, on Facebook/Instagram/TicTok), but also a lot of what people want to find in todays world just isn't on the internet anymore, except places like the web archive, where Google isn't allowed to venture...
As with TFA, the notion that Google has some death grip on data is premature at best.
Go to Wordpress and start a blog. The fascists have blown up much of the rest of social media.
The open web has had a great run but it too is being brought to its knees by spam just like every other open platform.
I've never encountered this before when searching for linux or programming topics. In those cases, Google results always include relevant stack overflow postings and links to the appropriate section of documentation.
I'm surprised Google hasn't penalized these spam pages, but I'd imagine there are some perverse incentives to keep them around. Wouldn't surprise me if many of these sites show adds through a Google-owned affiliate program or are in another way tied into Google's ad tech empire.
You're rebuilding the internet, if not from the ground up, then {UDP,TCP}/IP up.
What do you do in the next internet to try to avoid the spam and SEO problems on this internet?
Overall I'm very happy with this extremely simple setup, and am almost annoyed that I didn't spend those few seconds it is to set something like this up years ago.
---
As to the original link posted, blogs obviously never went anywhere, but they aren't (anymore) in the places that you are. I feel this comes close to the frustration some people have that "nobody is reading books anymore because everyone are streaming movies and series instead". Books never went anywhere, and they're probably more accessible than ever. If you're not reading books now, that's on you.
Similarly with blogs: if you're not reading and/or following blogs, it's just because you don't want to.
My tech/programming blog has 1.4K subscribers and used to reliably get between 100 to 200 views per day, then in the space of 2 days from 6 March to 7 March this year it suddenly dropped down to around 10 to 20 views per day. The drop was extremely sudden and hasn't recovered since. Nothing changed on my side; I just started publishing more blockchain articles (since I work in that industry) but the drop badly affected my non-blockchain articles too (especially the ones which used to get a lot of recurring visitors from Google).
I wasn't relying on my blog financially though (just a hobby) so it hasn't hurt me too bad.
Here is my blog: https://medium.com/@jonathangrosdubois
Many of my past articles were related to my open source project (I've been maintaining it for many years and it is not blockchain related): https://socketcluster.io/
I feel that Google has always been working against open source software when it comes to search; maybe because their algorithm figured out that Google can't monetize open source projects (OSS projects don't tend to promote on Adwords). They tend to drive organic traffic mostly to paid SaaS solutions instead.
Strangely enough though, my open source project is now getting starred at a higher rate than ever before, it has almost 6K stars on GitHub and seems to be consistently getting several per week now even though I do no marketing and my Google organic traffic is terrible - The faster rate of stars is also strange because Google Analytics shows me flat traffic (has been around the same number of daily users for the past couple of years).
http://handlr.sapico.me
One thing, people really like https, especially when sending form data such as the signup.
But certainly the more the merrier
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For me it's really quick and lightweight.
I genuinely don't understand the author's complaint. The only thing I can imagine is that there are a lot more alternatives for self-expression on the internet now, e.g. Instagram, Twitter, podcasts, etc. So blogs are perhaps a smaller percentage.
But given that you could never read even 0.1% of all the blog posts ever written, the percentage is irrelevant. There are more unique, quirky, individualist blogs out there than the author could ever get to the end of.
So I don't understand what the problem is. It's not even factual. The author claims Blogger was shut down... but it still exists. The author claims there's no way to find blogs... but it's pretty easy. The author claims nobody is writing blogs... but obviously they are.
I guess the main complaint is that you can't find quirky random blogs by searching Google for the search term "blog"? Not much of a complaint to me. If you want a curated list of quirky blogs, there are lots of lists out there of people's favorites.
No, they don't. This comes down to two main changes in how Google operates: 1) Google no longer respects search operators so that users can get fine-grained results, and 2) Google has chosen to progressively delist old content, even if many blog posts from the early millennium remain just as relevant today because no one has posted at length on the subject in the years since.
Thus, people are unable to find a great deal of content through Google even if they search for the exact strings which appear in those posts. You might see some blogs in search results, but they are a miniscule representation of the whole blog ecosystem.
They do. Search for "javascript vscode" and "javascript -vscode" completely different results.
Do you have an example of a website that is linked to from other sites (so Google can find it) where a quoted search for a unique sentence fragment from it doesn't list it as a result?
I've just never heard authoritatively of Google removing old content from results, especially since it seems antithetical to the company's mission of organizing all the world's information. And seeing how so much of the value of search (and purchasing and content and so much else) is in the "long tail", it seems like it would be an extremely counterproductive strategy.
The medium has diversified away from just blogs, but the amount mediums and creators has exploded.
Many of those people who used to blog on Blogspot have moved on to YouTube, TikTok Twitter, Instagram, Medium, WordPress, Shopify, Webflow, and more.
So the whole premise is bunk. "Blogs" in their 2005 term may have changed. But the amount of people publishing 280+ character content on Twitter, Instagram (as video or image descriptions), and all others is more than ever.
Instagram and YouTube are where many of the eyeballs are.
The author longs for self-expression in blog format, the self-expression is there more than ever, just not in the one strict format that existed that way for a brief moment.
Blogs were written and read on computers. Now people consume, and increasingly produce, on phones. Hence blogs (long-form text) -> social media (short-form text) -> vlogs (long-form video) -> tiktok (short-form video)
> just not in the one strict format
It’s exactly the other way around. 95% of all “content” on the platforms you mentioned looks the same today. The goal is now success, not sharing for the sake of sharing, and that severely limits how much you express yourself.
Not sure what this author is talking about.
So longer form blogging on a unique site [yourname.com or wordpress.yourname.com] didn't grow as quickly as posting pics on Titter/IG/Snap etc...
That makes sense to me, most people aren't putting effort into writing.
Oh there are still endless blogs. There are definitely a lot of defunct ones - but many have become active again recently. I review the unknown ones I come across here: https://www.kickscondor.com/hrefhunt/ (I skip software and startup blogs, because they are so numerous.)
You just can’t use the old avenues (Google searches, casual social media mentions) to find them. HN is a good source, Indieweb circles are good, and Pinboard and Are.na are other good catalogs. Once you find a few blogs you like, you’ll find your way to many more.
It force content creators to write it in a certain way that in many cases might be way too long and not ’to the point’.
I dont remember the last time I searched for something on Google and it showed me a high quality opinion article in a random blog.
nowadays everything is around SEO and blogs, as much as I understand why google does that, I think it's the main reason for why blogs are not that popular anymore
Instead of an introduction and a recipe, you get a massive wall of text, such that you have to scroll for what seems like an eternity until you get to the actual recipe. Drives me nuts!
I guess search engines aren't the best place to get recipes, you need someone to vet and review them.
Actually.. that might be an interesting thing to do heh
I should also mention I have no ads of any kind on my blog.
This is a huge problem and google definitely makes it worse, but this has always been a problem.
From magazine writers who are paid by the word to technical books that are padded out to be 400 pages when they could have been 50.
Writing for SEO and trying to game Google is not interesting to me. There comes a point where the only think that keeps you going is the desire/compulsion to write.
I think the primary discovery mechanism should be blogrolls but few blogs have that today. My website does not have one either. Why? Because I don't follow my feed reader that deeply anymore. Instead I rely on Hacker News and other aggregators. The advantage of aggregators are that a human filter further reduces the noise.
A secondary mechanism should be links in articles. This requires articles to be comments on other articles. However, commenting mostly happens on the aggregators these days. When did you see a blog post which was a response to another blog post?
A healthy blogging culture requires a web of relationships between bloggers. Unfortunately, these relationships are mostly replaced by more efficient aggregator platforms.
In some sense blogging is dead: I see no discussions between bloggers anymore. On the other hand blogging is still alive: Lots of people write blogs but the intended audience is usually an anonymous community of aggregator commentators.
In short: Discussions do not happen in the blogosphere anymore but on aggregators and thus the relations between blogs have nearly disappeared.
Update: After writing this comment, I felt bad about not having a blogroll. Fixed that: http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/blogs_en.html
As for content discovery I find that Google is irrelevant. Most of the time I want to read on topics I don’t know much about. Hence I would not even know what to search for. I rely on the power of the community to bring to light the best pieces of content. If I was still using RSS I would need to be subscribed to specific websites and would not read anything outside that bubble.
On a final note I think blogging is alive and well. This community proves it as much of the top posts are from blogs.
Nope. It still exists and I use it.
And I'm given hell for it.
The degree to which my blogging gets so much hostility from people does not mesh with articles like this one claiming they wish blogs still existed. I can't get traffic for my blogs. No one shares them but me and then I get crap for doing that.
If you want that kind of internet, foster it. Look in the mirror. It's not just choices made by big companies or whatever that shape this space.
You shape it with your actions. And I get a fuck ton of accusations that if I advocate for something, it's "content marketing" and not my actual opinion. And the many people who know I'm dirt poor and most of my blogs have no ads, etc, usually don't bother to come forward to defend me or make sure to post first before some random internet stranger can thread shit.
Downvotes: Ironic evidence of the veracity of my claims.
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Currently it's linking to the "edit" page.
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