If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs | Hacker News Reader

If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs

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1,186 pointsTTTThis615 comments

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.

> The blogs the author misses aren't written to make money off of ad traffic, they were just written to put down ideas.

This is what I've been pointing out for years as the lost core of the internet.

>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.

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?".

> 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.

[1] Nor any trackers of any sort.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> It looks like this is the author's fourth post and s/he hit a home run with the top post on HN.

Think this is NOT his fourth post. It may be a new front end: Check out the other blogs: http://tttthis.coolstuffinterestingstuffnews.com

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.

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.

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.

More on my blogging here: https://henrikwarne.com/2017/11/26/6-years-of-thoughts-on-pr...

> Then, nothing. You'll check the analytics. Abysmal. Nobody is reading!

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

The way to immortality is to write.

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.

Thanks for the wonderfully insightful comment. I need to save this so I can periodically look at it for motivation!

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.

I disagree, I had 100,000 uniques on my third blog post. Of course, there was less Internet in 2005.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

In a vein similar to your annoying technology site, you would probably appreciate https://grumpy.website/ One of my favorite blogs of all time.

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/

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 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'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.

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).

I have an entire setup for crawling rss hourly

http://handlr.sapico.me

Your annoying technology blog reminds of this Jonathan Blow talk where he talked about decreasing quality of software: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk

You inspired me to do a project today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23208846

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

I just want to say that I like your nitmyhostname blog and enjoyed your article on RSS.

I like your blog! It reminds me of https://littlebigdetails.com/ except it’s the opposite. Bookmarked!

Annoying Technology is one of my favorite recent finds. Just wanted to vouch: Good stuff!

Why is the annoying.technology blog uses so much cpu?

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.

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.

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.

Not sure what this author is talking about.

It’s not something most people care about anymore, and it was nice when it was.

My 2000s Blogger sites are all still live. I've ported some of those posts to other sites, but most just live over at Blogger.

Could give examples how finding blogs is easy and "lots of lists out there of people's favorites"?

> 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.

HrefHunt is awesome! Thank you. Crawling through it for my spartan collection: https://old.reddit.com/r/SpartanWeb/

The problem as I see it is the Google algorithm.

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

Food blogs are the perfect example of this.

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 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.

>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’.

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.

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.

Update: After writing this comment, I felt bad about not having a blogroll. Fixed that: http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/blogs_en.html

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.

But Blogger was shut down by Google years ago

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.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200516183004/http://tttthis.co...

The OP link should probably be changed to: http://tttthis.com/blog/if-i-could-bring-one-thing-back-to-t...

Currently it's linking to the "edit" page.

If I could bring one thing back it would be just plain old _websites_, when people would make a place on the internet dedicated to some topic that was organized in a way _other than_ chronological order, and just became a great resource where important information was always easy to surface.

Here's a great example that will probably trigger some nostalgia for anyone who grew up on the late 90s internet:

http://www.petesqbsite.com/

I was just looking for good academic websites in my field, and I found that for the most part, they're gone. They still exist, especially Google sites. It's just that they're purely for promotion. Almost entirely things an employer would look for. 20 years ago, you'd have academics putting material on their websites to provide information to others.

I would bring back RSS. The good parts of twitter (you can follow what lots of people have to say and aggregate it in a single feed) without the bad parts (character limits, "you stink" and other snarky comments, control of a centralised platform over who can say what, etc).

Twitter - ephemeral, too condensed or else a huge thread

Blogs - permanent, can explore at depth

RSS - Multiple chances to go back and read something if you don't right away

I use RSS everyday, and follow several hundred sites using it. One thing that gets overlooked when discussing RSS is that the nature of feeds themselves lends to scripting. I have one single source of aggregated data that I can run queries against, automate scripts with, generate alerts from etc. It's nice.

I don't think RSS has gone anywhere. Most half-decent blogs still support it, I think.

We sure do spend a lot of time brooding about how to generate, write about, and share ideas with an unknown online audience. What would happen if instead of spending hours and hours researching whether we should use WordPress or Ghost or Jekyll, we spent that time reading and writing and reflecting?

We all know too much about one another these days. It doesn't seem to matter to whom we address our writing. There is something to writing for yourself, writing offline, writing as a means of forming a private life and a private consciousness. And what about writing for the experience of writing itself? Forget publishing.

Ours is a society that says so little about nearly everything, and most commentary on the web today isn't worth reading. Furthermore, all content is ephemeral, people share gentle opinions instead of strong convictions because it is safer for one's public reputation, nobody is good at or cares about typography, self-editing is not a skill that people have, and you can never tell where the delusional self-promotion ends and the truthful personal expression begins.

We have become so sensitive to other people's personalities, accomplishments, productivity habits, recommendations, and advice for life. To what end?

I don't know. Reading blogs is not my idea of quality time.

There is just a problem with self curated content in general. There used to be a lot of experts making their own sites with information that was never available before. It was easy to just upload some HTML files somewhere. Now this information is being put in inaccessible areas like Facebook Groups. Then people tried running their own sites with wordpress and stuff but that becomes hard as you are usually on a crappy shared host, and get hacked the minute an exploit comes out.

As technologists, I think we could help by making it easier for people to publish to the open web with just plain HTML. Static site generators like Hugo go a long way there. CDNs like cloudfront are cheap now so no servers needed. We should make it easy for people by having something that can do it all for them. Get a domain, CDN, and SSL cert then a simple local editing tool and one button publish.

> Now this information is being put in inaccessible areas like Facebook Groups.

I hate that Facebook groups hide a lot of info this way. Back then google found blog posts and forum posts about a particular subject. Now if they are in a closed facebook group (is this the default?) then google won't see it.

I don't know if google indexes public facebook groups.

I agree and have personally found it quite easy to setup small websites hosted on AWS using Route53, Certificate Manager, S3, and CloudFront. They cost nearly nothing at low scale and are quite cost efficient until you hit serious scale, which few personal website ever achieve.

Yet, I don't think most people are going to want to go this route and it would take a fair amount of tooling to automate everything. It's not sufficient to just abstract away the cloud provider, people also need tools for creating and managing content. In theory you could run such tools locally, but I think most people would expect a web interface similar to that provided by Wordpress and medium.

Further, there's a big difference between free and essentially zero cost. How many people are going to be motivated to pull out their credit card to create blog when free alternatives already exist? Not only are existing blogging sites free, but they also promise the opportunity to actually make money through their affiliate program if the site becomes popular.

The huge leap would be to try to make all of that simple and accessible to non-technical people without making it bloated like Wordpress.

What are these Facebook Groups with expert content?

It’s not so much that blogging died but that commenting on them directly did, and with it blog culture. Commenting now takes place in other venues, not visible to the blog’s reader unless that venue is where they came from.

HN is part of that of course.

Shameless plug:

I wrote my own blog engine in Python (https://github.com/betodealmeida/nefelibata). It generates static pages, but publishes a snippet to Twitter/Mastodon/etc., linking back to the blog post.

People can only comment on the social media sites, and periodically the comments get scraped and appended to the blog post. Here's an example: https://blog.taoetc.org/mastodon_integration/index.html

This way, people can comment in the other venues where they're used to, and comments get persisted past the lifetime of these venues.

I have four new interns who recently started in my team. I'm setting them up for blogging and made the same point to them (almost verbatim).

Another thing that died is the practice of linking to each other like it's going out of style. These days the majority of backlinks are earned through aggressive SEO techniques, not organically like 10-15 years ago. This penalizes regular blogs in favor of crappy blogs run by SEO experts.

I still believe in blogging and I think that the lesser competition, in a roundabout way, makes it easier to stand out. However, discoverability in Google can be a frustrating process both for readers and publishers.

I think most wordpress blogs with commentariats just use Disqus now. It's buggy and unreliable, but the commenting capability is still there generally.

I use commento.io, which allows anonymous commenting. More than half of the comments on my blog are anonymous commenters. I think it's about reducing the initial friction as much as possible.

Blogs are all over the place and I don't find any of the arguments as to why they might not be as popular well founded nor compelling.

Running a blog is either free or nearly free. With Github pages, Blogger, Netlify, and many more platforms, the only cost you're going to incur is a domain name and even that isn't mandatory. If you do want one, you can easily get a domain name for a tenner a year or less.

Technicality isn't a convincing argument either, there are many ways to get started with just a push of a button and the range of options spans far and wide if you want more. Premade templates, static site generators, WYSIWYG editors and more have made the barrier to entry lower than ever.

Which brings me to my last point, audience. Audience is one of the most recurring themes of woes and, I would say, the most childish. Wanting to be heard is a reasonable wish, along with wanting to belong and many other basic traits. However, demanding to be heard is something else entirely. Your blog wont attract thousands of regular readers from day one and in hoping so, you're simply setting yourself up for failure. The truth is, if you write good content, the readers will come.

Even with that said, I would argue that having readers isn't a good end for your means in and of itself. Much like chasing popularity just because, obsessing over SEO, analytics and all that other jazz is simply trying to feed your ego. Tame your ego, and write about what matters to you. If you're only writing for others, then maybe writing isn't the best way to use your time.

Fully agreed. When the blogs died one of the richest and most interesting parts of the internet died with it. The good news is that Wordpress.com and Blogspot still exist so the information was not lost, but almost all of the blogs haven't been updated in 5+ years. I'd love to see a concerted effort to have them rebooted -- maybe Google could up-rank them, or CPMs could increase, or Patreon-like models could be built in, who knows.

fwiw I don't see Medium as being a replacement for blogs. It's gotten quite bad from a user standpoint and kills the relationship with the reader in the same way that "blogging" on Linkedin or Facebook does (not quite as bad because at least it's findable on the open web).

I don't think blogs are dead, just hidden from view. That's why I obsessively bookmark blogs when I see them posted to HN or Reddit, since I know I'll never be able to find them again if I lose the link.

The thing about WordPress is that the majority of WordPress sites are presentational websites, landing pages or e-commerce sites, not actual blogs.

Remember E/N sites? Everything/nothing. Just a blip.

It was weird reading this. My blog's been around for 16 years, always on my own platform(s), never on Blogger, Wordpress or the like (I have a presence on Medium, but post very seldom since I see little value in it).

Most of the 200-odd RSS feeds I follow are unique voices (albeit 50 or so are "mass market" stuff like Anandtech, The Verge, etc., just so that I know what is making the headlines).

We've always been here. Search results and social networks have added a lot of noise, but you can still get signal.

I recently fell in love with https://micro.blog

It sounds exactly like what the OP is looking for. In addition to being a easy-to-use (micro)blogger-focused platform (no ads, $5/month basic plan for hosting), the fact that they allow you to host everything on your own domain and cross post to more widely used platforms like Twitter and Medium seems like the best of both worlds. My current flow is writing in iA Writer and saving to Dropbox (for long term archiving). iA Writer allows publishing directly to micro.blog. Following other people through RSS feels like a breath of fresh air after being used to the Twitter feed for too long. I thought that RSS was dead for a long time, but checking out NetNewsWire and the default feeds there restored a bit of faith for me.

I hope and believe that blogging is going to survive this current centralized social media boom, and come out stronger in the end.

I’d love to check out your blog if you have a link for it please. Thanks!

Blogs exist, they just morphed. People with things to say moved to platforms, like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, Twitch, or Medium.

This is because there's no point in self-hosting; using a platform is free and gives you some degree of discoverability.

Nobody wants to self-host on their own domain because it costs money and you need at least some rudimentary tech/sysadmin skills. Self-hosting doesn't solve the biggest problem of blogging - which is that nobody will read your work.

Facebook makes your content virtually inaccessible and discoverable from those outside Facebook. They are the opposite of the way things were on the open web. Medium "is easy" but they are gradually asking more and more of people visiting too. Twitter is a good platform for streams of thought but it is a terrible "blogging" platform. Having "a series of tweets" does not make for a blog. It is hard to read and terrible.

But you are right. People feel they don't need to self host because these things are there. The problem is you then no longer own your content distribution and are at the whim of them walling it off or shutting down.

Self-hosting doesn't solve the biggest problem of blogging - which is that nobody will read your work.

I started blogging in 1999 (and sadly there are the Wayback Machine archives to prove how juvenile I was!) and it was either self host or use Blogger.

Discoverability was pretty interesting. Most blogs' traffic didn't come from search engines (Google existed but it was pretty much geeks only) or platforms, but from other blogs whether by being referenced in a post, via a sidebar link, or via a webring or similar device. Getting over 100 visitors a day to your blog would be a big deal! Getting other bloggers' attention via linking to them was a big part of things or leaving comments on their blog. These things barely move the needle anymore.

While I have a lot of nostalgia for those days, I think there's actually a lot of other ways to be discovered now. Sites like Hacker News, Reddit, Lobsters, Designer News, etc. provide opportunities to be found within various sub-communities. Most people have Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social profiles on which they can share their links, often findable via hashtags people are monitoring. There are 1001 email newsletters that are always seeking out interesting things to link to.

So, I dunno, is discovery really a problem nowadays? I don't think it is, but maybe I'm too "in the game" to see the problems people are having with it. If anything, I think there's just too much to do nowadays and we're really competing with there being 100x more people online than 20 years ago.

Right but this creates a new issue, those platforms can moderate what you can say, and not every controversial statement is wrong or bad, but to avoid liability these platforms moderate it away. Then the other related issue is on the chance that what wasn't previously controversial becomes controversial they can go back and scrub older posts. Hosting your own blog protects you from this.

They have offered a lot of benefits but they also have the ability to censor.

If you think the biggest problem of blogging is that nobody will read your work, you're not blogging, you're angling for popularity (or ad dollars, which comes out to the same in the end). If you have something interesting to write, write it in a blog. If you care more about having people read it, write on social media.

To me it's more that Blogs vanished and the people that spent time with it moved their attention onto different media, especially Twitter. Both exploring and maintaining blogs is an effort, and I think what's left are tech blogs and blogs attached to news or magazine websites that are written by professional Journalists. Medium and Youtube also seems more like something for people who spent a lot of effort on this.

I think most people resorted to platforms for hosting the blogs. Not sure if it's so important if many people read something as long as it's interesting for some people.

The challenge with platforms is that they have big incentives to push small, regular updates and posts, to increase impressions. Thoughtful, considered content and engaged responses are lost in the noise.

The bloggers went to places where the eyeballs are. If you read a good book, make photo and post it with a comment on instagram. You will get much more reaction than with a blogpost on your private blog. Same for forums. If you are looking for a community with a special interest you will have more luck to find an active facebook group than a independent forum/message board somewhere else.

People don't read blogs anymore, but they still read blog posts. Let me explain: In the past people may have visited certain blogs directly, or maybe they followed a blog through an RSS feed. Nowadays, a more likely scenario is someone google's something and a blog post on the topic pops up in their search results. That's where I find myself consuming blog posts. Likewise, all of the traffic for my blog comes from search engine traffic as well.

If I could take two things away, it would be upvotes and targeted advertising.

They allow for manipulation of the new commons and the societies of the people therein.

The manipulation existed before, but not in such an effective way.

US army in Eglin, various Russian bot farms, and effective private firms are open to deep-pocketed millionaires.

There must be a way that's /less/ open to manipulation. Or at least a way that openly expresses this happens.

As the world comes even more digital, the bigger risks this manipulation has on society.

I mean you're free to start a site with neither upvotes nor targeted advertising... And while I'm sure you'll find an audience, the vast majority of the population enjoys upvoting, and actually prefers targeted adverts over untargeted ones.

I am still blogging [0][1]. And I thought static blog generators where quite the thing, I even wrote my own [2].

[0] https://plurrrr.com/

[1] http://johnbokma.com/blog/

[2] https://github.com/john-bokma/tumblelog

Same here. It may be basic and crappy, but if you want to read an unsuccessful blog with no attempt at monetization or ads or even visitor counting, mine[1] is where you should feel right at home.

But I guess the author means a platform, not loose websites without a collective 'new' feed. I remember looking for one when wanting to make a new blog and I haven't found a platform that felt right, at least back then (probably ~2015). Heck, I couldn't even find software to install: everything is either super heavy stuff that requires caching or at least a beefy CPU to survive the HN homepage (with custom software, HN can be survived on an ancient Atom CPU even if you use PHP (also pre-PHP7) and do multiple SQL queries per pageload) or some static generators that I wasn't looking for.

Edit: While we're at it, another blog I read is Robert Heaton's one[2], and I'm subscribed to a few others but they don't seem to post anymore since I stopped getting email notifications. I remember Coding Horror[3] was also nice to read but he posts very infrequently now (for those who don't know, that's by the co-founder of Stack Overflow). Finally, Cryptography Engineering[4] might be nice if you're into that sort of thing. But I suppose those can all be mostly considered successful in that they all have a following.

[1] https://lucgommans.nl/blog

[2] https://robertheaton.com

[3] https://blog.codinghorror.com

[4] https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com

Blog never went away. There are plenty of it, and very good one.

Just like there is still good music today.

The problem is discovering it.

Before internet became a medium for mass sharing pictures of inspiration quotes and kitten, blogs had a change to stand out.

Now, theyr are completly dwarfed by other usages, and most users don't find it a popular format anyway. Search engine rarely put them in top of search results either, because they rarely quickly answer and direct question or provide the popular untertainment du jour.

So if you want to help bring blog back, you gotta find a way to make them more visible, and get people interested in them.

Good luck with that. Videos store instantly became more popular than libraries IRL, and I don't see a reason why suddenly blogs would win against Youtube. Same with equivalent to Facebook, Twitter, etc.

When the perception of what’s out there is filtered through so few sources, then it’s bound to be skewed. The blogosphere is as vibrant as ever. The blogs that have staying power, that are well done, are still there. Finding them through search engines is not going to provide you with the instant discovery you’re looking for.

HackerNews and other niche sites, word-of-mouth, and serendipity, play a bigger role in blog discovery for me. It’s a slow process but the results are stronger.

There’s no instant tech-effort solution to this in my opinion. If you want a good blog to stick around, express your thanks and gratitude to the blogger. Buy them a coffee. Encourage them.

Go now to your favourite blogger and send them a message of appreciation.

Ask HN: What is your blog and why should I read it?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22800136

Seems like the problem isn't the lack of blogs, but ways to find new ones.

Kinda weird reading a blog post about no blog posts, like it being read disproves its point a little bit.

I think they are there as long as you know where to look.

If I could bring one thing back to the internet, it would be to have people with little technical knowledge to be brave and listen less to [disparaging remarks from] geeks. Go to https://wordpress.com/start/user (or https://www.blogger.com/, nobody actually shut it down) and create your blog!

This definitely touches a nerve for me.

Blogging, when introduced, was marvelous. People sharing their personal takes and learnings, unfettered by the desire to earn from them.

If you were into bicycles, you find a blog by a cycling-fanatic and start following along and engaging (remember inter-blog "pings"?). If you were into any topic, you could find enthusiasts writing on it. And it'd have a bit of personal touch, which is very valuable!

"Planets" were great as a starting point, and you still have those at Planet Gnome (I think one of the original ones, at least it had custom software done for it), Planet Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora...

It was the true decentralised discussion forum bliss that Internet always promised!

Alas, platforms like Blogger and Wordpress actually diminished the true essence because they promoted siloing in.

And being there from early on, I can promise you that "blogs" (web logs) were not personal diaries put public. People did that a long time before blogs and called them, surprisingly, diaries.

It was already a point where web was becoming too big, and search engines were becoming useless, so it was, imho, a "log of the web" — every early blog post was pointing to a hidden gem elsewhere on the web which you'd never reach through a search engine. It's just that the term was taken and switched to "any regularly updated set of articles" without any other constraints (technical or topical) that defined the early blogs. As if that did not exist before "blogs".

I still can't forgive Google for killing reader. There are plenty of replacements, but none have became as popular, and culture of subscribing to RSS feeds died with it. You can still do that, but you can't count on your readers doing it en masse; so all content creators that want to find an audience moved to Twitter, FB, and other platforms, and gradually changed their content to fit these social networks accordingly.

Unfortunately blogs are missing a strong feedback loop. If RSS was the notification mechanism, then what was it that closed the loop so the blogger got great info on what was being read, liked, disliked? Chen gets this right here: https://andrewchen.co/the-death-of-rss-in-a-single-graph/

The internet is full of people with incredible ideas, many of which are writing them down, but the problem is discovery. How to connect them. If you can unify blogs with a feedback mechanism, with the immediacy of social media then that would be progress.

Unfortunately most mechanisms for discovery are hopelessly low SnR or totally contaminated with advertising or articles gaming some search algorithm. Funnily enough I write a little about it here within the context of one platform which could have been good, but wasn’t. https://blog.eutopian.io/building-a-better-linkedin/

Not entirely sure what they mean here:

> But Blogger was shut down by Google years ago

It's still up from what I can tell, the blogs hosted there still work, and the Wikipedia page still lists it as active.

That said, I definitely wish blogs were more popular again. Finding individual people's blogs used to be a great thing, and the way they've basically been buried by Google is depressing as hell.

Is it really the case that blogs are dead? It seems that a decent chunk of the posts on HN are from blogs.

The reason I don't blog as much as I used to is because nobody reads anything I write. The traffic is a joke. Thus is doesn't seem like a wise investment unless there is some ulterior motive (eg. demonstrate proficiency in some field).

Also anything I feel compelled to write about is generally something controversial, especially relating to politics or work culture, and it would be career suicide to write that under my real name. Therefore if I want to write anything that's actually interesting, I have to write under a pseudonym.

If I could bring anything back to the internet, it would be internet forums. Real communities. Reddit and HN serve their purpose, but there's no sense of any real community.

Blogs aren't dead, but they've become a niche product the last 5 years. In 2006, pretty much every stay-at-home mom with an Internet connection would have a blog, but as social media gained more traction most of those with small reader numbers moved to those platforms instead, as they we're more efficient to reach small groups of acquaintances.

There are still a lot of blogs around, but they seem to be targeted at specific groups, with technically minded people and fashionistas being the two largest.

Twitter killed blogging. Not just the popularity of it, but the expectations of both the writer and reader. When Twitter launched, it was described as a "micro-blog", because that's what it is, really, before morphing into its own thing: a tweet.

We all know what a tweet is: A short polemic statement, usually emotional, biased or opinionated, but expressed as self-evident without any justification, explanation or thorough analysis, which simply wouldn't fit.

I was an avid blogger at the time Twitter started, thousands of daily readers, and relatively influential in my tech niche. I had every reason to continue. And yet after I started tweeting regularly, my blogging slowed and then stopped. That day had passed, and now my blog sits on my website like a monument to the 2000s. Many others were like this as well.

The reason is pretty simple: When you blog regularly, there's a certain itch to express an idea or an opinion that builds up and you want to scratch it by writing a post. But you'd ruminate on it for a while, so that it could be a decent sized post with rationale for your thought.

But tweeting could scratch that itch instantly - no need to save up enough of an idea to write a full blog post of a few paragraphs, you could just write, "Wow, foo sucks. Totally prefer bar instead." And the feeling was satisfied.

You'd think at the time that you'd save up some ideas and write a longer post later, and at first you did, but as time went by, later never seemed to come. And then, when it did, you'd be so used to culling your opinion down to the essential idea for a pithy tweet, fully expressing your thought became harder. Besides, the more open-ended a tweet was, the more opinionated, the more it would get reactions. It seemed that expressing fully formed ideas wasn't worth as much.

It was a vicious cycle, you'd blog less. And others who used to blog their ideas or leave comments wrote less as well, and that great feedback loop stalled as everything moved to tweets. Intelligent analysis was replaced by emotional exclamations and hard opinion. There's no room for nuance in a tweet.

And that's where we are now. With a president who's a master of tweeting unjustified, irrational opinion and lies and a society that responds in kind because doing otherwise takes too much time and effort.

Blogging is never coming back. Even this comment is probably too long for most HN readers to do anything more than just skim. And if they don't like a word or two, they'll downvote and move on, rather than write their thoughts out in a coherent manner.

Two weeks ago I decided to set up one for myself as I have all these conversations where I instructed someone to do some obscure thing so thought to package them into public tutorials I could easily share.

Wanted my own domain, didn't want to deal with content moderation by someone else, wanted the ability to easily customize things, didn't want to show crappy ads, didn't want editors being able to hold up things, etc.

I spent a good 10 hours configuring all the basics for that between SSL certificates, DNS, domain name, etc. The barrier to entry seems to be substantial if you just want a simple clean interface that you yourself control and that is still building everything on top of WordPress.

Blogs can be static.

Netlify static hosting has a very low barrier of entry (just drop a folder if you don't have a git repo).

You get a fast SSL enabled site.

Adding your own domain is just going to your domain registrar as usual and pointing to the appropriate address.

Now, if you go over 100GB a month it could get pricey. https://www.netlify.com/pricing/

Still for a simple text oriented blog that could be a fantastic option.

I found something called WordOps (.org I think) and they make that trivial. Even win set up the letsencrypt. I don’t even use my own scripts any more- just theirs.

Blogs are too monetised today. For example, if you need some solution for Django (+ORM) - as of today it’s much easier to end up on some mediocre blog website than on official docs.

All authors tend to do so to re-create the same content in a different form and publish it. I assume taking most popular answer from Stack Overflow and writing a blog post about could be one of their strategies.

Basically blogging today is all race to infinite splits of the initial pie.

I have to admit I often true to keep blogs published on Hacker News because they usually do contain some unique content. However that is no longer the majority. An average blog today is equivalent to an average Facebook profile - it has nothing interesting per se.

No mention of Twitter, Facebook or Instagram? It seems obvious to me that that is where the blogs went. People don't create content so that people they don't know have something to do in their spare time, they do it for the recognition, and social acceptance. In other words; they do it for the likes. The blogs dried up because the audience's attention coalesced on the few sites and apps that people used the most. Blogs won't come back unless people read blogs, and people won't read blogs unless doing so it easier than Twitter and Facebook. They don't care about censorship, or even privacy (apparently), just the sweet sweet dopamine rush.

> they do it for the likes

That's it.

I think RSS should be better built in to browsers. Make it as simple as a follow button is on centralised websites.

e.g.: A little RSS icon pops up when RSS is available on a page, press it and you're now following that feed. Feeds window in the browser shows your feeds, and a small alert icon shows up somewhere when there's unread content. Your subscriptions are saved to your account. If you want to read the article, you click the link and read it directly on the source website. It doesn't need to be any more complex than that.

Firefox had "Live Bookmarks" for RSS but it was relatively terrible, and eventually got removed.

Heh. I remember the days before blogs. Everyone posted on community forums. You'd get some amazing, long, and lasting conversations that way. Then everyone who posted in the forums started blogging, and I saw the forums dry up. Sure, part of it was that teenagers grew up and went to college and didn't have time for the forums, but a good portion was due to blogs.

I suppose good communities still exist out there, somewhere... But, like the OP said about blogs being hyper focused, there don't seem to be many general forums. I've mostly stumbled across tech related forums.

I agree. Forums and old school personal web sites were much better for quality content than blogs or social media. Things went in the direction of mental junk food, focusing on getting a lot of new content as quick as possible.

My feeling is that a lot of tech forums have become Q and A / code support, and not a place for discussion.

I blog a lot. I do it mostly when I do a fun hobby project and want to write down what I did. It's kind of like a public journal with some pics. They're usually esoteric enough that when someone searches for the thing I was writing about, they'll find it. I get a few hundred hits on a handful of pages per month. Not going to make it big with this, but it is fun and I just love publishing hobby stuff on the internet for some reason.

I also find it kind of fun when I'm searching for something and my own blog comes up reminding me how I did something 6 years ago.

> I also find it kind of fun when I'm searching for something and my own blog comes up reminding me how I did something 6 years ago.

This happened to me a couple days ago. Except it was a 12-year-old post.

I have recently been enjoying exploring gemini [1] - a new gopher-like web protocol that has been mentioned a couple of times in recent days here on HN. There's not a great deal of content at the moment, but that which does exist does tend to be of a personal, blog-style nature, and also remarkably interesting - if, that is, like me, you're fond of beer and steel framed bicycles (fill in your own stereotype here...).

[1] https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

Check sdf.org too. A lot of people overlap, because of Pubnixen/Gopher.

Blogs are still around. They may even be up, since Medium started insisting that you sign in to read.

Try searching with Bing. Bing is years behind Google, and that's a good thing.

What do you mean "back"? Blogs very well exist. I read a number of them. I write one, for heaven's sake (probably a dozen people or so reads it but it's ok that's how it is meant to be). They are living in the shadow of facebooks and twitters of the world, but who cares. Turns out, popularity is not everything, and unless you plan to make living out of it (which I most definitely don't) you don't need to compete with anybody on anything.

Billion dollar unicorn biz idea for any frothing young entrepreneur:

1) Locally ran blog app with nice UI (think wysiwyg text editor, file “uploads” etc) and single file install.

2) Central server managed by a cloud service to resolve people’s dynamic IP into a stable URL, your blog will live at myblog.blogservice.com

3) locally ran blog engine pings new IP address every time people’s ISP change it.

4) Good instructions on how to forward 443 to your local machine running blog.

5) bonus points if local app runs on raspberry pis that can be always on.

> Nowadays people won't share content simply because they don't trust the internet to share content to it.

What the author speaks of sounds a lot like I2P.

Years ago I played around with I2P. I2P was pretty interesting, it was a traffic obfuscator like Tor that had the express goal of not connecting to anyone else who wasn't also on I2P. (Of course people can and did run outproxies where you could connect to the web through them).

If you made a site available on I2P you had to keep the local I2P router running. You could register your node with a I2P hosts maintainer if you wanted and that was as far as DNS went (it was pass around the hosts text-file style).

The couple sites I found were a lot like the web in the early 90's as far as style and content. Before I stopped messing around with it, someone had created a Twitter clone and made it available. At that point it was very slow. This was probably 2011.

Overall, there's nothing preventing people from trading lists of URLs, and nothing preventing anyone from putting these in local a searchable database. It's completely possible to do this without Google. Google made it much easier and spoiled us, but there was a world before Google and there can be one afterward.

Blogs are fun. On a dare, I booked a domain in my name in 2001 and started writing a lot. Being an n00b in everything, I wrote anything that fancies me. Macromedia (then Adobe) noticed and had it on their site front-n-center alongside some of the best sites of that time.

The site was well visited, approaching million-month hits at times. Advertisements on the site supported me while I bootstrap my Startup (failed later).

Now, I write but very far and in between. If a topic/idea comes to mind, I search/research and found that someone has done a better job and so I don’t write. Trivial things are ignored because it is trivial and everyone would have known. I don't think I even have analytics enabled or it is just that I never cared to look at Analytics anymore.

People emailed me about missing/non-working links, open-sourced files missing, thanking me, etc once in a while but that's it.

The bar for a good article has hit the ceiling and I’d rather not write than write like I used to write long ago.

I miss blogs too, not just reading but the writing of them. I've been trying to start up again, and recently wrote this take on Twitter's role in all this:

> I turn to Twitter even though it is just about the worst platform imaginable for the exposition of ideas. In its favor: the barrier to publication is extremely low, and there is no shortage of engagement with others to be found. The negative: that engagement is often of the worst kind. Nevertheless, for all its flaws, Twitter is immediate and just sufficiently gratifying that once you’ve blurted out a half-formed, typo-ridden, uneditable utterance, you might find your original communicative impulse satisfied enough that you’ll never take the time to turn it into a more polished and complete work in the form of a blog post.

https://wincent.com/blog/something-to-say

I disagree with the author’s idea that blogs shouldn’t have a focus. I think the best blogs are these sort:

1. By an expert in a specific domain.

2. Blogs by someone in the process of developing expertise, documenting what they learned along the way. The idea is it really helps the learning process to learn something well enough to write about it cogently and teach others.

On the second point, the ones that really appealed to me were the indie game dev blogs. They would figure out a unique mechanic or way of implementing a nice graphical effect, and then do a short post about it. Then other developers might pick up on it and adapt it for their projects. Most of the time those blogs were eventually abandoned along with the games they were trying to make but I think that a lot of indie games that have been released probably learnt a lot and sourced inspiration from those blogs. I wouldn't be surprised if a game like Terraria found a lot of inspiration from all the procedural generation blog posts after Minecraft came out.

I've had a blog for 5+ years but typically it had one or two intro articles then nothing. I found that I wanted to write perfection before publishing. Lately I've just been putting up information that I have found helpful in short form and found my visitors went from flat to several dozens a day getting utility.

I think the way to solve this would be a sort of blog index - an easily discoverable directory of personal blogs

Everyone should consider making their own blog! Kind of like everyone should consider baking their own bread, at least once.

Having a blog that I built that is truly “mine,” with a domain name that I own, is one of the most rewarding things I’ve done. Even though I don’t write that often and don’t have that many readers.

I currently host it on github pages, but I could move it somewhere else in a weekend if I wanted to.

Depending on your motivations, discoverability by strangers may be overrated. I’ve had good success just telling people that I respect that I wrote something and getting feedback from them. I’m not selling anything on my blog, so that’s worth a lot more to me than anonymous attention.

Social media like HN, Reddit, Twitter, or Facebook may also help for getting the word out about your writing while still letting you own the space where your writing lives.

I think MySpace should've focused on the blog, and kept the feel of having 'my space'. I think it could have thrived. It would've been better than whatever it is now anyway, some crappy pop music ghost town thing.

Why isn't anyone creating smaller, specialized search sites?

Imagine a search site that is dedicated to nothing but sci-fi, and it includes blogs, reviews, and discussions from a curated list of smaller and independent publications. No large, ad-heavy, seo gimmicky sites are indexed.

YaCy (https://yacy.net) seems like a reasonable option for this.

I run an instance (non-peered) internally on my network. I index smaller blogs, mostly around music reviews. While I like to use RSS to get updates, I find having a search engine is great to go back and find something or to seek out something new. I only index with a depth of 1, so I get the origin site plus any direct links to external sites. For my purposes, it has been working really well and is easy to maintain.

I've maintained a blog regularly for two decades without worrying about promotion, or whether anyone would read it. I knew that some of my friends and students would read it, but that was about it.

I still treat it as a way for me to gather my personal/professional thoughts or provide a summary of a topic or technology that others may find useful. And no, I don't give a rat's ass whether it's politically correct.

But over the past 2 decades, I've received hundreds of emails from people who came across it from all around the world. And some of my blogs have even been posted here on Hacker News. It's http://jasoneckert.net (which forwards to a longer URL that is secured) in case you are interested.

At the moment blogs have been failed about a few things:

1. Walled gardens (this include medium). Basically they've self decided that content should be here and they keep your audience there. Also, they tend to self select what opinions the community is to keep. This is a huge concern for freedom of expression.

2. The networks aren't there. We need a way to have neutral aggrigation and federating against many other blogs for commenting, replying, and annotation of existing content. (Give people a reward for being in a community, reddit does this with karma, but they also try to wall off the users)

3. RSS has been badly treated. This is a great standard for syndicating updates to your channel.

4. Build good networks to remove the spam. Basically the baby was thrown out of the bathwater rather than to fix the problem.

Usenet / NNTP. That's what needs 'reviving'.

These days, light and responsive client app/interfaces with little Javascript (service worker) scripts could be busy UUen/decoding and uploading/downloading all those distributed binaries and 'news' with ease! ;)

I've long argued that RSS should have been NNTP.

I never get far with that, though.

Blogs are not dead, neither is RSS.

You find interesting blogs by chance or via blogroll of blogs you like.

What really has changed are stock related news. Recently I went back into stock trading and was shocked. Basically 90% of the stock related news on google seems to be AI/ML created bullshit with zero value.

Same with recipes or diets and any information about parenting. Google is losing the battle.

I noticed the same thing! It’s terrible for stock trading. Were you able to find anything useful? I resorted to some Discord groups.

I think a lot of this type of writing shifted to Twitter and Instagram, but I agree this microblogging is not the same... it lacks the immersiveness of a good long story.

On the other hand it has never been easier to set up your own blog with services like Netlify, Jekyll, Pelican etc.

I recently started my own blog in this way, however it requires some coding skills... I know it’s a shameless plug, but here it is: https://haltakov.net/blog

To not be too selfish, let me also share one of my favorite blogs of a guy telling amazing stories about his hikes and adventures (unfortunately, he hasn’t written in a while): https://www.otherhand.org

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Ohh boy, right here why blogs might not be best suited for this hyper-connected global world we live in... HN Hug of death is real I guess

"I am nostalgic for the heyday of the blogosphere before social media surpassed it, even though in an absolute sense the blogosphere is larger and more vibrant than ever, and I have only myself to blame for using social media more than I read blogs"

there I fixed it

Very curious to hear – how do people actually discover blogs?

A friend and I have a blog based upon our experiences scaling product/engineering at a startup (we've been fortunate enough to see several growth stages over ~8 years). But it's challenging to get in front of readers who might be interested, outside of places like HN or Reddit.

When I look at the blogs that I read regularly myself, it tends to be a small subset of names that I've collected over the years from Hacker News, Quora, and friends sharing articles. I'd like to find more but don't really know the best place to start. I'm sure that there's tons of content that I would really enjoy but discovery is difficult.

Plase AskHN this question! Probably it's been asked many times before.

I wrote a blog article about reading books and blog articles instead of watching YouTube videos, ergo using addictive, low-quality, negative social internet: https://dennisarslan.nl/you-should-read-books-and-blog-artic...

You can still use https://www.inoreader.com/ for blogs and use Google to find good-quality blogs in your niche.

The fact that blogs aren't so popular anymore could also force them to write higher quality content to gain popularity.

Okay which planet internet is this author living on? I regularly follow two cybersecurity blogs, two science fiction blogs and a photography blog? Searching for an hour and not finding any blogs? Credibility evaporated with that sentence.

There are real issues with discoverability, anonymity, archival and freedom of expression. That’s what the post is about. The fact you have found five blogs to follow doesn’t make his point any less valid.

Since a good portion of this article is about platforming issues I thought I would highlight one of the good guys who is doing it right: Archive of Our Own. It does not have a recommendation engine or try to optimize for any consumer psychology networks. It does have an elaborate tagging that you can use to find something you'll be interested in and it's pretty good at displaying text on the internet. I also don't think it's going to get purchased by Yahoo and have a bunch of subcultures get dumpstered out of nowhere.

Ao3 for blogs? That'd be nice. I mean, does anyone actually like clicking into a Medium link?

Blogs died when blog specific search engines disappeared, particularly 'Google Blog search' which was quietly killed off in 2014. Technorati the other popular option for searching blogs, also went dark in 2014.

This is so weird to read. As a rare language native (Hungarian) I was never part of The Glorious Blogsphere That One Day Disappeared. I ran my blog because I wanted to make it, to tinker with it, to write, to create.

Those that went dark only because search engines now don't find them feel like they never done it for these values.

Remember when google bought blogger? I don't know if they ever really grew it. Having a blogger account did give me early access to Gmail though.

I've long wanted to build a search engine of only personal blogs. I am less familiar with the field of information retrieval so I haven't gotten started yet, but it's always been a dream of mine and if anyone is interested please contact me at [redacted] [at] the world's largest email provider.

Discovering unknown parts and blogs on the internet is one of the enduring goals of a newsletter that I run [1], which provides a single link to an interesting article every day, usually by lesser-known authors and blogs across the internet.

[1] www.thinking-about-things.com

90% of my RSS feeds are blogs. Of those I’d say around 80% are private ones.

What do you mean by private blogs?

I blog on Facebook and it works really well for me because I have a built in audience that is interested in what I have to say. I can tell stories about my life that my kids and parents enjoy. I have no need for NSFW posts. I avoid politics. I keep it fun and interesting. Hot takes on local issues sometimes. I have 60 followers who I don't know and don't understand why they follow me, although I do try to explain the latest technology trends to my immediate family, being the lone geek, and maybe other people find that helpful.

> I blog on Facebook

That is not a blog.

You don't have control over it, you don't have archives, and it's not world readable.

None of what you listed is a reason to not to use a real blog.

It's kind of ironic, but a blog I follow recently said I'm moving everything into youtube and social media now, and the blog will just be a permalink archive with transcripts to those youtube and social media posts, because that where everyone is now.

If I want to find random rare opinion X from a casual person, now I have to search youtube to find something useful unfortunately. Youtube videos are a lot slower to digest than the equivalent blog article, and take more time to make. But since youtube can give you money, thats where people go.

I am not convinced that there is enough good content to sustain blogs. Even in the current blogging minimum I see a lot of repetitive self-selling blogs from the usual suspects and a performative aspirational blogs from nobodies. The people who I would read are mostly doing work and, if the are writing, it is about the state of their current work (Brian Goetz for example) rather than broader thoughts about the state of the industry, priorities and challenges. Technical content and informed perspectives are sadly in short supply.

Bloggers might be interested in knowing… we're bringing back iBlogger for iPhone (and now, iPad) this week, an all-new product built in Swift for iOS 13. The core text posting features will be free for all blog types (WordPress compatibility in this new release), with a subscriber In-App Purchase option to keep the product in active development.

If you want to join the TestFlight which will start within the next few days, find @illumineX on Twitter.

(I founded illumineX in 1998, and iBlogger was one of the first apps on the iPhone App Store in 2008.)

> 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.

This happened to me. One of my first blog posts pre-2005 made it to the front page of Digg/Reddit. With only AdSense ads I managed to make $20-$30 day for a few days. I tried writing a few follow ups but never again "caught lightening in a bottle".

IF I had kept blogging consistently, I'd now most likely have a nice side income.

I've noticed that a lot of Japanese blogs here something akin to a blog webring[0] on their blogs. It'a called Blog Mura (Blog Village) and is basically a blog aggregator. It a provides rankings, let's you search by categories and even a way for you to contact an author that does not have contact information on their own page.

Maybe we need to bring back a webrings but with a modern spin.

0: https://blogmura.com

This is exactly what I wanted to post as well. Maybe that should be my next sideproject, it seems fun. I wonder if enough people have blogs about a specific topic that this would work.

I moved mine from Wordpress to GitHub pages, and basically stopped using it; I could either pay Wordpress to not show gross ads, or host a mostly static site on GitHub.

If you don't mind sharing, why did you stop using your blog on GitHub?

I went from Drupal based blog to Hugo and then I stopped blogging. I used to write a post every six months or so. This was long enough to forget how to use Hugo, so I stopped. Lame excuse I know.

I feel similarly to this author. A few weeks ago, I built a small tool that surfaces submitted blogs to a "Ask HN" thread.

It's delightful! I've discovered so many cool blogs! It made building the tool take twice as long as it should have, as I kept finding myself reading extensively from a delightful personal blog.

Check it out!

https://random-hn-blog.herokuapp.com/

Self-promoting that I have a blog with scattered thoughts here: https://mlu.red/

Also built with a custom static site generator (https://github.com/owenshen24/Volta), like many other blogs in the comments here. Woot for customizability and self-expression.

Being in quarantine has unleashed a lot of nostalgia in me. Just recently I got a new blog up and running after years of inactivity.

I wrote a post about a precursor to blogging, which was “Everything / Nothing” websites:

https://ease.gg/2020/05/07/everything-nothing/

Does anyone here remember those days?

Today’s vlogs are similar to the blogs of 10 years ago. They’re day-in-the-life snippets from normal people doing mundane or semi-interesting things. Some of them are famous and are run like businesses with financial motives, but most aren’t. And you can find vlogs on all kinds of topics: travel, parenting, running, and even unicycling.

If you miss the old days of blogging I think you’ll enjoy watching vlogs.

Personally I hate the trend toward video content. I prefer to read as I can skim and highlight the important content as I see fit.

The main problem I have with vlogs (and podcasts for that matter) is that they are linear, and they are long. When I read a blog, I can skim, scan for keywords, I can take it at my own pace. It's a very different experience, even if the raw content is the same.

I always disliked video content with minor, rare exceptions. Text survived hundreds (sometimes thousands) of years; I don't think video will.

What are some good vlogs?

They still exist, many people are sharing valuable gems over there, but searching for blogs it's hard(you can find blog posts on HN then you follow the blog if you like it) + here are some blogs on HN :

Ask HN: What niche blogs are worthwhile to follow? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21928170

This blog in particular needs to increase the line spacing. Makes reading it a bit painful for me at least. Firefox reader view to the rescue.

This looks like another good time for me to bring up https://startablog.com - our initiative to get 10,000 people to star their blog.

There's really never been a better time to control your site, own your content and start working on your voice.

Read David Perell for more the benefits of writing publicly more often.

There are still blogs.

When I hit a problem and solve it I'll usually make a blog post about it on my personal blog. I try to share as many random learnings and other tidbits from my career on my blog. There are even some search terms where my blog comes up in the top 1-5.

There aren't any less blogs now than there ever have been, other content is just more prolific these days.

I think there could be more fun and experimental content on the web. I'm working on a side project called https://taaalk.co, where people have long and continuous text based conversations. Please check it out if you're looking for something new on the web. (Feedback welcomed)

Seems clickbaity to me, but i can expand my feedback if you want.

I’ve learned a lot from blog posts and still follow a handful of outstanding blogs by experts in specific domains.

That said, I rarely read company blog posts any more as many companies seem to be phoning it in. Writing high quality blog posts likely to be useful to an audience is a lot of work.

I’d love to see the return of blogs as a priority not an after thought done mostly for SEO.

I just don't think there's ever going to be a platform that won't be at risk of being corrupted or shut down. If you care about control of your own blog, host it yourself. I realize not everyone can do this, but it's getting easier and easier. With static site generators and services like Netlify, it's practically free too.

I miss the unmonetized internet.

When something becomes "too cheap to meter", someone will immediately start working on a better meter.

Is this something that a new search engine could solve? or is it that countering SEO is so hard that not even Google can do it?

In the blog post it says "Blogger was shut down by Google years ago" which is not true as far as I know. Google just did a big update to the Blogger interface, which is not something they do to (the many) platforms they abandon. I blog frequently about games and art and have a steady audience of between 3k and 4k readers monthly.

It seems to me that blogs have been replaced with Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Social Media platforms let you express yourself in similar ways that blogs did, with the added benefit of immediate and easy feedback from your followers. I don’t see blogging returning unless it becomes far more interactive then traditional blogs were.

I blog. Have for a long time. The key is to own your own domain. Then your works cannot be taken away, and they are visible to all instead of risking becoming trapped in a walled garden. It doesn't cost much and it is not that hard. See http://dwheeler.com

Blog used to be a cool thing for teenagers a long time ago. Since YouTube, fb, insta are coming out, users are more inclined to images and videos instead of text.

Blog can never go back to be the most popular media. However, blogs will continue to specialize in long form articles, e.g. tutorials, how-to, reviews, ebook, courses, etc

I started to blog in 2003-4 but these days I rarely write long form. I feel that the the rise of social media and 'micro blogging' platforms have changed reading habits of the masses and people, in general, now prefer to skim through a thread of tweets than reading a long form blog post of 2000+ words.

I'm working on Pressdown https://github.com/lucianmarin/pressdown to do just that, bring back blogs on a easy to setup and use CMS. It's inspired from Jekyll and has less to do with WordPress.

They haven't gone anywhere. And the small ones are just as hard to find as before.

Furthermore, most people choose to "blog" on the major platforms, probably because it's easier and they don't care about ownership of content or monetisation or anything.

Sad imo, but it's just a reflection of how the majority thinks.

Sad imo, but it's just a reflection of how the majority thinks.

It's a huge uphill battle if you do care about such things. Don't go blaming them. That sounds an awful lot like victim blaming.

You want to see more blogging, help people succeed instead of adding more baggage to their path.

We should be able to dial up folks' computers directly and look inside their /public or /www folder.

Opera tried it, it didn't work:

https://dev.opera.com/blog/taking-the-web-into-our-own-hands...

Current attempts:

DAT: https://dat.foundation/

Zeronet: https://zeronet.io/

Secure Scuttlebutt: https://scuttlebutt.nz/

Normal people don't have computers anymore.

This is the reason platforms are far more popular than blogs - people don't have this knowledge of setting up web servers that we take for granted. And even if they did, there's no benefit.

This, and seamlessly mirrored in IPFS whenever I'm offline.

I've got a blog but I haven't brought it back up: The reason is that our attention spans have lowered and outside Hacker News, there isn't a lot of people willing to read up opposing or interesting views, or detailed descriptions of things - or what people feel when they go around their lives.

I have used RSS every day for years - far more controllable than social media as I can filter out anything I wish. With RSS-Bridge, RSSbox and the likes I use it for everything, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, HN, Reddit etc etc I recommend Bazqux as the aggregator- much more power user friendly than Feedly

Personal thought:

I wonder when writing does the content have to provide something to the reader eg. teach them something. I like to just write as I build something but I think people don't want to read it if it's not cleaned up/packaged and has value.

I think of it like a live stream where you just tune in for noise.

Why don't we have a modern, laymen version, universal replacement for RSS? The hurdle with RSS at the end of it's popularity is it required a special tool to subscribe, and a little technical knowledge to make sense of it all. My mother wouldn't ever be able to figure it out.

I wouldn't being it back. The platform was merely abused by scammers/advertisers/illegal activities. Most of the blogs were cool and had their own style but the majority was used by someone who couldn't bother to buy a domain, install WordPress and write quality stuff

The blog is not gone. You can start writing your own blog now and it cost no money at all as there are plenty of free of charge blog hosting services.

What I miss is the public forum and chat. True, it still exists in English, but in my native language, Japanese, these are long lost in the Internet.

I was just thinking that we need to revitalize the culture of blogrolls. Those sections on the sidebars pointing to other blogs the author reads. That used to be a nice "feature" helping discovering blogs. Also, RSS. Many new blogs just don't support RSS :/.

Seems like a good idea. But it also seems others have tried and failed: http://www.blogscatalog.com/Automotive/index.html

And it’s the first page on google for blog catalogue

Agreed, I try to encourage people to create their own blogs whenever I can, but very few see past the year. I think the main problem is that the temptation to buy into a centralized platform is very great - cost, maintenance, customization, out-of-the-box functionality.

Back on the[day you felt your blog would be picked up randomly and a variety of people would read it.

Today no one will read the blog unless I push them from twitter or youtube or facebook.

People post photos/videos/comments with less investment and get better viewship.

Well you can have a link to my unsuccessful unfocused blog. I have posted fairly recently though. Software music mountaineering etc http://omnisplore.wordpress.com

...though when I say unsuccessful I should clarify I'm being tongue in cheek. Sharing ideas makes me happy whether or not it brings me any material benefit :)

Blogger... wasn't shut down?

I'd bring back screen names. Some sites are nice and isolated like HN but most aren't. It's much easier to ignore death threats and racist tirades when they come from xXBonerLord420Xx than when they come from Steve Smith.

What's the origin for the fascination with blogging in the tech/software world?

I used to maintain one (mostly because I worked with other engineers who fetishized blogging and encouraged everybody to blog). I eventually lost interest.

Does it stem from Usenet?

In retrospect, it appears that the death of Google Reader ended up doing a ton of damage to blog readership. Nothing truly stepped into the void for discovery and distribution of blogs, and instead other sources of content took over.

One blog that TTTThis talks about right here: lostbookofsales.com

Writing for years, and only now I start to see more visitors per day as well as other sorts of traction. Don’t be discouraged and write something that you yourself would enjoy reading.

I've been blogging regularly for almost a decade, and I've just made the decision to move to YouTube.

I feel like the internet moved on from reading walls of text, and if I don't get with the times, I'll just become irrelevant.

Maybe something akin to webrings and blogrolls could help alleviate the discovery challenge. And this could be solved through culture, without any special newfangled technology. Blogger, support your fellow bloggers!

This guy seems to be have compe up with a search engine https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23208846

This gives me an idea for a curated blog which highlights defunct blogs. Waybackmachine is full of long-dead blogs with interesting thoughts. It would be cool to dig them up and (naturally) blog about them.

I don't understand. Blogosphere seems vibrant to me.

I blog semi irregurally on my blogger.com blog. Read dozens of blogs every week. Just added a couple new blogs.

Maybe it depends on subject. All of the above are rpg and warfare blogs.

For those who want to read blogs.

Here are some of them, a feed with lots of them.

https://trivial.observer/100daystooffload/

I so miss the deep veins of content in blogs and forums. So much niche, rich knowledge lost. Not have to resort and gag on highly monetized social forums for a fraction of depth or worse Medium.

I recently released https://notetoweb.com that lets you convert your Evernote notes to a blog. Let me know what you think.

> but when you look there's nothing to read

I don't get it. When was the last time you looked?

There's more good stuff to read online than you could ever read. There are probably even more blogs than ever before, blogs just don't have the same slice of the pie that they once did.

Seems like when people complain there's nothing good to watch anymore. I suspect that they are so accustomed to having so much material to watch that they confuse their lack of looking for lack of content as they're so used to the next thing to do served to them by recommendation engines.

In other words, this just sounds like another "ugh nothing is good" circlejerk, a subject unfortunately destined for upvotes on HN.

I suspect you’re below 30 years of age? It’s quite interesting how quickly the memory of the internet has faded and this became the new normal. Sometimes it pays to look a little deeper.

To follow blogs, check out the most excellent recently-on-HN Fraidycat. I love it: https://fraidyc.at/

Blogs are still there, you just have to look for them.

What you’re seeing with platforms like Medium is it centralizes content discovery. That’s powerful. But it doesn’t mean blogs have disappeared.

Blogs died because:

- It takes a lot of time to write well especially every day.

- Most couldn’t make a living on it because Google’s whole model is to underpay for content and Google has a monopoly on ads.

The author might be surprised by the amount of high quality literature that's been created over the past thousand years, that no blog can compare to.

Flip side: I would destroy Twitter.

Twitter is absolutely the worst thing to happen to the internet. Low effort, inherently self-aggrandizing and standoffish, literally impossible to express a complex or nuanced thought. The only people I know who regularly engage with Twitter are extreme narcissists and conformist thinkers, and yet all of Twitter considers themselves to be the Important People. This mentality has crept into all spheres of public life.

Good blogging requires effort, effective communication and something interesting and original to say. Those days are long gone.

All you have to do is viciously mute/unfollow people and words that are remotely in the sphere of something someone might get angry about.

My twitter feed is 95% weird humor and cool art/tech projects. It takes some work but it's doable.

I agree. Not to mention tweeting seems to carry the highest risk of destroying your career and/or social life of pretty much any other online medium. It probably has something to do with the whole "casual communication" focus. People tend to put a lot more thought (and time) into a blog post.

I think it's been years since I posted anything on twitter.

My honest recommendation for Twitter: Don't use the built-in systems to follow anyone. Keep bookmarks on people's profiles and visit manually if you want to know what they're up to. The timeline is a terrible idea. Twitter works really well for me because of this.

Counterpoint: Twitter is the preferred social media among scientists, and a good place to keep up with the latest papers and developments. The quality of discussion on science twitter can be pretty good too, despite the character limit.

I think the popularity of Twitter is due to people not wanting to express complex or nuanced thoughts. If it weren't Twitter, somebody else would be in that space. It seems to me that the ones who are participating in such networks never intended to put too much effort into their communication or arguments anyway.

It's a supply and demand issue, not a tool's existence.

If you carefully curate who you follow, Twitter can be more like a bunch of subreddits, with the added signal of knowing who's posting. So it ends up a being great way to keep up with small communities.

I really understand your feelings. A ton of misinformation, disinformation, and fake news, make Twitter a terrible platform. It looks much better than Facebook. Many people are being controlled something to say what some want to hear. Attacking and harassing users is what I see every day. I don't know where we can find another platform that gives and updates us.

Twitter is great for pushing current events or initiating discussion on less well thought out topics.

It's not a good place for conversation. And that's ok, as long as users understand these limitations and there's an alternative (blogs or forums) that interested participants can turn to.

I find twitter great for following astrophysics researchers and optimization/DL researchers.

I have never understood the appeal of Twitter. (Or short Facebook/G+ status update type content) I mean, what is so great about seeing lots of really short posts? You can't say anything truly meaningful. It's just a bunch of pointless noise.

Honestly, the only thing I really like about Twitter is Moments. They aggregate the current trend from various tweets and compile a good enough summary to get you upto speed. But this is so deeply buried in the UI, it's a shame.

Twitter is the best because it's about the individual , not the groupthink. Most aggregators fail hard because groupthink destroys them, but on twitter you can follow individuals and ignore everyone else. You are not forced to follow trends (like in most aggregators, even here) , and you can even follow people banished from most aggregators (e.g. Trump)

Funny enough, I just re-started my blog today. I love blogs AND don't forget RSS for a truly open internet. No closed platforms BS

I don't like blogs. People should have websites not ordered by publication date. I want to see the personal website brought back.

> Also, the platform must be profitable or promise future profit

This is arguable. The very idea and existence of non-profit organisations are proof.

The page is very hard to read for some reason. Is it the font or the line spacing?

The privacy ok until the content has issue then ... it is a hard question.

Not sure about the no focus part. I go to a blog at least the person is the focus and usually even for hobbits they have focus.

The one I go to everyday is still a blog

https://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photogr...

We have many search engines these days. Use any other than Google's search, and you may find some luck.

There is always Medium for the 200 things I do every morning for a happy and productive life type of stuff.

They didn't go anywhere. Other ways to publish that information cropped up alongside them.

Is it not what steemit is for? It also provides ways to tip authors for their good writings.

Other that or ipfs.

Is there a way to search only for blogs on Google?

Could be a great way to find 'unpopular' content

Hmm, Mastodon sounds to be the kind of "platform" you are searching for ?

Newsletters and podcasts are somewhat decent replacements worth considering.

Hey man if you want a unsuccessful blog, here's mine: shash7.com

Blogs are still here ...

Like, personal blogs? There are shitton of generic blogs

did someone delete the blogs or make laws perventing people from connecting new webservers to the Internet with the intent to host a blog?

and isn't the death of the traditional blog just linked to the death of the personal website?

You lost me at nowadays especially

A very short post (a graphic, really) about what I learned about blogging over the years.

https://medium.com/@solidi/the-one-about-blogging-cd9e65a205...

The discovery? I am interested in humanist side of software development. With writing once every 2 months for 3.5 years, this small but impactful finding changed my life and focus.

There are countless blogging platforms, but surprisingly, I don't think anything hits the nail yet, which is why I think blogs are dying.

There's WordPress, Ghost, and static site builders, all amazing self-hosted solutions. They're hosted on your own domain, meaning you own your content and control your audience. This type of decentralized blogging makes it difficult for writers to find audiences, and it's typically hard for readers to find relevant content. These blogs are all over the internet, and only a few can make it to the top of Google. Setup, maintenance, and server administration are large barriers for those simply looking for a place to write something.

Of course, there's also Tumblr and Medium. I'm actually a fan of the idea of having more centralized blogging platforms, because they give writers audiences right out of the box. It takes just a few minutes to start a blog and begin writing your first post. But these platforms limit creators' ability to own their content, and even go to lengths to make content less accessible to readers. I especially don't like Medium's paywall approach, nor their policy towards not allowing custom domains.

Issue is that different "agents" ruined blogging: war of misinformation, politics, fake news, conspiracy theories, corporate advertisement fake stories, quick money earning scheme, phishing sites, AI created pages, etc.

Nowadays, there is so many of above that simply finding meaningful read is really hard work. I guess we are race of attention seekers (money and fame), some of them justifiably as they have really new inspiring ideas, other not so much. One Flappy Bird and gazillion clones. Issue is in global world with 5 billion connected, top of the pyramid is very limited space. And to get into that space is very, very hard.

Anonymity never worked, as because of shared data across cookies and huge number of cross referencing vectors, it is easy do identify any person. GDPR does not help much. So, do I agree of anonymity no, maybe for a change everything should be transparent, if you have crazy idea, and you wish to say, because you broadcasting to wide population then you have to be prepared to face consequences. Also if people would bully writer because of what s/he said they should post their comments only as identifiable personas.

Definitely! It was fun discovering bloggers' content before the era of social media. Social media platforms created silos, and limited discovery options. Now people share their content behind paywall (e.g. medium) or force you to register to the platform (e.g. facebook) to see the content.

So read them. I do.

I miss blogs too

... with rss

The only blog I follow is https://slatestarcodex.com/

TL;DR Blogs still exist! sure maybe not in the vast amounts you feel they once did but thats because people have moved onto podcasts

isnt medioum blogs

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