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Comment by INTPenis | Hacker News Reader

That's complete rubbish. Information rots, whether it sits in a blog or a wiki doesn't matter. A blog can be updated, can show its last updated date, just as a wiki does.

The statement hits home with me because over the past 20 years I have actually gone back and forth between having a wiki as a personal website and now finally back at blog again.

I find that markdown + tags is the best way to organize my personal knowledge base that I call a blog. My attempts at using Wikis always felt overkill.

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I interpreted the poem less as a literal manifesto against the practicality of blogs and more as a metaphor for how the format impacts us psychologically. Blogs, being chronological and linear, feel a bit disposable—you post and move on—which promotes rot. Wikis, on the other hand, are dynamic and interconnected, inviting ongoing growth and freshness.

I still don't really really agree with that either, though. I tried swapping out my simple static blog for a MediaWiki instance and quickly realized why you don't see many people doing that anymore. Maintaining a "complex abyss of ever-evolving thoughts" and actually writing stuff are often mutually exclusive

MediaWiki is too much of a pain to maintain for single user.

I use Vimwiki: easy to version control, no database to maintain, familiar (to me) interface. Back up by git push/pull to/from many places.

As someone who regularly finds pages on his own wiki that have not been changed for 10 years (and forgotten): I kinda disagree :P

Blogs are normally run by a single person (unless for a publication), wikis are normally run by a community. Hence someone can discover a wiki and edit it long after its original creators have departed, so long as it wasn’t set to private. The best that discoverers of an old blog can do is to write in the comments section. Maybe reblog it and hope that pingbacks (remember those?) get triggered.

The implicit invitation to collaborate is what gives the wiki longevity and the possibility of resurrection.

do you find that a blog (with the web interface) adds any value over just having a git repository of markdown files that have tags inside?

I'm guessing the main advantage is navigational structure - while I agree that can be overdone, and I practice very minimal navigation on my own 'blog', I think some amount can make the pile of markdown files easier to read.

Yes it adds value to see an interface, funny you should mention that specifically because recently I was on the job market and I created a Hugo blog where each job I applied for was one post. So I could keep track of when I applied, how, interviews, results and so forth in one markdown file. Then when it was time to report my job applications to the government so I would get money I just ran hugo server and looked at them graphically and chronologically.

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