
If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs - TTTThis
http://tttthis.com/blog/if-i-could-bring-one-thing-back-to-the-internet-it-would-be-blogs
======
aazaa
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.

~~~
mawise
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.

~~~
rland
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.

~~~
throwaway1777
Start an anonymous blog. I have one. Also an anonymous hacker news account. :)

~~~
Reelin
The trouble with that is that once you post something to it you can never
associate it with yourself (even accidentally!) or deanonymization of
everything else posted by that identity will also occur.

Half baked idea: A decentralized and properly anonymized (at the protocol
level) service intended for long-form articles. Employ cryptographic
primitives to allow association of a single article with one or more
identities at any time after publication. (I suspect such a system would just
end up getting abused, but who knows?)

~~~
adrianN
That won't be safe for very long. De-anonymization based on writing style is
pretty good already.

~~~
langitbiru
Maybe AI that changes the writing style to monotonous style would help.

Say, you always write like Yoda speaks, "Great you are." Then the AI would
change it to, "You are great."

I know, I know, it's a tall order.

~~~
pferde
I suspect that resulting articles would be, while probably reasonably safe
from style analysis, awfully boring and difficult to read. Good and
interesting writing style is a skill.

------
dewey
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...](https://blog.notmyhostna.me/posts/rss-is-luckily-not-dead-yet/)

I also recently started a new blog where a friend and me are blogging about
annoying things: [https://annoying.technology](https://annoying.technology)

~~~
zhdc1
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.

~~~
keenmaster
I’m not sure if the premise is correct here. What metric is Reddit being
judged by? What if the various fashion subreddits, in aggregate, have more
users, more content (both good and bad), and more innovation than websites
like AskAndy?

I suspect what you’re looking for is:

1\. The intimate small town feel of the early internet, and

2\. The higher average post quality (because of the type of person that both
had internet and used forums back then) as measured by intellectuality, domain
specificity, and demonstrated expertise.

Reddit doesn’t display those qualities because of the tragedy of the commons
phenomenon. Great content is interspersed with what is essentially “noob
spam.” Even if it has a greater aggregate amount of quality content, it
doesn’t have the same feel as older forums.

Reddit can try to fix this by grouping people together into social clusters.
If there is a subreddit with 2 million people, why not create many smaller
“breakout” groups that coexist with the main thread? Of course, this is easier
said than done, but I’m sure it’s possible to execute this idea well.

I think VR meeting rooms will be the ultimate solution. They will be intimate
by definition, and people will sort into their favorite social groups. An
American scientist might join an international “scientist salon” and socialize
with scientists everywhere from Germany to Japan. A bulletin would contain and
display static text posts by the members of the salon. It would also display
things like plebiscites and summaries of important meetings. You’d be able to
bounce around different groups with a different subject matter any time you
want. Some will have barriers to entry and identity verification, most won’t.
Some groups will be purely social and defined more by the members than by any
subject matter. Altogether that would make the internet feel more like a
collection of physical spaces inhabited by communities of people.

What I’m describing ideally shouldn’t be run by one corporation like Facebook
or Reddit. The communities should be strung together by a shared backbone
under an Internet 3.0. Visiting one should be like visiting a different
website. We can use the formation of the original 2D internet as a template
for how to proceed in creating a VR internet.

~~~
zhdc1
The issue with Reddit is that there's little to no user engagement with older
content. Comments on posts older than a day in pretty much every reasonably
active subreddit are ignored. This is also an issue on HN.

This kills informed discussion - some topics need more than one or two minutes
of thought for a thoughtful and articulated response. This simply isn't
possible when you know that the person you're replying to likely won't respond
if you take more than a couple of hours to reply, that the conversation thread
will be hidden behind a 'read more' button after one or two responses, and
that the post itself will be buried shortly thereafter.

The average post quality on most forums was awful, as much or more so than
what you see now on Reddit or HN. The difference is that it was possible for
informed posts to persist as the center of discussion for years, if needed.

As an example, I don't see how a group of people can become interested and
collaboratively participate in something like designing an amplifier circuit
on Reddit without moving to a third party site, and in doing so cutting off
contact and visibility with potential collaborators who happen to find the
discussion a couple of hours too late. That's the level of connectivity and
cooperation that was possible through forums and bulletin boards for a bunch
of different niche topics, and it's basically been lost now that the
2chan/Digg style format (Reddit) has taken over.

~~~
dredmorbius
So much this.

For a discussion site, Reddit's a really shitty discussion site. Good
conversations rarely even begin, and die rapidly. I've discussed this a few
times and places.

On HN:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16865105](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16865105)

It was a problem I'd identified when first trialing a Reddit-as-blog dynamic:

 _The Reddit Notifications dynamic is proving to be a very strong negative.
Something Google+ got right is to keep re-engaging people with active,
productive, posts. Days, weeks, months, even years later. This isn 't
something you want in _all cases (and can opt out of), but it is often useful,
and means that conversations can develop. Reddit, sadly (after some five years
or so of trying) is proving to be a Flying Purple Conversation Eater. This is
a major site frustration._

[https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/wiki/faq#wiki_so.2C_red...](https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/wiki/faq#wiki_so.2C_reddit.27s_got_everything_you_couldn.27t_find_at_the_other_place.3F)

That's from 5-6 years ago.

True conversation is fragile, rare, and scales poorly.

And, as noted in both links, Google+ managed this surprisingly well.

~~~
freehunter
This is super awful when you’re trying to have a potentially controversial
discussion with someone. Even if both of you are interested in the discussion
it gets to a point where why bother continuing because no one is going to see
it when they have to click “load more comments” and follow the thread for
hours or days. Forums like Reddit and HN actively encourage short pithy sound
bites that sound interesting but are actually shallow so they’re easy to write
and easy to consume and also uncontroversial so your comment(and the following
discussion) isn’t hidden after one or two downvotes.

~~~
fragmede
Reddit, at least, has an active reply notification system, so while this is
rare, at least it's possible to have a conversation, even if it's probably
only visible to its participants.

HN's lack of an active reply notification means that, unless you're checking
the [threads] link obsessively, replies can easily go unnoticed, so writing
here is more performative.

How that intersects with the rest of the site's dynamics, I'm not sure.

~~~
dredmorbius
Yes, though it operates at the post level only. There's absolutely no
indication that a post _in which you 've already indicated strong interest by
participating in it_ has ongoing discussion. If you've received a reply
notification to your comment, my own, immediately adjacent, receives no such
notice: the tpost is effectively dead. Visiting a subreddit gives no clues as
to recently-active posts.

Mind, inbox replies for _any_ activity on, say, /r/funny or /r/politcs would
get old fast. But _some_ indication of 'this thread is still live* would be
tremendously useful. Again, from Google+, I (and other) users frequently
"lived" in the Notifications pane. I'd customised that through CSSso that it
was large and functional enough to do that.

Twitter's TweetDeck and the similar Mastodon web client similarly feature a
Notifications pane as a principle feature, and much engagement can be
transacted from it. One of Ello's iterations had a similar and incredibly
fluid design making following up very lightweight, unfortunately later
abandoned.

HN's "Threads" view is ... similar, but crippled (lack of context within the
subthread I'm replying to being a constant annoyance). Reddit's notifications
suffer similarly.

------
crazygringo
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.

~~~
josephjrobison
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.

~~~
jiofih
People publishing blogs were not “creators”. They were ordinary people
publishing their personal, not-fashionable, unfiltered ramblings. That’s what
we lost. It’s obvious that with the growth of internet access “variety” has
grown exponentially, but it’s the same kind of variety you get from
supermarket products, not real life experiences.

> just not in the one strict format

It’s exactly the other way around. 95% of all “content” on the platforms you
mentioned looks the same today. The goal is now success, not sharing for the
sake of sharing, and that severely limits how much you express yourself.

~~~
ulisesrmzroche
That last point is wrong, it doesn’t make any sense, for example, Banksy. He’s
not sharing for the sake of sharing and he has no trouble expressing himself,
even pissing off the governments of the world more often than not

~~~
jiofih
This is about Instagram/YouTube, I don’t see where banksy fits the comparison.

~~~
ulisesrmzroche
People have been spreading their opinion to the masses forever. It was not
born with YouTube. I don’t understand why you’re not getting it.

------
kickscondor
> 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/](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.

~~~
dvtrn
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_.

~~~
kickscondor
Where are you promoting things, dvtrn? Good to meet you.

~~~
dvtrn
_Where are you promoting things_

...on a platform (it was a tweet), ironically. I tore my jekyll-based site
down earlier this year because I have a bad habit of redesigning it every
other Tuesday.

it’s a strange compulsion, but your site and a few others I found on
indieweb.xyz have been some good motivation to work towards some degree of
content permanence that I own and control (plus a general frustration and
growing loss of patience with the platform)

~~~
kickscondor
Twitter is fine by me. The Indieweb is a cool ideal. But I’ve still made great
discoveries through Twitter as well. (Perhaps that speaks to the ingenuity of
humans despite the platform tho...)

If you get your own site up, let me know!

------
thereyougo
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

~~~
GordonS
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!

~~~
tayo42
Recipes aren't good either. I noticed good sites like serious eats almost
never come up. The same sites always come up, nytimes, all recipes, food.com.

I guess search engines aren't the best place to get recipes, you need someone
to vet and review them.

Actually.. that might be an interesting thing to do heh

------
qznc
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](http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/blogs_en.html)

~~~
human
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.

------
DoreenMichele
_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.

------
neonate
[https://web.archive.org/web/20200516183004/http://tttthis.co...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200516183004/http://tttthis.com/edit/blog/if-
i-could-bring-one-thing-back-to-the-internet-it-would-be-blogs)

~~~
jph00
The OP link should probably be changed to: [http://tttthis.com/blog/if-i-
could-bring-one-thing-back-to-t...](http://tttthis.com/blog/if-i-could-bring-
one-thing-back-to-the-internet-it-would-be-blogs)

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

~~~
dang
Changed from [http://tttthis.com/edit/blog/if-i-could-bring-one-thing-
back...](http://tttthis.com/edit/blog/if-i-could-bring-one-thing-back-to-the-
internet-it-would-be-blogs). Thanks!

------
adamwathan
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/](http://www.petesqbsite.com/)

~~~
bachmeier
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.

~~~
jason0597
Where do academics put their material nowadays?

~~~
bachmeier
Apparently, they've stopped posting it. I'm referring to things like advice,
introduction to the field, a bibliography of the important papers in the
field, why they love their research topic, and that sort of thing.

------
cm2187
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).

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

~~~
jeffkeen
Yeah, I don't get what people mean when they say "bring back RSS"—-it's still
around. The thing that disappeared was Google Reader, which I guess was a
signal of super mainstream popularity of RSS.

Feedly is a great app that I use regularly to keep up with RSS, and there are
other RSS readers too. It's not like we're talking about a dead protocol like
Gopher, here.

~~~
BlueTemplar
IMHO Feedly is barely adequate.

~~~
beambot
Give NewsBlur a try.

------
blueridge
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.

------
specialp
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.

~~~
dmortin
> 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.

~~~
specialp
I'd suspect not. I sometimes will get a FB result for businesses (with nagging
box for me to join Facebook taking up 33% of the screen). I Google a lot of
stuff and never get results for FB groups public or private as a non Facebook
user.

------
asplake
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.

~~~
roberto
Shameless plug:

I wrote my own blog engine in Python
([https://github.com/betodealmeida/nefelibata](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](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.

~~~
cxqtheresh
Worth checking
[https://indieweb.org/Webmention](https://indieweb.org/Webmention) and
[https://brid.gy](https://brid.gy)

------
Etheryte
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.

------
pavelmark
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).

~~~
benrbray
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.

------
rcarmo
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.

------
Klipi
I recently fell in love with [https://micro.blog](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.

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

------
krapht
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.

~~~
specialp
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.

~~~
ordinaryradical
I’d really like to see a “Medium minus the bullshit” service. Those pages are
so full of js garbage they just feel awful to read and most of the
interactions Medium tries to lead you toward are even more painful.

~~~
christiansakai
I’m curious. Have any company or anyone implemented something like this?
Basically let people blog and let author themselves pay (instead of being paid
by ads) subscription fee to pay cloud machine that hosts their content.

I think something does exist in Ethereum platform but why it doesn’t exist out
there anywhere else.

~~~
alisonatwork
LiveJournal has worked this way for decades and still exists.

~~~
skyfaller
Dreamwidth is the spiritual successor.
[https://www.dreamwidth.org/](https://www.dreamwidth.org/)

LiveJournal went closed source in 2014. It was also bought by Russians,
relocated its servers to Russia, and began enforcing Russian law in 2017,
which included laws against "gay propaganda", which was when me and my
remaining friends abandoned the service for good.

------
topherPedersen
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.

------
tarkin2
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.

~~~
londons_explore
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.

~~~
tarkin2
I doubt anyone enjoys targeted advertising. Any slim benefits it brings comes
with the huge disadvantage of mass emotional manipulation for political ends.

Upvoting is a difficult one. Undoubtedly it's enjoyable. But given enough
money and time any private or public organisation can game it for the same
political ends.

If you can use targeted mass advertising to play on people's fears or give the
illusion of group acceptance, then you have an incredibly powerful tool, and
especially so in a democracy.

------
jjjbokma
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/](https://plurrrr.com/)

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

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

~~~
lucgommans
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](https://lucgommans.nl/blog)

[2] [https://robertheaton.com](https://robertheaton.com)

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

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

------
BiteCode_dev
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.

------
decasteve
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.

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

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22800136](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22800136)

------
decompiled_dev
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.

------
smarx007
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](https://wordpress.com/start/user) (or
[https://www.blogger.com/](https://www.blogger.com/), nobody actually shut it
down) and create your blog!

------
necovek
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".

------
golergka
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.

------
nickdothutton
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/](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/](https://blog.eutopian.io/building-a-better-linkedin/)

------
CM30
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.

------
JSavageOne
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.

~~~
1bc29b36f623ba8
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.

------
russellbeattie
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.

------
MattGaiser
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.

~~~
sireat
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/](https://www.netlify.com/pricing/)

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

------
heavenlyblue
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.

------
arkanciscan
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.

~~~
passthejoe
> they do it for the likes

That's it.

------
Nition
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.

------
jerrac
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.

~~~
Chathamization
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.

~~~
jerrac
It makes me wonder, how could we rebuild things?

It's not a tooling problem. There are several high quality forum tools out
there. Discourse being one of them. But getting people to actually participate
seems impossible. I've had a Discourse instance running for family for over a
year now. It's basically empty.

I've tried inviting friends to a another instance, and only one ever showed
up.

------
acidburnNSA
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.

~~~
passthejoe
> 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.

------
DC-3
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/](https://gemini.circumlunar.space/)

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

------
Animats
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.

------
smsm42
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.

------
holografix
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.

------
tenebrisalietum
> 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.

------
Brajeshwar
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.

------
marmot777
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.

~~~
rob2312
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.

~~~
marmot777
Funny you mention Minecraft. My son LOVES Minecraft.

------
wincent
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](https://wincent.com/blog/something-to-say)

------
bochoh
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.

------
5986043handy
I think the way to solve this would be a sort of blog index - an easily
discoverable directory of personal blogs

------
jwmerrill
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.

~~~
stOneskull
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.

------
l72
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](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.

------
jasoneckert
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](http://jasoneckert.net) (which forwards to a longer
URL that is secured) in case you are interested.

------
monksy
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.

------
ourcat
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! ;)

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

I never get far with that, though.

~~~
ourcat
*nods. I was friends with Dave once too.

------
joyj2nd
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.

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

------
vladoh
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](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](https://www.otherhand.org)

------
agustif
```Resource Limit Is Reached The website is temporarily unable to service your
request as it exceeded resource limit. Please try again later.```

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

------
exolymph
"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

------
hackitup7
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.

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

------
DennisArslan
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...](https://dennisarslan.nl/you-should-read-books-and-blog-articles-
instead-of-youtube-videos/)

You can still use [https://www.inoreader.com/](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.

------
PerilousD
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.

~~~
jiofih
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.

------
jabroni_salad
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?

------
ss64
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.

~~~
pmlnr
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.

------
Gary_W_Longsine
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.)

------
text_exch
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 threemillionthflower [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

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

~~~
jobigoud
What do you mean by private blogs?

~~~
pmlnr
Hidden; sort of. These days if I want to get the RSS for a site, I need to
look for 'alternate' links in the code.

~~~
Hedja
My blog does this. Not because I want to hide it. Since RSS is a standard, I
expect anyone wanting to add my blog to their RSS would just use the current
URL and the reader will grab the alt meta tag. I have multiple feeds, one for
each tag, so if a reader uses a blog post URL they'll be given a choice on
what tag to subscribe to (or everything). Having separate RSS links on the
page for this would add clutter.

Before, Firefox used to show the RSS icon but they killed it. It really should
be a browser-level thing, it's no different from favicons, rather than
requiring users to hunt down a link somewhere on the page.

------
novok
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.

------
okareaman
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.

~~~
pmlnr
> 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.

~~~
okareaman
I'm not sure how you define a blog. Could you clarify? I often delete or edit
posts, so I have control. I download my FB data so I have an archive. I have a
link to my FB on my Twitter and all my posts are public and I get people from
Twitter reading it. I have 60 followers I don't know who read it. Not sure
what else it needs to be to meet your definition of a blog.

~~~
pmlnr
Short answers: [https://indieweb.org/site-deaths](https://indieweb.org/site-
deaths) and [https://indieweb.org/Facebook](https://indieweb.org/Facebook)

~~~
okareaman
I don't expect a free site to be available for eternity. That's why I archive
it. The archive is a pretty nice format. I can load it up in a browser from an
index file and browse my entire history. I could host it somewhere else if I
wanted. I could use a parser to extract the content and repost it in a new
format. I still maintain it is a blog.

------
bondolo
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.

------
josefresco
> 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.

------
SenHeng
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](https://blogmura.com)

~~~
StavrosK
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.

------
RyJones
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.

~~~
mmsimanga
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.

~~~
RyJones
I stopped blogging because I don't think the world needs - or wants - my hot
takes. I re-posted some things[0] that I refer to in the outside world; right
now I'm digging into Honda Telematics[1]. That might end up on the blog, or I
might leave it as a gist.

[0]: [https://blog.ryjones.org/](https://blog.ryjones.org/)

[1]:
[https://gist.github.com/ryjones/73739f6a7e662b9ed9ba64d9141f...](https://gist.github.com/ryjones/73739f6a7e662b9ed9ba64d9141ffcc9)

------
wonder_er
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/](https://random-hn-blog.herokuapp.com/)

------
owenshen24
Self-promoting that I have a blog with scattered thoughts here:
[https://mlu.red/](https://mlu.red/)

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

------
ErikAugust
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/](https://ease.gg/2020/05/07/everything-nothing/)

Does anyone here remember those days?

------
gk1
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.

~~~
radmarshallb
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.

------
saadalem
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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21928170)

------
Topgamer7
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.

------
joelrunyon
This looks like another good time for me to bring up
[https://startablog.com](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.

------
marmot777
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.

------
kaydub
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.

------
FailMore
I think there could be more fun and experimental content on the web. I'm
working on a side project called [https://taaalk.co](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)

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

~~~
FailMore
Yes please. The clickbaityness is not intentional

------
imgabe
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.

------
thordenmark
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.

------
spiritplumber
I miss the unmonetized internet.

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

------
dang
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?

------
jasonlfunk
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.

------
dwheeler
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](http://dwheeler.com)

------
lcnmrn
I'm working on Pressdown
[https://github.com/lucianmarin/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.

------
pythonbase
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.

------
jotm
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.

~~~
DoreenMichele
_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.

~~~
jotm
There's no blame, it's just an observation.

One could use WordPress or Hugo. Or a Reddit account. The latter brings
instant viewership and feedback. The former gives you more control.

There's no fight here, people choose what they want.

~~~
DoreenMichele
I use blogger, the thing the article claims doesn't exist.

I have a zillion blogs. I'm telling you from firsthand experience that it's
hard to get traffic, it's hard to monetize, etc. So it's unsurprising that
some people go "Fuck it. I don't care. I'm just going to talk somewhere on the
internet."

And the irony is even if you go that route, people will give you hell. One of
the most common criticisms I get on HN boils down to "Bitch, go start a blog
and stop leaving long comments on HN telling us about your life." when I have
a zillion blogs and I'm pretty choosy about what I say here.

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

~~~
pmlnr
Opera tried it, it didn't work:

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

Current attempts:

DAT: [https://dat.foundation/](https://dat.foundation/)

Zeronet: [https://zeronet.io/](https://zeronet.io/)

Secure Scuttlebutt: [https://scuttlebutt.nz/](https://scuttlebutt.nz/)

~~~
angel_j
imo we need personal, public IP addresses, not labyrinthine decentralized p2p
projects

------
mrbenns
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

------
vkaku
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.

------
ge96
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.

------
imagetic
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.

------
lihaciudaniel
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

------
ezoe
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.

------
stanislavb
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 :/.

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

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

------
bArray
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.

------
wolco
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.

------
sideshowb
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](http://omnisplore.wordpress.com)

~~~
sideshowb
...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
:)

------
s17n
Blogger... wasn't shut down?

------
causality0
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.

------
sevagh
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?

------
ashtonkem
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.

------
iamsanteri
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.

------
grecy
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.

------
jsilence
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!

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

------
phendrenad2
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.

------
njharman
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.

------
g-garron
For those who want to read blogs.

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

[https://trivial.observer/100daystooffload/](https://trivial.observer/100daystooffload/)

------
brentis
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.

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

------
hombre_fatal
> 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.

~~~
jiofih
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.

~~~
hombre_fatal
Nope. Probably older than you, but I wouldn't use that to suggest I have
better insights here than you.

It's very popular on HN to yearn for the good old days of the internet instead
of realizing that we're in them right now.

More importantly, it's also likely you that's changing more than the internet.
Maybe a decade or two ago you were looking for blogs while these days you just
stop by Reddit and HN. And assume anything you don't find on Reddit/HN is
probably dead or dying, you're not going to look. In fact I guarantee that's
what going on most of the time in these posts.

Kinda like how almost everyone reading this who used to use an RSS reader
doesn't use one anymore. Not because RSS is dead or all of the blogs
evaporated overnight. But because we just don't use the internet like that
anymore.

I think TFA is closer to a nostalgic obituary for how OP used to use the
internet, and they remember those as good ol days, and they are mistaking this
flicker of nostalgia for some overarching commentary on the New Internet.

~~~
jiofih
> you just stop by Reddit and HN. And assume anything you don't find on
> Reddit/HN is probably dead or dying, you're not going to look

So you saying that browsing reddit had replaced the “old ways”. That is
exactly the problem, this was _not an option_. If those blogs or sites never
appear in search engines, blogrolls are gone, archives have been deleted (eg
Tumblr), delicious/stumbleupon/etc are gone, how do you find them? The
internet and how content is distributed has changed a lot, it’s disingenuous
to just dismiss it as nostalgia.

On RSS, maybe you forgot that google mangled it in 2013? They shut down the
most popular RSS reader without warning, and around the same time most large
platforms stopped providing full content via feeds, to drive traffic to their
site == ad revenue. RSS went from being a major source of traffic for blogs,
to 1-2% of visitors. Of course people will stop using it if stops giving you
content and your software is gone.

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

------
mvkel
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.

------
jboydyhacker
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.

------
alexashka
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.

------
Mizza
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.

~~~
_bxg1
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.

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

------
nunodonato
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

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

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

------
ngcc_hk
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...](https://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/blog_index.html)

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

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

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

------
hirako2000
Is it not what steemit is for? It also provides ways to tip authors for their
good writings.

Other that or ipfs.

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

Could be a great way to find 'unpopular' content

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

------
cetico
Newsletters and podcasts are somewhat decent replacements worth considering.

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

------
barkingcat
Blogs are still here ...

------
Giorgi
Like, personal blogs? There are shitton of generic blogs

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

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

------
solidist
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...](https://medium.com/@solidi/the-one-about-blogging-cd9e65a2055b)

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.

------
mrcartmenez
You lost me at nowadays especially

------
rolandtshen
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.

------
NiceWayToDoIT
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.

------
_____smurf_____
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.

------
knorker
So read them. I do.

------
wejick
I miss blogs too

------
adiian
... with rss

------
jack_pp
The only blog I follow is
[https://slatestarcodex.com/](https://slatestarcodex.com/)

------
adam0c
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

------
nolawi89
isnt medioum blogs

