
I miss blogrolls - dna_polymerase
https://iwantmyname.com/blog/i-miss-blogrolls
======
gavanwoolery
I feel like there is a legitimate market for "the old ways" (TM).

Social media is "great", in the same way that the invention of alcohol was
"great" \- the bad part of it is that it is literally designed to drive clicks
and addict us, and we have no way of turning it off (temporarily) that we
can't just switch right back on (yes, I have seen all your handy scripts and
tricks).

You know what was awesome about walking into a brick and mortar building and
buying a piece of software? It almost certainly would not contain a virus due
to the prohibitive cost of getting it on a shelf, and it was not flogged to a
state of near-death by app store restrictions. Yeah we killed some trees, and
we liked it that way! (shakes fist at sky).

Writing impressive code used to be a highly valued skill, limited to the few
who put in the time to piecing together arcane knowledge. Now we are just
surfing on the backs of giants and locked into their ecosystems. So long as
you can write a laggy javascript app and google how to do something you are
safe in this world. (shakes fist at sky again, why not)

...continues muttering/ranting...

~~~
mroll
> ...and we have no way of turning it off (temporarily) that we can't just
> switch right back on...

i solved this problem by convincing myself that i don't actually want to turn
it back on

~~~
gavanwoolery
I tried this, but then my friends convinced me to keep it on. :/ May at some
point turn it off regardless...

~~~
lemonberry
I deleted all of my social media profiles, i.e., unfriended and unfollowed
everyone and then deleted my account. It's been a huge plus for me.

What I've done to replace it is email and call people. I'm 42 so many of my
friends are receptive to calls that younger people may not be so ymmv.

I'm sure you know this, but your true friends will be there offline whether
you see them online or not.

Good luck!

~~~
AFNobody
I'm a 30s fellow and I do this as well. I'm all calls/text message + video
calls via Signal/Wire/Skype.

I don't understand the desire to publicly broadcast things and none of my
friends have had an issue with it. Of course, my friends are mostly technical
or privacy-oriented folks.

~~~
wll
A broadcast may be worthwhile when it carries measurable value and: produces
_unsigned_ side effects [0]; produces manageable _signed_ side effects [1].

I’m 24, deleted Facebook at 18, WhatsApp last year, and I too am all calls
(and emails for longform or bit sharing). I still observe HN, Twitter [2],
domain-specific newsletters for value, and occasionally share when there’s
value to be added.

While I might have to manage debris, I see value.

[0] [https://arxiv.org/rss/cs](https://arxiv.org/rss/cs)

[1] [https://twitter.com](https://twitter.com)

[2] A meticulously curated, filtered stream.

~~~
rimliu
Texting and callung are very different, sync vs. async.

~~~
wll
They are indeed. I prefer to act within the boundaries of bare reality and
leverage technology for value-oriented scenarios. I feel business-driven,
cognition-altering escape palaces are wrathful, detrimental environments.

------
jcadam
I keep thinking of starting a blog under a false name. My current blog:
[https://jamesadam.me](https://jamesadam.me), is full of mostly vanilla tech
articles, conveying nothing particularly unique in perspective nor noteworthy
in content.

I have ideas for more "interesting" articles I'd like to write (still mostly
about software development, my industry, etc), but I fear they would either
cause offense (and we all know there is no greater sin) or at the very least
be off-putting to potential employers. Thus, I keep thinking about adopting a
'pen' name and throwing up a second blog to serve as an outlet for some of the
more insane ramblings I'd like to inflict on the world.

~~~
o_____________o
I first did this years ago with a science blog under a nom de plume and ended
up with a decent audience relative to no promotion (40-60k~ readers per
article). It was pretty satisfying and I would highly recommend doing it. The
only downside may have been that it deeply inflamed my generalist yearnings
for multiple careers.

~~~
DoreenMichele
Any thoughts on how you ended up with that much readership?

~~~
o_____________o
Focused on a niche subject. Wrote with humor, brevity and (unearned)
authority. Was strategic with visual and verbal tone: styled the blog to
reference institutions like NYT, wrote with the voice of authors I respect
and/or enjoyed.

Most important, I think, was writing for being pleasurable and nourishing to
the reader rather than egoistically trying to impress with wit, domain
knowledge, and, worst of all, personal anecdotes – the boring, herpetic poison
that oozes from most blogs.

Like art, you're assembling a puzzle with no preordained point of completion.
It didn't come easily but seemed clear when it was done.

~~~
DoreenMichele
Thank you.

------
simonw
I restarted my blog a few months ago after a seven year hiatus and I couldn't
be happier about it: it's been incredibly rewarding. If you're thinking "maybe
I should (re)start my blog" I strongly recommend doing it!

[https://simonwillison.net/](https://simonwillison.net/)

~~~
dqv
I really like your blog and I noticed you have the source code here -
[https://github.com/simonw/simonwillisonblog](https://github.com/simonw/simonwillisonblog)

But I noticed it doesn't have a license. Are you okay with people adopting the
backend for their own blog?

~~~
simonw
Good call, I'll add a license.

------
coding123
I love the idea of more and more people trying to get away from platforms. But
for the love of all things good, please:

1\. Don't use wordpress, you'll catch a virus.

2\. Don't use scroll-jackers, your OS/Browser combination should provide the
best scrolling experience for your user, if you hate your own scroll
experience, get a better browser/OS, don't FK with the one I have it's
perfect.

3\. Don't use pop-ups that cover content to sign up - EVERYONE I know
immediately closes the page and never returns when that happens... it's kinda
the opposite of what you want right?

~~~
klez
Am I doing it right? No wordpress, no js (at all!), no popups, just (low
quality) content.

[https://klezlab.it](https://klezlab.it)

EDIT: damn, I just noticed the date on the most recent post. I should give the
blog some more love...

~~~
bovermyer
I do the same thing, though my site doesn't look as polished as yours:
[https://www.benovermyer.com](https://www.benovermyer.com)

But yes, you should really write something new!

------
melling
The web is missing something between reddit and HN comments, and long form
articles.

It’s difficult to have a good discussion in the comments. And if you do, it’s
quickly lost to time.

For example, I can’t have a discussion about why I think the Amazon Alexa is
“Making a Dent in the Universe” without being drowned out by the privacy
debate,

So, I started a blog where I can [attempt to] write my thoughts in a short
piece.

[http://h4labs.org/the-amazon-echo-made-a-dent-in-the-
univers...](http://h4labs.org/the-amazon-echo-made-a-dent-in-the-universe/)

My musings can go in place that I can revisit:

[http://h4labs.org/category/musings/](http://h4labs.org/category/musings/)

I actually started a few years ago but I wanted off the ugly WordPress ads:

[https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2015/07/28/in-the-future-
everyo...](https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2015/07/28/in-the-future-everyone-
will-wear-a-smartwatch/)

[UPDATE]

I just got downvoted because someone didn’t like what I said. Happens all the
time. I’ve gone several levels deep explaining why I disagree with the common
opinion.

This brings up one of the other benefits of writing out your thoughts and
opinions in a blog, you don’t have to waste FU karma trying to explain
yourself.

------
newen
I agree with this so much. I miss reading thoughts by independent people on
semi-esoteric things instead of filtered conversations on filtered topics had
in vote-based sites like reddit, HN, and pretty much any other news
aggregator. And I miss the blog rabbit hole you can go into. That was half the
excitement of blogs.

------
frgtpsswrdlame
It still exists (although reduced) but the trouble is breaking in. For
economics my favorite is
[http://economistsview.typepad.com/](http://economistsview.typepad.com/) which
has a huge blogroll, and those blogs, say
[http://crookedtimber.org/](http://crookedtimber.org/) have their own
blogrolls and so on. What are some of your guys' favorites?

~~~
newen
I used to read language log
([http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/))
a lot. I get why they disabled comments for most of their posts but I kind of
lost interest after they did that. I am not really sure but I feel like
popularity of sites like reddit increased after a lot of blogs and news sites
disabled comments.

------
ibudiallo
I used to work very hard to produce low quality content and post it on hn
twitter and whatnot. It was depressing to see very little traffic.

So i reduced the number of post, stopped posting on HN. Suddenly i have more
traffic then ever. Though google is mostly responsible for it.

What i started doing more often is link to people i find interesting in my
articles, that's the new blog roll replacement, and somehow it has pushed
those to link back to me.

Ps: don't give up because no one likes your content, the majority will not
like it anyway.

[https://idiallo.com](https://idiallo.com)

~~~
bowlich
The fact that almost all the traffic to my personal blog are just one-hit
wonders from google actually made me feel a lot less pressure to "grow" the
blog or to even keep to any kind of coherent theme.

These days, I post about whatever I feel like. With greatly varied degrees of
quality. All knowing that a small handful of posts on some oddball niche will
continue to garner tons of Google traffic while the vast majority of pages lay
fallow.

~~~
nercht12
ditto. That's why on WP, I feel more connected. I get various followers and I
can search WP for blogs I'm interested in, but that leaves out everyone not on
WP. :(

------
pqs
I never stopped reading blogs using feedly. I don't like feedly a lot, but it
works and it allows me to follow nice blogs, which, from my point of view, is
a much better use of my time than using social networks, which I almost don't
use anymore.

~~~
doctorRetro
Moved to Feedly from Google Reader (I miss Google Reader). But likewise, I get
more value from that than social media. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the
instant gratification of someone-liked-and-shared-my-post just as much as the
next person, but if I'm going to learn anything over the course of the day,
it's more likely to be in my Feedly time than Facebook time.

------
pmlnr
Can someone justify me a blog that shows a blank page when JS is disabled with
noscript (and, therefore, <noscript> tag is triggered, unlike with umatrix and
ublock disabled scripts)?

~~~
rayalez
Server-side rendering can be challenging to implement.

~~~
pmlnr
I'm going to assume sarcasm here, given we're talking about content which is
purely text, without interactive bits.

EDIT especially after looking at the source: it's a CSS blanking to show
signup for newsletters. Once the CSS is disabled, the text is there.

------
ehnto
This was what I enjoyed about svbtle when it was first kicking off. They may
not have realised that's what they had done, but they had created a great
aggregate of quality bloggers.

Then they turned the public accounts on and the blog roll off and I can't even
find the people I used to read when I try let alone have them in a handy list.

And RSS feeds. Also, get off my lawn!

------
CodeCube
Getting a lot of nostalgia as well ... for most people, social media has 100%
replace the "need" for maintaining their own individual blog. They can post
their thoughts to facebook well enough, and their friend list (when shared)
essentially functions as their blogroll ... you can see who anyone follows on
twitter, and (when allowed) on FB, so you can traipse through an interesting
person's friend list and see what else you can find.

That's in no way excusing the state of affairs. As I mentioned, I fully agree
that _something_ has been lost since those halcyon days. The blogs that
existed (there was definitely a higher barrier to entry than opening a social
media account) each went their own individually quirky ways (at least, until
the staggering conformity of everyone using blog engines like Wordpress (<3 ya
WP, but you made the world bland)). It was great when a contributor had their
own little corner, and would actively customize it (in much more interesting
ways than the MySpace pages of yore).

~~~
mistermann
> They can post their thoughts to facebook well enough

I don't know if Americans are this much different than Canadians, but I have
200+ FB "friends" and outside of the occasional complaining about various
social injustices, no one ever posts anything of substance, I have a strong
feeling that most people would consider it weird.

~~~
CodeCube
I've been hiding any page that anyone shares: memes, animals, jokes, fails,
vines, overly-partisan political, bad pop-science ("OMG look at this projector
in a wristband that lets you use your iPhone in the tub!"), stupid "quizzes"
that prove you're a genius, ad nauseum -- all the garbage that swamps one's FB
feeds -- for the last few weeks. It's improved the quality of my feed
dramatically! People do post things, it's just that you never see it because
shares are so highly prioritized in the feed (anecdotal, but that's how it
seems).

------
ar-jan
Combined with RSS/Atom feeds please. Many newer blogs just omit feeds,
presumably because it's not included in whatever framework they're using.

~~~
daw___
Presumably because content consumed via a feed reader won't monetize.

~~~
icebraining
Nah, those use RSS but put just an excerpt of the post so that you're forced
to visit their site.

------
eitland
Related: I've finally found a feedreader extension for Firefox that I like.
I've started subscribing to rss feeds again and it feels great!

~~~
sparky_z
I've been looking for a good rss reader. Which one did you find?

~~~
interfixus
Can't answer for parent, but _I_ have settled for Feedbro, and it actually
works really well. I have a couple of hundred feeds, OPML'ed across several
readers over the years. Mercifully never the Google one, though.

~~~
eitland
It's the same I settled with.

The only thing I can think of that I want and isn't included are:

Auto sampling based on pages I visit (like old Google Desktop Search)

and auto following (not sure exactly how) of issues etc that I interact with
on github etc.

------
0xCMP
I think the issue with blogs is things like Twitter solved: making it low
effort to publish and promote content.

I've recently thought that maybe a blog should really be a timeline (or
similar) where you can tweet and posts simply exist as pages and show up on
category/tag pages. You'd "tweet" your posts to a timeline and this would be
what would normally appear on the home page and rss feed. You could re-promote
an old post with a small blurb why it's relevant again. You could link to
other sites with a blurb why. All the while you're not clogging up twitter and
others since they can go to the website and see the information there (pull vs
push).

~~~
thanatropism
You're describing Tumblr.

~~~
0xCMP
Yea, pretty much. Except I'd like one that's open source and not maintained by
them.

------
Sir_Cmpwn
I've been thinking about reblogging articles on my blog. I want to set up
separate article listings with and without reblogs, and separate RSS feeds. I
wouldn't rehost the content, just put a link to the article in my feed.

~~~
nathcd
I do exactly that with a /links.html page. Unfortunately it requires js
because it's just pulling in my latest shares from Pinboard. (But the link to
that page gets added to the navigation with js, so non-js user agents don't
see the link to it.) Pinboard provides a RSS feed I can link to for my shares
as well.

I've been thinking about moving from Pinboard and setting something up myself
and compiling it into my site's static html instead of syndicating from a
third-party.

------
lettergram
I actually touched on this in my recent article "Is Search Solved?":
[https://austingwalters.com/is-search-solved/](https://austingwalters.com/is-
search-solved/)

Fact is, I'm fairly confident with the greater and greater pull of social
media and walled gardens, indie writers are simply fading away.

I know I stopped writing because it's hard as hell to both rank and share
content.

------
hphu
Yes!

I started writing about random experiences and thoughts at my blog:
[https://www.pixelsbetween.com](https://www.pixelsbetween.com) but since I
decided to self-host instead of going with a specific platform, it feels like
I'm on my own tiny island.

I would love for a better way to share and find independent content like my
own.

~~~
gt_
I like the site! Good writing, thoughts, and the illustrations are wonderful!

------
spondyl
Oh, congrats to the iwantmyname team for making HN :)

I've been a customer for at least a year or more now and I can highly
recommend them. They're a nice bunch and always happy to help out.

I've even weirdly been enjoying and fully reading their newsletters which just
started recently. I guess because they're written in such a conversational
tone!

~~~
chriswrites
Thanks for reading the newsletter (Chris from iwantmyname here)! I dropped
social media a few months back and started a similar family/friends
newsletter... was hoping it’d work out for iwantmyname as well. It’s
admittedly a little quirky, but I’m having a lot of fun writing it.

------
gt_
The music blog era was one of the greatest achievements of blogrolls. Music
media was entirely subverted in favor of a litany of independent artists and
it would have never been possible if it weren’t for the ‘friends’ or blog roll
section in the margins of the blog pages. This author has a great point.

------
CM30
They're still out there in some niches. For example, quite a few gaming sites
still have affiliates, which are basically the fancy equivalent of a blogroll
with site quality and traffic requirements attached to them.

That said, they're certainly less common than they used to be, and that's
something that's definitely annoyed me about the internet in recent years.
Feels the culture of helping people out and working together to provide great
content has been replaced with a 'me me me' type self centredness, where
everyone only thinks about backlinks and personal social media popularity and
anyone not in the 'in group' should be discarded whenever it gets convenient
to do so.

------
icc97
I vouch to add a blogroll to my blog. I fully agree it's a great thing to do.

edit: I've added three...
[https://ianchanning.wordpress.com/](https://ianchanning.wordpress.com/)

------
shams93
Neocities has this kind of functionality. With a normal host you get 0
traffic, my coming soon prelaunch page for my podcast has gotten close to 10k
hits through the neocities network with no cost or effort on my part.

------
etchalon
I definitely miss running my blog. Might have to get back into it.

------
themodelplumber
Wow. I was seriously looking into web rings yesterday, just to see if there
were any remaining leads to chase down there, with the exact same problem in
mind. I gave up after a few frustrating minutes of finding not _just old_
content but _old and useless_ content at the top of the search results. It's
one of those problems that, if solved, will add new growth potential to
communications technology.

------
icc97
There's a nice post somewhere I read about good reasons for blog posts.
Unfortuately searching for it gets buried in snake oil.

The simplest point was if you've written a long email to someone explaining a
tech topic - write it up as a blog post.

But there were a couple of other equally valid reasons for writing a blog
post, but I can't remember them now.

~~~
jamietanna
I'm not sure if you're referring to Scott Hansleman's approach:

> This stemmed from listening to a podcast on The Changelog about ‘Open Source
> at Microsoft, Inclusion, Diversity, and OSCON’ with Scott Hansleman. In the
> interview, Scott mentions how he receives questions via email fairly
> regularly. Interestingly, instead of replying to the email directly he
> instead writes a blog post and then replies to the email with a link to the
> post. Scott goes on to describe how he is constantly aware of the number of
> keypresses he has left in his life and therefore has taken the approach to
> not want to waste a single one of them.

Extract from an article I wrote on the subject, under the term Blogumentation
[https://jvt.me/posts/2017/06/25/blogumentation/](https://jvt.me/posts/2017/06/25/blogumentation/)

~~~
icc97
I'm not sure either, shows how shot my memory is.

It sounds almost exactly like it though and I have read quite a bit of
Hanselman's stuff. Bloody good find. Thank you :)

------
panzagl
I miss webrings.

~~~
bovermyer
It looks like webring.org is still a thing, though it looks quite a lot like a
sketchy landing page.

------
anigbrowl
Is there an easy way to scrape blogrolls information/trackbacks or does it
require buying a commercial scraper or rolling one's own in Python with
BeautifulSoup or something? I'm very interested in mapping blogosphere network
structures but don't want to reinvent the wheel unnecessarily.

------
biznickman
More importantly is the death of two key resources: mybloglog & technorati
which enabled bloggers to publicly keep track of trackbacks. I used it all the
time and ended up with sizeable audiences!

~~~
lkrubner
Technorati had terrible management. I was very frustrated trying to deal with
them. In 2006 myself and friends were trying to build a startup that would
rely heavily on Technorati's "Authority" ranking. Technorati supposedly had an
API, but to use it we were supposed to write to the company and negotiate a
price. I wrote to them 20 times. No one ever wrote back. Out of frustration, I
tracked down some of the top people online, found other email addresses for
them, and wrote to them. No one ever wrote me back. We were desperate to give
them money, but they did not want our money.

------
Bensch
Curation for discovery has been the most difficult problem for information
since access exploded with the internet. Netflix had prize money behind
algorithmic improvement here. Public libraries and physical bookstores use
experts and physical placement. Most digital content services use humans to
curate new content. The last chapter in James Gleick's book "The Information"
identifies this as the next problem in information - now that access is no
longer a barrier, how do we decide what's useful? The combination of wikipedia
and Google has largely solved search for most internet-available content, but
not discovery or trust of what you don't yet know to search for.

This curation problem isn't only about blog content - it also contributes to
the proliferation of fake news and conspiracy theories. Comment curated by
many people's networks has become limited to their tribal connections, and
some tribes exclude information sources that value scientific or journalistic
standards.

What we already know about and read daily is what we trust, and helps define
our tribe. Our tribe uses HN. Other tribes (which may intersect with ours) use
Reddit, Digg, 4Chan, forums, newspapers, blogrolls, and many other systems.
When we get content from our tribe - the concept of 'social media' \- someone
else is sharing their trust in content with us, in ways we can categorize.

Each content system on the internet is rooted in a point source, the owner,
who shares their trust with varying levels of directness: Newspapers don't
have a pattern of trust sharing, though some experiment. Blogrolls' owners
share trust directly - 'direct owner trust sharing'. Small forums (where
content is only ranked by time, not votes) use 'direct user trust sharing'
because users are treated equally; Reddit posts use 'indirect user trust
sharing' through voting. Facebook and Twitter use both 'direct user trust
sharing' (what your friends post) and 'indirect owner trust sharing', (the
owner algorithms).

It seems clear that there are serious manipulation problems with indirect
trust sharing systems open across tribes - Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter all
struggle with this. Innovation in social media seems to focus on curating
direct user trust sharing to guide indirect user trust sharing. To fix trust
sharing, we'll have to curate new direct relationships. I believe this will be
much along the lines of blogrolls - direct trust sharing from identified
tribal members, rather than only from your direct network.

Work has been done to map the internet through linking. Some of this, such as
Jonathan Albright's coverage of the 2016 US Presidential election, has begun
to identify tribes in those maps. I believe the next major algorithmic
innovation will triangulate your tribe, using content you've already trusted
yourself (by sharing with others), and curate discovery of new tribal members
based on the nodes in and near that tribe. A network-wide blogroll, across
content types, which links you to new direct trust sharing relationships. This
would help democratize curation, and could result in a clearer understanding
of tribal boundaries and how disinformation spreads.

~~~
specialist
I don't equate curation with recommenders.

Back in 1989, when Byte Magazine was warning us of "infoglut", I decided that
the most valuable job was the editor. I've seen no reason to change my mind
since.

I ran the hub of a BBS network, moderated numerous forums, have run a few user
/ study groups, published a few zines / newsletters, was a (terrible) radio
DJ, etc. I even work on recommenders for my day job.

I remain unimpressed. I've tried to be open minded about automated curation.
But I've decided recommenders, as we know them, have topped out.

~~~
Bensch
Recommenders and editors are both curators. My comment also doesn't recommend
algorithmic curation, except in linking tribal members.

~~~
specialist
What's the algorithm for taste, opinion, intuition, judgement, exploration,
novelty, criticism?

Machine learning-based recommenders are just feedback loops, automated
groupthink.

\---

Aha. It's worse than that. Today's recommenders are merely accelerated
preferential attachment. aka Fads.

Thanks, articulating myself has been a useful exercise.

~~~
Bensch
I think you're confusing "algorithm" with "curation".

~~~
specialist
So you do understand! Terrific.

------
kbuchanan
Isn't this the nature of wanting to be special? If you fancy yourself Mr.
Bespoke Blog Reader, than you gotta go look where others don't. This feels
like one of the conflicting desires of the open web crowd: the view that
decentralized content can exist without a cost.

~~~
themodelplumber
That's a good point. Habit probably gets in the way, too: Many of us have
conditioned ourselves to continually check the same mainstream sources/walled
gardens. These places have no blogrolls, of course. Thanks for your comment,
it's good food for thought.

