
Show HN: r/hnblogs, Blogging is not Dead - fossuser
Link: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;hnblogs&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;hnblogs&#x2F;</a>
Old Reddit Link: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;hnblogs&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;hnblogs&#x2F;</a><p>Hi HN,<p>Inspired by this post earlier this week: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23237559" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23237559</a>, I thought we could make blog discovery easier by having a place to find interesting, unusual, niche, or really any kind of non-marketing blogs that are posted by the people that write them.<p>There are a ton of interesting blogs on the web, probably more than there were when the web was new, but even though there&#x27;s more they&#x27;re a smaller percentage of the total internet and hard to find.<p>Search engines fail to help with this for a lot of reasons. They&#x27;re both <i>not</i> incentivized to find this kind of non-ad, non-sales content, and there are lots of sophisticated actors trying to game search engines to show their own content.<p>Regular people just writing interesting blogs who don&#x27;t have an interest in SEO will be lost in that shuffle.<p>HN and Reddit are great for link aggregations, but rely on submissions and upvotes which skew things to more generally popular content. The volume of posts also make it hard to compete (even though I really like HN and find the content interesting).<p>The restriction to only allow posts from the authors of the blogs should help and the writer can interact with the community.<p>The end goal is to generate a wiki on Reddit reminiscent of old 90s &#x27;portal&#x27; pages with curated links to interesting content.<p>We have a small initial community from my HN comment on that other post (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23239999" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23239999</a>), but if you write a blog and want to join please do!
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ve55
The difficulty with the blogging ecosystem is the same challenge that many
others face, which is that some very large companies don't want you to have
your own blog when you could instead be producing content to make (Twitter,
Medium, Youtube, Facebook, etc) more valuable. Still, the level of control and
decentralization with blogs remains appealing to many, luckily. While blogging
isn't _dead_ , being able to better discover individual places on the Internet
is a great step.

My vision of the Internet was always that everyone gets their own website,
which could be a blog, or of course anything else, perhaps they want to host
videos or music instead of text posts. Then there would be centralized
directories as well as decentralized+federated networks and interlinking to
help people navigate through all of this. Then you could have open protocols
on how all of these things connect, but the huge benefit would be the level of
control that users have, resilience to censorship, significantly more creative
freedoms and so on. It would be nice if people were not obligated to use
certain social networks to be able to have certain kinds of content viewed by
others, since we all know if you want your video watched, you have to use
Youtube, as an example.

~~~
snisarenko
Yep, I agree with this idea. Aggregators and directories should be separate
services from the actual blogs, content. If you don't like the
censorship/curation on one aggregator, you can go to a different one.

I started working a little bit on this idea, by creating simple aggregators
for mastodon and pixelfed (still thinking about how to improve the
discovery/curation aspect)

[https://pixelfed.club](https://pixelfed.club)

[https://mastodonia.club](https://mastodonia.club)

~~~
asaibx
This is great. Thanks so much for creating this!

There is actually an amazing amount of really good quality content out there,
but as everybody on this thread has pointed out already, discoverability is a
major issue. I often wonder how one would go about finding a site like the one
you made if it hadn't been posted here, though I suppose "aggregator" is
actually a decent search keyword that should (in theory) also lead to other
good content. Presumably "blog aggregator" wouldn't be a particularly useful
search term though.

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bpodgursky
To close the loop, remember that you can get an RSS feed to a subreddit by
tagging .rss on the URL.

So if you want, you can get an aggregate RSS feed of hnblogs here:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/hnblogs.rss](https://www.reddit.com/r/hnblogs.rss)

~~~
notadog
Thanks for mentioning that, I had no idea that was a feature.

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glenstein
I love this idea. I guess my main concern will be figuring out how to do it
without mission creep.

It's unproductive to debate what it does or doesn't mean for blogs to be dead.
But it is productive, I think, to do something like Awesome Lists[1] but for
this.

There are some great blogs that I never, ever would have found, unless some
random person on Mastodon pointed me to them, and I want there to be a way to
find them. I don't even want to say findable blogs are bad necessarily.
Discoverability isn't what it used to be.

1\.
[https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome](https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome)

~~~
thaumasiotes
StumbleUpon was pretty good for this.

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bachmeier
I really like this, and I think the key is that you have to submit your own
posts, so that there is engagement. I suggest having _some_ kind of
requirement that authors engage with comments. Otherwise it could turn into
Twitter: someone posts material in an attempt to promote themselves (even if
there's no attempt to sell anything) but they refuse to engage with most
people. That's super boring, and there are other places to do that.

~~~
m01
I feel that if in general you want the authors to engage, I would ask the
audience to post the comments on the author's blog (for those blogs that
support comments).

In this specific case it's a bit trickier because you want authors to post
their content, and this may or may not be in line with your goal, depending on
whether you e.g. prioritise build another community (social network?) of
people interested in blogging or reducing reliance on <big centralised
websites>.

I would prefer reducing the comment fragmentation in this kind of a context.

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dasqxi
The subreddit appears to entirely miss the difference between a "blog" and a
"post." The former is a collection of posts, and the subreddit seems to
consist exclusively of posts, not blogs. What the the HN post was lamenting
was that there aren't blogs as a whole that you can follow anymore. The
subreddit doesn't quite seem to be filling the void that had been identified.

~~~
fossuser
This seems pedantic to me?

The reason for people to submit a post they like is to interest people in
their blog and focus discussion about a specific post in the comments.

Submitting the homepage is less interesting.

People that like the post can follow the blog (the homepage of which is easy
to find from a post).

Also, the wiki is a place for the collection of blog links generally.

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qznc
For a lean mobile view add ".compact" to the end:
[https://old.reddit.com/r/hnblogs/.compact](https://old.reddit.com/r/hnblogs/.compact)

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bredren
Thank you for trying this. It is adding to my own recent interest in resuming
blogging for blogging's sake.

~~~
fossuser
Thanks - I look forward to seeing your post!

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pokemod97
All this talk about blogs and this subreddit led me to restart my github pages
blog.

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polote
Just liking a post in which I discribed a tool I created to help finding
'original posts' and therefore blog from HN publications

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23093990](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23093990)

I'm going through all post published on hn everyday to discover those
contents, maybe I could publish my daily findings

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radoncnotes
This is a great idea for aggregating blogs. I am very happy with the
initiative. Blogging isn't dead but it has become more niche.

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brianzelip
Glad to see you followed through with the idea!

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aklemm
If you’re running a blog or personal website, be sure to IndieWeb-ify it for
maximum site-to-site engagement. Use micro.blog or the various IndieWeb
plugins (or find lots of other options on
[http://indieweb.org](http://indieweb.org)).

~~~
tduberne
You got me thinking... Would a webmention-based aggregator make sense? In the
sense that you link to it from your post and send a mention to it, and your
post appears on it?

I see a potential for spam, but on the other side I always found that given
the low number of webmention-using blogs, they do not seem to bring a lot.
Most posts where Ibsaw them used were posts about webmentions themselves,
where people basically were playing around.

Such an aggregator would at least create some kind of hub where such posts
appear.

~~~
aklemm
I can see something in that idea for sure. Maybe read through some of this to
help conceptualize what might work.
[https://indieweb.org/Webmention](https://indieweb.org/Webmention)

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im3w1l
May I recommend a webring?

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some_furry
I'll believe blogging isn't dead when more small blogs make the HN front page.

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mraza007
Thanks for making this

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redis_mlc
> No ads on your blogs (no ad-farms), some light ads may be allowed on a per-
> blog exception basis.

So no way to montize blogs for the creators. Are you serious?

> Add your post.

This is not a list of blogs, you have to repost each article. Perfect for
full-time SEO spammers, but a burden on normal bloggers.

~~~
fossuser
I’m not against creators making money, but the default stance should be no-ad
with exceptions for light ads on quality blogs when necessary.

This whitelists the spam problem which is more effective and reduces the
incentive to push large volumes of low quality content that only exists to
serve ads.

Creators can also make money via paid subscriptions and Patreon, both of which
are better models than ads.

You’re not supposed to spam every post you’ve written, you’re supposed to post
an interesting one that introduces people to your blog so they can then follow
if they like it.

The wiki is a ‘portal’ of links to the blogs themselves. The post requirement
is better for engagement and more likely to get people interested in your blog
if they like the post.

