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.

Or, to put that another way: blogs are/were effectively people publicizing their diaries. (Or, in the case of a work blog, publicizing the contents of their https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventor%27s_notebook).

> Today that need is filled with Facebook/Twitter/

Not really? Facebook/Twitter/etc. are for "what you're thinking right now." Incomplete, out-of-context thoughts. Maybe conversations, where the thought plus access to the author for further questioning can "add up to" a complete, legible text.

I've never seen Facebook/Twitter used for "a breakthrough in understanding you've had, and want to preserve for posterity and your own future reference; where enough context is given that you (or someone else) can recapture the whole of the idea just from the words on the page, 10+ years down the line." That's the sole province of blogging. (Or of books, journal papers, and open letters. But blogs are a lot lower-overhead than any of those.)

Sports journalists (including the mathy ones) use Twitter this way. And, boy howdy, do I hate it. But they do.

Exactly this. Im not sure if my experience was typical, but i recall lots of small mini communities of bloggers, where each blog would have less than a dozen real followers, but everyone would read the other peoples content. Thats why you had the "follows" tab on the sidebar of the blog.

I also recall a distinction between homepages (IE where useful static information collected in one place) and blogs (personal stories not with the goal of teaching). Homepages could have lots of traffic but little real interaction (like FB today). Blogs would have lots of detailed interaction but but very little viewership.

It was a nice way of discovering new things, and a more personal one. You jumped around topics and social networks simultaneously; at every step it wasn't just a new theme, but a new person, an acqauintance of an acquaintance, someone with a name (or more likely then, a nickname) you would remember and refer back to in conversations. Even though we mostly didn't know one another except from blogs and IRC, the Internet felt much more like a village back then. Now, it feels like a strip mall.

My honest feeling is that if you're a good writer and not just posting ranty flamebait -- and "strongly worded and highly opinionated" is not the same thing, although it can be -- blogging is valuable. Or at least it used to be. And really, I'd like to see it make more of a return, too.

It requires work to avoid being flamebaity

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?)

All the social problems, such as the underlying reasons for wanting or needing anonymity in the first place, remain.

And people will slip up and make mistakes. A lot.

The downside is that as a reader you wouldn’t be able to follow your favorite authors anymore.

Consider the usage of semi-anonymous accounts on HN or Reddit or wherever. There's some risk of deanonymization depending on usage style and how determined the attacker is, but it's still quite different from openly publishing things in a manner that links back to you directly.

The issue for me is that (for an anonymous blog) once I decide to publish something to it the article becomes permanently and publicly linked to all the others as well. This means that I can never change my mind in the future without simultaneously changing my mind about all the other content published there. It also means that if I ever slip up (say on a non-anonymous HN account) and reveal that I'm the author then I've inadvertently and publicly tied the entire blog to myself (not just that one article).

Any time bits leave your computer it would be wise to assume that they're out in the world for good. Especially for anything with a distributed architecture, presumably all you have control over is whether your personal box continues distributing it. I suppose you could set a "don't distribute" flag and hope that other hosts choose to honor it ...

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.

Consider all the issues that Reddit and HN have with spam and other sorts of abuse. Then again, BitTorrent and IPFS seem to work well enough. At a minimum, I suspect that issues will tend to crop up anywhere a search or other curation mechanism exists that can potentially be gamed in order to gain an audience.

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

Patreon, Etsy, OnlyFans, Kickstarter, and even Github (just to scratch the surface) all serve to put pressure on creators to turn their hobbies into second jobs.

I had some hobby pages in the 1990s that got a lot of views and came high up in search results. None of them were ever deliberately publicised. I doubt that any of my material would show in the top 1000 of any web search today.

Hobbies for most people are a way to spend money, not make it. No one I know has "side hustles"

It’s social media, it’s private blogging platforms and it’s the plight for power.

It's the way you're given knowledge, slow with thought control and subtle hints

It's the fast talk they use to abuse and feed my brain

It stretches for as far as the eye can see

It's reality, fuck it, it's everything but me

Atmosphere - Scapegoat, with some blogging additions

Almost all news organizations -- they're not bloggers but chances are they're using blogging software (mostly WordPress) -- have figured this out. And they're still not making enough money from advertising. Hence subscriptions. Bloggers can go this route directly with https://substack.com.

Google-owned YouTube's willingness to compensate those who make popular videos has fueled that service's growth and helped it draw a young audience.

The fact that Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have no way of "paying" its top performers, as it were, is interesting. You get paid in eyeballs. In exposure. Since the pay for blogs is usually non-existent, there's some value in the "likes," and most people who envision making money off of their social-media/internet presence need to get a side hustle to their side hustle -- a product they can make and sell.

Youtube is a good example. It used to be so fun to just throw up videos on the internet, without caring how far they would really go. I definitely think there are great content creators on it nowadays and I'm glad that they're being paid for their hard work, but it still feels like we've lost something.

This right here. You all need to calm down like you're all so unique you are all owed 1000s of views a day. Write for the sake of writing- it's rewarding in and of itself.

Writing is a public act. You might still be expecting some readership without the expectation of ad money or promotion of something.

What I miss most about the blogs in 90s and early 00s is the conversation between blogs by linking, quoting and commenting each other. Reading blogs involved going from one blog to another, and reading blogs of 10 people about a single issue. It was a conversation. And you would constantly discover new blogs this way.

I've never really bought this line of argument. People who "write just for writing" don't publish. They write it in One Note or Evernote or Tiddlywiki or plain old text files on their laptop. They don't sign up for Wordpress accounts (or even worse, spend hours configuring some static site generator) and publish it.

People publish things because they want them to be read. Having no indication that they are being read is, understandably, discouraging for people who are publishing things.

Then internet slowly became a place where everything is a business opportunity, and blogs were relayed into the second zone. Google also somehow became much less useful when it comes to find good blogs, probably because of aggressive SEO.

Besides, I really prefer to read over watching videos as I can do it at my own pace. Except in cases where a lot is shown like EEVBlog, it makes sense there.

But easy platforms exist. Wordpress is still there :) You just have to keep it up to date like a hawk.

Don't they all work like this by default? You don't have to share what you write everywhere. You also don't need to use FB or Twitter to blog.

Personally, I think the blogosphere is covered pretty well for me by the likes of Medium. I'm not sure how I feel about that, but they've made a damn good job at cornering that part of the market for those more serious posts that were previously relegated to the blogosphere. That's a place I'd put a more well-formed idea. A great example is the article, "Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now" by Thomas Pueyo.[1]

Outside that, blogs still exists! I still even have my own. I think the complaint is rather that they're hard to index or search. And to that end, there are many solutions and ways around it that still exist, such as syndication or even RSS.

[1]: https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-peop...

I blog my work activities on an internal wiki for similar reasons. Major decisions need to be gathered in project documentation but small decisions and daily challenges are good to have written down.

It was more of a journal and something maybe if my friends and family wanted to read, they could. A slightly extroverted way of showing your inner thoughts and life.

I used to think blogging come as complementary to your skills. How will anyone use them against you?

If, say, you blog about some social/economic/political position that is (or becomes) unpopular/unacceptable, your career may be toast. Such as, for example, happened for James Damore.

So if you're going to blog as your meatspace identity, you gotta protect your brand.

If you want to blog carelessly, you'd better do that using a persona that can't readily be linked to your meatspace identity. That's why I'm here as Mirimir.

But even then, Mirimir has a reputation to protect. And that's why I use other personas, which can't readily be linked to this one.

But I like the idea of blogging under a fake name! This will sound ridiculous, but I'm a young individual with big ambitions. I don't want to blog, lest my future enemies figure out my psyche to use it against me.

I suppose that you could use other personas for totally non-controversial stuff. Indeed, you could have a range of them, and disclose some if you like.

There is the issue of writing style. At this point, Mirimir is my only persona that writes extensively in English. There are a few others that are basically Mirimir's pseudonyms. But my IRL identity doesn't post much in English. For some others, I've translated into other languages, using offline software.

I think you overestimate the sophistication of your future enemies. The bigger risk may be that by not blogging you don't figure out your psyche, to use it for you.

As Mirimir, I have voiced opinions about such topics. I'm not dogmatic, but neither do I avoid dark humor, so I suspect that I've managed to piss off some on every "side".

Anyway, I was thinking about decades ago. There were opinions that you just didn't voice, if you cared about your reputation. Back in the 50s, communism became a dangerous topic in the US. And homosexuality was a dangerous topic there until the late 70s. Although there were some flamboyant stars, and cartoon characters like Bugs Bunny, they were just perceived as strange.

Further back, dissent among Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony led to the establishment of Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Hampshire.

Yes I did, sorry.

The rest of your comment here highlights why I believe freedom of expression is so important. Society would not have progressed if it were not for people brave enough to defy those social norms. I guess the intolerance for alternative points of view has not changed, but over the past ten years or so we have seen the establishment of an entirely new set of sacred social norms, which I would characterize as a bit of a regression.

That depends on who you are, and where you hang out.

By "sacred social norms", I presume that you mean what some call the "social justice movement": liberal perspectives on "race", culture, sexuality, gender, and other human rights. It's true that those norms now apply for liberal mass media, academica, and large enterprises. And increasingly, they've become part of state and federal law.

Those norms reflect activism over at least the past 200 years. However, change hasn't been steady or even monotonic. Recent reverses occurred during the Reagan era, driven by the Moral Majority. And again during the Bush II era, driven by them and the New Right.

American society has also become increasingly polarized since the 60s. Although the mass media has become increasingly liberal, the Fox News Network and associated talk radio developed. And since the early 90s, development of the Internet has dramatically increased polarization.

So now we're in the Trump era. By 2016, American society was already so polarized that the liberal mass media was totally blind sided by Trump's election. And even after three years, they're still convinced that it was a Russian plot.

Anyway, it's hard to say whether the intolerance of the "social justice movement" has caused the backlash, or whether the backlash has driven the intolerance. But either way, both sides are ~equally intolerant.

And yes, it's a disturbing development. At some point, it may drive the US to partition. Much like India split off Pakistan, but on a larger scale.

>But either way, both sides are ~equally intolerant.

When I was growing up it was the intolerance of Christian morality that prevented people from living their lives and expressing themselves the way they wanted to. The intolerance was a largely bipartisan (see the PMRC with Tipper Gore and Paula Hawkins for instance), but it was really the Democrats that gave way to social progress first, and the Republican party still today retains a reputation for Christian puritanism. The modern flavor of puritanism most certainly comes more from the other side of the isle (whether you want to call it the "social justice movement" or anything else). The basis of each of those political stances is the same. People should not be able say anything they want, or live any way they please, because allowing them to do so would risk causing offence. I've supported gay marriage since the 90s, and for the same reason that I support freedom of expression today. In the past those views (which I have not changed) aligned me much more firmly with the "left" than the "right", and the reverse is true today. I would argue that modern "progressive" (or whatever else you want to call it) politics has no room for freedom of expression, because it won't tolerate anything seen as "offensive", "hateful" or "dangerous". Which is basically the same premise that has obstructed all of our past social progress up to this point.

Yeah, same here.

But arguably the "right" just talks that way because they're recruiting. If they had a lock on the government, and the mass media bagged, they'd be far less tolerant.

But in any case, that's why I'm an anonymous coward. In meatspace, I just keep my head down. Nothing to see here, move along.

But I think it's a stretch to call the situation "reversed". You can see the right often using the very methods and talking points they seem to criticize on the left. From efforts to shut down protests, to constant usage of patriotic symbols to silence speech ("if you kneel during the anthem, you're disrespecting the flag"), to starting investigations for cases where speech didn't align with their values.

Here's an article about growing right-wing threats to free speech on campus for example. Note, this article was published in Reason of all places: https://reason.com/2019/09/19/the-growing-right-wing-threat-...

Here's the thing: write that. Go meta, just a little, and write about your journey. "I thought this, but then I found out that, and now my questions have evolved thus..."

I think it was Orson Welles who, when somebody asked him if they could write his biography, said, "No, because it will be false. You may write the story of your attempt to discover the truth of my life."

There is also nothing wrong with serving good knowelage, even if you can find the information somewhere else. Maybe your source is 10 years old, what has happened since? Or maybe its hard to understand for laymen. Or maybe the other sources will fall off the web, great websites disappears in the thousands every day.

Maybe someone is looking for a tech, but there's little info out there, even if the i info is good, it can still be dismissed. Help spread the knowledge.

Then there's the noise to signal problem. Your blog will be a light beacon - for others to navigate around all the crap.

When you're familiar with an idea, it seems to you like it's obvious and it's mentioned everywhere, but there are also lots of people out there for whom it will be new. Maybe you aren't the first one to say it, but you're the first one they heard it from. You'll inevitably put your own spin on it, too. I've been working on convincing myself that it's not necessary to come up with some completely novel thought that nobody ever thought before in order to just post something. Practically nobody does that.

Not everything has to be new or novel. You may add to the discussion and enhance it by writing about what informed your change of heart.

I'm 26 and I see people writing about stuff that are much younger than me and I still think "I know nothing". Maybe I have a huge case of imposter syndrome?

And that, right there, is the best reason to remove all analytics from your blog/website[1]. At the risk of being held guilty of self-promotion, I wrote a little blog post about just this a couple of weeks ago: https://one.mikro2nd.net/2020/05/why-no-web-analytics-are-to... (Thing is, if anybody here does go and read it, I won't even know.)

At the root of the unease is the question, "Why are you blogging?" If it's something you do for yourself, then analytics -- specifically: who is reading which posts -- is a distraction, and sure to lead you astray into the thickets and quagmire of writing mere clickbait.

If you're writing to establish "thought leadership" in some sphere, then display leadership, not followership (i.e. chasing the analytics.) It's a strange and uncomfortable feeling at first (perhaps always!) but at least you'll always know who you're writing for (yourself). If you're writing for some "payback" then I'd suggest that submitting articles to magazines is a better path/platform than blogging.

Personally I am more interested in inciting thought and discussion through my blog, so mere visitor statistics are of little interest. What would validate what I do there would be someone who reaches out to talk about something I've written. That's the real payback.

[1] Nor any trackers of any sort.

Why would I use the very thing I'm trying so hard to avoid when surfing the web? It's basically a matter of respect to the reader. So I designed my site following the values I consider so important for websites in general: no trackers, no mandatory javascript, no obstacles between the user and the content.

+1 on joining in. Perhaps we can turn it into a movement. ;)

my first thought when reading this was "yeah, that's because users don't know how to RSS". it's not that i know how to RSS that well, but i do have friends who use RSS in the style of masters. my favorite strategy that i have heard of, and what i will try to replicate in a few months, is: rss subscription >> local mail service >> inbound mail folders filled with articles from my RSS feed.

i've been practicing my own ability to use "the computer" in a way that makes me feel like a master... and we'll see if i ever get there. surely though, we are all missing out on the oldschool internet that was swallowed by the walled gardens.

but it seems that we're headed for a renaissance

I've only been doing it for less than a year, so I haven't reached the stuff you're talking about. I haven't even really branched out into talking about general topics yet, but I plan to soon. I'm just slowly feeling my way around, seeing what I can do and what I have time for and whatever. I don't get (m)any views that aren't myself yet though, lol.

That's what people chose, because it's easier. They gave up content rights and many, many possibilities for the ease of posting and the near instant views and feedback.

Still, something doesn't feel quite right about Medium to me.

From a reader’s perspective, the content just seems repetitive and traffic-driven. There is a certain sensationalist slant that must drive views, and the articles rapidly started to feel samey.

I’m still subscribed to it but I doubt I’ll renew.

I have a blog which I've maintained for a long time and continue to publish on. But for a lot of the material I write on a day to day basis, I can publish at online pubs/sites where I have editorial support, an established audience, and promotional machinery. I'm not limited--I can always publish by myself--but for many of the things I write about I might as well choose an existing publication.

Open source software development can be like this as well. Most of my projects ended up being useful to me alone. I started some just to see if some fundamental idea was possible: lost all motivation to actually finish the project once I proved to myself that it was.

I contributed some features to an existing project and they got a lot more attention. Interacting with fellow developers and users is a great experience. Made me care a lot more about the end result and whether it got merged.

Perhaps a personal wiki would be better than a blog. As long as the articles are useful to their writers, they should have enough motivation to keep writing.

However things with the publishing and PR industry are such that I think it would be best to get some eyeballs and feedback before you spend years writing hoping to get discovered, much like launching a product or service too late after spending too much time in pre-production.

Sadly I think it's multiple changes in google that killed blogs over the years and I don't see blogs coming back into the top search results (or blog link rolls not being penalties that scare people into never using them) and changing things.

I love blogs, and blogging - but I must admit that more success is found by tweeting or even making a meme that is shared. If you can't hope for google to give you results and never know if fbook is going to block your blog, then I don't suggest people put eggs in that basket - unless there is another side reason for doing so, like your posts are auto-added to instagram or something somehow.

Real blogging is about sharing your thoughts and ideas on whatever niche topic interests you with people who have the same interests, and the conversations that arise out of that. Like the friendships that form from participating in BBSes and forums over the years, the value is in the fun you have and the interesting discussions and bouncing ideas off others' viewpoints. It doesn't need to be a business to be fulfilling.

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

Their site is http://tttthis.com

I remember it because I sometimes try to find it. I quite liked a post of theirs called "Remember websites" or something to that effect.

I think what is missing now is the rich set of tools around the ecosystem. Posterous was a great service to let you email your thoughts directly to a blog post. I am amazed there was no other competitor that sprung up when they got bought out and shut down by Twitter nearly a decade ago.

I really miss Google Reader, which was where I used to keep a curated list of the top blogs I used to read regularly. Even now, some mornings I wish I could just open my Google Reader home page and check out the latest updates from some of my favourite bloggers.

It’s hard getting the ideas down, but having lived long enough to lost a few email accounts from My childhood, and other such content.

When you want to preserve for future generations I think there’s really something to be said for paper. I think Nassim Taleb had ideas about papers longevity too, the longer a technology had been around the longer it will likely stay around. As in email will likely outside Facebook simply because it’s already been around longer.

You might want to check it out.

https://www.inoreader.com/

Edit : Their free tier has 150 RSS subs allowed. So it's pretty reasonably. I have the middle tier for $US 20 a year that sets that to 500 subs.

Also, I have no interest in the company financially, just very pleased that there is a better than Google Reader replacement.

To my surprise, medium doesn't let you publish (write yes, not publish) anything, unless you jump through several obscure loops like "engaging with the platform for a while".

My article wasn't particularly important, so I am not too heartbroken about it. But what this tells me is that there seems to be a lot of demand for publishing posts of different nature.

My problem with blogging is that I can’t just write in a vacuum, I must always write in response to something and when I have something worth responding too I can write more usefully.

[1]: https://daringfireball.net/

[0]https://www.jwz.org/blog/

I've been blogging for eight years now, and it has been very rewarding. It's great to get readers, and it is great to end up on the front page of Hacker News. But it is also really good to have a blog to point people to when you look for a job.

One thing that is still true is how much work it is to write even a short blog post. It still takes me hours of concentrated work. But I am still doing it, becuase the value outweighs the cost.

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

> After all, how can you justify more time spent on something that doesn't pay back?

If you think that the value of your writing is measured by the attention it attracts, you are set for a really rough and sad career as a writer.

> But that's rarely how things work.

Totally agree. I've written a fair bit about blogging, but when I started a new blog aimed at helping new developers, for the first month I wrote more posts than I had visitors (!): https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/2019/10/14/how-to-start-b...

I think that six months is enough time to commit. At the end of that period you'll either have the bug and want to keep blogging or know the format is not for you.

If I was to make an analogy using your perspective on blogging with facebook or instagram - you post about yourself or post personal photos for a long time. It is futile, for a long long time, nobody sees your content... you post photos for years, and you realize it changes you. You will notice patterns, you will get better at posting photos ...

I am exaggerating to make a point and it is this, you may find yourself needing to perfect your content strategy(blog, photos or facebook-style posts) for years and the main reason it doesn't pay back is there is no network or community anymore. You shouldn't have to be a pro to get noticed.

People tried decentralized networks and that didn't work so well, because one - you need modern blogging software (newsfeed, real time comments, spam moderation, good recommendation algorithms) and it has to be managed by a centralized authority that offers a great user experience. Today, closest thing to this is facebook and twitter (and instagram). All in all you must have these for a great blogging experience: first, good software and central authority, then network. It must be focused on serving authentic bloggers, and it must be backed by a commercial solution.

That in turn means, a paid service, whose customers are bloggers. That means, how badly do you want an amazing blogging experience, where you blog with great writing tools, search, discover, and interact with others (and probably in today's world, be able to hop on a video chat with your viewers and share that in comments). Yes, so how much do you desire to have it, would you pay $5/month? $30/month? $100/month? It comes down to this.

If there was monetary backing, this problem could be solved with a 'solution'. Chances are that not enough many people want it, and people are content with free posting on instagram, twitter, or facebook, and happy to live with ads. If this was a high demand service, chances are that it would have already been built, or existing ones would already be prospering (tumblr didn't make money and got acquired, blogger shut down, medium serving writers looking to make money, recreational blogging is not their target and so on). So is this a real problem to solve or not?

Maybe people don't know they want it and aren't organized enough to support it, - if you built an amazing experience maybe lots of bloggers will pay for it, then it will become another, facebook where the network is funded by its users.

As for a network and aggregation, back in the day there were decentralized solutions. We had RSS and pingbacks and Google News, which in the early days was largely a blog search engine. There were things like Reddit and StumbleUpon for finding new blogs, in addition to slashdot and Hacker News. Many of these sites have changed in terms of content since then, but originally a lot of what they linked to was blogs.