I personally find Medium to be a horrible way to find content. Maybe it works for new content, if that's what you're after.
Now, decades later, there seems to be a shared yearning for the curated web, perhaps in response to the low signal:noise ratio of search. Isn't it funny, how the world works in cycles?
Curated search (domains chosen by a set of humans with no financial conflicts of interests, with some grokkable categorization and full-text search) might be the nirvana we're searching for. I think the GP has a point, that the need for a sustaining business model tends to strongly conflict with this equilibrium.
Wikipedia has sort of evolved to partially fill this niche, but it periodically struggles with funding. I agree there's not a similar filling for blogs, yet: maybe GitHub will evolve there, but it will face the same pressure of other platforms owned by public for-profit companies.
I eventually stopped using it because it didn't keep up. These days, search is for many purposes completely useless. If I want to find someone to do work on my house, the last place I'll go is Google. It's truly amazing just how worthless the results are. You'll get results from Michigan and Florida and Oregon all for the same search, in the same town, and claiming to be a local business. I imagine it's a fraud-ridden garbage dump if you actually try to use Google to find businesses to do work for you.
On the topic of blogs - not completely useless, but overrun with shallow, uninformative trash posts by SEO experts. I think Google is more vulnerable now than at any time in the past 20 years.
It's worse if you are non-US. Google seems to think that anywhere in the UK is local to me for businesses, and that's AFTER I've added loads of filters to stop American results from showing.
The problem is that the second it becomes an authoritative source, every spammer and marketer will start trying to game it, just like the SEO does now. Corruption is a huge problem with that approach. I'm old enough to remember how much influence yahoo categories editors had, and that many have asked for money to include you in the list, or they would use the position to simply block all the competition to their own sites. Same story is happening with Wikipedia, just it's more about personal wars and agendas instead of straight down racketeering.
I feel like the key to good curation might be good moderation. In other words, allow people to submit links to be on the list, but there must be humans to control for SEO and marketing spam (like there is on HN). Making those humans incorruptible is hard but maybe not impossible, if they’re well compensated and hired thoughtfully.
That being said, I’m doubtful that such a strategy of moderation would scale to hundreds of thousands (or tens of millions, shudder) of active voters and submitters. At some point, it would need to federate, with different mods owning different lists, and it would be difficult to avoid a devolution into Reddit.
Moving away from ads towards human-centric curation is a primary design feature of the decentralized web.
Just found: https://www.kleptones.com/blog/2012/06/28/hectic-city-15-pat...
Thanks!
There is also some discussion about this kind of thing here: https://forum.indieseek.xyz Good to meet you, Alessio.
Maybe an idea would be something like what you have, but using some sort of standard that could be pulled down similar to rss feeds?
You discover a directory like mine just as you would discover any other link, johntash - by coming across it as you read, perhaps on Hacker News. If there were more directories, they would be easier to discover. They happen to be richer discovery points than a normal blog or profile page.
I get that that would miss some of the benefits you mention (shared comment logins for example) but I'm wondering if people think it would capture 80% of the same benefits or, like, <50%. And I don't think for the discoverability to work there's any innate reason it has to be restricted to a single blogging platform.
For my part, I want more long-form, thoughtful articles that offer an enriching read. Not only have we got a good decade or two's worth of experience showing that no algorithmic discovery system ever favors that kind of thing over content that's morally equivalent to Five Minute Crafts, but I've got a couple decades' worth of experience telling me that, since long-form bloggers tend to link each other quite a lot, never needed an algorithm to help me with discovery in the first place.
If I want anything, it's algorithmic filtering: Take the feeds I'm already subscribed to, and filter out the stuff that I tend to skip over without reading. Because my blog feed already delivers me a couple hours' worth of reading a day, so I can afford to be choosy.
For myself, I usually read in two "phases". I collect material from sources that are usually high quality for me, and do some superficial skimming to trim out the content I don't particularly care for.
Later, when I'm more "in the mood" or have a long period of time, I pop() and read(). The stack gets pretty large at times, but it only takes a couple days of vacation to blow through most of it. If I pass over something in the stack enough times, it gets free()'d.
I don't know if I'd trust an algorithm to do either of these stages for me. I'd trust an algorithm provide input to phase (1), but never to replace phase (1).
I think that Newsblur does this.
I appreciate people wanting to own their own writing, having permanence of data assured, etc. so this is probably worth thinking about. At the same time, many outside the tech world don't want the overhead of hosting or setting up their own blog.
I wonder if a hybrid would be best? Host yourself option or host-by-us option, with a pricing structure that accords.
The point is really to maximize ones ability to traverse between writers on subjects that interest you, so the physical location of the data is secondary.
I'm interested in this problem space, because current social media tools leave me somewhat dissatisfied. But I'm also skeptical about how you'd build it successfully.
Myself and a partner are building this, here are a few points:
- It's a community to read and write about building things with technology
- Clean, fast and light UX + Markdown editor (https://able.bio/new)
- Bootstrapped with low overheads. No outside investment removes pressure to grow at all costs and the lapse on integrity that we see more of each day.
- No data lock-in. Export your posts in a single JSON file (containing Markdown + HTML versions) accompanied by all images.
- We're finishing up a big set of data portability / data respect features, which we plan to announce soon.
The aim is to build a community of capable people with a genuine interest in technology and attach a job board to the site. Companies can then pay to display their vacancies on the job board and users can take a look whenever they like. No popups, banners or any of that dodgy/spammy crap getting in between users and the reading/writing. In this age we see integrity towards our users as a differentiator.
Building it is fairly straightforward and fun. Some learnings we've gained in terms of 'jumpstarting' it:
- a lot of people are vehemently sceptical after the Medium debacle.
- creating a feed that prioritises good content without "censoring" dev spam or trivial posts is tricky when coming off a smaller user base. For example, upvotes can have outsized effects.
- getting regular volume of good content so that people use Able as source of news/inspiration/learning.
We've had some great posts from people but we need just that little bit more to get the flywheel going. As soon as someone posts something, activity on the site goes up but then dies down again. It's the classic building vs. promoting trade-off. However, we've chosen to get data portability and respect right first as we believe this is fundamental. We're wrapping that up now and then have loads of learnings and ideas we want write about.
We feel that same potential 'renaissance' you're talking about and this is how we want to try and activate it. If you feel inclined, have a look and let us know what you think.
I do think it's important to have an element of discoverability for new content (otherwise there's no real way for a writer to bootstrap into visibility), but I think an important element is being able to follow and trust content aggregators. Maybe algorithmic curation will be trustable in a decade, but right now it feels too gameable, and too easy to degenerate into thinkbait.
Is anyone anywhere close to this?
it's not ready yet but I would love to hear more about what features people want. Email is in the profile.
I will have to look more into it though.
A blogverse of some kind that allows for algorithmic discoverability & aggregation (ala Medium) without the bullshit/terrible UX.
The real value proposition of Medium is that a well-made aggregator benefits readers and writers alike. Readers find more authors they like, writers find more audience. There are also network effects with shared comment logins, inter-blog citations, etc.
I really think a blogging renaissance is waiting to happen. These ingredients plus a business model not reliant on ads, massive js overhead, and other nonsense could jumpstart it.