1 - owning your blog is too big of a barrier of entry, there is a need for a platform: look at the success at medium for tech writers, despite that we hate it.
2 - we need the return of the domain name based blog. This helps with independence, censorship, and the like. You can always move from the platform, and the platform can claim they can't censor you since it's your domain, so DMCA should be sent to you directly.
3 - this platform should do blog + microblog. You don't always have something long to say, announcement, though and quick tips are very well suited to tweets. But only this format leads to quality deficiency. Being able to write a big article easily is equally important.
4 - forwarding all posts to your social networks is essential. Yes, your blog should be the original source (so you get ref, credit, independence and not the duplicate content ban from google). But the discovery problem cannot be solved easily, and those networks already exist.
EDIT: unrelated, but I love phone calls. I mean, I hate doing them, but I love having the ability to do them. It's a universal reliable tech, it works in the country side, it works when the wifi is down, it works well in the car, and I don't have to have the app du jour installed or insist that the other party does.
I've been talking to businesses for years about this same thing. Using a blog as a way to broadcast to social media but keep the blog/site as the main source of information for your audience.
And it never works because it is far too simple to just use social media directly and even if you don't, your audience still comments on social media and so your discussion remains there.
Discussion should remain on social media. This avoids the problems of moderation and spam that plagued blogs.
> it is far too simple to just use social media directly
Yes to succeed the blog platform should be super easy to setup and to link.
There are benefits that can then attract people:
- if you have several social accounts, on the same or different platforms, then having a centralized way of publishing on all of them is a nice perk
- social media platform impose a lot of rules, but on your blog, you can do whatever you want. So for problematic content, you can tease on social networks, and bring people on your blog for the real uncensored thing.
- the source of truth that the blog would be is a fine touch in this era of fake news
- you can add paid sections to the blog and make money directly with your biggest fans
What I was trying to say is that I think that ultimately social media will eat your traffic and blog. I think that the peril of using social media to promote your own content is that you will ultimately depend on social media.
I think that the best route to take is to find a way to promote your content without it.
At least if you have are on several platform, there are multiple entre points for your content. And your blog would allow you to offer things that the platform don't, like code snippets, easy media download, or something more innovative.
Not if it's on a platform - see part 2 of GP's ramblings.
After all, I'm responsible for my vps content, not my hosting. What's the difference ?
I feel like medium doesn't even care about tech writers -- don't people still have to host github gists for code snippets? The biggest middle finger to tech bloggers, and yet they keep flocking to the platform.
I've made 4 phone calls this year: to a buddy, to my wife, to an old friend, and to my fax/voicemail provider (JConnect) which decided to terminate voicemail service on the phone number I've used since the 1990s. (So I may be part of the problem I am describing — that number didn't ring any device, it only accepted voice messages and faxes, which it forwarded to me via email.)
Of those 4 phone 2021 phone calls:
1.) My buddy no longer has voicemail on his phone, and a recording just told me he was not available and to try again later. (Head kinda exploded.)
2.) My wife also no longer has voicemail! How tf did that happen? No idea but it was 2 months after the above call so I was less surprised.
3.) My old friend is old-school (hence the phone call), and still does have voicemail — but it was full. I assume because he never checks it.
4.) JConnect support's touch-tone B.S. support system did disconnect me a couple of times, requiring that I call them back... but it did eventually connect me to a support rep who helped me cancel my account. But: only because they are the kind of asshole company that engages in the common-but-should-be-illegal practice of letting you sign up on the web but only cancel by phone, as a method of retaining "customers" who no longer want their product.
So n=1 sample, might not be typical, etc. but I suspect the phone is getting less universal and less reliable over time.
[EDIT] Except for work. My work email is still sorta useful. But in part that's because it's much newer. It's also getting more and more junked up with garbage, without active management and rule-setting.
Twitter is getting more and more universal, but reliable does not apply.
I guess no, we are living through a breaking of communications.
I certainly do. I have no intention of EVER checking my voicemail, so why would I want to leave callers with a false impression that their message will be heard?
I never answer those on the first go - only if they left a voicemail or a text message...
Micro.blog does this!
To meet some arbitrary SEO goal like, longer articles do better we have people filling in the top 1/3 with unneeded filler. Then we have companies trying to plug their product in a "10 best tools for X" article. Even if their product is crap for that feature, along with the content mills, the quality has dropped.
Google downloaded all that curation effort and then claimed we didn't have to do it anymore, and that we just need to "be indexed", but that opens the door for spammers and scammers, and there's no fix for it. Without curation, blogs are no better than strangers on a street corner.
I think the only way to restore the health of the blog ecosystem is to go back to webrings, except with an RSS accumulator added^, so that we can follow everyone in a webring and report abuse to the webring curators.
^ OPML subscriptions would be a workable model, except that many feed readers only support "import OPML one-time", not "poll and refresh".
EDIT: It isn't sufficient to implement RSS or OPML support. The missing piece is webrings that curate their membership lists, with a human sanity limit of 25 or 50 sites per webring. That was a real limit back in the day, but it's still worth keeping to keep humans honest. You can't replace this effort with technology, but you can support it. We just choose not to, because search is lazy and somewhat effective, and so blogs suffer.
Most blog-entries were never much more than that anyway, especially since the free blog-services started appearing and setting up a blog was effortless. There is a reason why Twitter were named micro-blogging-service in the beginning. And the other side was blogging being a primitive form of social network, till better social networks appeared. So it made sense for people who were more interested in the social aspect to moved to the optimized services.
> I've been reading blogs and perusing my self-curated NetNewsWire RSS feeds for 20+ years, and blogs never went away, RSS never died, Google Reader getting googled didn't really matter, etc.
In both cases, the hype died down, and was replaced by other hypes. The remaining people use them now for the dedicated reasons where both can shine their best. But the danger remains that loosing support will long term lead to them dying for real. In case of RSS it's already happening slowly. Though blogs are more resistant to this, as your blogging does not depend much on external support, as long as you do not care about money or reader-stats.
(a) Basically just a bunch of glorified retweets, but (b) Free of the moronic 280-character limit, and (c) Immune to Twitter's moronic "jail" algorithm (all I have to do is delete the IFTTT tweet, not my "blog post")
And I think that's fine. And, yes, I do have opinions on the moronicity of Twitter, how did you know?
or worse, a 10/ sequential message "magnum tweetus"
Of course, it's not the same as a blog. I think the length "requirement" of a blog made it so only people with the time, dedication and skills (or lack of self-awareness) would keep them going, so if you were reading an established blog a bit of selection bias was at play. On Twitter you can tweet garbage day in day out and still be on the platform for years. Heck, you'd probably gain a significant following.
I might be coming off as a Twitter fan or something but just to be clear: the site is cancer. It's impossible to stay on for longer than a year and not have your brain melt off by how it works, and they're becoming more and more closed and restrictive by the day. It's a shame because there's clearly something about the site that interests a mass audience, but I wish there was a service that was like Twitter but better. I know Mastodon exists but outside specific niche audiences it's never gained traction, but I hope it does take off eventually.
Maybe the same applies to Facebook/Instagram/Other major social media provider as well, but I don't have any experience with platforms outside Twitter and Reddit so I couldn't say.
Edit to expand on something: I mentioned that Twitter is interesting to mass audiences, and that's actually more important than you'd think. Speaking personally, before I went on twitter, I don't think I'd ever consistently read content posted by women. It's a natural result of being in a male-dominated industry and following male-dominated interests. On Twitter, though, because there were so many people of all walks of life I quickly followed a lot of interesting women who posted great content: women who were activists, historians, academics, homemakers and so on. That really was why I stuck around for so long on Twitter despite how awful the site is, and why I think any serious contender has to appeal to the normies, so to speak.
Best thing about blogs at the beginning was that they were not mainstream. They were specialized and interesting.
When they were mainstream in the internet only short period between internet becoming mainstream and social networks and platforms gaining popularity.
Today blogs are back in the golden age of not being mainstream. It's easier to find quality content by following them and their links to other blogs.
I don't know if bloggers turned to Twitter, TikTok, and similar goldfish attention span media. (Maybe. I don't have data.)
I think it is more likely that high-quality blog posts drown in the sea of tweets. More people do the latter, and the cost of doing a single one is orders of magnitude lower than writing even an average-quality blog post.
I realize I am being utopian, but providing a facility like Medium that uses open standards, allows bloggers to blog and doesn't skim profits should be a public service.
The platform effect means there’s just less quality content and it’s more difficult to surface.
Not in the "I had kids so my blog went dark for a few years" sense, but in the sense of "ooh twitter was invented and now I just emit a halfassed one-sentence brainfart or 5-second tiktok cellphone video and get way more dopamine hits".
I've been reading blogs and perusing my self-curated NetNewsWire RSS feeds for 20+ years, and blogs never went away, RSS never died, Google Reader getting googled didn't really matter, etc.
And there are probably technically more blogs now than ever before.
But still, the blog kinda died, in the sense that it would be a lot more surprising to learn your friend's 80-year-old grandma has a blog today than it would have been in 2011.
It went from an increasingly-mainstream thing to a decreasingly-mainstream thing.