I remember when the blogging world became "obsessed with this corpo nonsense", and it was a very strange experience. Blogs had been a kind of distributed social media, global conversation among creative weirdos, but eventually some tipping point of public awareness happened and seemingly overnight people just would not shut up about the idea of making money writing a blog, making a living as a blogger, which made about as much sense to me as the idea of going into business as a dinner-party guest, or a book club participant. But they were persistent, they were noisy, there were eventually more of them than there were of us, and... well. That was a long time ago now, and I wouldn't even know where to start looking for interesting blogs of the old style, if they still exist.
Content marketing ruined blogging, just like SEO ruined search.
I used to work with a lot of content marketers when it started to get hot. SEO was doing particularly poorly for a period (Google used to resist seo rather than reward it) and people realized that if you started writing "authentic" content, then people would organically link to it and it would increase your ranking.
Then social media furthered this problem by people mindlessly sharing content they never read but just looked engaging.
Marketing robots where just churning out content on blogs because eventually you would just hit search engine gold by nail the correct topic for some long tail search term. In my own domain, the atrocious "Towards Data Science" is a great example of this (except their "brilliant" innovation was to replace marketing robots with people eager to pad their resume). The content is largely garbage, but it looks about right and is easily shareable.
Today, whether you like it or not, if you want to make people to see your blog at all you have to think at least a bit like a content marketer to get seen at all. Consider Jay Alammar's fantastic blog [0], which is very high quality content, but still requires a tremendous amount of polish and marketing to survive. All of this has made it impossible to create the network required for a "global conversation among creative weirdos". Real content does get made, but has to be produced with the effort of a real marketer.
Before I toned it down, my blog post about SSR rendering was called "SSR sucks and you (probably) shouldn't use it", tons of views.
Boring "History of " posts, meh.
But it also depends who I am writing for. Ideally if I am writing for myself, I shouldn't care about the views, right?
Counter argument to that is I am writing for people who may want to read it, and with all the noise out there, if I don't try and elevate my posts to some extent, the people who want to read them may not be able to find them.
You basically don’t exist unless you hustle like crazy as if you want to be a famous influencer. Like, imagine your goal is just to get people to read your work and get some feedback: good luck with that unless you’re first willing to invest a year into growing an audience from scratch. The seo and content marketing spam has buried almost all organic content and google seems to reward it instead of blacklisting those sites
I think something similar happened to forums: they stopped showing up in search results over time, and gradually died from there
There’s a lot of things we can complain about but the destruction of the blogosphere had a very specific individual cause. The death of Google Reader.
Google Reader came onto the scene and essentially destroyed all incumbents. Even if you used an independent client, the syncing was almost certainly based on your Google Reader account.
And Google Reader also provided a social discovery component which no one even tried competing with because how could you.
The sudden death of Google Reader was followed by a glut of rushed alternatives, which meant no specific alternative could get sufficient acceptance.
There were a lot of things that hurt the blogosphere but most of them would either have naturally withered away (for instance, the commercial crowd would almost certainly have migrated to social media), or could have been figured out (spam blogs could have easily been beaten if the likes of Google were interested).
The death of Google Reader, which also happened to coincide with the rise of social media (not a coincidence since Google Reader was killed in order to promote Google’s social media offering), was something the blogosphere could not recover from.
I would add also that after the 2008 crisis, the precariat grew, and some bloggers found themselves in it. Once your living standard is precarious, it is a lot harder to resist the temptation to include affiliate links and get at least some material reward out of your blogging, even if you don't turn it into a full-fledged business. The shift in the culture was due to a little quiet desperation, too, not just greed.
"token white person as a service" is a thing in China. It's apparently a very big deal in business circles that you have SOMEONE non-Asian in your party.
"Moxley said they were told they were working for a U.S. company based in California, a story that later turned out to be untrue. It was really just a ruse to impress the workers and the entire community — they even had the mayor at the opening — that they were some fancypants American company.
Moxley said being a fake executive has become a lucrative source of income for expats living in China. Though, sorry ladies, this is China after all — they’re only hiring men.
Moxley said he knows a half dozen men who’ve done this type of work, and since he wrote an article about his experience in The Atlantic magazine, dozens more have written to him sharing their experiences. He was recruited by a friend of a friend — a headhunter for white guys in suits, if you will — but said sometimes you can also find ads in the local classifieds for this type of work."
How would it not be? "I refuse cookies" is not a protected class, thus a private business may discriminate it at will. Same way a business could refuse to admit patrons not wearing shoes or carrying a firearm.
GDPR does not regulate cookies, it regulates usage of PII (personally identifiable information). So blocking cookies on principle is not against it, but collecting PII without consent is. Forcing the user into accepting, such as saying "click accept or pay" also is.
European courts have jurisdiction in the EU, and CNBC is accessible in the EU unlike some other US websites, so they have to follow GDPR at least for EU visitors. And as far as I know cookie rejection must not influence the basic functionality of the site.
I'm not an expert on the GDPR (and I'm frankly sick of hearing about it) but surely what it bans is tracking cookies, and not cookies necessary for the proper function of the website?
Exactly, it regulates collection of PII, which includes most tracking cookies.
It doesn't really regulate "refusing service due to disabling of browser features", but then again it's a complex law, so someone (even a court) might argue otherwise, but it's doubtful.
As a white person who has spent some time in China. It definitely is a thing. I have not been paid (also not interested), but have definitely been invited places for no reason other than to add a foreigner.
One time I ended up at a lunch with some manager people from the local tv station. One of my friends was trying to sell him some tea and he asked that I attend his lunch event as a favor. It was interesting.
Another example more recently - I wanted to visit a tea factory and while I was there they asked if I could put on a uniform and pose for some photos for them.
I recently finished reading Chesterton's "The Club of Queer Trades", and one of the jobs in there was a paid dinner guest who even set up the conversation so the client could make witty remarks.
> I wouldn't even know where to start looking for interesting blogs of the old style, if they still exist.
If you're looking for any sources, not necessarily massive volumes, Gemini and Gopher still host written content produced without any hope for monetary gain. gemini://medusae.space/index.gmi is a good starting point.
At the same time blogging was on the rise and "making it as a blogger" was a thing, the print media was getting absolutely torched by downsizing, layoffs, forced retirements, and private equity buyouts.
So there was probably some vain hope that independent blogging could be a sustainable revenue stream for the reporter class. Alas, it has not.
Honestly it doesn’t strike me as too different from a paid dungeon master. I guess the horror is when it goes from explicitly compensation to some sort of product placement.
> “ people just would not shut up about the idea of making money writing a blog, making a living as a blogger, which made about as much sense to me as the idea of going into business as a dinner-party guest, or a book club participant.”
isn't that just the internet (and in many ways our societies) in a nutshell?
All the people today saying the internet and content wouldnt survive without advertising and payments and some of us remember that actually the internet and content came first, then the corporations and profit seekers arrived. everyone was originally just excited to get their stuff out there and talk to other people who were passionate and knowledgeable about their stuff as well. then the corps, advertisers, seos came.
sharers -> profit seekers
remember when uber was supposed to be about being able to car share on your way to and from work and cut down on car use?
sharers -> profit seekers
remember when airbnb was about being able to share your home with someone else while you were away at someone else's so you wouldn't have to pay for hotels?
sharers -> profit seekers
remember when hackers were people who set up share drives in university halls with free music and movies, fighting for open access to books and software and info and publications? now we have saas, Steve jobs bios and hacker news is run by a startup venture capitalist firm...
i wonder what the next thing they can destroy will be...
i guess if the pattern repeats look for anything anywhere people are sharing or doing something of value amongst each other for free. they will climb on board try to expand the audience and swamp out the signal of the original community and change the narrative to entrepreneurship and making money from this was always the point, then they will lock it down with network effects and strap on parasitic payments or revenue streams, then they will optimise until they destroy the original with universal enshitification.
There is nothing stopping you from making and sharing the old style of internet stuff right now. There's never been anything stopping people from just continue to make 90s style web sites or 2000s style blogs. Many people still do.
But you can't demand to have an audience if you do that. Likewise, you as a hacker can not demand that people produce more of that style of content for your convenience.
There is no limit to the real estate of cyber space, so there is no reason to complain about the stuff online that you personally don't fancy. That stuff is not taking away any space from the stuff that you do fancy.
Let's say there's a nice old family restaurant on the corner, that you've always visited every weekend. Then a huge shopping mall opens down the street, with unappetizing fast food and non-durable consumer crap. So then you go and walk around inside that mall every day and complain how bad it is, instead of just continue to go to the nice restaurant on the corner, that still is there. Does that make sense?
To answer the headline, nothing happened to it. Writing about stuff for writings sake and just to get it out of your head into some form is still very much a thing. That said, it is possible to make (varying amounts) of money writing a blog, and so it attracted a huge number of people who wanted to do that, and as a ready market various "corpo" types sprung up to "feed their dreams" for a small fee. And this is where the disaster happens.
When companies that index the web make 99.9% of their money selling ads on that index, and the index is a place where wannabes ask the question "how do I make money on a blog" ask that question, you gets something not unlike unconstrained algae growth in a badly maintained aquarium of things "popping out of the woodwork" to fill that demand. As a result, if you used that to measure "What happened" you would easily come to the conclusion that nobody does this any more, after all wouldn't it be great to have a reliable way to "collect" the blogs of interest and be notified that they had said something new?
Yeah, that would be a really cool thing but apparently the corpo types could not figure out any way to make money on that and so decided to cancel that part of their offering.
Aren't there places away from the conventional protocols where people still blog and the world is innocent?
I'm serious. I came across some of these communities nearly a year ago while reading about solar powered servers. And after I forgot how I found them, I've thought of them about once a month and wondered what the hell is wrong with me for forgetting.
They were incredibly neat and niche spaces, full of very idiosyncratic websites and things that had no commercial point. It was fantastic.
They exist and they're hard to find - but if you find one, you often find a few, and you can follow the chain as far down the rabbit hole as you want.
Of course you have the interesting side effect that you only get linked to them now and then, and often it's almost "invite only" for something that's entirely public.
> after all wouldn't it be great to have a reliable way to "collect" the blogs of interest and be notified that they had said something new? Yeah, that would be a really cool thing...
> but apparently the corpo types could not figure out any way to make money on that [other than ways that cut into their ads] and so decided to cancel that part of their offering.
All we have to do is pay for it (and so I ask everyone to):
Wait I thought reddit prohibits using personal API on third party client, that's one of main complain of the protest. Otherwise 3PA will still be running around just with asking each user for their API keys. Of course there are ways to circumvent that (cough, revanced, cough) but of course it's not official and your api key may suddenly be blocked.
> To answer the headline, nothing happened to it. Writing about stuff for writings sake and just to get it out of your head into some form is still very much a thing.
What happened was directing people to websites put up for free with all the information they need doesn't make Google any money, as compared to a bloated POS on SquareSpace that downloads 80 MB of JavaScript to checks notes... render fucking text alongside a few dozen AdSense slots, or, perhaps more commonly, a Facebook group that has six hundred people asking the same questions in a format that doesn't allow going back to actually find the goddamn answers, which also shows ads.
The wide, weird internet still exists, but none of our corporate overlords make shit on it so it gets zero attention in the mainstream.
Actually, posts on HN routinely lead me to several fantastic blogs! So yes, there are people writing interesting stuff in a blog as opposed to byte-sized nibbles on social media, and I enjoy them.
Nobody here has mentioned the real reason public blogging has died off, which is that with the modern public Internet, the risk of being attacked - doxxing, harassment, or simply the grind of moderating comments - has completely eliminated any desire any normal person would have to interface publicly (or anything more than pseudonymously) with the world apart from a profit motive.
I to some extent agree. A blog can be an attack surface for someone wishing to doxx you, a point of failure for potential employers, or perhaps an opportunity to open yourself up to criticism for the local equivalent of your knitting community when they're having a purity spiral.
You could, of course, keep to the driest topics, the most tamed opinions, nothing spicier than an animal cracker, but for some this self-censorship of "your most honest, primitive, real thoughts" (to quote Naked Lunch) is tantamount to a sin, just one step up from lying to your diary.
If you are trying to keep it safe, are you truly communicating what is on your mind, or are you pasteurizing your output, homogenizing it, adding a touch of gamma radiation and a run through the freeze-drier, until the final result is palatable pablum, certainly inoffensive and low-residue, but ultimately unworth either consumption or production?
Blogging seems to have shifted on the risk/reward scale and people have responded as such. A pity.
> You could, of course, keep to the driest topics, the most tamed opinions, nothing spicier than an animal cracker, but for some this self-censorship of "your most honest, primitive, real thoughts" (to quote Naked Lunch) is tantamount to a sin, just one step up from lying to your diary.
Um, I guess. It seems to me like most of the "controversial" stuff that people get attacked for is just lame vomit about current-events political junk. No one needs yet another clueless nobody ejecting that crap on the Internet. Go write about something interesting, like old computers, or music, or I don't know, your favorite species of grass. You'll be contributing something of value, instead of more mindless current-events garbage, and you won't get attacked for it. Win-win.
One would think, but again, the bar is now very, very low. Like I said, a purity spiral on a knitting forum.
I used to be on a once-popular forum which has slowly skewed to the left, and then farther, and farther. Now everything there is politicized because the Red Guard types remaining are on the continual hunt for anything at which they might take offense. These are people who go wild for the opportunity to talk about the racist origins of steampunk.
Sure, but that's about a community drifting to topics you're not interested in, not about your being attacked for maintaining a personal blog about a hobby. I'm not saying it can't or never has happened, but I'm skeptical that this problem is widespread enough that it should deter anyone from writing about their interests (again, provided their interests are something other than current-events trash).
Yeah. I'm saying if you're digging a hole for no reason and going "man it's a lot of work digging this hole and there's no reward at the end," then you should stop digging the hole and go do something else. Writing about current-events political junk is a waste of your time. If you're not finding it fun then do something else with your life. There's a whole universe of interesting stuff!
I think this is it. Of course you could blog anonymously? Though it kind of defeats half the purpose and feels like shouting into the void. At that point, it's easier to just be another random user on hn and reddit.
I think this has contributed to my life-long mental health problems, as I've purposely separated myself into 2 personas. To paraphrase Agent Smith...
Jelly 1 has a job and a mortgage and a Facebook, is made of matter and occupies space, and is openly lesbian, and isn't shy to talk a little about politics or her old schizophrenia diagnosis.
Jelly 2 exists only on the dark web, never grew out of enjoying hentai, delights in posting political hot takes like "gasoline should cost more, actually", lies about absolutely everything to shake off doxxers, and doesn't even use the same username on any 2 forums.
Both Jellies are miserable most of the time, since they take turns hiding the other one from one social circle or another. Jelly 2 can never hold a job. Jelly 1 isn't convinced that there's enough stuff in the real world to kill off Jelly 2 and live alone.
It's still good to lie about everything to keep stalkers off your trail. Furthermore, it contributes to the erosion of trust that everything online is literally true. People have gotten complacent in that regard.
I have set up anonymous websites before, long ago, over a trivial bit of local politics that might almost be described as minutae. I have no idea how difficult it would be now.
The reasons for blogging are varied. Part of me would like to post the odd bit of how-to on an obscure technical topic, that kind of thing. And then there's writing reviews. No expectation is had of reward, but that does not preclude the kind of risk I run if some gibbering nutjob decides I am a fascist or someone else dehumanizable because the Devil's Advocate in me might want to point out that this person was not given a fair shake in this instance, or that something else is a bigger deal than we are making it, and so on.
Of course, I would like to know that there is someone who is catching my signal besides Grim Entropy and the Inverse Square Falloffs, but then you're back to moderating comments which are largely linkback blogspam.
Another poster once mentions that there's an eerie comfort in the thought that even if no one ever reads their blog, it's probably still crawled and ingested by various LLMs. Even when you're dead, your ideas may still live on in AIs of the future.
For me it is partially that for sure. There's plenty of stuff I would - in theory - not mind to post publicly. E.g. my personal notes about interesting stuff I stumble on, want to read up on, how to troubleshoot stuff etc. But the issue is a) I don't feel like investing the time to individually post only subsets and b) posting all of it makes me feel way too vulnerable. At a quick glance suddenly everyone would just know all my interests, my expertise and lack thereof in areas and so on. Just not worth it in the current internet and societal discourse.
I turned off comments a long time ago because the effort required to get a signal-to-noise ratio I liked was more than the value I got from the good comments. I'm glad I did it. If you want to comment on a blog post, drop me an email.
I have a few websites dedicated to some old microcomputers. They are niche and very few people care. I work on them in bursts and then they sit there for years before the next bout of updates. It is often an excuse to take advantage of the latest CSS or whatever.
Anyway, many years ago I added a message board to most of them so passersby could share their recollections and nostalgia. At first it was a PITA to keep out the spam. But message boards are so passe that not only is it rare to get a new comment, but it is rare to get spam too.
Good old "security through not being a big enough target to make it worth the time to write an exploit". The rtl-sdr.com blog uses this sort of captcha.
Unfortunately I suspect someone will break this whole category of captcha soon enough by throwing an LLM at it.
LLM cracks into your blog: "interesting blog post today about the 8088, thank you! that 8/16 architecture, with some 32 bit ops and, through segmentation, a 20 bit address space really expanded the possibilities for this chip. These PoTeNcY pIlLs will expand your possiblities even more!"
I'm not sure this is it. Twitter and Mastodon has loads of people who turned some details that would previously been considered intimate or controversial -- transness, sexual preference, polyamory, stance on American partisan politics or Israel vs. Palestine, etc. -- into a major part of their online persona, and are posting either under their own names or pseudonyms that aren't impossible to discover, but without a profit motive.
Only when those details/stances are obviously protected, IME. Consciously or unconsciously, they may be concluding that being visibly a member of a protected class makes you safer from being fired than not being so.
I'm not convinced normal people have ever interfaced publicly with the world via the Internet in a way apart from a profit motive, actually. Most of what you read on the Internet is written by insane people [1].
In the early 2000s there was a ton of bloggers publishing under their real name, what fear would they have for doxxing? Comments can be turned off, or set to only appear after admin approval.
These people now mostly publish stuff under their own profile on Facebook, because that's where the audience is. Soon to be was.
Akismet is great. It's baked into every WordPress blog (but needs to be activated separately) so it's widely adopted. You can also use it via their REST API. It's not limited to WordPress.
I blog just for the hell of it. No client side trackers, no ads, just the spew of thoughts I need to get out of my head by vocalizing them. It costs me money every month and brings in no revenue and I fucking love it.
bruh, that loads WAY too fast. you gotta slow that role, have a splash, prompt for signing up for newsletter, display some ads, prompt to disable ad blocker, etc etc.
I'll stick with my throwback to what websites used to be like when they were simple, quick to load and asked visitors only for their attention and not much else ;)
> Utilized Low Code Tools at Client’s Request for the Web Front End Work
Oof!
Nice to find someone else who recognises explicitly that management is in no way a natural career progression path, it may have been decades ago, but in the current market we often see seniority / value confused with team management when the two need have little relation.
I started a random blog of my own for no particular reason recently. Even if nobody reads it I think I enjoy the whole 90s internet vibe of people having individual personal websites. Everyone being on Twitter, Facebook, Mastodon or wherever has no personality to it.
I like writing blog posts about things which interest me, have no comments, and no ads. I post links to it on Mastodon, where I have exactly zero followers. Nothing wrong with just putting it out there.
I did that for awhile, almost as a notepad - I still get a few comments here and there randomly because someone finds just what they wanted in a search.
When LiveJournal first launched my friends and I all got one. We treated it as a sanitized for public consumption diary, and we all posted regularly. It was really neat and really fun. I miss when the internet was more care free.
I also started a random blog out of no where recently. I had been thinking about for a while because I post random thoughts all over the Internet and felt like I should have a place where they are collected.
Also started a few tech hobbies and actually putting stuff out into the world is how the hobby grows. I've benefited from the writings and videos of others and wanted to pay that forward.
How do you even find blogs to read these days? In mid-2000s, I worked in a company using beta version of WPF and I was able to search for an error message, and it brings back blogs where people actually posted about the issue I encountered. These days, if blogs still exist, search isn't showing them anymore, preferring to provide results from the same few Stack Overflow/issues aggregators/documentation aggregators mixed together.
When I really love something, I find myself just checking the site periodically to see if they've published anything new recently. Astronomy Photo Of The Day makes this more predictable because I expect to see 1 new post every day. https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix.html
I have been blogging since 2004. I have four blogs that I currently write to regularly. Many others are more like archives. Three of the active blogs are public and two of them are similar, about dancing, but in different languages, one IT related.
The private blogs have been the most useful for my thinking. The active private blog has no readers at the moment.
I kind of miss the period from 2004 to perhaps 2009 when there was a community around blogging. But even then I was intentionally very marginal. I have never tried to attract readers, more the opposite.
There may be benefits from writing, such as publicity. But I dom’t think that is necessary a very useful motivation on the long term.
It seems to me that the only reasonable reason for writing is that you have this internal urge to write, to understand whst you think. You will know what you want to write. It does not matter if people do not read it, because you are writing for yourself.
My blog is for the purpose of just having a blog. I love to write medium-long stuff there.
I’ll go from life updates to some technical thing I learned or am learning. I have various topics like keyboards, photography, typography, and other interests that I will write 2 or 3 posts about and then move onto a different topic.
I find it impressive that people can have just one topic to write about but I can’t stick to one.
I also don’t have a lot of readers. Anything between 100-200 unique visitors a month, nothing to monetize off of.
Hello! I am the author of this post. I never expected more than 10 people to read it max because it was a rambly thing that I dashed off pretty quickly. I’ve received some really interesting responses and emails as a result, as well as many recommendations of cool blogs to read!! Thank you for all those.
I’ve seen some folks expressing their incredulity that a writer would need to do an internet search for ideas, so I wanted to add a bit of context. I’ve got some ideas for future posts jotted down in my notes app, but nothing that I feel I am ready to go ahead with writing yet. I still wanted to write something that day just to exercise my writing “muscle,” as it were. I like to do personal journalling and write fanfiction (yeah, cringe, I know) and in both of those online communities there are lots of ways to find cool prompts from other writers for if you have writer’s block. There are whole lists of questions to answer in your journal to help jumpstart some self-reflection. In fandom spaces, there are tons of “fan weeks” (or months) where there will be a prompt or two per day, and the challenge is to write something based on that prompt. I’ve really enjoyed consulting those to spark an idea when I’m not sure what to do, and I’ve written some pieces I am really proud of based on those prompts. So I (naively, I now realize) assumed that there might be cool blogging challenges or prompts I could find out there to spark something interesting I could write about…and then I got flooded with all that nonsense and I was like, what is this?? I hate it! And I wrote about how I hated it, and here we are. :)
I am relieved to see that personal blogging is very much alive on the quieter side of the web, away from social media and SEO optimization. It’s a space I am increasingly spending time in and still figuring out how to navigate. It seems like the best way to find stuff over here is to talk to people! I’ve received some really nice emails from people sharing their blogs with me and enjoyed reading their posts. I am definitely going to check out the many recommendations in this thread! Thanks to everyone who has been so welcoming to me as a total blogging newbie, and as for answering the question in my post title: Blogging for the hell of it is alive, just much harder to find by the means I’ve been used to up until now.
As an aside, I do also think it’s really funny how people are assuming I’m a guy…I guess because I mentioned I’m playing Baldur’s Gate, and girls don’t know how to do that. ;)
In my (extremely limited) experience, 100% of the people I know playing Baldur's Gate are women.
I suspect it's more of an HN thing. The site is overwhelmingly male-presenting. There may be more women than it would appear, being carefully neutral about using any kind of female-coded language, and content to let the assumption be that they're male.
If you look into any of the threads on gender topics, very few women talk about their experiences. With good reason, I think: those threads are often very hostile to women.
Ah, I see. I had barely heard of this place before I was informed that my blog post was up here and that’s why I got a huge spike in traffic. Unfortunate to hear.
A few months ago there was an HN thread calling for personal blogs, and it accumulated almost 2,000 comments. Plenty of blogs to be found, if you like:
I started blogging [1] in 2012 as a kind-of documentation of my work and thought processes (especially with raspberry pi projects) because when after a year on not working with a specific technology I forgot many aspects or challenges I had to overcome and I was sick of re-googling fixes for problems I have already fixed in the past.
Blogging has been a blessing for me and I have hit the top of hacker news a few times and even though I don't monitize my blog in any way (not even affiliate links) I still feel good about other people learning things from my projects or mistakes.
Longtime HN reader, I finally made an account to comment on this. I started a blog in 2008. Math and genetics, time-insensitive material. I worked hard on the quality. Page views 1-10K per post overall. In 2018-2019 the page views dropped to 1%. I still write, but now it's just for me.
This post really reminds me of my relationship with hackernews, I was elated for a period having found a source of constant interesting bits from the net, then for a brief period I got quite shell shocked; for every second article seemingly talking about one interesting thing always turned into "then I found my calling and started xyz.com and it'd make world a better place". Luckily I got quite good at noticing the tone and have since avoided bunch of them, but still.
This is a weird rambly post. Blogs became "corpo" like 15 years ago. But in the last 3-4 years there's definitely been a return to "blogging for the hell of it".... especially around these parts. Tech people just doing writeups on their projects, something random they learned, discovered etc. After like the 5 years preceding that it's been refreshing that more posts shared around here are like personal blogs and not just news sites etc.
He wants to put his bachelor's degree to use that he paid X amount of money for. He has the same blogging-as-a-job mindset.
Why is (for example) Raymond Chen's blog interesting? Because he has a real job that gives him stories to blog about and occasionally vent his frustration, and the result is entertaining but real, useful information. He doesn't spend time pondering what to write about next.
You don't need a degree in creative writing to blog. You need a real job or hobby to have something to blog about. I don't care about some rando's opinion on some video game, whether he writes like Shakespeare or not.
Hi Mike! It’s cool if you didn’t enjoy my post, but there are some rather strange assumptions about me in here just because I happen to enjoy computer games, and was at a bit of a loss as to what I wanted to write about that day. I have a full-time job that I think is pretty cool (I’m a librarian) but I prefer to keep my work life at work, and my internet life on the internet. Never the twain shall meet. I am also a she who has many other hobbies. :) I know there’s a bit of a stereotype that anyone who likes computer games must be a male NEET living in their mom’s basement, but it’s pretty inaccurate to reality!
Indeed. Searching for phrases like that are exactly why he got some many not-just-for-the-hell-of-it hits. The people who are most in need of ideas about what to blog about are those that are doing it just because they heard their company's site needs a blog. So those are the kind of answers most people searching for "blog post ideas" are looking for. People who are blogging just for the hell of it don't typically need to search for ideas, since they just post about whatever they want.
This is a fair point! My search became a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts…I had been hoping to find some cool blogging challenges or prompts on some small community, but of course it’s only the SEO optimized stuff coming up in the search, and that SEO optimized stuff will tell you to blog like they do. Lessons learned!
If the author is not trying to make money, but rather “write creatively and have fun,” then why consult startpage.com or other online lists? Those are written for people who want to make money.
If you want to blog for the hell of it, then just do it. Write about whatever you want. Baldur’s Gate, whatever. I have a two-post blog about some esoteric math I thought was cool. Very few people care and that’s fine.
Nothin'. I have had a blog for 10 years. Pure vanity. When I feel like getting something out for whatever reason, it is there. No one reads it, there's no money in it, and that's just fine.
It's simple... you write something, and then nobody ever comments on it, or links to it. It used to be that Google pushed blog results to the front, then backed off as they chased profit instead of quality.
The demise of Google Reader didn't help matters. Google essentially killed blogging single handed.
It's still going on, and it's naturally micro-communities. It's just drowned out by the sheer volume of content possible because social media lowered the cost of writing to near zero.
But there's lots of blogs out there. I did stop blogging but not for a good reason: I had a server with 11 y or something uptime and when the VPS provider wanted to turn it off I'd forgotten what I did. I've got the backups, though. So one day perhaps.
Hmm i thought it was still there. Problem is discoverability and the insane high bar on "sexy ui"? I maintain a personal blog (ive been waiting for ages to put it out thanks to fear of ridicule but time to break free of the shame) - http://buildmage.com/ where I just write about the random side (and possibly unfinished) things I dabble in pure fun, some learning, some sharing. Probably good thing discoverability is hard!
Social media took the "small posts" off personal blogs onto bigger sites. Now it feels like a blog post has to be big and important. And that's a hard threshold to work up to.
I'm not sure about commentors being able to preserve the spirit. I'll be charitable and not name the blog, but I still RSS-follow one blog that is one of the oldest, most respectable, and once most-read in its subject area. It still gets comments regularly, but always by the same handful of people who are 1) obviously on the autistic spectrum, and 2) all getting on in years, because younger generations no longer follow blogs. The effect is sad, it makes the blogging feel even more declassé. In fact, its image would only improve by the owner turning off comments entirely and perhaps moving to a static site generator.
The blogging-SEO connection is also so unnatural to the way capital thinks, yet it's developed because it works.
I mean, tell a Realtor that nobody gives a f2k about a Realtor in their town and you'll never get a link to a plain ordinary web site and that they should blog if they want attention and the vast majority of them will think you're insane. Except for the Realtor who runs a blog about your town and ranks #1.
I still blog, non-anonymously just for the hell of it, less so than I used to due to the pandemic, but I still have my cooking blog (which contains no life stories), programming blog, personal blog (consisting of quips, jokes, movie reviews, music reviews, stupid comics and observations on life) and a few other outlets. Once I work through some things, I will blog some more and also make some more comic books. I still keep my musings reasonably weird. I also pull old stuff from my journals and transcribe them into blog posts, with appropriately old date attached. My public writings go back some 40+ years with actual blog posts going back 28 years since some of my personal websites began in 1995.
Some people like it, other people tell me they hate it (usually the space invaders game (wow! much unprofessional!1!) and it makes me un-hirable. Oddly enough the people telling me I am un-hirable are usually the people I would never consider working for, who in the next breath also try to convince me I should take a sizable pay cut to work for them.
The oodly weird and just for the sake of it are still out there, in fact, I dare say, more so than it ever was, but frequently people complain about the state of the web, and then immediately open up Facebook or Twitter or use Google to go find their next distraction. Discoverability remains a problem, especially given Google's almost hostile ecosystem of search that favours the recent and viral over the older and evergreen.
Instead of being able to follow 50 or 100 blogs and just see the new stuff daily, I tend to rotate through the same five or ten blogs hoping for something new, or else look on Twitter and similar platforms hoping for something interesting.
I suppose most people want to monetize everything. Articles about how you can monetize writing articles, so you write these articles about how you would monetize and the cycle never ends and the web because harder to navigate.
Now you need a clever app that filters through the BS.
Short form video happened. I reach more people for non-commercial posts about software development that way. There are a few topics that are hard to cover that way, but very few that can't be shortened to fit. Like tweets were, it's a discipline.
I have a system where I write markdown files that get zipped and a password I don’t know is applied. I’m just accumulating this journal nobody can read and it feels pretty therapeutic. There isn’t an audience and can’t be an audience.
I've blogged on and off for many years. Personal, work, and in between. Maybe it's just me, but I find blogs have a lifespan. There's a period wherein they provide fulfillment as well as value, followed by a period where one or both of those tends to slip away. When both have left, it's time to stop.
Right now my only blog is for my freelance consulting biz (blueferret.consulting). I've debated a Substack for a different project as well...something of a philosophy discussion, wherein I'd clarify a set of ideas out in public. Because I can, and because I think others would enjoy seeing it too.
1) Spend more time on it, because it is their source of income and not a hobby. They don't have to just do it in their spare time.
2) Be motivated to write it even when they don't feel like it, therefore putting out a more consistent product and gaining more readers.
3) Be more motivated to generate an audience, meaning advertising their blog and/or writing content that will generate a lot of clicks.
In short, you are more likely to encounter blogs written by people trying to make money because they are going to do more things to get the blog in front of you, in order to make that money.
Great read. I think the shift in internet culture towards everyone being an “expert” in their domain as opposed to sharing their experience (or sharing “vibes” if you will) has been very toxic.
One example: was talking to my cousin the other day, there was a YouTube feature she misses called video replies. Around the 2010s, that feature was used in hair and makeup communities to share videos purely about an experience or journey. So you wouldn’t necessarily be reviewing a product for general purpose, just saying “this is how I used this thing and how it worked for me.”
Now? It is so (potentially) lucrative to be an influencer making normative statements that not doing so seems pointless, even looked down upon as possibly spreading misinformation. Something critical has been lost.
And now we have "reaction videos" where a more famous internet celebrity with millions of followers watches random funny videos and gets paid for it - while the actual creators don't get anything.
But it is well known that these "reaction videos" are largely fake, and the creators are operating an advanced ad revenue scam, and somehow producing fake views on YouTube and not getting caught (or at least, YouTube is not publicly speaking about this, and most likely knows internally).
Either YouTube is going to ban them and try to claw back literally years of money from them, or this is going to explode in the news in the next 2-3 years and Google is going to have to explain to their largest advertisers where their money went.
There's some really interesting Youtube drama going on where a literal multimillionaire Twitch streamer/Youtuber doxxed another Youtuber by streaming their actual home while standing on their front yard.
Something that's extremely illegal by Californian law.
But the offending internet-celebrity has a habit of not being affected by any kind of lawsuits because they bring in millions of viewers (34M viewers on Youtube) and are too good for business to actually kick off the platform.
Just because some shmucks insist what the coffee should be only served in a mushy mix of fruits and vegetables, or be prepared, brewed and consumed only by a very specific procedures - doesn't mean you can't just enjoy your cup made in a old beaten jezwa or, why the hell no, just that 3-in-1 mix which still evokes the memories of subsistence on it and instacook ramen back in the day.
You are free to write about anything. And everyone is free to visit your writing. Or not to.
Influencers all started making money and then everyone else decided they should make money and then nobody ever read my livejournal anyways so why bother continue writing it.
> So I consulted my friend Startpage.com with the obvious prompt: "blog post ideas."
My first thought is that a lot of people are blogging for the hell of it (me, nonstop, for decades), but that they accidentally typed "blog post ideas" into a search engine, and got what they deserved. That is, the problem is with search engines returning trash, and not with the nonexistence of blogs that aren't trash.
That was my thought as well. I feel like everything that I used to (and sometimes still) do as a hobby has become super-commercialized and 99% of those interested in doing that thing only wants to do it for the money and not as a hobby.
The entire world wide web I guess is a good example. But people are seriously paying professional game masters to run table-top RPGs for them and so on.
Search engines happened. Once random assholes could find me and fling shit at me, I walked away from ‘blogging’ and never looked back. Since then, I’ll only write posts on sites that can’t be searched without being logging in. It’s the way it used to be, before webcrawlers and social media ruined our lives, and it’s better for it.
I do blog about whatever thing I'm working on. I know that what gets hits are the tutorials... but I also like to thought dump but I give any readers a warning ahead of time.
Somewhat unfortunately I have been lazy/writing under some platform, which it does mean having an audience.
It turned into a numbers game because becoming popular online equates to money. The biggest catalyst for that? Social media. Since then, social media has become the window into people’s thoughts. Blogging is an additional ‘tool’ to get a bigger cut under your rules.
If you need to google "blogging ideas" you're probably out of ideas and shouldn't be writing, or you're looking for corpo non-sense and that's what you found.
Text sucks, but it was a necessity before the advent of streaming video and cellphone cameras. Now you can find all of that blog content over in video form on youtube and tiktok.
Funny, I have a similar observation but the opposite opinion: I realized that my favorite major platform these days is Youtube because there's a ton of great content there that is harder to find elsewhere. Unfortunately, a lot of that content would be much better in written form.
As an example, I recently watched a video about the best weapons in Tears of the Kingdom that was over 40 minutes long, but all that information could have been a ~3000-word blog post. Yes, some of the information is best conveyed in video form (demonstrating certain effects with in-game footage), but a lot of the content was essentially just the creator explaining out loud why certain combinations work well. For the bits of information that work better as video, the author could embed a short video into the article.
It probably would've been a lot less effort for the creator to make a listicle or blog post with a section for each of the weapons shown, and it would certainly save the viewers a lot of time. But then such a blog post would probably make way less money than the Youtube video. Youtube does a better-than-average job of paying creators for popular content, and they've fostered a network effect where audiences go to Youtube when looking for certain types of information. All this means that the incentives push people to create video content even when another medium would suit the content better.
When you hear Zizek talk about ideology this is what he means. The ideology of capitalism influences us in certain ways, such as desiring to capitalize off our audience, the goal subtly shifts to increasing metrics such as readers, likes, shares.
What really changed about blogging is that people started to care about these metrics more and more. In the early internet one wrote a blog post without really expecting anyone to read it! ( although someone stumbling upon it was paradoxically more likely before we switched to social media platforms etc ) As such I'd argue the author wrote more authentically.
2. Money happened pretty much. First people started monetising their blogs, then they turned into books, which turned into multiple books and youtube channels and then it was no longer a blog and more of a company.
and additionally:
6. The younger generation is used to having their actual face plastered all over the internet and thus feel more natural making videos with their own face and voice.
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I, and I think a good part of the HN crowd, are in the generation where we had actual friends we only knew by their handle/nickname and never saw their face unless there was a meetup of some sort and we actually went there.
For me, using my own face, or even name, to present any sort of content just feels wrong in a visceral way.
People didn't have much interesting to say before, but they didn't have much else to do. Now with #3, other platforms, they spend a lot of time on those other places writing short quips all day.
6. Entities on the internet either copy your work and claim credit, harass you because of your opinions, or use your works against you(mining, social engineering, marketing).
There is no way to know what people will find interesting. There is a healthy gap between someones content being absolutely not worth reading and being professional. I think more people should have hobbies and they should write about their experiences even without it necessarily being interesting. I also don't think it needs to be about making money. Once you start trying to get paid for your hobbies it becomes work and not fun.
With an online blog rather than an offline journal you can easily share it with friends. I think the main difference here between TikTok and other huge social media is that less is more. I don't see much point in a million anonymous strangers looking at my posts. I don't think there is anything "natural" about these huge social media platforms. This kind of socialization feels very unnatural to me. Mostly do to the parasocial relationships that occur from the million people to one person style interactions.
