I too have been throwing messages in bottles into a silent sea for a pretty long time, but I think I'm okay with that. It doesn't help if you also have difficulty adhering to quintessential blog SEO best practices.
1. Consistent theme - A diverse set of interests and a lethal dose of ADD make this virtually impossible
2. Consistent updates - My articles tend to be rather unusual, and I'll often combine them with customized interactive layouts. Even a monthly post would be pretty ambitious for me.
On a slightly related note, I'm hoping that zines [1] see a resurgence in popularity as I could see it being a good point of entry towards possibly gaining readership for those whose sites are inadvertently running in stealth mode.
Wow, thanks for link to Paged Out. Any ideas how to discover any more tech focused zines? We have a zine culture in UK but afaik it’s more culture / music focused (v happy to be wrong here)
Like many here, I too blog for the mental exercise of composing, the human desire to express, and a faith that posting to the public web is some how intrinsically worthy. On the first point I've found I get a lot of benefit from the posts I never even publish as I'll keep chewing over subjects which I'm mentally composing a post about and gain a lot of personal clarity in the process.
One thing I've wondered though (and am mentally composing a post about) is whether there's more good in ai digesting ones writing that we might first feel.
Here's a thought experiment: Would you feel good if someone read your blog and learned something from it? Probably yes. Would you feel good if they passed along something they learned to others, likely in their own words? Probably yes. What if they couldn't recall, or didn't choose to reference where they saw it? Probably still yes, although (speaking personally) my ego would probably prefer they did credit. What if the reader who passed the learning along was the ai?
In a sense we're still contributing to the public discourse and culture when we write, just mediated by models. If a model gives someone a slightly different answer in part because of something you wrote, you've still had an impact on the ultimate human reader.
Just to lay my cards on the table I'm no AI booster, nor doomer. In general I think it's over hyped and may well have a net negative effect if steered by those current at the wheel and consumed without due care, but it has its place where it can be useful.
> Here's a thought experiment: Would you feel good if someone read your blog and learned something from it? Probably yes. Would you feel good if they passed along something they learned to others, likely in their own words? Probably yes. What if they couldn't recall, or didn't choose to reference where they saw it? Probably still yes, although (speaking personally) my ego would probably prefer they did credit. What if the reader who passed the learning along was the ai?
This is definitely an interesting way of looking at it. If your blog ends up in pre-training data, it will become part of the AI. Or if not, an AI might still fetch it when a user asks something specific. It reminds me of voting in a democracy, which many people consider a right and a duty - but in reality a single vote is hardly going to swing any election.
This is a good way to look at it. I recently starting thinking something similar now that chatgpt.com and Perplexity are showing up as referral sources to my blog. So there is some verification (or hope there is) that someone got to my content and learned something from it.
I gave up on reaching anyone. Now I blog for myself alone. My blog serves only 1 real purpose, which is to build and host my resume, but I enjoy writing anyways.
I’ve blogged on and off since the late 90s when it was more “update the /writings.html file with a new addition every now and then” and I learned pretty early that I don’t actually care if anyone reads the stuff I like, I just like the act of writing.
Getting thoughts out of my head and into writing is very therapeutic, as even though I know it will probably get zero views, the fact it might get views makes me think carefully about how to word and structure it all and how to turn the jumble of chaos in my head into something the general public could comprehend.
Recently I was complaining to a friend that this does not work like this any more. 10 years ago, yes but at least in my experience the personal touch seems to have lost value.
I to still do blog because it's good to write. Who knows, someone might benefit from it.
Shameless plug as always when the topic comes up: submit your blog to https://indieblog.page to be discovered. subscribe to its RSS feed or mastodon account to discover indie blogs one random post at a time.
I have been blogging for awhile. Not too concerned if it gets read. I post articles on hackernews if it's relevant to the tech crowd. My writing is really for me. And maybe my family will want to read it some day.
Having a lot to deal with is same as having nothing. Having 10,000 applicants for a job is same as not having any, if a human need to process all of them.
Human attention and processing breaks down. Filters will be used, to cut the volume down to human levels. Automation becomes an indispensable layer between human-to-human interactions. Humans become cells served by the filtered feeds from automation, with no direct to other humans.
I don’t relate to this that much. Of course the AI crawlers have come in hard, but at least https://taoofmac.com still gets a very large amount of human visitors (either organicallly or return visits, plus RSS).
I think the real issue is that people now consume much more than they contribute or comment (even if I did get rid of comments years ago due to automated spam, I do get one or two e-mails a week plus a bit of feedback on social networks). And, of course, people have unrealistic expectations about publishing online making you more visible/reachable (there is just too much out there).
I do hope indie blogging makes a comeback. When the only objective of the post is for the author to ‘scream into the void’, it’s refreshing in this day and age.
As someone who’s been writing online for almost three decades, I don’t think blogs ever went away—they just became a smaller percentage of the overall Internet.
From personal experience I can tell you that they are coming back. And a lot of blogs never left. Granted, compared to how many people are on social media the number seems small but that’s ok imo.
- Hosting a website is not so easy for the average person, even the tech savvy person, specially if you try to learn it now using the way large websites are developed.
- Static site blogs lack interactivity: people can't comment on your blog. You have to post a link to Twitter or HN (here!) and interact with people over there.
- Static site blogs also don't usually let people "subscribe" by email or whatnot, so unless people bookmark your website or follow you on Twitter, they are not going to find your content.
P.S. this is a problem area I'm trying to work on, at least on the technical front.
I would counter your three assertions with a few thoughts:
- there are now literally thousands of ways to host personal websites, even if we’re not in the LiveJournal age anymore
- there are also several services out there to host comments (many of which I tried over the years before I realized the absence of comments was a feature, not a bug)
- RSS is still a thing. Very much so. My site publishes a full RSS feed, and I have at least as many individual RSS GET requests as for the rest of my site, bar the homepage.
The counterpoint is that not having the ability to comment means that the author avoids the anxiety of not having anyone comment on their blog. Or worse still, having to filter out the negative comments.
No comments are normal if no one can comment.
Personally I've learnt that anxiety removal leads to a healthy life.
There are also tools like giscus[1] which allow comments on static pages but only for folks logged in on third party services - such as github in the case of giscus.
> - Static site blogs lack interactivity: people can't comment on your blog. You have to post a link to Twitter or HN (here!) and interact with people over there.
This is not really an issue at all, more like a feature. Posts that provoke discussion or are otherwise interesting get HN discussions. Posts that don't get traction also don't require a comment field. Free moderation and signal boosting.
I'd also recommend putting an email address on the website (but not your main address). That also tends to promote high-quality engagement with readers directly.
> Hosting a website is not so easy for the average person, even the tech savvy person, specially if you try to learn it now using the way large websites are developed.
It's easier then ever. Shared hosting with cPanel has enabled anyone including my mother to host a website, blog or whatever.
A blog doesn't need to be an abstraction of JavaScript libraries and frameworks tucked behind Cloudflare. Just make a CRUD application and you have a blog. It yes requires knowledge but it's not hard. With LLMs now running the internet it's even easier than before.
My website[1] will be hitting 25-years next year (2026 JUN 11). I stopped caring about comments, reactions, SEO, etc. for a while; I just post whatever I want these days.[2]
Of course, I like the fact that sites such as Adobe, Wikipedia, WordPress, IBM, the US Patent (mostly via Google), Russian and Chinese Websites, and quite a few other prominent websites maintains their links that points to some of my articles.
Yeah, that’s mostly the direction I’ve taken taoofmac.com to. I do it for fun, extremely odd dives into weird tech, and essentially public notes on my consulting stuff.
> But then I stopped because I had no return from it.
> The main reason was to get back into the habit of writing, and by extension thinking. ChatGPT has weakened my thinking capacity.
I can definitely relate, and find this true as well. While a (monetary) return has never a big focus for me. It's still hard to keep going over time with motivations around self improvement, accountability, etc.
I have two niche blogs( civilwhiz.com and mes100.com). Those bot traffics increase my visitor count in Google analytics by more than 100%. It's super annoying when the analytics are distorted by bots traffic.
In the past, you also used to ping a bunch of search engines (eg Technorati) for each new post. Going forward, you should be able to ping AIs but there should be a paywall before they can train on your content.
Also, how are AIs going to train for new languages and business rules in the future? People may start to get defensive. It must be worth something.. enter x402.
AIs are dumb - they can't really make sense of anything new without a human first to put it into context.. right? Remember that!
Here's a runaway feedback loop: if you put your blog behind a paywall for AIs, there's an army of spammers, narcissists, and marketers who would be more that happy to substitute for you in the training set for free. Commodification leads to a race to the bottom.
At scale? It'll just put a nail in the coffin of mass literacy, cognitive ability, emotional well-being, sheer sanity. The nonsensical will become even more normalized, while the reaction to someone e.g. doing maths will come to be: "ew, die"
Okay, so if you open up your site for free, there should be a way for an AI chat to link to the paid version of the free page when referencing in the chat window. That link can be obfuscated in some way too, perhaps. Also, it'd be very cool to split that payment back to the AI.
- You help the LLM by putting something up for free and pinging it upon publishing
- The LLM helps back by linking to you (hopefully)
- The user helps by paying you when they visit the paid version
- You help the LLM by splitting that payment back to it
optional: your free page can have reference links.. so other pages that helped you reach your final version can get a split of the payment as well. Perhaps the LLM can handle that part in "upstream distributions."
In fact, your reference links can lead to even more reference links further upstream when stepping back through the totality of references: the pyramid slice. Perhaps it should be capped at say 3 steps back.. that can be decided somewhere or the payments can be diluted the further back the focus.
So here's the crux - there should be a way for the user to decide how much they want/can pay you. A tipping culture can work. If you're broke, just don't tip anything or put it on hold. Big Business can be transparent on their payments and build up social capital by disclosing their "giving." There can be a level of transparency and privacy that can be tweaked for each situation.
Most of my use for my blog posts is linking people to them on IRC and forums. I don't need or want search engine traffic. It's true there's no money or the churning waves of activity associated with that money in blogging anymore. And that's great. Social media siphoned off the profit chasers and all their running in place activity to stay on top of the eternal wave of now in recommendation engines.
I log on once in a while to a channel I used to use, and some of the same people are sorta still there. IRC is weird now, nostalgic but also... the things that made it truly fun aren't really a thing. Weird !fserves for warez, strange early chat bots, a/s/l... I do miss it. I think it has moved on except in little bubbles, and I cheer those on from afar.
I do keep an eye on my (fairly privacy positive) analytics via Matomo and I've seen increase in readership over the years as well as spikes in traffic as ie I'm top on reddit, Hacker News or Lobsters
>how many people are really going to read it directly
For me probably very few if any :) It does not help I moved to my site Gemini (the real gemini, not google's thing) a year or 2 ago. Not that I blog much anyway.
But I hope some future digital archeologist may find our blogs and get a view into what non-corporate controlled people thought :)
Note, I find Gemini and Gopher far easier to maintain then anything on the WEB. FWIW, I mirror my items on gopher.
> So if you have a blog nowadays with all kinds of useful information ... how many people are really going to read it directly?
and
> If the answer was on a forum, blog or any other website the AI will fetch it behind the scenes and summarize it for you.
Because of exactly this(AI stealing people's traffic and exposure, becoming de facto gateway into the internet and keeping the real users away from actual content creators, controlling the narrative or getting paid for other people's work), I have become convinced that in order to preserve humanity and freedom on the internet and avoid being totally controlled by social networks and these AI information manipulators, there is great need to paywall all content. It is horribly sad that it came to this, because internet was not made to become like this, but I see no other way to preserve its essence. One of the reasons I have created Gethly.com was because paywalls will become necessity.
In the past, search engines were helpful because they guided users to your content and for that functionality, they got paid money from showing some ads on their own search result page. But with AI bots, they are literally stealing all the information out there, all the traffic the websites would otherwise generate, and are stealing people's money because these AI bots/agents have paid versions, which only turns their theft into profitable crime. These AI tools bring no value to the content creators whose content they are stealing and preventing real users from discovering and connecting with the authors. Only their users see value in them as it allows them to avoid doing the manual work of searching the information themselves. But this comfort comes at an astronomical cost because in time, this will completely kill content itself as people will stop creating it due to lack of traffic and interest from real users when AI bots will come in once, steal the content and then sell it to the end-users for ever and the content creators will not get one more page hit.
These are dark times, people just don't get it yet how bad thins will get.
Yes, the distribution is super hard. I recently changed how I blog and building entire platform around that called LakyAI (https://lakyai.com). The idea is being able to run multiple blogs in parallel with crosslinking, sharing resources, reposting to platforms that give you distribution, repurposing the blogs entirely, and more. I am at the beginning but if someone is interested in some novel ideas just drop me an email at hello@lakyai.com.
I too have been throwing messages in bottles into a silent sea for a pretty long time, but I think I'm okay with that. It doesn't help if you also have difficulty adhering to quintessential blog SEO best practices.
1. Consistent theme - A diverse set of interests and a lethal dose of ADD make this virtually impossible
2. Consistent updates - My articles tend to be rather unusual, and I'll often combine them with customized interactive layouts. Even a monthly post would be pretty ambitious for me.
On a slightly related note, I'm hoping that zines [1] see a resurgence in popularity as I could see it being a good point of entry towards possibly gaining readership for those whose sites are inadvertently running in stealth mode.
[1] - Such as Paged Out (https://pagedout.institute)
Here is vunderba's site, for anyone who got curious too:
https://mordenstar.com/
I just skimmed but looks like exactly the content I love. It's a shame search engines are so narrow minded and such content so hard to discover.
Wow, thanks for link to Paged Out. Any ideas how to discover any more tech focused zines? We have a zine culture in UK but afaik it’s more culture / music focused (v happy to be wrong here)
From yesterday's PO! thread [1] [2]:
- https://phrack.org/
- https://tmpout.sh/
- https://www.hugi.scene.org/
- https://lainzine.org/archive
- https://inteltechniques.com/magazine.html
- https://n-o-d-e.net/zine/
- https://increment.com/issues/
- https://pocorgtfo.hacke.rs/
Not all of them are active though.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46134188
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46130469
Anyone know what happened to NODE? They seemed to have had a good momentum and then went radio silent.
Like many here, I too blog for the mental exercise of composing, the human desire to express, and a faith that posting to the public web is some how intrinsically worthy. On the first point I've found I get a lot of benefit from the posts I never even publish as I'll keep chewing over subjects which I'm mentally composing a post about and gain a lot of personal clarity in the process.
One thing I've wondered though (and am mentally composing a post about) is whether there's more good in ai digesting ones writing that we might first feel.
Here's a thought experiment: Would you feel good if someone read your blog and learned something from it? Probably yes. Would you feel good if they passed along something they learned to others, likely in their own words? Probably yes. What if they couldn't recall, or didn't choose to reference where they saw it? Probably still yes, although (speaking personally) my ego would probably prefer they did credit. What if the reader who passed the learning along was the ai?
In a sense we're still contributing to the public discourse and culture when we write, just mediated by models. If a model gives someone a slightly different answer in part because of something you wrote, you've still had an impact on the ultimate human reader.
Just to lay my cards on the table I'm no AI booster, nor doomer. In general I think it's over hyped and may well have a net negative effect if steered by those current at the wheel and consumed without due care, but it has its place where it can be useful.
> Here's a thought experiment: Would you feel good if someone read your blog and learned something from it? Probably yes. Would you feel good if they passed along something they learned to others, likely in their own words? Probably yes. What if they couldn't recall, or didn't choose to reference where they saw it? Probably still yes, although (speaking personally) my ego would probably prefer they did credit. What if the reader who passed the learning along was the ai?
This is definitely an interesting way of looking at it. If your blog ends up in pre-training data, it will become part of the AI. Or if not, an AI might still fetch it when a user asks something specific. It reminds me of voting in a democracy, which many people consider a right and a duty - but in reality a single vote is hardly going to swing any election.
that's a good analogy
[dead]
This is a good way to look at it. I recently starting thinking something similar now that chatgpt.com and Perplexity are showing up as referral sources to my blog. So there is some verification (or hope there is) that someone got to my content and learned something from it.
I gave up on reaching anyone. Now I blog for myself alone. My blog serves only 1 real purpose, which is to build and host my resume, but I enjoy writing anyways.
I’ve blogged on and off since the late 90s when it was more “update the /writings.html file with a new addition every now and then” and I learned pretty early that I don’t actually care if anyone reads the stuff I like, I just like the act of writing.
Getting thoughts out of my head and into writing is very therapeutic, as even though I know it will probably get zero views, the fact it might get views makes me think carefully about how to word and structure it all and how to turn the jumble of chaos in my head into something the general public could comprehend.
None of you have your blog or anything linked in your profiles here. I'm not trying to be critical, I was just curious about what they'd look like
I don't anymore but heres mine from 2005 when I was 16
https://web.archive.org/web/20051231031003/http://www.lordse...
My even cooler self php made blog from 2013. Want cringe? Just visit.
https://web.archive.org/web/20130816005929/http://www.paw-fo...
My blog was dead before dead blogs were cool.
Recently I was complaining to a friend that this does not work like this any more. 10 years ago, yes but at least in my experience the personal touch seems to have lost value.
I to still do blog because it's good to write. Who knows, someone might benefit from it.
Shameless plug as always when the topic comes up: submit your blog to https://indieblog.page to be discovered. subscribe to its RSS feed or mastodon account to discover indie blogs one random post at a time.
I have been blogging for awhile. Not too concerned if it gets read. I post articles on hackernews if it's relevant to the tech crowd. My writing is really for me. And maybe my family will want to read it some day.
Having a lot to deal with is same as having nothing. Having 10,000 applicants for a job is same as not having any, if a human need to process all of them.
Human attention and processing breaks down. Filters will be used, to cut the volume down to human levels. Automation becomes an indispensable layer between human-to-human interactions. Humans become cells served by the filtered feeds from automation, with no direct to other humans.
Their photos are worth reposting for the few who won't read past the first paragraph. This is cool.
https://mijnrealiteit.nl/
I like this a lot, simple, elegant, unpretentious, walking down memory lane.
I don’t relate to this that much. Of course the AI crawlers have come in hard, but at least https://taoofmac.com still gets a very large amount of human visitors (either organicallly or return visits, plus RSS).
I think the real issue is that people now consume much more than they contribute or comment (even if I did get rid of comments years ago due to automated spam, I do get one or two e-mails a week plus a bit of feedback on social networks). And, of course, people have unrealistic expectations about publishing online making you more visible/reachable (there is just too much out there).
I do hope indie blogging makes a comeback. When the only objective of the post is for the author to ‘scream into the void’, it’s refreshing in this day and age.
As someone who’s been writing online for almost three decades, I don’t think blogs ever went away—they just became a smaller percentage of the overall Internet.
From personal experience I can tell you that they are coming back. And a lot of blogs never left. Granted, compared to how many people are on social media the number seems small but that’s ok imo.
There are two issues:
- Hosting a website is not so easy for the average person, even the tech savvy person, specially if you try to learn it now using the way large websites are developed.
- Static site blogs lack interactivity: people can't comment on your blog. You have to post a link to Twitter or HN (here!) and interact with people over there.
- Static site blogs also don't usually let people "subscribe" by email or whatnot, so unless people bookmark your website or follow you on Twitter, they are not going to find your content.
P.S. this is a problem area I'm trying to work on, at least on the technical front.
I would counter your three assertions with a few thoughts:
- there are now literally thousands of ways to host personal websites, even if we’re not in the LiveJournal age anymore
- there are also several services out there to host comments (many of which I tried over the years before I realized the absence of comments was a feature, not a bug)
- RSS is still a thing. Very much so. My site publishes a full RSS feed, and I have at least as many individual RSS GET requests as for the rest of my site, bar the homepage.
The counterpoint is that not having the ability to comment means that the author avoids the anxiety of not having anyone comment on their blog. Or worse still, having to filter out the negative comments.
No comments are normal if no one can comment.
Personally I've learnt that anxiety removal leads to a healthy life.
I removed comments not due to anxiety but to the drudgery of having to deal with ever more creative ways of spamming.
There are also tools like giscus[1] which allow comments on static pages but only for folks logged in on third party services - such as github in the case of giscus.
[1]: https://giscus.app/
> - Static site blogs lack interactivity: people can't comment on your blog. You have to post a link to Twitter or HN (here!) and interact with people over there.
This is not really an issue at all, more like a feature. Posts that provoke discussion or are otherwise interesting get HN discussions. Posts that don't get traction also don't require a comment field. Free moderation and signal boosting.
I'd also recommend putting an email address on the website (but not your main address). That also tends to promote high-quality engagement with readers directly.
> Hosting a website is not so easy for the average person, even the tech savvy person, specially if you try to learn it now using the way large websites are developed.
It's easier then ever. Shared hosting with cPanel has enabled anyone including my mother to host a website, blog or whatever.
A blog doesn't need to be an abstraction of JavaScript libraries and frameworks tucked behind Cloudflare. Just make a CRUD application and you have a blog. It yes requires knowledge but it's not hard. With LLMs now running the internet it's even easier than before.
My website[1] will be hitting 25-years next year (2026 JUN 11). I stopped caring about comments, reactions, SEO, etc. for a while; I just post whatever I want these days.[2]
Of course, I like the fact that sites such as Adobe, Wikipedia, WordPress, IBM, the US Patent (mostly via Google), Russian and Chinese Websites, and quite a few other prominent websites maintains their links that points to some of my articles.
1. https://brajeshwar.com/
2. https://brajeshwar.com/2021/brajeshwar.com-2021/
Yeah, that’s mostly the direction I’ve taken taoofmac.com to. I do it for fun, extremely odd dives into weird tech, and essentially public notes on my consulting stuff.
You’d be an excellent guest for my pepleandblogs.com
I love having people with “old” blogs on to hear their stories. Thank you for writing for so long, I’ll definitely get in touch.
I second the sentiment expressed. I used to blog often and cross post on Medium and Twitter.
At peak, every third post I wrote went viral. But then I stopped because I had no return from it.
I recently started writing on my blog again: https://shivekkhurana.com
The main reason was to get back into the habit of writing, and by extension thinking. ChatGPT has weakened my thinking capacity.
> But then I stopped because I had no return from it. > The main reason was to get back into the habit of writing, and by extension thinking. ChatGPT has weakened my thinking capacity.
I can definitely relate, and find this true as well. While a (monetary) return has never a big focus for me. It's still hard to keep going over time with motivations around self improvement, accountability, etc.
What kind of return were you expecting? Exposure? Ad revenue? VIsibility? Those are not good reasons to maintain a blog… not today anyway.
My time was better spent building my startup.
The return from the startup was experience, friendships, skill-development and money.
I chose to trade my time for tangible returns.
Speaking about blogging, for those who run on WordPress at least, do you get lots of bot traffic from China and Singapore recently? They usually appear in pair. (https://support.google.com/analytics/thread/378622882/google...)
I have two niche blogs( civilwhiz.com and mes100.com). Those bot traffics increase my visitor count in Google analytics by more than 100%. It's super annoying when the analytics are distorted by bots traffic.
I've been getting Singapore traffic like crazy
Same. Not Wordpress, but Cloudflare tells me my main traffic (by far) is from Singapore and the US, and in numbers that are clearly bots.
In the past, you also used to ping a bunch of search engines (eg Technorati) for each new post. Going forward, you should be able to ping AIs but there should be a paywall before they can train on your content.
Also, how are AIs going to train for new languages and business rules in the future? People may start to get defensive. It must be worth something.. enter x402.
AIs are dumb - they can't really make sense of anything new without a human first to put it into context.. right? Remember that!
Here's a runaway feedback loop: if you put your blog behind a paywall for AIs, there's an army of spammers, narcissists, and marketers who would be more that happy to substitute for you in the training set for free. Commodification leads to a race to the bottom.
And if that puts a nail in the coffin of LLMs then I'm all for it.
At scale? It'll just put a nail in the coffin of mass literacy, cognitive ability, emotional well-being, sheer sanity. The nonsensical will become even more normalized, while the reaction to someone e.g. doing maths will come to be: "ew, die"
Okay, so if you open up your site for free, there should be a way for an AI chat to link to the paid version of the free page when referencing in the chat window. That link can be obfuscated in some way too, perhaps. Also, it'd be very cool to split that payment back to the AI.
- You help the LLM by putting something up for free and pinging it upon publishing
- The LLM helps back by linking to you (hopefully)
- The user helps by paying you when they visit the paid version
- You help the LLM by splitting that payment back to it
optional: your free page can have reference links.. so other pages that helped you reach your final version can get a split of the payment as well. Perhaps the LLM can handle that part in "upstream distributions."
In fact, your reference links can lead to even more reference links further upstream when stepping back through the totality of references: the pyramid slice. Perhaps it should be capped at say 3 steps back.. that can be decided somewhere or the payments can be diluted the further back the focus.
So here's the crux - there should be a way for the user to decide how much they want/can pay you. A tipping culture can work. If you're broke, just don't tip anything or put it on hold. Big Business can be transparent on their payments and build up social capital by disclosing their "giving." There can be a level of transparency and privacy that can be tweaked for each situation.
It would be better to have a Reddit-style service where all the blogs are in one place.
I was about to subscribe to the RSS feed, but there wasn't one. Pared down a bit too far!
(RSS feed is how you -used to- follow blogs you thought were interesting)
I find blogging to be a step further than screaming into my mic daily and transcribing it. At least I can formulate it a bit better when I type.
Shameless blog plug -
https://www.rxjourney.net/
How AI is making us Dumber.
Fully agree. The brain is a muscle like any other, so atrophy is no different. I’ve started playing chess and a few other simple brain exercises.
Thanks for reading.
Yea, solving problems with our brain is more fulfilling
Most of my use for my blog posts is linking people to them on IRC and forums. I don't need or want search engine traffic. It's true there's no money or the churning waves of activity associated with that money in blogging anymore. And that's great. Social media siphoned off the profit chasers and all their running in place activity to stay on top of the eternal wave of now in recommendation engines.
What's the state of IRC these days? I've not kept up since the mid 00s and wonder where people have gone now.
I log on once in a while to a channel I used to use, and some of the same people are sorta still there. IRC is weird now, nostalgic but also... the things that made it truly fun aren't really a thing. Weird !fserves for warez, strange early chat bots, a/s/l... I do miss it. I think it has moved on except in little bubbles, and I cheer those on from afar.
Did I miss this magical time where every blogger was getting thousands of hits? Posting on the internet has always been screaming into the void.
I do keep an eye on my (fairly privacy positive) analytics via Matomo and I've seen increase in readership over the years as well as spikes in traffic as ie I'm top on reddit, Hacker News or Lobsters
https://www.jvt.me/site-in-review/
But I very much still enjoy that some of my posts are "screaming into the void", giving me an outlet
>how many people are really going to read it directly
For me probably very few if any :) It does not help I moved to my site Gemini (the real gemini, not google's thing) a year or 2 ago. Not that I blog much anyway.
But I hope some future digital archeologist may find our blogs and get a view into what non-corporate controlled people thought :)
Note, I find Gemini and Gopher far easier to maintain then anything on the WEB. FWIW, I mirror my items on gopher.
> So if you have a blog nowadays with all kinds of useful information ... how many people are really going to read it directly?
and
> If the answer was on a forum, blog or any other website the AI will fetch it behind the scenes and summarize it for you.
Because of exactly this(AI stealing people's traffic and exposure, becoming de facto gateway into the internet and keeping the real users away from actual content creators, controlling the narrative or getting paid for other people's work), I have become convinced that in order to preserve humanity and freedom on the internet and avoid being totally controlled by social networks and these AI information manipulators, there is great need to paywall all content. It is horribly sad that it came to this, because internet was not made to become like this, but I see no other way to preserve its essence. One of the reasons I have created Gethly.com was because paywalls will become necessity.
In the past, search engines were helpful because they guided users to your content and for that functionality, they got paid money from showing some ads on their own search result page. But with AI bots, they are literally stealing all the information out there, all the traffic the websites would otherwise generate, and are stealing people's money because these AI bots/agents have paid versions, which only turns their theft into profitable crime. These AI tools bring no value to the content creators whose content they are stealing and preventing real users from discovering and connecting with the authors. Only their users see value in them as it allows them to avoid doing the manual work of searching the information themselves. But this comfort comes at an astronomical cost because in time, this will completely kill content itself as people will stop creating it due to lack of traffic and interest from real users when AI bots will come in once, steal the content and then sell it to the end-users for ever and the content creators will not get one more page hit.
These are dark times, people just don't get it yet how bad thins will get.
Ughhh how I wish I trusted the void enough to scream into it anything of substance! Shitposting on HN at least just annoys people.
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Yes, the distribution is super hard. I recently changed how I blog and building entire platform around that called LakyAI (https://lakyai.com). The idea is being able to run multiple blogs in parallel with crosslinking, sharing resources, reposting to platforms that give you distribution, repurposing the blogs entirely, and more. I am at the beginning but if someone is interested in some novel ideas just drop me an email at hello@lakyai.com.