Comment by bnralt
9 days ago
> We started by putting advertisements on existing content, then moved to social networking and social media, which was essentially an engine for crowdsourcing the production of greater amounts of content against which to show advertisements.
I see a lot of people talk nostalgically about blogs, but they were an early example of the internet changing from ever green content to churning out articles on content farms. If people remember the early internet, it was more like browsing a library. You weren’t expecting most sites to get updated on a daily - or often even a monthly - basis. Articles were almost always organized by content, not by how recent they were.
Blogging’s hyper-focus on what’s new really changed a lot of that, and many sites got noticeably worse as they switched from focusing on growing a library of evergreen content to focusing on churning out new hits. Online discussions went through a similar process when they changed from forums to Reddit/HN style upvoting. I still have discussions on old forums that are over a decade old. After a few hours on Reddit or HN, the posts drop off the page and all discussion dies.
Blogs were great when they supported RSS, you could subscribe to feed and get updates if they happened every day, or randomly months or years in the future. There was no need for refreshing to see if there was something new.
I feel like RSS feeds made it to easy for me to follow lots of blogs to the point where the amount of content was too much. Being forced to manually review blogs for updates works as a filter in that I only go through the effort (albeit still small) of visiting the page if I was interested enough in keeping up to date with it. Not saying RSS didn’t have great advantages; just that your comment made me think of this potential downside.
Also with some blogs we started to attach content to personalities, which was different than consuming content from another internet stranger.
And with personalities you have some form of relation to, you want these more recent updates instead of sticking to topics of interest.
Reddit is at least still focused on topics instead of people. I think this is why for some it still is more interesting than platforms like Insta, Facebook or Twitter.
That's a fascinating perspective. I imagine A blog should do something like press releases and describe and progress made on the actual website or plans for-. Forums should then play with ideas and chat is for hammering out details that are hard to communicate or overly noisy and for talking about stuff unrelated to the project.
> I imagine A blog should do something like press releases and describe and progress made on the actual website or plans for-
A lot of older websites actually used to do this with a “what’s new” section or page. With blogging, “what’s new” became the entire site, with almost the entirety of the content (everything that wasn't new) now hidden.
Ironically, after mentioning that discussion dies off incredibly quickly when HN stories fall of the front page, this discussion was moved off the front page to a day old discussion. My guess is that almost no one will see it now.
People some how forgot the concept of accumulated value. It use to be my main argument against platforms. You dump your stuff onthere and then it vanishes into the memory hole entirely by design. The point is to keep you on the website not to make your stuff available. It is a strange contradiction that really shouldn't be.
I remember when forums gradually turned into q&a repos.
Ive seen it! But yeah, I typically only browse the best stories section, basically I really want some human curation in my feed which might help with the vast amount of infogarbage generated by llms?