It seems to me that the blogosphere was not a ZIRP but rather a young Internet phenomenon. Which could exists, like usenet before it, when mere access to it was a filtering mechanism.
Once you have seven billion people with virtually no access control, you can't have a public blogosphere, and groups retreat to the cozyweb.
Either way, I enjoyed it while it lasted. Thanks for the Office series!
The public blogosphere died because of Google, simple as. Once search stopped prioritizing blogs over bloated, SEO-optimized slop, traffic to blogs died and discoverability was limited to you spamming your posts everywhere.
Google bought Blogger in 2003; that was the main blogging service for a long time in the US, at least. Google not being able to optimize search results for their own hosted content implies...a lack of overall content available. It used to be a lot better in the earlier days, for ROMs and especially album downloads blogs would pop up all the time in the results. It's just that there are a lot more people online now, and more accompanying spam, and also the fact that Google delists any sort of "download" type site by default - which used to be a substantial subcategory of blogs.
People forget how "tightened up" the web is nowadays, or many just aren't old enough to remember. It wasn't 10 years ago that Fox News would archive full, uncensored ISIS videos on their website - which is kind of insane, when you think about it.
Average age of first phone ownership is really young these days, which is arguably the #1 factor in everything online becoming a closed system for sheep.
On the other hand, no parents want their 11-year-old wandering into videos of hostages being burned alive. Or getting solicited for photos etc. So the internet is kind of dying for the sake of real life.
Those seven billion people aren't very good for the most part, and include a critical mass of spectacularly awful people. It turns out that public access forums calibrated for the small and self-selected community of mostly high quality internet pioneers aren't prepared to deal with 1000000x expansion of reachable audience. The Eternal September effect has been getting stronger ever since it's first been observed.
There's a gap between public fora and the blogosphere though.
Generally speaking there are plenty of blogs that get linked in places like here. Blogs just don't have comment sections hosted on their own as much anymore.
Having discussions happen in separate places is also interesting, because the HN convo and some subreddit convo will be different, for example.
There's a lot more mainstraeam stuff but I think niche communities still exist. Glibly, we're not a part of most of them on account of having gotten older. Or we are a part of some, but there's plenty we're not seeing.
It's not just that the social media is filled with low on substance posts with excess anger and snark, but this incentivizes everyone to be more forceful - as otherwise the louder voices can dominate the discussion. So, it's not just a quality of people issue but also an emergent dynamic which encourages tribalism instead of substantive posts. The same people can make reasonable posts in other contexts
This need not be a unsolvable problem, and that one has to retreat places like HN relying on a single moderator(good, but doesn't scale).
One can also rely on timelines/feeds being based on Distributed moderation -
A user selects moderators or custom-algorithms who they find valuable. The moderation can be along different dimensions like accuracy, interest, or aligned with some political view.
There could a moderator whose style is to purely check the soundness of the reasoning without taking any position on the issue itself. This can lead to improved standards of discussion.
A key issue is how to reduce the energy required to moderate - typically a moderator evaluates the quality and rely on networks of other moderators each handling smaller domains.
Current discourse encourages users to sort into strongly polarized groups, whereas more nuanced feeds in social media can lead to coalitions which don't neatly align with the standard fault lines. Platforms like Polis actively encourage common points of agreement across different groups.
I had a hilarious time deleting comments from people who don't believe the topic is real. Specifically hard to believe stuff made the experience funny. People got really mad in private messages. As if it is a god given right to complain about others talking about something so elaborately that the conversation dies.
All scaling issues solved.
If you want to talk about the garden gnome liberation front you must believe they need to be rescued.
Yeah, but this sounds more like social media than the blogosphere.
Blogs were always effort to set up and maintain, even if you were just going with one of the hosted platforms rather than self-hosting.
And comment spam was certainly an issue but, firstly, systems for dealing with that became pretty good. And then, outside of major news sites - I'm thinking particularly here of BBC's HYS, but the same applies to other news sites - and other sites with very broad interest bases, you didn't tend to get loads of nasty or toxic comments on blogs. Plus, the moderation tools were - as previously mentioned - pretty decent. A lot of the bigger news websites did close comments, but I'm not so aware of this being an issue with blogs which were often more focussed around a particular community or interest anyway... just publicly available.
I don't think the quantity of people online in itself had anything to do with the "death" of the blogosphere. It's just that most of those people don't read or write blogs. And it's become harder to find blogs and other long tail content because search results are now so heavily skewed towards paid results and commercial entities who invest huge amounts in SEO.
FWIW I also think you're probably going a bit far with the moral pronouncements on those 7 billion people: neither you nor I have any real idea what the vast majority of them are actually like as human beings. Moreover, I'd suggest that writing off most people as "[not] very good" or branding a critical mass of them as "spectacularly awful" - and especially when you're speaking from a position of ignorance - is exactly the kind of rhetoric that's landed us with this grim tribal culture that permeates large areas of online - and offline - life.
>It turns out that public access forums calibrated for the small and self-selected community of mostly high quality internet pioneers aren't prepared to deal with 1000000x expansion of reachable audience.
"Checklist for new theories purporting to prove that the social web is presently unworkable:"
...
26. The predicted conflicts still wouldn't be as bad as Usenet flamewars.
27. Your theory proves that Hackernews does not exist. <---
28. Audiences afraid of engaging with an unfamiliar interfaces weren't making websites in 1998 either.
This forum has been decreasing in quality since its inception, currently hovering at not-quite-reddit and that's with an organic audience of tech-adjacent posters. It would turn into a smoking hole in the ground if it somehow caught worldwide attention.
You're a fish swimming in fragile water you fail to appreciate.
For those who don't know, you can click the "past" link in the toolbar, and see for yourself what HN was like on any given past day, and judge for yourself whether the quality has declined
There's an interesting phenomenon where any time a long time HN user says that discussion quality has been declining (something many have reported), a moderator will essentially say that people have been claiming that for as long as they've been moderating, but that it does not match their observations.
I've always found that contradiction interesting (and puzzling).
1. People change. My HN account is 15 years old, and my interests and ambitions and tolerances are not the same as they were in 2009, when I was 28 years old and in a very different place in my life. When you interact with something for many many years, even if that thing stays exactly the same, you change, and think differently about it.
2. The site changes, too, of course. They aren't necessarily bad changes (and often I would say they're good changes!), but people sometimes associate change with negative feelings, especially with something they have an emotional attachment to or at least have been a part of for a long time.
Mind you, I don't think discussion quality has been declining here. In many ways I think it has been improving, or at the very least staying the same under a barrage of new users, higher scale, and low-effort LLM-generated comments.
I also joined HN in 2009 and I agree with you. HN isn't perfect but it's about as respectful and intelligent of an organic community as it gets on the public web. When I do analytics on my blog, an upvote on HN is worth 10 on Reddit. Manipulative paywalled media pieces usually stay off the front page. I love how when I read news about a famous CEO like Matt Mullenweg, I can see him commenting here like the rest of us. I also think we're very fortunate to have dang running things.
In 2010 I found the average HN comment far more insightful and likely to be true than I do in 2024. I am fairly certain that this is almost entirely due to me changing, and not the content of the site. At a very basic level my views on the concept of a VC funded startup is so very different now from what it was in 2010 that I would certainly interpret all of those discussions very differently now.
When Google takes me to a very old discussion on HN I am usually surprised by how similar they are to threads from today, even if some of the specific viewpoints in vogue are different.
I disagree. Quality has certainly varied over the years, but HN is still miles above Reddit. I'm not a heavy Reddit user, but every time someone or something links me to Reddit for something I might find interesting, the comments are mostly garbage. The same tired memes and jokes, over and over and over, tons of low-effort comments, not much substantial, curiosity-piquing discussion.
Sure, maybe there are some subs that are better, but I doubt I'd be convinced to spend more time on Reddit and less on HN. Certainly there are useful places on Reddit; I've gotten a lot of mileage out of searching for product reviews or general customer support questions on Reddit, but that's kinda a "single purpose" visit, not something for general curiosity.
I feel like there are some long-time HNers (your account was only created two years ago, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you've changed accounts or have just been a super long time lurker) feel like quality has gone down; that's almost a meme of its own. Hell, the HN guidelines even has a blurb about how tired it is to suggest HN is turning into Reddit.
But I think it's a lot more accurate to say that quality ebbs and flows, and varies between articles and topics. And yes, sometimes the focus of the site (based on what submissions get voted to the front page, and what kind of discussion happens) shifts in ways that make my interest wane a bit, though always only temporarily. But that's not the same thing as quality.
I'm speculating, but I think the big difference is the barrier to downvoting something here is greater.
If you say something controversial over at Reddit there is a substantial chance you get piled on and labelled a troll, unpopular positions cannot be expressed without the risk of no longer being able to participate.
Anything you suspect will generate something other than a bland, mildly positive response is too risky to express.
> It would turn into a smoking hole in the ground if it somehow caught worldwide attention.
This seems untrue? Of course I like HN, but from the perspective of a typical person, HN is an ugly, hard-to-use website with "news" that caters to a small fraction of the population and is likely quite uninteresting to the rest. I think this is why it manages to stay roughly the way that it is - that and extremely thorough and strict moderation to keep it that way.
> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
See the link for some examples, but I can also recommend looking at some old front pages from over the years and poking through the discussions. Unscientifically, it seems that quality is pretty similar to me.
My HN account is older than either of yours, so I don’t think I can be dismissed as a “semi-noob”. rogers12 is mostly correct, sad to say. dang has done a good job slowing the decline (and I actually noticed an uptick in quality when he first took over) but HN is past its peak.
My account is a few weeks older than yours, and my opinion is pretty much the exact opposite of yours.
I still get a ton of value out of HN, even after over 15 years. I visit multiple times a day, and genuinely enjoy reading articles and comments, and joining the comment threads myself. It's not perfect; there's certainly annoying crap, bad-faith posters, trolls, spam, LLM-generated junk, etc. But (with the exception of the LLM-generated junk) none of that is new since I first started hanging out here. Overall the quality of discussion (like this one!) is still quite high, and there isn't another news/interest/discussion site on the internet where I spend anywhere near as much time, even after 15+ years.
(I'm not going to argue about whether or not it has "peaked", since that's not a particularly useful measure. If quality is a scale from 0-100, and we already hit 100 but are now hovering around 80, stably, then who cares if the peak is in the past? The quality is still fine.)
This is a good question that probably deserves more thought and effort than I can apply to it. I would say that when HN was at its peak, the overall vibe of the commentary reflected the perspective of people who people who built things, while the overall vibe today reflects the perspective of people who like to go online and bitch about things.
There’s a famous email exchange—I’m sure you’re familiar with it—where someone writes to Steve Jobs complaining about a bunch of things Apple was doing, and they go back and forth a few times, and Steve Jobs finally gets annoyed and writes back, "By the way, what have you done that's so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize others’ work and belittle their motivations?" HN these days is absolutely full of people who don’t seem to do anything but criticize others’ work and belittle their motivations.
I’m not saying that HN never had unfair criticisms in the good old days—the “middlebrow dismissal” has been a trope here for a very long time—but we didn’t use to have entire threads filled with nothing but middlebrow dismissals. And we also had tons of people criticizing Apple, but then again most of them were complaining that Apple was actively interfering with their attempts to create things (e.g. the uproar over arbitrary and unfair App Store moderation policies).
The clearest indicators of decline to me have been the signs of evaporative cooling. Maybe I’m falling into a different common fallacy by saying this, but I do think HN was a lot better when the old regulars—yourself included—were more active. I don’t exactly blame you guys, but it is an indicator.
It feels like some threshold was crossed in early 2023. That's when I noticed it, at least, in the long, crazed threads on the SVB bank run and murder of Bob Lee. There've been a lot more of those low-quality discussions since, but the good parts of HN are still here, too.
I think you're underestimating how effectively the old-fashioned text-based design repels users who would lower the quality of the site. (Although as Usenet proves, high-quality moderation is also necessary.)
Given that hn is the forum of yc, I think we should not feel comfortable with it's trajectory even if dang does a great job moderating. Garry Tan is in the ceo chair here and he is currently advocating for a purge of the homeless, democrats, and "anti-tech" people from San Francisco. A Republican who is too ashamed to admit being a Republican (preferring Grey vs Blue or the network state concept) , who drunkenly tweets death threats at his political opponents is not trustworthy.
HN’s association with YC has felt looser every year for over a decade at this point. If not for the Jobs link, the subtle username colors, and the domain, it’d almost be forgettable.
I'm not sure how much things have changed, but when HN was semi-spun-off into its own autonomous unit inside YC, dang was given the option to change reporting structure so he'd report directly to the board (and not CEO) if he ever thought that was a better arrangement. If he hasn't done so, then I trust that he hasn't felt he's needed to, and that YC's leadership hasn't meddled in HN's operations.
And if he has pulled that trigger, I expect things are still fine, else he'd leave and go elsewhere.
Yeah. That's why Twitter is useful as a kind of flypaper or quarantine. Let the passive stay and let the deliberate find new spaces that can be good the way Twitter once was. If Twitter was to go away, places like Bluesky would unavoidably get worse.
My experience with Bluesky has been similar to my experience with other "disruptive" platforms like Cara (the anti-AI art portfolio app/site).
When a "new" (usually overall non-corporate) internet space opens up that, in theory, caters to a broader audience, the most immediate colonizers are the type of people that have some sort of "underground" bent to them - subcultural things like furries, erotic artists, etc.
Opening up Cara produces an avalanche of large-breasted foxpeople, and the last time I opened Bluesky I was met with a photo of what appeared to be a boy in his underwear. Mastodon has its dubious reputation also for child pornography.
I'm just saying, the mainstream internet is moderated for a reason. Being mainstream, there's money behind it, and with money comes power - this results in moderation that is usually politically motivated, and so in recent years there has been an exodus of the masses to low-moderation platforms like Tiktok, or things like Kick for younger users.
When a platform or site is staffed small, such that it cannot afford to moderate, it will be suffocated by the "undesirable" groups I mentioned, earlier, as though they were some sort of choking algae. There are so many of these people "empowered" these days that, from what I have seen, it is really hard to start new social media sites without corporate resources. Twitter is already plagued with OnlyFans bots due to being smaller now, and streaming platforms are forced to aggressively build themselves to be resilient against similar sexual content creators, who are the first people that show up. Most times these creators will be working for an organization.
In the end...could Twitter have existed in a non-sh*tty form in the first place? It was rapidly approaching bankruptcy when Musk was (in the end) forced to purchase it (lol). If not him, someone else would have acquired it, probably a corporation, and monetized the content to keep it afloat.
I think in the end, the landscape is going to look more like Tiktok (computerized moderation) for anything beyond Meta. Smaller social media platforms will be seedy and not widely populated. Forums will continue to be used by countries with their own internet ecosystems, like Korea or Nigeria or Finland, but not really exist in global lingua franca English beyond a handful of major ones like SomethingAwful.
Bingo, the problem is that with a world population of 8 billion, there are easily 8 million people who genuinely do want to see vast amounts of furry porn the moment they open up an app.
Filtering out even a tenth of them, say 800 000, just takes too much effort for a startup, so there’s no viable pathway without being incredibly popular and scaling incredibly quickly to just drown out all the unpalatable users. i.e. Tiktok
Even if you accept this at face value (I don’t) note the problem: on Bluesky and Mastodon, you have to look for racy content and then follow it on purpose. It must be a deliberate, intentional choice. For the average user, my experience has been that Bluesky and Mastodon are, if anything, too tame and boring.
Whereas Twitter/X is pushing for whatever brings engagement, damn the consequences.
No. It was profitable in 2019. Under the old ownership it could have easily become profitable again by correcting the overhiring and not pissing off advertisers.
> when Musk was (in the end) forced to purchase it
And because it's private now, we have no idea what its financial situation is. My expectation is that they're much worse off financially since Musk's acquisition, even after shedding most of the staff.
A lot of people I know predicted Twitter would be completely shut down within a year of Musk's acquisition. I wasn't quite so quick to agree, but I think we're still going to get there eventually unless Musk drastically changes course.
> A lot of people I know predicted Twitter would be completely shut down within a year of Musk's acquisition.
As one of those people, I'm definitely eating crow. Three things happened that bode well for Twitter's future:
1. Musk has attracted a loyal core of true believers that think he has saved free speech with the Twitter purchase.
2. The Overton window of online discussion has started moving right. In particular, companies are becoming less interested in toeing a left ideological line with their ad spending.
3. A bunch of people who hate X and hate Musk and his politics stayed on Twitter! To me this is most surprising of all, but perhaps shouldn't be because many of these same people posted to Twitter in the past while simultaneously calling it things like "the hellsite"[1].
I'm no longer sure we'll ever "get there" other than if a new paradigm marginalizes all of social media the way social media marginalized blogging.
The blast of "For You" inauthenticity that hits a fresh X/Twitter account is about equaled by the astroturf fiesta that hits a fresh Instagram Threads account. The underlying modus operandi of the apps are the same, regardless of political declension.
Difference between the two is that beneath the surface Twitter is a functional social environment, while Threads is certainly not.
Regarding your 3rd point, this is the same behavior we see when people say they're leaving the country if X candidate wins an election. They never leave, because change is hard and they're addicted to the attention they get when they complain.
Being in internets from before there were internets... I just cannot believe what I read nowadays.
This tldr I reply to is especially pathetic. If your beliefs are so fragile, if someone's post can crush them then you must, MUST question yourself, not some irrelevant JSON sitting who knows where.
Otherwise you do not deserve any respect or attention. You do not even have a right to be listened to.
This thing is called self-respect. If you do not have it then you are nothing. It follows .. well 4chan follows. For some time I and many others thought that this mocking taken to extreme would tell people basic truths. Alas. Still we had some fun
> "This blog was sponsored by ZIRP. The future historians who dive into these archives for archaeological research will likely be economic rather than cultural historians, trying to reconstruct the play-by-play impact of ZIRP. Many of the big hits of this blog, such as The Premium Mediocre Life of Maya Millennial, and The Locust Economy (a forgotten hit from 2013) had ZIRPy subtexts."
I think the author might he referring to their own blog (ribbonfarm) as a ZIRP phenomenon, not the whole blogosphere.
Don't think it's really systematic. I think this is just a generational cycle. Plenty of content coming from newer people on other platforms through other mediums.
Substack—and the surviving blogs that aren’t on Substack—are still going strong, and I don’t think they’re going to go away. Maybe Substack as a platform might decline the way Medium has. But the “Eternal September” types are usually either functionally illiterate or don’t like long form reading, and social media is increasingly optimized for those people. If you actually take the effort to write down your thoughts in text, you end up filtering for people intelligent and diligent enough to choose the written word even when video and photo content is readily available.
> If you actually take the effort to write down your thoughts in text, you end up filtering for people intelligent and diligent enough to choose the written word
Interesting point. But, ChatGPT/AI summarization and Tiktok-style speech-to-text that the "Eternal September" perferrers are being trained to eat up.
What is your thoughts on that altering the dynamic?
I don’t think that alters the dynamic much. There isn’t much point generating low quality long form text content for the Eternal September crowd because they’ll just ignore it anyway. The filtering is on the consumer side, not on the producer side.
Substack (together with Medium) appears to be the blogosphere. As usual, venture capitalists managed to take over an open protocol and turn it into a singular product.
Eh, even in his niche we have people like Gwern pioneering in the aesthetic web movement. I'm not sure I buy the web is dying so much as the cultural conversation revolves around the larger platforms ($$) along with in general web discoverability getting worse.
Having access to wikipedia on a phone everywhere you go is what killed the bar conversation. No longer did you have to compare notes and argue over beers to remember trivia.
And in that same way, no longer do people have to ramble on into the aether in blog form to work through some shit. Now they can do that with ChatGPT and actually get responses to their thoughts in real time. And most of the time it's agreeable in tone.
Tech continues to change the world.
Maybe that isn't what is contributing to this particular blog dying, but I bet it's contributing to the larger community of blogs dying, which has probably created some inertia.
From what I can tell, highschooler and younger, there's almost a complete abandonment of mainstream social media in favor of self-curated chats like Discord, and it revolves heavily around gaming. A sort of hearkening to the AIM days, which is naturally what you'd expect from individuals who socialize in friendgroups that are developed beyond "work drinking buddies", lol.
But in general, without being too doom-and-gloom about it, and perhaps this is because of the election going on, it does feel like there is a greater trend going on of internet users stepping away from social media.
There's no easy way to divert this weariness back to specialized forums a la the 00's or 90's, though, which is probably where everything should be for the internet to remain useful. This is exacerbated by the fact that 85% or so of internet traffic is phones, resulting in discussions being comprised of back-and-forth thumbtap-quality posts that nobody (including the senders) really seems to care about. It's also exacerbated by the fact that search engines cannot seem to index traditional message boards or wordpresses etc. properly; there are too many of them nowadays to navigate (most being identical templates like vbulletin).
Average age is 16 on Discord, average time spent per day is less than 10 minutes, so it's being used as a messaging service (but connected to a greater gaming-type ecosystem). 90% of servers are less than 15 members. 30% of teens use it, which is significantly higher than the rest of the population.
I don't really have anything concrete to point to for my general feeling about American society slowly moving into a post-social media phase. Tiktok falling into relative unuse with most Americans except Hispanics is probably a main point of data. There hasn't been anything emerging to replace it besides (according to studies) the more cordial YouTube, which you cannot really say is a social media site. It is the most widely used of all of them, though, something like 94% penetration.
On the other hand, the smartphone has enhanced the culture of watching TV and movies at home. It is acceptable etiquette in my house for any viewer to pause the show and read out the results of a web search about the writer, director, plot, history, concepts, etc. related to the flick at hand.
Oof, you consider that an enhancement? If anyone paused something we were watching to read something off a web page, I'd lose my patience real fast.
My partner is often on her phone intermittently while we're watching something together, and even that bothers me. It seems quite sad to me that people can't put their phones down for even a half hour to watch an episode of a sitcom.
If the claim that the blogosphere is dying is true, does that imply the public intellectual commons is dying too? I suspect that while the cosyweb is more pleasant for most, this retreat might hinder vital testing and cross-pollination of ideas, and make it much harder for people to polarize into being intellectually active. For example, I've never been an active participant on ribbonfarm, but Rao's writing has made me a little smarter and inclined towards certain vectors of thought. And you can see ripples of his work in later writing by others.
What a shame it would be for this culture to be lost; while there's a lot of dross in the blogosphere, I don't know if the brightest jewels will still be possible in a future system of local, private, transient clusters of thought.
I would say it's dead. Killed by a change in cultural attitude to one that sees an opposing idea as a declaration of war. Retreat into private walled gardens seems like the only option.
This is quite sad, I've been very inspired by the writings of Artem Litvinovich [1] (although he stopped publishing 8 years ago). I inspired a lot of my research on what he did.
>Sometime in the next few months, I’ll figure out how to move it to a lower-cost archival hosting model, probably as a static non-WordPress site,
That is the part I am most interested with. I wish there is a one off payment services, for let say fixed price for 20 years where you blog and domains remains on the internet.
I always thought Venkatesh is often guilty of shaping the reality to fit the narrative of the current post, which often is quite random and possibly even contradicts all his other posts. This is also the case here.
Unfortunately, I do share the suspicion that a lot of good things I am very much used to were sponsored by ZIRP and soon it will crash really, really hard. This thought makes me anxious, I really don't like it, but I do agree that the culture of open source, and free web, and all these things was a fleeting phenomenon. Some of it is already dead, some will die soon. But I don't believe it applies to blogging.
I mean, fine, guy wants to retire. And it "coincides" with his 50th birthday (that's a magical coincidence for sure!) Just admit it's just about you, you are tired of doing what you did for 17 years. It's ok. But you weren't the only blogger, and everyone else isn't retiring together with you. Heck, I bet there is some new blogger writing his first post right now. I don't know if I'll like his posts as much as I liked some of yours, but I'm pretty sure life goes on without you, whether you like it or not (yeah, I know, I also don't really like the idea that life will go on without me!) Blogging is just one of the formats of how people express themselves, and while today there are many alternative formats that weren't really an option, say, 20 years ago, you cannot replace all of blogposts with a YouTube video or a TikTok. You can replace some, sure. Which isn't a bad thing either, it just means there now is a media that suits that type of content better.
Also, that warning about your substack not being a blog... But it is. A different kind of blog, maybe, but let's not pretend words mean anything more than they do. Even a telegram channel with lengthy posts is pretty much a blog. And, BTW, I don't know if Scott Alexander is supposed to be an "old media refugee" who's posts Venkatesh doesn't read, but his content is pretty much the same as on SCX. FWIW.
Very curious. I started my personal website with the rise of Hugo (which I like to call as "the new age of SSGs"). 5 years ago. Time does fly. As I look more and more into the old days of anything, It's like, things survive long enough to get popular... Then it goes back to where and how it was. It doesn't necessarily die.
I am curious if we had the expectation that if hosting and other tech became accessible, more people must've been blogging or maintaining personal websites. That is not how it works right? Pepole maintaining websites on their on were a niche in that time of the internet. And it is still a niche in this time of the internet.
Fountain pens for example was the only way to write at one point. And once ball point pens came along which is more managed, common folks went behind it. Fountain pens didn't die. It has became more luxurious or a premium item once again. It's still thriving and there is a whole new world of fountain pens if you start digging about it. Heck, new brands have emerged.
I can see the same parallels for bikes (MTB or Road Bikes etc) as well.
More people will discover blogging and the blogosphere. And some of them will go away. Some of them stays. Some lives and some dies. Just like humans, websites will live and die.
It is obviously sad when I see someone stop blogging or stop maintaining their personal website. Since I still consider myself young to the blogosphere, It's like reading up on celebrities you don't know about after their death. But it's way of life. Life of a blog.
This might seem a little odd, but I’m trying to “find my tribe” of interesting thinkers to bounce around ideas with and your comments on this thread suggest you’d have some great/thoughtful/interesting takes.
If you’re open it would be great to connect (email in my HN bio).
This is a hard journey and really one you need to go on finding people you work with. It will drive you to work with more interesting people and do harder things.
I find the Gervais Principle very illuminating but would love to hear how you turned it into career growth. Did it motivate you to indulge in Machiavellian scheming and join the ranks of the Sociopaths? Or let you make peace with a fate among the Clueless?
It's so strange when people say that such-and-such-internet-thing is dead. For the most part, I see no truth in that. There's SOME truth in SOME of it. Private mail servers are getting harder to use, because other servers don't trust them.
But blogs will work. The technology is as good as ever, and people can go read stuff on blogs. Maybe masses of people are choosing to do that less. That's not what being dead is. That's being less popular.
I mostly post on LinkedIn instead of my blog, because I like the shorter writing form.
What I see most from people who appear very attached to the Web of 15-20 years ago is a constant iteration of values, branding (cozy, small, open), discussions over protocols and platforms, and not much writing or self expression.
People don’t seem interested in “blogging” as much as they seem interested in building communities, or rather, full-fledged sovereign states.
But the problem is that they have to be hosted on the same platform, which will be set up like a social media site with curated content, otherwise you'll have to spend a lot of time finding them.
Maybe you get self-hosted things via github or whatnot, but that's about as non-consumerist as it'll get.
And the younger generation is not doing this beyond work-related pages, so eventually the internet-as-literature phase will end. In the past you could type into Google "new mothers discussion board" and immediately find organic, non-corporate socialization geared towards Americans. That ease of use is sort of erroneously gone, and probably not returning.
> But the problem is that they have to be hosted on the same platform
No they don't. I avoid Medium and Substack like the plague. I don't use those sites for discovery at all, and whenever I come across a link to a blog on either of them, I usually regret clicking it.
I end up on plenty of blogs found through various sources. A few I've been reading diligently or on-and-off for many years, others I read one-off articles here and there that I've found through sites like HN.
The blogosphere's death is highly exaggerated, regardless of what TFA says.
> Maybe you get self-hosted things via github or whatnot, but that's about as non-consumerist as it'll get
I don't see that as a bad thing.
> And the younger generation is not doing this beyond work-related pages, so eventually the internet-as-literature phase will end
I don't think it will. I think there will always be enough people writing interesting long-form articles to satisfy my curiosity. Mind you, I don't exclusively read blogs, but I haven't touched social media in 5 or 6 years and that hasn't caused me to run out of interesting things to read.
The "Blogosphere" represented something like Livejournal. You'd write your daily thoughts, not so much imagepost at all, and there would be your friends doing the same thing whom you'd check on. Some countries still have internet ecosystems like this; NAVER is the main one I can think of, in Korea; Livejournal itself was sold to a Russian buyer nearly 20 years ago and lives on in that country mostly intact and widely used.
But longform internet posts are gone nowadays in America, largely - due to English. It's too widely spoken for things to be found easily. Think about finding information about heavy metal concerts in Finland: that's probably doable from Google purely based on the fact you're not imputing English.
Self hosting a newsreader has been remarkably satisfying. Over the past few years I've been adding blogs to as I encounter them here and in a few other places, and it's one of my favorite places to spend a few hours browsing through things other folks spent the time to write. I kinda feel like everyone should have something like this, and I deeply regret Google Reader's retirement for that reason.
Crooked Timber, Daring Fireball, kottke.org, Econbrowser, DSHR's Blog, Jayarava's Raves, Pushing Ahead of the Dame, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, Michael Tsai, Scripting News, Simon Willison's Weblog ... about 150 feeds in total I think (some of them inactive now but overall more than I can read.)
I think most feed readers support OPML now, more people should put together blog starter packs (like Bluesky's starter packs, which are super useful.)
I agree, and I don't think they're actually dying. I think certainly they're a much smaller percentage of consumed content today than thy were 15 or 20 years ago, but I don't believe that's because readership has dropped. It's just that the pie is significantly bigger now, and other media has gobbled up most of it.
I dropped off social media 5-6 years ago and don't miss it; I still read blogs and get much more value out of them.
There's still plenty of audience for blog posts. The blogosphere (god I hate that term) hasn't grown at the pace of social media, certainly, but that doesn't matter. And in some ways I'd probably consider that a good thing for the medium.
I'm not insulting you, I'm merely stating you have an aggressive and patronizing attitude comment after comment which is a fact.
> I’m sorry to belabor this but you probably don’t know how growth and death cycles work.
> Sorry that’s just life.
> I think maybe you could just reread this as you being informed by someone who worked on this for many many years at internet scale. It’s ok to have less knowledge or be misinformed about something.
It's okay to share expertise, but this is better done with data (which you have provided none) and without that very sad aggressive attitude. "I know better, because I know and you don't" is no argument.
"The numbers for this and that huge blogging platform are down year after year" is an argument, yours isn't.
The medium is shifting just like it shifted 25-ish years ago. People would write and publish on paper or fax. Then came email and websites. Eventually the blog came up because the self publishing process at the time was cumbersome and people didn’t want to be writing html.
I consider Venkatesh to be amongst the brightest and insightful thinkers of our times (The Gervais Principle being a particularly brilliant eye opener that I share with everyone who could be interested and ready to benefit from it).
I hadn’t quite appreciated how long he’s been blogging for, nor that we was nearing 50 (the latter point gives me some inspiration in my mid-30s that there’s still time to contribute).
In terms of the article, and this doesn’t injure his main point, but I feel he has been overgenerous about how long the blogosphere has lasted (though there are of course still exceptions eg for me recently Ludic’s blog https://ludic.mataroa.blog/, some old gems like Rands in Repose ticking away, and more focused series like Patrick McKenzie’s Bits about Money).
To my mind it was well and truly done (in the way that it once existed) before Covid, with the absence of a resurgence during a period with so many locked down and online proving its end.
By that point there had already been the rise of walled gardens, the fall of Google Search, the rise of social media and influencers (and since the subsequent fall post-Covid), clickbait, smartphones as the primary browsing device, constantly online culture, attention exhaustion, (low quality) content saturation, etc. If the blog had survived all this LLMs adding fuel to the attention harvesting noise would almost certainly have sealed the deal.
On the whole “online” feels like it’s falling apart.
The leading apps and sites are buggy and broken with little innovation in years despite obvious low-lying fruit yet still dominantly crowding out (or buying out and shutting down) challengers, websites are a mess of instinctual clicking past popups like your relative’s malware-infected WinXP desktop you had to fix up at Christmas, almost everyone seems to be an influencer cynically pumping out low quality noise that the algorithms seem almost determined to elevate over unloved crafted quality content (and we still don’t seem to be reaping benefits of AI to sort through this), US politics contextlessly infects nearly every platform and channel globally (thankfully usually not here except when relevant), the subscription sites have bait and switched after hooking us all in and continue to turn the screws, the “gig economy” and “disruptors” have done the same continuing to damage broader society with their externalities while skirting the purpose of established laws and norms and now raising prices to higher than what they displaced, our democracy is challenged by the inability to know truth accelerated by the overwhelm of targeted noise (and old media has just as much guilt in monetising then selling out the fourth estate while governments are now racing towards totalitarianism in an attempt to put the genie back in the bottle), attention span and ability to think as humans is being fundamentally reshaped in ways that most consider damaging, digital has accelerated (or at least coincided with) the society-consuming and society-destroying elements of capitalism over the last 50 years as it “cleverly” works out how to turn anything and everything (quality, brand value, trust, institutions, connections, spare time, relationships, attention etc.) into $ and destroy them in the process, and it all seems to have turned into walking through a crowded alleyway of people shouting and fighting and exploiting and vying for your attention and and and and.
The fall of Rome analogy feels figuratively rather apt, because it certainly has a sense of that, and maybe this cozyweb is a nice hideaway answer from all this (I haven’t quite found my online cozy place yet).
For those who haven’t seen it and find any of this resonates (especially as a Millenial), Bo Burnham’s Inside brilliantly talks to this all, and he’s the first I’ve come across to really do so.
Is anyone else talking about this in a way that’s helpful, or at least helpfully relays the problem that’s emerged upon us?
I read the first several paragraphs. Since they seem wordy and light on actual meaning, and the post is long, as I often do, I grabbed all the text and headed to ChatGPT/Claude -- in this instance ChatGPT.
"Summarize this in no more than twenty bullet points."
ChatGPT spits out exactly twenty bullet points, including pointless gems like:
- He believes public social media, particularly blogs, played a more vibrant role than traditional media during their heyday
- Rao humorously attributes the blog’s success to the low-interest-rate era, with its cheap hosting and free distribution.
So I switch to Claude and prompt:
"Summarize this into no more than 20 bullet points. Skip unimportant housekeeping bits."
Claude also feels the need to produce exactly 20 bullet points, including exactly the housekeeping bits I pointed it away from like:
- Some content threads (lab tinkering, fiction) will find homes in other media or formats.
- Rao plans to compile book-length volumes from the blog archives.
Now I'm going on too long, so I'll just say it took several more prompts, with examples, to get them to coalesce to:
ChatGPT:
1. Venkatesh Rao is retiring his blog *Ribbonfarm* on November 13, 2024, after 17 years.
2. He views this as the end of the blogosphere era, which played a major role in shaping the internet during the Web 2.0 phase (2000-2020).
3. The decline of blogs is linked to rising interest rates and the shift toward paid distribution models, which replaced the free, open web environment that allowed blogs to thrive.
4. Rao coined the term "cozyweb" to describe the more intimate, private online spaces (like Discord and Substack) that are replacing the public nature of blogs and social media.
5. *Ribbonfarm*'s closure symbolizes the broader cultural shift from the chaotic, public blogosphere to this new era of niche, cozy communities.
Claude:
• After 17 years, Venkatesh Rao is retiring his blog, Ribbonfarm, on November 13, 2024 (his 50th birthday).
• Ribbonfarm's lifespan (2007-2024) coincides with the rise and fall of the blogosphere, Web 2.0, and public social media - a significant chapter in internet and civilizational history partly enabled by low interest rates and cheap venture capital.
• Rao sees the "cozyweb" (a term he coined in 2019) as the successor to public social media, favoring more intimate, subscription-based platforms like Substack.
• In recent years, Rao shifted to writing "blogchains" and avoiding viral content, reflecting broader changes in online writing styles.
• Post-retirement, Rao plans to compile book-length volumes from the blog archives but is uncertain where to share his "random impulses" that found a home on Ribbonfarm.
It seems to me that the blogosphere was not a ZIRP but rather a young Internet phenomenon. Which could exists, like usenet before it, when mere access to it was a filtering mechanism.
Once you have seven billion people with virtually no access control, you can't have a public blogosphere, and groups retreat to the cozyweb.
Either way, I enjoyed it while it lasted. Thanks for the Office series!
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
The public blogosphere died because of Google, simple as. Once search stopped prioritizing blogs over bloated, SEO-optimized slop, traffic to blogs died and discoverability was limited to you spamming your posts everywhere.
Google bought Blogger in 2003; that was the main blogging service for a long time in the US, at least. Google not being able to optimize search results for their own hosted content implies...a lack of overall content available. It used to be a lot better in the earlier days, for ROMs and especially album downloads blogs would pop up all the time in the results. It's just that there are a lot more people online now, and more accompanying spam, and also the fact that Google delists any sort of "download" type site by default - which used to be a substantial subcategory of blogs.
People forget how "tightened up" the web is nowadays, or many just aren't old enough to remember. It wasn't 10 years ago that Fox News would archive full, uncensored ISIS videos on their website - which is kind of insane, when you think about it.
Average age of first phone ownership is really young these days, which is arguably the #1 factor in everything online becoming a closed system for sheep.
On the other hand, no parents want their 11-year-old wandering into videos of hostages being burned alive. Or getting solicited for photos etc. So the internet is kind of dying for the sake of real life.
You can always search old blogspots. https://www.searchblogspot.com
You forgot technorati! They lost the plausible deniability there.
Back when the rat was in effect, the rat would always index the splogs I made but I could never get it to index my non-spam blogs.
> Once you have seven billion people with virtually no access control, you can't have a public blogosphere, and groups retreat to the cozyweb.
Why can’t you? There’s a logical leap in this statement I don’t follow.
Those seven billion people aren't very good for the most part, and include a critical mass of spectacularly awful people. It turns out that public access forums calibrated for the small and self-selected community of mostly high quality internet pioneers aren't prepared to deal with 1000000x expansion of reachable audience. The Eternal September effect has been getting stronger ever since it's first been observed.
There's a gap between public fora and the blogosphere though.
Generally speaking there are plenty of blogs that get linked in places like here. Blogs just don't have comment sections hosted on their own as much anymore.
Having discussions happen in separate places is also interesting, because the HN convo and some subreddit convo will be different, for example.
There's a lot more mainstraeam stuff but I think niche communities still exist. Glibly, we're not a part of most of them on account of having gotten older. Or we are a part of some, but there's plenty we're not seeing.
It's not just that the social media is filled with low on substance posts with excess anger and snark, but this incentivizes everyone to be more forceful - as otherwise the louder voices can dominate the discussion. So, it's not just a quality of people issue but also an emergent dynamic which encourages tribalism instead of substantive posts. The same people can make reasonable posts in other contexts
This need not be a unsolvable problem, and that one has to retreat places like HN relying on a single moderator(good, but doesn't scale).
One can also rely on timelines/feeds being based on Distributed moderation - A user selects moderators or custom-algorithms who they find valuable. The moderation can be along different dimensions like accuracy, interest, or aligned with some political view.
There could a moderator whose style is to purely check the soundness of the reasoning without taking any position on the issue itself. This can lead to improved standards of discussion.
A key issue is how to reduce the energy required to moderate - typically a moderator evaluates the quality and rely on networks of other moderators each handling smaller domains.
Current discourse encourages users to sort into strongly polarized groups, whereas more nuanced feeds in social media can lead to coalitions which don't neatly align with the standard fault lines. Platforms like Polis actively encourage common points of agreement across different groups.
I had a hilarious time deleting comments from people who don't believe the topic is real. Specifically hard to believe stuff made the experience funny. People got really mad in private messages. As if it is a god given right to complain about others talking about something so elaborately that the conversation dies.
All scaling issues solved.
If you want to talk about the garden gnome liberation front you must believe they need to be rescued.
Yeah, but this sounds more like social media than the blogosphere.
Blogs were always effort to set up and maintain, even if you were just going with one of the hosted platforms rather than self-hosting.
And comment spam was certainly an issue but, firstly, systems for dealing with that became pretty good. And then, outside of major news sites - I'm thinking particularly here of BBC's HYS, but the same applies to other news sites - and other sites with very broad interest bases, you didn't tend to get loads of nasty or toxic comments on blogs. Plus, the moderation tools were - as previously mentioned - pretty decent. A lot of the bigger news websites did close comments, but I'm not so aware of this being an issue with blogs which were often more focussed around a particular community or interest anyway... just publicly available.
I don't think the quantity of people online in itself had anything to do with the "death" of the blogosphere. It's just that most of those people don't read or write blogs. And it's become harder to find blogs and other long tail content because search results are now so heavily skewed towards paid results and commercial entities who invest huge amounts in SEO.
FWIW I also think you're probably going a bit far with the moral pronouncements on those 7 billion people: neither you nor I have any real idea what the vast majority of them are actually like as human beings. Moreover, I'd suggest that writing off most people as "[not] very good" or branding a critical mass of them as "spectacularly awful" - and especially when you're speaking from a position of ignorance - is exactly the kind of rhetoric that's landed us with this grim tribal culture that permeates large areas of online - and offline - life.
>It turns out that public access forums calibrated for the small and self-selected community of mostly high quality internet pioneers aren't prepared to deal with 1000000x expansion of reachable audience.
"Checklist for new theories purporting to prove that the social web is presently unworkable:"
...
26. The predicted conflicts still wouldn't be as bad as Usenet flamewars.
27. Your theory proves that Hackernews does not exist. <---
28. Audiences afraid of engaging with an unfamiliar interfaces weren't making websites in 1998 either.
...
This forum has been decreasing in quality since its inception, currently hovering at not-quite-reddit and that's with an organic audience of tech-adjacent posters. It would turn into a smoking hole in the ground if it somehow caught worldwide attention.
You're a fish swimming in fragile water you fail to appreciate.
For those who don't know, you can click the "past" link in the toolbar, and see for yourself what HN was like on any given past day, and judge for yourself whether the quality has declined
https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2008-08-24
There's an interesting phenomenon where any time a long time HN user says that discussion quality has been declining (something many have reported), a moderator will essentially say that people have been claiming that for as long as they've been moderating, but that it does not match their observations.
I've always found that contradiction interesting (and puzzling).
My theory is that it's two things:
1. People change. My HN account is 15 years old, and my interests and ambitions and tolerances are not the same as they were in 2009, when I was 28 years old and in a very different place in my life. When you interact with something for many many years, even if that thing stays exactly the same, you change, and think differently about it.
2. The site changes, too, of course. They aren't necessarily bad changes (and often I would say they're good changes!), but people sometimes associate change with negative feelings, especially with something they have an emotional attachment to or at least have been a part of for a long time.
Mind you, I don't think discussion quality has been declining here. In many ways I think it has been improving, or at the very least staying the same under a barrage of new users, higher scale, and low-effort LLM-generated comments.
I also joined HN in 2009 and I agree with you. HN isn't perfect but it's about as respectful and intelligent of an organic community as it gets on the public web. When I do analytics on my blog, an upvote on HN is worth 10 on Reddit. Manipulative paywalled media pieces usually stay off the front page. I love how when I read news about a famous CEO like Matt Mullenweg, I can see him commenting here like the rest of us. I also think we're very fortunate to have dang running things.
In 2010 I found the average HN comment far more insightful and likely to be true than I do in 2024. I am fairly certain that this is almost entirely due to me changing, and not the content of the site. At a very basic level my views on the concept of a VC funded startup is so very different now from what it was in 2010 that I would certainly interpret all of those discussions very differently now.
When Google takes me to a very old discussion on HN I am usually surprised by how similar they are to threads from today, even if some of the specific viewpoints in vogue are different.
I disagree. Quality has certainly varied over the years, but HN is still miles above Reddit. I'm not a heavy Reddit user, but every time someone or something links me to Reddit for something I might find interesting, the comments are mostly garbage. The same tired memes and jokes, over and over and over, tons of low-effort comments, not much substantial, curiosity-piquing discussion.
Sure, maybe there are some subs that are better, but I doubt I'd be convinced to spend more time on Reddit and less on HN. Certainly there are useful places on Reddit; I've gotten a lot of mileage out of searching for product reviews or general customer support questions on Reddit, but that's kinda a "single purpose" visit, not something for general curiosity.
I feel like there are some long-time HNers (your account was only created two years ago, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you've changed accounts or have just been a super long time lurker) feel like quality has gone down; that's almost a meme of its own. Hell, the HN guidelines even has a blurb about how tired it is to suggest HN is turning into Reddit.
But I think it's a lot more accurate to say that quality ebbs and flows, and varies between articles and topics. And yes, sometimes the focus of the site (based on what submissions get voted to the front page, and what kind of discussion happens) shifts in ways that make my interest wane a bit, though always only temporarily. But that's not the same thing as quality.
I'm speculating, but I think the big difference is the barrier to downvoting something here is greater.
If you say something controversial over at Reddit there is a substantial chance you get piled on and labelled a troll, unpopular positions cannot be expressed without the risk of no longer being able to participate.
Anything you suspect will generate something other than a bland, mildly positive response is too risky to express.
> It would turn into a smoking hole in the ground if it somehow caught worldwide attention.
This seems untrue? Of course I like HN, but from the perspective of a typical person, HN is an ugly, hard-to-use website with "news" that caters to a small fraction of the population and is likely quite uninteresting to the rest. I think this is why it manages to stay roughly the way that it is - that and extremely thorough and strict moderation to keep it that way.
Fluids can't be fragile.
As the guidelines [0] state:
> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
See the link for some examples, but I can also recommend looking at some old front pages from over the years and poking through the discussions. Unscientifically, it seems that quality is pretty similar to me.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Context.
That's a rule for jumping into a conversation and making petty putdowns.
It doesn't mean "if someone says HN has never been better, you're not allowed to disagree".
My HN account is older than either of yours, so I don’t think I can be dismissed as a “semi-noob”. rogers12 is mostly correct, sad to say. dang has done a good job slowing the decline (and I actually noticed an uptick in quality when he first took over) but HN is past its peak.
My account is a few weeks older than yours, and my opinion is pretty much the exact opposite of yours.
I still get a ton of value out of HN, even after over 15 years. I visit multiple times a day, and genuinely enjoy reading articles and comments, and joining the comment threads myself. It's not perfect; there's certainly annoying crap, bad-faith posters, trolls, spam, LLM-generated junk, etc. But (with the exception of the LLM-generated junk) none of that is new since I first started hanging out here. Overall the quality of discussion (like this one!) is still quite high, and there isn't another news/interest/discussion site on the internet where I spend anywhere near as much time, even after 15+ years.
(I'm not going to argue about whether or not it has "peaked", since that's not a particularly useful measure. If quality is a scale from 0-100, and we already hit 100 but are now hovering around 80, stably, then who cares if the peak is in the past? The quality is still fine.)
When was its peak, what would you say characterized that peak, and what are some clear indicators of the decline?
This is a good question that probably deserves more thought and effort than I can apply to it. I would say that when HN was at its peak, the overall vibe of the commentary reflected the perspective of people who people who built things, while the overall vibe today reflects the perspective of people who like to go online and bitch about things.
There’s a famous email exchange—I’m sure you’re familiar with it—where someone writes to Steve Jobs complaining about a bunch of things Apple was doing, and they go back and forth a few times, and Steve Jobs finally gets annoyed and writes back, "By the way, what have you done that's so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize others’ work and belittle their motivations?" HN these days is absolutely full of people who don’t seem to do anything but criticize others’ work and belittle their motivations.
I’m not saying that HN never had unfair criticisms in the good old days—the “middlebrow dismissal” has been a trope here for a very long time—but we didn’t use to have entire threads filled with nothing but middlebrow dismissals. And we also had tons of people criticizing Apple, but then again most of them were complaining that Apple was actively interfering with their attempts to create things (e.g. the uproar over arbitrary and unfair App Store moderation policies).
The clearest indicators of decline to me have been the signs of evaporative cooling. Maybe I’m falling into a different common fallacy by saying this, but I do think HN was a lot better when the old regulars—yourself included—were more active. I don’t exactly blame you guys, but it is an indicator.
It feels like some threshold was crossed in early 2023. That's when I noticed it, at least, in the long, crazed threads on the SVB bank run and murder of Bob Lee. There've been a lot more of those low-quality discussions since, but the good parts of HN are still here, too.
That doesn’t seem to be the claim, just that the average quality is trending downwards just like reddit.
It’ll probably never converge because reddit is getting worse at an even faster rate.
Quoting the HN guidelines at people is a semi-noob practice, as old as the hills.
I think you're underestimating how effectively the old-fashioned text-based design repels users who would lower the quality of the site. (Although as Usenet proves, high-quality moderation is also necessary.)
Given that hn is the forum of yc, I think we should not feel comfortable with it's trajectory even if dang does a great job moderating. Garry Tan is in the ceo chair here and he is currently advocating for a purge of the homeless, democrats, and "anti-tech" people from San Francisco. A Republican who is too ashamed to admit being a Republican (preferring Grey vs Blue or the network state concept) , who drunkenly tweets death threats at his political opponents is not trustworthy.
HN’s association with YC has felt looser every year for over a decade at this point. If not for the Jobs link, the subtle username colors, and the domain, it’d almost be forgettable.
I'm not sure how much things have changed, but when HN was semi-spun-off into its own autonomous unit inside YC, dang was given the option to change reporting structure so he'd report directly to the board (and not CEO) if he ever thought that was a better arrangement. If he hasn't done so, then I trust that he hasn't felt he's needed to, and that YC's leadership hasn't meddled in HN's operations.
And if he has pulled that trigger, I expect things are still fine, else he'd leave and go elsewhere.
Oh I did not know that this had happened. That actually does resolve a fair bit of my worry. Thanks!!
Weeellll. Not every forum has a dang. Just saying.
Almost every one does.
Most are nowhere near as thoughtful and effective as he is, though.
Yeah. That's why Twitter is useful as a kind of flypaper or quarantine. Let the passive stay and let the deliberate find new spaces that can be good the way Twitter once was. If Twitter was to go away, places like Bluesky would unavoidably get worse.
My experience with Bluesky has been similar to my experience with other "disruptive" platforms like Cara (the anti-AI art portfolio app/site).
When a "new" (usually overall non-corporate) internet space opens up that, in theory, caters to a broader audience, the most immediate colonizers are the type of people that have some sort of "underground" bent to them - subcultural things like furries, erotic artists, etc.
Opening up Cara produces an avalanche of large-breasted foxpeople, and the last time I opened Bluesky I was met with a photo of what appeared to be a boy in his underwear. Mastodon has its dubious reputation also for child pornography.
I'm just saying, the mainstream internet is moderated for a reason. Being mainstream, there's money behind it, and with money comes power - this results in moderation that is usually politically motivated, and so in recent years there has been an exodus of the masses to low-moderation platforms like Tiktok, or things like Kick for younger users.
When a platform or site is staffed small, such that it cannot afford to moderate, it will be suffocated by the "undesirable" groups I mentioned, earlier, as though they were some sort of choking algae. There are so many of these people "empowered" these days that, from what I have seen, it is really hard to start new social media sites without corporate resources. Twitter is already plagued with OnlyFans bots due to being smaller now, and streaming platforms are forced to aggressively build themselves to be resilient against similar sexual content creators, who are the first people that show up. Most times these creators will be working for an organization.
In the end...could Twitter have existed in a non-sh*tty form in the first place? It was rapidly approaching bankruptcy when Musk was (in the end) forced to purchase it (lol). If not him, someone else would have acquired it, probably a corporation, and monetized the content to keep it afloat.
I think in the end, the landscape is going to look more like Tiktok (computerized moderation) for anything beyond Meta. Smaller social media platforms will be seedy and not widely populated. Forums will continue to be used by countries with their own internet ecosystems, like Korea or Nigeria or Finland, but not really exist in global lingua franca English beyond a handful of major ones like SomethingAwful.
Bingo, the problem is that with a world population of 8 billion, there are easily 8 million people who genuinely do want to see vast amounts of furry porn the moment they open up an app.
Filtering out even a tenth of them, say 800 000, just takes too much effort for a startup, so there’s no viable pathway without being incredibly popular and scaling incredibly quickly to just drown out all the unpalatable users. i.e. Tiktok
Bluesky and Mastodon, for the average user, are G rated compared to the avalanche of smut on Twitter/X.
> avalanche of smut on Twitter/X
I haven't seen this.
Maybe you only run into that sort of thing if you go looking for that sort of thing?
Even if you accept this at face value (I don’t) note the problem: on Bluesky and Mastodon, you have to look for racy content and then follow it on purpose. It must be a deliberate, intentional choice. For the average user, my experience has been that Bluesky and Mastodon are, if anything, too tame and boring.
Whereas Twitter/X is pushing for whatever brings engagement, damn the consequences.
The top replies to any big viral tweet are Onlyfans models and other spammers.
I usually have to expand the "more replies" and often also the "probably spam" sections to see those.
It’s incredibly hard to avoid graphic images of dead children if you even lightly engage with political content on Xitter
> It was rapidly approaching bankruptcy
No. It was profitable in 2019. Under the old ownership it could have easily become profitable again by correcting the overhiring and not pissing off advertisers.
> It was rapidly approaching bankruptcy
I don't think that's a foregone conclusion.
> when Musk was (in the end) forced to purchase it
And because it's private now, we have no idea what its financial situation is. My expectation is that they're much worse off financially since Musk's acquisition, even after shedding most of the staff.
A lot of people I know predicted Twitter would be completely shut down within a year of Musk's acquisition. I wasn't quite so quick to agree, but I think we're still going to get there eventually unless Musk drastically changes course.
> A lot of people I know predicted Twitter would be completely shut down within a year of Musk's acquisition.
As one of those people, I'm definitely eating crow. Three things happened that bode well for Twitter's future:
1. Musk has attracted a loyal core of true believers that think he has saved free speech with the Twitter purchase.
2. The Overton window of online discussion has started moving right. In particular, companies are becoming less interested in toeing a left ideological line with their ad spending.
3. A bunch of people who hate X and hate Musk and his politics stayed on Twitter! To me this is most surprising of all, but perhaps shouldn't be because many of these same people posted to Twitter in the past while simultaneously calling it things like "the hellsite"[1].
I'm no longer sure we'll ever "get there" other than if a new paradigm marginalizes all of social media the way social media marginalized blogging.
[1] https://samkriss.substack.com/p/welcome-to-hell
The blast of "For You" inauthenticity that hits a fresh X/Twitter account is about equaled by the astroturf fiesta that hits a fresh Instagram Threads account. The underlying modus operandi of the apps are the same, regardless of political declension.
Difference between the two is that beneath the surface Twitter is a functional social environment, while Threads is certainly not.
Proud to be one of those that ditched "the hellsite", and it remains ditched. One of the best moves I've ever made.
Regarding your 3rd point, this is the same behavior we see when people say they're leaving the country if X candidate wins an election. They never leave, because change is hard and they're addicted to the attention they get when they complain.
Being in internets from before there were internets... I just cannot believe what I read nowadays.
This tldr I reply to is especially pathetic. If your beliefs are so fragile, if someone's post can crush them then you must, MUST question yourself, not some irrelevant JSON sitting who knows where.
Otherwise you do not deserve any respect or attention. You do not even have a right to be listened to.
This thing is called self-respect. If you do not have it then you are nothing. It follows .. well 4chan follows. For some time I and many others thought that this mocking taken to extreme would tell people basic truths. Alas. Still we had some fun
I think that AI generated personas who push an ideological direction on anonymous forums are more of a threat that just stupid people.
Eg: https://theintercept.com/2024/10/17/pentagon-ai-deepfake-int...
There is a NYT op ed titled “The Tyranny of Convenience” that covers the phenomena well.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/16/opinion/sunday/tyranny-co...
[flagged]
Are bloggers required to meet a quota?
There may be examples of this, but picking on Venkat Rao for not being sufficiently prolific is a laughable argument.
For those missing context:
> "This blog was sponsored by ZIRP. The future historians who dive into these archives for archaeological research will likely be economic rather than cultural historians, trying to reconstruct the play-by-play impact of ZIRP. Many of the big hits of this blog, such as The Premium Mediocre Life of Maya Millennial, and The Locust Economy (a forgotten hit from 2013) had ZIRPy subtexts."
I think the author might he referring to their own blog (ribbonfarm) as a ZIRP phenomenon, not the whole blogosphere.
> ZIRP stands for “Zero Interest Rate Phenomenon,” …
https://www.ycombinator.com/library/LC-what-is-zirp-and-how-...
Don't think it's really systematic. I think this is just a generational cycle. Plenty of content coming from newer people on other platforms through other mediums.
Substack is doing OK, I think. It's the intellectual child of the blogosphere.
Substack—and the surviving blogs that aren’t on Substack—are still going strong, and I don’t think they’re going to go away. Maybe Substack as a platform might decline the way Medium has. But the “Eternal September” types are usually either functionally illiterate or don’t like long form reading, and social media is increasingly optimized for those people. If you actually take the effort to write down your thoughts in text, you end up filtering for people intelligent and diligent enough to choose the written word even when video and photo content is readily available.
> If you actually take the effort to write down your thoughts in text, you end up filtering for people intelligent and diligent enough to choose the written word
Interesting point. But, ChatGPT/AI summarization and Tiktok-style speech-to-text that the "Eternal September" perferrers are being trained to eat up.
What is your thoughts on that altering the dynamic?
I don’t think that alters the dynamic much. There isn’t much point generating low quality long form text content for the Eternal September crowd because they’ll just ignore it anyway. The filtering is on the consumer side, not on the producer side.
Substack (together with Medium) appears to be the blogosphere. As usual, venture capitalists managed to take over an open protocol and turn it into a singular product.
Surprised you lumped Medium in with Substack. I always associate Medium with C-tier tech tutorials at best these days.
They are both neoblog platforms.
I've read some A-tier libertarian noir novellas on there.
> A-tier libertarian
It's been a while since I've seen an oxymoron as perfect as this one.
Eh, even in his niche we have people like Gwern pioneering in the aesthetic web movement. I'm not sure I buy the web is dying so much as the cultural conversation revolves around the larger platforms ($$) along with in general web discoverability getting worse.
Having access to wikipedia on a phone everywhere you go is what killed the bar conversation. No longer did you have to compare notes and argue over beers to remember trivia.
And in that same way, no longer do people have to ramble on into the aether in blog form to work through some shit. Now they can do that with ChatGPT and actually get responses to their thoughts in real time. And most of the time it's agreeable in tone.
Tech continues to change the world.
Maybe that isn't what is contributing to this particular blog dying, but I bet it's contributing to the larger community of blogs dying, which has probably created some inertia.
From what I can tell, highschooler and younger, there's almost a complete abandonment of mainstream social media in favor of self-curated chats like Discord, and it revolves heavily around gaming. A sort of hearkening to the AIM days, which is naturally what you'd expect from individuals who socialize in friendgroups that are developed beyond "work drinking buddies", lol.
But in general, without being too doom-and-gloom about it, and perhaps this is because of the election going on, it does feel like there is a greater trend going on of internet users stepping away from social media.
There's no easy way to divert this weariness back to specialized forums a la the 00's or 90's, though, which is probably where everything should be for the internet to remain useful. This is exacerbated by the fact that 85% or so of internet traffic is phones, resulting in discussions being comprised of back-and-forth thumbtap-quality posts that nobody (including the senders) really seems to care about. It's also exacerbated by the fact that search engines cannot seem to index traditional message boards or wordpresses etc. properly; there are too many of them nowadays to navigate (most being identical templates like vbulletin).
Do you have any sources to read/learn more about this phenomenon? Would be great to understand why
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/teens-and-so...
https://influencermarketinghub.com/discord-stats/
Average age is 16 on Discord, average time spent per day is less than 10 minutes, so it's being used as a messaging service (but connected to a greater gaming-type ecosystem). 90% of servers are less than 15 members. 30% of teens use it, which is significantly higher than the rest of the population.
I don't really have anything concrete to point to for my general feeling about American society slowly moving into a post-social media phase. Tiktok falling into relative unuse with most Americans except Hispanics is probably a main point of data. There hasn't been anything emerging to replace it besides (according to studies) the more cordial YouTube, which you cannot really say is a social media site. It is the most widely used of all of them, though, something like 94% penetration.
On the other hand, the smartphone has enhanced the culture of watching TV and movies at home. It is acceptable etiquette in my house for any viewer to pause the show and read out the results of a web search about the writer, director, plot, history, concepts, etc. related to the flick at hand.
Oof, you consider that an enhancement? If anyone paused something we were watching to read something off a web page, I'd lose my patience real fast.
My partner is often on her phone intermittently while we're watching something together, and even that bothers me. It seems quite sad to me that people can't put their phones down for even a half hour to watch an episode of a sitcom.
Lol. The argument used to be that it is quite sad that people waste half an hour of their lives watching a sitcom.
Are you sure that's acceptable? I do that all the time, but I think the right word for how my wife feels about it is "tolerable," not "acceptable" :-)
> No longer did you have to compare notes and argue over beers to remember trivia.
The Guinness Book of Records was started because of a pub argument whose participants lacked a good reference to settle the dispute.
If the claim that the blogosphere is dying is true, does that imply the public intellectual commons is dying too? I suspect that while the cosyweb is more pleasant for most, this retreat might hinder vital testing and cross-pollination of ideas, and make it much harder for people to polarize into being intellectually active. For example, I've never been an active participant on ribbonfarm, but Rao's writing has made me a little smarter and inclined towards certain vectors of thought. And you can see ripples of his work in later writing by others.
What a shame it would be for this culture to be lost; while there's a lot of dross in the blogosphere, I don't know if the brightest jewels will still be possible in a future system of local, private, transient clusters of thought.
I would say it's dead. Killed by a change in cultural attitude to one that sees an opposing idea as a declaration of war. Retreat into private walled gardens seems like the only option.
This is quite sad, I've been very inspired by the writings of Artem Litvinovich [1] (although he stopped publishing 8 years ago). I inspired a lot of my research on what he did.
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/author/artem/
>Sometime in the next few months, I’ll figure out how to move it to a lower-cost archival hosting model, probably as a static non-WordPress site,
That is the part I am most interested with. I wish there is a one off payment services, for let say fixed price for 20 years where you blog and domains remains on the internet.
I always thought Venkatesh is often guilty of shaping the reality to fit the narrative of the current post, which often is quite random and possibly even contradicts all his other posts. This is also the case here.
Unfortunately, I do share the suspicion that a lot of good things I am very much used to were sponsored by ZIRP and soon it will crash really, really hard. This thought makes me anxious, I really don't like it, but I do agree that the culture of open source, and free web, and all these things was a fleeting phenomenon. Some of it is already dead, some will die soon. But I don't believe it applies to blogging.
I mean, fine, guy wants to retire. And it "coincides" with his 50th birthday (that's a magical coincidence for sure!) Just admit it's just about you, you are tired of doing what you did for 17 years. It's ok. But you weren't the only blogger, and everyone else isn't retiring together with you. Heck, I bet there is some new blogger writing his first post right now. I don't know if I'll like his posts as much as I liked some of yours, but I'm pretty sure life goes on without you, whether you like it or not (yeah, I know, I also don't really like the idea that life will go on without me!) Blogging is just one of the formats of how people express themselves, and while today there are many alternative formats that weren't really an option, say, 20 years ago, you cannot replace all of blogposts with a YouTube video or a TikTok. You can replace some, sure. Which isn't a bad thing either, it just means there now is a media that suits that type of content better.
Also, that warning about your substack not being a blog... But it is. A different kind of blog, maybe, but let's not pretend words mean anything more than they do. Even a telegram channel with lengthy posts is pretty much a blog. And, BTW, I don't know if Scott Alexander is supposed to be an "old media refugee" who's posts Venkatesh doesn't read, but his content is pretty much the same as on SCX. FWIW.
Very curious. I started my personal website with the rise of Hugo (which I like to call as "the new age of SSGs"). 5 years ago. Time does fly. As I look more and more into the old days of anything, It's like, things survive long enough to get popular... Then it goes back to where and how it was. It doesn't necessarily die.
I am curious if we had the expectation that if hosting and other tech became accessible, more people must've been blogging or maintaining personal websites. That is not how it works right? Pepole maintaining websites on their on were a niche in that time of the internet. And it is still a niche in this time of the internet.
Fountain pens for example was the only way to write at one point. And once ball point pens came along which is more managed, common folks went behind it. Fountain pens didn't die. It has became more luxurious or a premium item once again. It's still thriving and there is a whole new world of fountain pens if you start digging about it. Heck, new brands have emerged.
I can see the same parallels for bikes (MTB or Road Bikes etc) as well.
More people will discover blogging and the blogosphere. And some of them will go away. Some of them stays. Some lives and some dies. Just like humans, websites will live and die.
It is obviously sad when I see someone stop blogging or stop maintaining their personal website. Since I still consider myself young to the blogosphere, It's like reading up on celebrities you don't know about after their death. But it's way of life. Life of a blog.
Adam Curtis’s All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace and Rivbonfarms The Gervis Priciple were foundations of my professional career growth.
This might seem a little odd, but I’m trying to “find my tribe” of interesting thinkers to bounce around ideas with and your comments on this thread suggest you’d have some great/thoughtful/interesting takes.
If you’re open it would be great to connect (email in my HN bio).
This is a hard journey and really one you need to go on finding people you work with. It will drive you to work with more interesting people and do harder things.
What is it that you think you are missing?
I find the Gervais Principle very illuminating but would love to hear how you turned it into career growth. Did it motivate you to indulge in Machiavellian scheming and join the ranks of the Sociopaths? Or let you make peace with a fate among the Clueless?
It mostly taught me to discern when to speak game talk, baby talk or PowerTalk.
This is the primary way to be promoted and seen as “part of the next level” in larger organizations.
It's so strange when people say that such-and-such-internet-thing is dead. For the most part, I see no truth in that. There's SOME truth in SOME of it. Private mail servers are getting harder to use, because other servers don't trust them.
But blogs will work. The technology is as good as ever, and people can go read stuff on blogs. Maybe masses of people are choosing to do that less. That's not what being dead is. That's being less popular.
I mostly post on LinkedIn instead of my blog, because I like the shorter writing form.
I have to admit, the idea of a “viral hit blog post” sounds absolutely quaint now
but honestly was that ever a good thing?
What I see most from people who appear very attached to the Web of 15-20 years ago is a constant iteration of values, branding (cozy, small, open), discussions over protocols and platforms, and not much writing or self expression.
People don’t seem interested in “blogging” as much as they seem interested in building communities, or rather, full-fledged sovereign states.
Low wit: writers must have got busy
Mid wit: this is a poignant soliloquy in the state of the open web
High wit: writers must have got busy
It's like that ancient meme where a programmer starts at Hello World, ascends through corporate complexity, then comes back to Hello World.
I'd never heard of this blog before, but it looks like a really interesting, eclectic one, and the Web may be a bit darker, for its absence.
That said...
> anymore than there was a single heir to the Roman empire
I'm not exactly sure I'd classify this blog at the same level of influence as the Original Italian Mafioso.
He’s talking about blogs in general
I'm reading more blogs than ever. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
But the problem is that they have to be hosted on the same platform, which will be set up like a social media site with curated content, otherwise you'll have to spend a lot of time finding them.
Maybe you get self-hosted things via github or whatnot, but that's about as non-consumerist as it'll get.
And the younger generation is not doing this beyond work-related pages, so eventually the internet-as-literature phase will end. In the past you could type into Google "new mothers discussion board" and immediately find organic, non-corporate socialization geared towards Americans. That ease of use is sort of erroneously gone, and probably not returning.
Might I ask...which blogs are you reading?
> But the problem is that they have to be hosted on the same platform
No they don't. I avoid Medium and Substack like the plague. I don't use those sites for discovery at all, and whenever I come across a link to a blog on either of them, I usually regret clicking it.
I end up on plenty of blogs found through various sources. A few I've been reading diligently or on-and-off for many years, others I read one-off articles here and there that I've found through sites like HN.
The blogosphere's death is highly exaggerated, regardless of what TFA says.
> Maybe you get self-hosted things via github or whatnot, but that's about as non-consumerist as it'll get
I don't see that as a bad thing.
> And the younger generation is not doing this beyond work-related pages, so eventually the internet-as-literature phase will end
I don't think it will. I think there will always be enough people writing interesting long-form articles to satisfy my curiosity. Mind you, I don't exclusively read blogs, but I haven't touched social media in 5 or 6 years and that hasn't caused me to run out of interesting things to read.
The "Blogosphere" represented something like Livejournal. You'd write your daily thoughts, not so much imagepost at all, and there would be your friends doing the same thing whom you'd check on. Some countries still have internet ecosystems like this; NAVER is the main one I can think of, in Korea; Livejournal itself was sold to a Russian buyer nearly 20 years ago and lives on in that country mostly intact and widely used.
But longform internet posts are gone nowadays in America, largely - due to English. It's too widely spoken for things to be found easily. Think about finding information about heavy metal concerts in Finland: that's probably doable from Google purely based on the fact you're not imputing English.
Last point: https://www.statista.com/statistics/990899/livejournal-users...
Self hosting a newsreader has been remarkably satisfying. Over the past few years I've been adding blogs to as I encounter them here and in a few other places, and it's one of my favorite places to spend a few hours browsing through things other folks spent the time to write. I kinda feel like everyone should have something like this, and I deeply regret Google Reader's retirement for that reason.
Crooked Timber, Daring Fireball, kottke.org, Econbrowser, DSHR's Blog, Jayarava's Raves, Pushing Ahead of the Dame, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, Michael Tsai, Scripting News, Simon Willison's Weblog ... about 150 feeds in total I think (some of them inactive now but overall more than I can read.)
I think most feed readers support OPML now, more people should put together blog starter packs (like Bluesky's starter packs, which are super useful.)
Can you share some blogs you are following? I would love some more stuff to read.
I really don't get how and why are blogs dying.
I agree, and I don't think they're actually dying. I think certainly they're a much smaller percentage of consumed content today than thy were 15 or 20 years ago, but I don't believe that's because readership has dropped. It's just that the pie is significantly bigger now, and other media has gobbled up most of it.
I dropped off social media 5-6 years ago and don't miss it; I still read blogs and get much more value out of them.
Google made the web searchable not browsable.
Social and media networks inside their walled gardens took over browsability.
Because people don't go surfing on the web anymore, they stay in the same facebook-twitter-instagram-netflix-amazon-reddit loop forever.
That's not death. That's non-virality.
For extroverts and fame-seekers, I guess that feels like death. But it's not.
False, while you try to make this a moral point, the reality is where the audiences go the content goes.
Sorry that’s just life.
Source: worked on this research at Google for decades. We accelerated the issue unfortunately.
There's still plenty of audience for blog posts. The blogosphere (god I hate that term) hasn't grown at the pace of social media, certainly, but that doesn't matter. And in some ways I'd probably consider that a good thing for the medium.
I can put my content where I like. People who want my content follow the link I give them.
That’s just life, too.
That again only implies less popularity, if anything, not death.
I’m sorry to belabor this but you probably don’t know how growth and death cycles work.
Every day people churn in and out. As more churn out for audiences less new ones come in. Therefore it dies.
You should be sorry for yourself with your sad patronizing attitude.
What? I’m sorry are you not on a public forum where people share their expertise?
I think maybe you could just reread this as you being informed by someone who worked on this for many many years at internet scale.
It’s ok to have less knowledge or be misinformed about something. We all are. It’s not ok to respond to that with insecurity and insults.
I'm not insulting you, I'm merely stating you have an aggressive and patronizing attitude comment after comment which is a fact.
> I’m sorry to belabor this but you probably don’t know how growth and death cycles work.
> Sorry that’s just life.
> I think maybe you could just reread this as you being informed by someone who worked on this for many many years at internet scale. It’s ok to have less knowledge or be misinformed about something.
It's okay to share expertise, but this is better done with data (which you have provided none) and without that very sad aggressive attitude. "I know better, because I know and you don't" is no argument.
"The numbers for this and that huge blogging platform are down year after year" is an argument, yours isn't.
You literally called me sad and pathetic. You’re either a bot with a bad context window or a young kid who is more than a bit lost here.
Just take a breath and read over this again. It’s better to learn from others than dig yourself in a hole of insecurity.
Also we don’t use data to proof text common knowledge in the field.
I don’t know what else to tell you other than your inexperience is showing and you’re angry about it
I said you have a sad patronizing attitude.
You managed to twist it into calling you sad and pathetic and to add more of your sad and patronizing attitude in this comment.
Probably "experts" in the field like you have missed few days too much in elementary school when reading and text comprehension skills were taught.
Take care of yourself in your desperate quest for feeling superior over the internet.
The medium is shifting just like it shifted 25-ish years ago. People would write and publish on paper or fax. Then came email and websites. Eventually the blog came up because the self publishing process at the time was cumbersome and people didn’t want to be writing html.
I consider Venkatesh to be amongst the brightest and insightful thinkers of our times (The Gervais Principle being a particularly brilliant eye opener that I share with everyone who could be interested and ready to benefit from it).
I hadn’t quite appreciated how long he’s been blogging for, nor that we was nearing 50 (the latter point gives me some inspiration in my mid-30s that there’s still time to contribute).
In terms of the article, and this doesn’t injure his main point, but I feel he has been overgenerous about how long the blogosphere has lasted (though there are of course still exceptions eg for me recently Ludic’s blog https://ludic.mataroa.blog/, some old gems like Rands in Repose ticking away, and more focused series like Patrick McKenzie’s Bits about Money).
To my mind it was well and truly done (in the way that it once existed) before Covid, with the absence of a resurgence during a period with so many locked down and online proving its end.
By that point there had already been the rise of walled gardens, the fall of Google Search, the rise of social media and influencers (and since the subsequent fall post-Covid), clickbait, smartphones as the primary browsing device, constantly online culture, attention exhaustion, (low quality) content saturation, etc. If the blog had survived all this LLMs adding fuel to the attention harvesting noise would almost certainly have sealed the deal.
On the whole “online” feels like it’s falling apart.
The leading apps and sites are buggy and broken with little innovation in years despite obvious low-lying fruit yet still dominantly crowding out (or buying out and shutting down) challengers, websites are a mess of instinctual clicking past popups like your relative’s malware-infected WinXP desktop you had to fix up at Christmas, almost everyone seems to be an influencer cynically pumping out low quality noise that the algorithms seem almost determined to elevate over unloved crafted quality content (and we still don’t seem to be reaping benefits of AI to sort through this), US politics contextlessly infects nearly every platform and channel globally (thankfully usually not here except when relevant), the subscription sites have bait and switched after hooking us all in and continue to turn the screws, the “gig economy” and “disruptors” have done the same continuing to damage broader society with their externalities while skirting the purpose of established laws and norms and now raising prices to higher than what they displaced, our democracy is challenged by the inability to know truth accelerated by the overwhelm of targeted noise (and old media has just as much guilt in monetising then selling out the fourth estate while governments are now racing towards totalitarianism in an attempt to put the genie back in the bottle), attention span and ability to think as humans is being fundamentally reshaped in ways that most consider damaging, digital has accelerated (or at least coincided with) the society-consuming and society-destroying elements of capitalism over the last 50 years as it “cleverly” works out how to turn anything and everything (quality, brand value, trust, institutions, connections, spare time, relationships, attention etc.) into $ and destroy them in the process, and it all seems to have turned into walking through a crowded alleyway of people shouting and fighting and exploiting and vying for your attention and and and and.
The fall of Rome analogy feels figuratively rather apt, because it certainly has a sense of that, and maybe this cozyweb is a nice hideaway answer from all this (I haven’t quite found my online cozy place yet).
For those who haven’t seen it and find any of this resonates (especially as a Millenial), Bo Burnham’s Inside brilliantly talks to this all, and he’s the first I’ve come across to really do so.
Is anyone else talking about this in a way that’s helpful, or at least helpfully relays the problem that’s emerged upon us?
"our incredible journey"
Well that was an interesting chain of events:
I read the first several paragraphs. Since they seem wordy and light on actual meaning, and the post is long, as I often do, I grabbed all the text and headed to ChatGPT/Claude -- in this instance ChatGPT.
"Summarize this in no more than twenty bullet points."
ChatGPT spits out exactly twenty bullet points, including pointless gems like:
So I switch to Claude and prompt:"Summarize this into no more than 20 bullet points. Skip unimportant housekeeping bits."
Claude also feels the need to produce exactly 20 bullet points, including exactly the housekeeping bits I pointed it away from like:
Now I'm going on too long, so I'll just say it took several more prompts, with examples, to get them to coalesce to:ChatGPT:
Claude: