[HN Gopher] 'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far - Bring Back Blogs
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'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far - Bring Back Blogs
Author : ingve
Score : 128 points
Date : 2020-04-26 20:24 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wired.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wired.com)
| aazaa wrote:
| The article mentions the 15-20 tweet roll as being cumbersome,
| and it is.
|
| But a bigger issue is at work here - censorship. Twitter is being
| pulled in two opposite directions. It's a platform in which
| authoritative content is hosted. For example, the president
| conducts foreign policy through Twitter. And Twitter is also a
| platform where bots try to influence elections, people post
| images of dubious taste, and plain old lies are told.
|
| Twitter has been leaning ever-harder into the role of curating
| authoritative content. The idea of verified identities as a
| prerequisite to post has been floated, and will no doubt
| resurface.
|
| All of this leads to a dead-end. Twitter won't be able to afford
| to host anything remotely controversial (i.e., interesting) for
| fear of upsetting the thought police.
|
| The same problem applies to Facebook, Medium, and all the others.
|
| The reason to blog is simple. Because sooner or later a rational
| human exploring the bounds of human knowledge through writing
| will post something that will make one or more powerful people
| scared, angry, or offended. A blog makes retaliatory
| deplatforming much more difficult to pull off.
| aaron-lebo wrote:
| It doesn't help that Dorsey is terrified of making the smallest
| changes to the platform. I guess he's too busy meditating with
| Himalayan salts or something. He works 80 hours a week at his
| companies (or did), but increasing the Tweet size took a
| decade.
|
| Check out Hatching Twitter. It presents the entire foundation,
| with Dorsey and Ev Williams as well meaning but flawed leaders
| that were more than happy to stab each other in the back when
| it helped them. That Medium turned out as it did, and that
| Twitter has changed little in the last 15 years isn't
| surprising. They were accidents of history and they're now
| stuck trying to please their existing power users and Wall
| Street, regardless of if that's what we really need as
| societies.
|
| It goes without saying, but our families and friends are
| literally dying because these platforms are so bad at handling
| disinformation. The question is if they are even capable and if
| not, why?
|
| We're either going to see the net balkanize (as it has in some
| places) or lose the freedom and hope that it used to entail or
| both. It is an existential threat, which is why these guys
| should be criticized all day until they show some real
| responsibility.
| jasonv wrote:
| > Twitter has been leaning ever-harder into the role of
| curating authoritative content.
|
| To be fair, both political ends of the spectrum in the US have
| been leaning very hard on Twitter, Facebook & Youtube to
| increase the active moderation of their platforms, algorithms
| and advertising services (not that those three are exactly the
| same content problem).
|
| And those political ploys tend to scream "censorship" (or
| reference "concerning developments") when they don't like the
| moderation, and scream for regulation when they deem the
| moderation too absent.
| some_furry wrote:
| I just started a blog last week.
|
| https://soatok.blog
| Icathian wrote:
| The devil is always in the details. Deciding who pays to host new
| platforms, who gets to gatekeep content, etc ad nauseum, would
| likely sink any such effort.
|
| Frankly, that seems like a long way to go for what is effectively
| twitlonger. If you buy the premise that Twitter is effective at
| amplifying the right voices (very much still up for debate), and
| the problem is the interface for long-form content, then it seems
| to need a much simpler UX fix rather than trying to invent a
| separate-but-joined platform from whole cloth.
| HugoDaniel wrote:
| What is your opinion on dev.to ?
| sergiotapia wrote:
| Full of armchair experts, and top-lists-huge-landing-image ego
| postings.
|
| Their platform is excellent, their content not so much.
|
| >The most important skill that you should develop to improve
| your life
|
| This is dev.to in a nutshell.
| pgt wrote:
| If you are an expert reading this considering writing a blog -
| whatever you do, please don't start publishing on a paywalled
| medium like Medium.
| yuyangchee98 wrote:
| What alternatives do you recommend? I'm starting to write, and
| Medium seems like the best option to me because how else am I
| going to get readers?
| kirubakaran wrote:
| Static website (Hugo/Jekyll) that you host yourself and share
| on Twitter, relevant subreddits, and Hacker News?
| tayo42 wrote:
| Sharing on those sites is pretty hit or miss. I posted a
| blog post I wrote here once, went pretty much ignored.
| Someone else posted it (big company engineering blog) same
| link and it was on the front page for awhile with some
| interesting discussion. I almost missed all of it too.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| This is a far less pleasant and high-variance process than
| you make it out to be.
|
| - Posting on Twitter just begs the "get an audience"
| question. You can't just GET followers, it takes months or
| years of constant content creation, tagging, hashtagging,
| etc to get an audience.
|
| - Subreddits are very hit-or-miss, and a lot of them will
| flat-out ban you for posting your own blog content, even if
| it's non-monetized OC (been there)
|
| - Hacker News is a single-stream audience, and while
| occasionally you'll get onto the front page, more often
| content dies with a few dozen views. And it's not an
| especially differentiated audience.
|
| For someone whose job is content creation, this might be
| realistic, but you're asking experts in a field -- whose
| primary job is research, and being an expert, not social
| media outreach -- to spend a huge portion of their time on
| audience generation and self-promotion. That's not
| realistic.
|
| I hate Medium, for a ton of reasons, but it succeeds at
| making it easy for one-off or two-off writers to get a
| large audience without investing years of work on it. Sure,
| the audience isn't WORTH a lot to them (they can't monetize
| it, and it could get pulled from under them at the drop of
| a hat), but if the goal is to spread a message or get a
| post read, sorry, it's still a very viable outlet for doing
| that.
| twic wrote:
| How does Medium get you readers?
|
| This is a genuine question - i only know Medium from the
| reader's side, where it is something that makes me about 20%
| _less_ likely to read your writing!
| soneca wrote:
| Publishing on you domain (with a email capture to build an
| email list), and republishing it on Medium kind of give you
| the best of both worlds.
| thanatropism wrote:
| Write a lot, have your blogging software auto post to
| Twitter, put the URL on your HN profile. Do this for ~2
| years.
|
| Also try to engage one or two people who for no apparent
| reason seem to enjoy your content and start writing for them.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| Multiple posts 365 days/year since 2004:
| https://www.bookofjoe.com/
| notacoward wrote:
| The obstacle is not the format but the ease of sharing. Yes, I've
| had a blog since ~2000, I know there are some ways to share
| others' content on your own blog, but it never became as easy or
| readily consumable as a retweet.
|
| Ironically, I think the reason is recognizable from epidemiology.
| The network of twitter followers is just denser than the network
| of bloggers ever was or likely ever will be. Even the very best
| blog posts still tended not to spread even an order of magnitude
| as well as a good tweet thread. As much as I hate the format, I
| don't think blogs can or will displace it.
| nullc wrote:
| The infinite scroll addiction pipeline has segmented the online
| world largely into two parts: Drooling scroll zombies on
| twitter/facebook/reddit/etc, and people who don't partake at all.
|
| The audience of people who might read your blog but who aren't
| stuck on a scroll treadmill is too small to bother, especially
| with the death of many popular rss readers.
| Noctem wrote:
| "Drooling scroll zombies" is a wildly and unnecessarily
| uncharitable description of people that visit websites and apps
| that you (apparently) don't enjoy.
|
| Disparaging entire mediums makes little sense. There is both
| enlightening and mind-numbing content on social networks,
| blogs, television, and books. Are people that read many books
| drooling page-turning zombies? Is scrolling through blogs
| inherently superior to Twitter scrolling?
| nullc wrote:
| > Disparaging entire mediums makes little sense
|
| I think it makes a lot of sense when the medium is purpose
| designed and highly optimized to maximize additive shallow
| interaction.
|
| Sorry, I've had too many meetings and dinners disrupted by
| too many different people who couldn't stay off the phone to
| keep pretending it isn't a problem. ... and had far too many
| informative long form works ignored by their target audience
| (members of which also just spent our last meeting glued to
| facebook scroll).
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >The audience of people who might read your blog but who aren't
| stuck on a scroll treadmill is too small to bother,
|
| I don't really like this focus on the size of audiences that
| has come with social media. For experts or scientists who want
| to communicate with other scientists, it shouldn't matter how
| large the casual audience is but how they can effectively
| communicate with each other.
| dlivingston wrote:
| "Socrates probably didn't draw a crowd": that's how I've seen
| this described. Meaning, the amount of people who see your
| content matters much less than who sees it.
| TheDong wrote:
| I don't see it that way at all.
|
| There are plenty of people who blog and tweet, and who read
| blogs and read tweets. Back when I used twitter, I used it
| partly as a sorta glamorized rss feed for when certain people
| posted blogs.
|
| There are and always have been people who do not read long-form
| blogs and people who do. I see no evidence that social media
| has changed that significantly.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| Sadly many blogs are often content mill level boilerplate
| followed by 1-2 sentences of real content. I think people begin
| to associate blogging at unknown domains as suspicious, given the
| wide variability in actual content per word on the page.
|
| A series of tweets won't have this problem, people aren't trying
| to game SEO. They're gaming social media which has a different
| set of incentives for good/bad
| smitty1e wrote:
| Blogs never left, as a technical matter.
|
| Go to Wordpress and get your dog-gone blog on.
| Reason077 wrote:
| Blogs died the day Google killed Google Reader.
|
| OK, they're still out there, but they rely on Twitter and sites
| like Hacker News to drive traffic. The RSS-driven native blog
| ecosystem is nothing like what it was in the Reader days.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| Typepad (paid user since 2004)
| [deleted]
| nickthemagicman wrote:
| And frickin RSS! That was the content collaborator before
| Twitter.
| rado wrote:
| Sorry, can't get web publishing advice from Wired.
| https://i.imgur.com/FaX02Aw.png
| golergka wrote:
| How would you publish it so you would earn enough to pay
| salaries to all employees involved?
| asjw wrote:
| Not using behavioural economics ideas
| golergka wrote:
| And what original ideas of your own would you use in their
| stead?
|
| Look, I don't like those popups too. And I, too, prefer
| media that doesn't do that. But at the same time, keeping
| in mind how hard it is to make any kind of money in that
| market, I don't have the guts to tell those people how to
| run their business.
| joelrunyon wrote:
| I've been on this train for a long, long time.
|
| If you don't own your platform, you don't own your content.
|
| Register your domain, install wordpress, start your own blog.
|
| We actually created https://startablog.com to drive this point
| home, teach people how to do it and even have a team that will do
| it for you for free if you need the help (lots of people still
| find the WP install process intimidating).
| Alex3917 wrote:
| > If you don't own your platform, you don't own your content.
|
| Not entirely true. You can generate nicely formatted content
| using a centralized service, and then self-host the files it
| outputs. E.g. we support this with FWD:Everyone, folks are free
| to use our tool to format any email thread for publication on
| the web, and then self-host published threads elsewhere by just
| saving our API responses.
|
| IMHO this is a much better deal for folks than either hosting
| Wordpress, using a simple static site generator, or using a
| purely centralized service. You always get the latest tech that
| we're investing in, but also the freedom to go nuts and do
| whatever.
| imglorp wrote:
| When would one choose WP over a static site generator? I just
| want to publish. I don't want to host something that needs
| patching and sysadmin and all that.
| faitswulff wrote:
| Speaking for myself, Wordpress's theme ecosystem is
| unbeatable, even if you just want a static site.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| I can't speak for or against WordPress in specific but there
| is often a need for patching even if you somehow had mythical
| bug free code and keep things simple there may be
| compatability with say IPv6 to maintain or what was good
| enough for the day may now be a sick joke like relying on
| passwords for cryptographic security.
| jedimastert wrote:
| > I don't want to host something that needs patching and
| sysadmin and all that.
|
| You mean like running your own webserver? Why would I do that
| instead of just getting a web host that'll take care of all
| of the sysadmin for you?
|
| With a lot of web hosting platforms all you'll need is to
| just press a button on a web site, then all you'll have to
| deal with is the wordpress interface
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| For what it's worth, I had to make this decision recently
| and decided to use Publii, which is a gui-based CMS for
| static sites. I hook it into Netlify, and then I can edit
| content on my computer and push it to the web with one
| button. And, since the Publii client lives on my machine,
| there's no admin portal exposed to the internet.
| arkitaip wrote:
| With some minor work you can set up Wordpress to
| automatically update itself on a 5 USD shared hosting. Just
| get a no-nonsense theme and keep the plugins to an absolute
| minimum.
| joelrunyon wrote:
| WP is accessible to the masses who just want to publish. It's
| not the pretties, but most people once set up can get it to
| do what they want it to do and start playing around with
| stuff.
|
| Generally speaking, the HN audience is not the typical
| audience we have at StartABlog.com, but WP "just works" well
| enough for most people.
| badwolf wrote:
| While not the easiest thing (it could be made easier though)
| I run a Wordpress instance in a local VM, that then publishes
| static to S3. Works pretty swell.
| cxr wrote:
| Today's static site generators are simply not fit for mass
| consumption. Even Jekyll--among the most polished and popular
| --immediately presents anyone stumbling onto its landing page
| with a facsimile of a terminal window with 3 inscrutable
| commands. And the kicker is that even if a prospective
| "customer" who was previously unacquainted with the command
| line managed to find their system's terminal emulator to open
| it up and enter the first command, it will almost certainly
| fail! What the jekyllrb.com folks gloss over is that there's
| an "implicit step zero"[1], and if you selected a random,
| college-educated writer, artist, etc, from a crowd, they are
| simply on average not actually in the audience for Jekyll or
| any other contemporary static site generator, despite how
| slick jekyllrb.com might look (and despite what the "just
| learn how GitHub Pages works" crowd might delude themselves).
|
| 1. https://www.colbyrussell.com/2019/03/06/how-to-displace-
| java...
| jasonv wrote:
| So far, getting Jekyll publishing to Github Pages has been
| way more complicated than I expected it to be... I know
| WordPress pretty well. With caching and automatic plugin
| updates, it's pretty low maintenance.
|
| Nothing about Jekyll + Github Pages feels "no maintenance"
| yet.
| awinter-py wrote:
| blogs take a long time to write -- if expertise is a product that
| consumers use to judge new information, a blog may be too slow
|
| long-form would be interesting if it were a pull-based model (N
| followers of some expert want their opinion on some piece of
| information)
|
| public follower networks are also valuable -- the signal value of
| one expert following another is non-zero
| andy_ppp wrote:
| Medium had such a great stab at doing this before they completely
| lost their way. I think someone should make another attempt at
| this, there doesn't need to be a billion dollar company here to
| still get very rich and, more importantly, make something people
| want...
| fortran77 wrote:
| It would be nice to see a blog platform like medium without all
| the pop ups, pop overs, and paywalls. Just Charge people a few
| bucks a month to have a blog and let them have a tip jar.
| askafriend wrote:
| You can bring them back, but I don't have time or attention span
| for 100 blogs.
|
| I still like Twitter for getting a broad range of thoughts
| quickly. I view it as a very rough pulse of public consciousness.
| Not a research paper or word from God.
| ThreeFx wrote:
| You don't have to, with RSS you have your own feed.
| asdfadfaf wrote:
| No one has mentioned substack (https://substack.com/) yet. It's a
| product that seems to be on the right track. More generally I
| think getting a newsletter from a trusted source is a much better
| way to be informed than Twitter threads because Twitter in
| general encourages a weird mind-meld type of narratives where
| everyone just talks about the same thing 24/7 because everyone is
| liking, retweeting, and thinking about the same set of ideas in
| 280 character chunks.
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