HN Reader

The “small web” is (citation needed) bigger and healthier than ever. Yep, big algorithm feed apps are huge. That doesn’t stop the small stuff from being more huge than it was way back, decades ago, when it was the big game in town.

It’s nice to take off the rose colored glasses and look at the present sometimes. The web is awesome - no hacks needed to make your site look amazing; awesome animations or frosted glass effects in one line of CSS; static site generators desperate for you to use their code to write what you care about; blogs with RSS feeds even though RSS is dead.

If you believe these awesome things don’t exist you’ll live in that world - but it does actually exist, so you’ll be very much missing out.

But, AI search is here. When you write for hours will it be just to have AI quote or amalgamate it, so you can have a link sit by it that few will click on? Or will you submit it to some old Yahoo-like index, HN, or peer-messaging app that reaches maybe typically 10 people typically or 100,000 once for your 15 minutes of fame?

When you write something fairly long, don’t do it for the clicks, unless you need the money. If you have something to say that’s that you think is important, sure, write it, but don’t bet on anything but making a few people mad. Do it because it’s what you want to do. AI can’t take that away from you, yet.

I’m sure I’ve recently read something great that was written by AI, though. It’s not all slop. It’s only a matter of time now before Armageddon.

However... for me, the communities come first. I mean I do have a goal in my internet usage, and this goal comes before any principled stands (mostly; there are exceptions). So if, for example, the hobby communities around games and crafts I enjoy form in Facebook, what can I do? Facebook sucks as a platform, but I want to be in those communities because I enjoy being part of them. It's a trap, but one where there's no easy way out.

As for YouTube: my search history and the algorithm are my main use of YT; I wouldn't dream of turning them off. Because I basically use it for two things, my hobby things (subscribed to several channels I like) and watching cartoon clips with my daughter, all the algorithm ever recommends me is exactly those two things: cartoon clips and things related to my hobbies. Never rage bait, never random nonsense. When I click accidentally on rage bait inducing stuff, I remove it from my watch history; I know this isn't perfect but it works in the sense I don't get recommended that crap.

Also, YouTube Premium because I can't stand ads. Yes, I'm aware I'm paying the mafia thugs to leave me alone. It sucks.

This is no defense of YouTube, I know it can turn to shit any minute, but at least for me the algorithm works.

The one thing that is absolutely driving me nuts is the AI-driven en-slopification of the internet. I wish AI got magically banned from most venues. I want to interact with humans and human-created stuff, not AI spam. I think this is a battle that cannot be won, to my eternal sadness.

Again I must repeat I do agree with the sentiment of the blog post, and I wish the internet got de-enshitified again. I'm not sure it's that easy though.

Back in the day an absolutely minuscule portion of humanity read blogs.

Technology Connections has 3 million subscribers. That's over 10x the number of people reading the most popular blogs in the world circa 2010[1]. And Technology Connections is only a moderately popular channel. If you look at the bigger channels like Mark Rober it is more like 350x.

What actually happened was that the first generation of text-loving online people were eventually outnumbered by subsequent waves of "migration" by people who don't like text and prefer images and (especially) video.

It was just replaced by a better product as the online audience expanded to become more representative of real people. Nothing stops people from writing blogs today. They'll probably even get roughly the same (small) number of readers that blogs pulled back in 2010.

[1]: https://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist...

However, RSS! People have literally emailed me to tell me that they are unsubscribing from my newsletter but "Don't worry, I follow you through RSS." My traffic is larger than ever thanks to RSS. I syndicate the full content, not just a summary, yet people still click and visit my tiny blog.

Google traffic, mainstream social media, all of them don't care about my blog. But from time to time, random people send me an email, and that makes up for it.

I'm a huge fan of the channel, and that video is mostly great and insightful. But his being "puzzled" at the way people use the subscriptions "feed" is kinda surprising. The low percentaged from that feed should lead to asking questions to understand why, instead of assuming people are "doing it wrong". People use subscriptions as a sort of meta bookmarking system. It's also a way of honing their algorithm. People can have a wide variety of interests. Just because someone is subscribed to a channel on anime doesn't mean it's the thing they're looking for at the time they dip into that feed. And some channels just fill the feed up with posts that don't always necessitate the work of pruning it. So, that firehose ends up being a lot of noise. The ideal would be some sort of in-between. Where you can pare down the subscriptions feed based on a current interest. One doesn't need to see the very latest post by a creator of they aren't someone who is chronically online.

I think we will still see the emergence of "human algorithms" that personally curate content for you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3Jz4dt_eLk

Unlike social media, few of these forums have mechanisms to "like" or upvote posts so there is no reward for posting just to attract attention, whether it be positive or negative. That changes the dynamic IMHO. People post to seek answers to their questions, or to share their knowledge and answer other people's questions. This is the way.

I'd include HN in this group of ye olde internet forums. It does have a mechanism to vote, but it's different and the expectation of the readers are brutal to frivolous posts (of which I have made only couple and paid for dearly).

I must also say I dislike the obnoxious "Look at how quirky I am!" 90s web badges on an HTML5 page.

We are surrounded by examples of sometimes mainstream products and services that reflect the way people are shifting their thinking and swinging the pendulum.

This survey isn't 100% the same exact topic, but I think that it's an illustration of my point that well over half of Americans say that social media has a negative impact. [1]

People know the present state is bad and I think they are starting to take their dollars and eyeballs elsewhere. It's just anecdotal, but the amount of people I know who fully pulled the plug on deleting social media accounts would have seemed incomprehensible 10 years ago.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/10/15/64-of-ame...

Technology-adept people will always have ways to avoid the prevailing swamp of dark patterns, but that's not corporate America's target anyway -- that target is people who constantly react to things, who don't exercise agency, who don't possess any measurable degree of autonomy.

That fact results from our broken educational system. In school, people are trained to surrender their autonomy early on. People aren't being taught how to think, they're being told what to think. And if we don't fix that problem, no later interventions have any hope of succeeding.

Few things have simple causes, but this is an exception. Most people are brainless consumers because that's public education's goal. It's not an unintended side effect.

Reminds me of the last line of R.E.M.’s ‘Radio Song’ (1991)… “Now our children grow up prisoners All their life, radio listeners” < https://open.spotify.com/track/5UBeN0XvvIvnEjyp6uThr4?si=V_Q...>

I've been thinking about this for a while. How could we both choose our feed sources and tailor our own algorithm? I'm tinkering with this idea at https://www.thecrux.is/

Today's kids will still do that, in their own way. I'm not convinced there's anything here other than old man and cloud. We did it our way, in our time. I don't think this generation is actually for-reals-this-time the one where technology finally neutered human curiosity and wrecked it all.

In the days you speak of the internet was the frontier for the curious and early adopters. The rest of the world caught up and now it's a fully commodified and industrialized space. Nostalgically trying to recreate the early internet isn't the way forward. I don't know what is but I know the kids will find it.

But yes, I agree pretty much with the whole article.

Relatively niche but traditional bulletin board forums are good. Recent posts to the top do tend make some threads be attention hogs, but there's a human mod in the loop if the forum is small enough.

I suppose chats (usually Discord) also fall into this as well. A smaller community there can be similar to a smaller community on Mastodon, forums, etc.

Any other thoughts? How do people discover new blogs?

Side note, I think I realized or came to the belief about 10 years ago that large groups of humans suck. Moderation becomes impractical or ineffective; content discovery becomes manipulated like this post is talking about. Similarly, large communities on a monolithic platform have to be monetized -- which results in clickbait of a sorts to maintain engagement.