hckrnws

It’s crazy to think how close humanity was to having pretty nice stuff right before Facebook came along. I don’t think it was obvious at the time but in retrospect, just before Facebook there was:

- RSS/atom for notifications without requiring an account

- Creative Commons for establishing a legal framework to choose how you wanted your stuff to be shared

- IRC for real time messaging

- Wikipedia for knowledge

- Craigslist for local

Admittedly it still wasn’t easy for everyone to have their own website, but if we had built off these things I think the web itself could have been the platform.

I know in the last few years some of these have come back in popularity (eg RSS/atom), and for me it’s been an absolute revelation experiencing what the web could have been.

> how close humanity was to having pretty nice stuff right before Facebook came along. [...] RSS/atom [...] IRC for real time message

Those protocols are "nice" to you but they're actually not nice technologies to use for most normal people who are not techies. The decentralists who evangelize RSS & IRC have to step outside of their heads to understand why normal people don't find them compelling and easy-to-use. The web couldn't have "stayed as RSS & IRC" unless it also stayed a small niche community for geeks. I tried to explain why those technologies are not useful to a lot of internet users:

Why a lot of normies don't use RSS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35861928

Why many chat groups don't use IRC: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42964882

If you still insist, "I don't see why regular people couldn't just adopt RSS and IRC like me" -- it means you still haven't truly stepped outside your mind to internalize why users have different preferences and priorities on how to interact with the web.

I think that majority prefer "algorithms" to serve them information, and that is a killer of any other solutions for media consumption, and for RSS.

People do not want to 'hunt' for information, they prefer to be served. This opens doors to tiktoks, facebooks, and other. This opens door to feed manipulation, where big tech can decide what you see, and what not.

That is why I have little regard for "what majority" is using, as commonly it is lowest possible denominator. Often such "algorithms" are abusive, and the take advantage of you, of your lizard brain, and your attention.

I am sure there is no golden solution, no ideal. That said I use mostly RSS, but sometimes I also check the "algorithm" of reddit to check what is happening outside of my bubble.

This gives me opportunity to taste both worlds, and have some sanity and middle ground.

I also like small blogs, than let's say Facebook posts, as the latter easily turn into quarrel, shouting, and small blogs offers insight without much social media distractions.

> I think that majority prefer "algorithms" to serve them information

This possibility was the theme of the (most?) recent video essay on the YouTube Technology Connections channel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJpZjg8GuA

There's definitely something to the appeal of algorithmic feeds, I suspect there's a fundamental neurological mechanism* in play which encourages us to scan somewhere for novel appearances / developments, same as seeing what's in the garden or on the market or who is present at the oasis etc etc.

But there's probably more to be said for consciously directing attention.

(*There's a certain d-word that probably has a genuine neurochemical meaning when not laden by a lot of popular baggage as it's entered colloquial use that I am intentionally not using because at this point I'd suspect it encourages misunderstanding more than helps, but I'm willing to believe it's related.)

relevant post: https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-margi...

> Simply put, companies building apps have strong incentives to gain more users, even users that derive very little value from the app. Sometimes this is because you can monetize low value users by selling them ads. Often, it’s because your business relies on network effects and even low value users can help you build a moat. So the north star metric for designers and engineers is typically something like Daily Active Users, or DAUs for short: the number of users who log into your app in a 24 hour period.

> What’s wrong with such a metric? A product that many users want to use is a good product, right? Sort of. Since most software products charge a flat per-user fee (often zero, because ads), and economic incentives operate on the margin, a company with a billion-user product doesn’t actually care about its billion existing users. It cares about the marginal user - the billion-plus-first user - and it focuses all its energy on making sure that marginal user doesn’t stop using the app. Yes, if you neglect the existing users’ experience for long enough they will leave, but in practice apps are sticky and by the time your loyal users leave everyone on the team will have long been promoted.

> So in practice, the design of popular apps caters almost entirely to the marginal user.

Is the word “degenerate”?

Dopamine.

I concur. "Broken Code" book by Jeff Horwitz at the Wall Street Journal amply elaborates how business metric driven algorithms stir user attention at their convenience, that may or not agree with the user's. For one data point, I prefer to be gourmet than to be fed.

I don't agree with this assertion. Back in those days, most people in my friend group were using MSN Messenger. The steps to get onto that were probably easier than signing up for Facebook/Insta nowadays. The same was true for yahoo, AOL or a whole bunch of other messenger services. But these all had open protocols that clients could implement, and they did - Adium for Mac was a great example, and it worked brilliantly. The only thing missing there was an open protocol for group video calls, which is why Skype came along. If we had continued on that path of open protocols (not even standards) vs. proprietary & locked down services, we'd be in a much different place now.

How do you fit podcasts into that philosophy? RSS/atom based and still going strong.

The amount of people that use RSS for podcasts is incredibly tiny

Small nitpick; RSS is still alive and well, but it's in the podcast space and slowly getting phased out by Apple and Spotify (in fact, most podcast SaaS's make it really hard to find the bare RSS feed). I think t would have fared well for blogs and news sites, but economic forces found it oppositional to their subscription model.

While you're right that social media has well-designed UX/UI, it's optimized for engagement and addiction rather than well-being, much like smoking in the past, but targeting different organs.

Yea, this is the real reason. Facebook and Social Media won because they invested $billions into it, shoved it down everyone's throat, and then got them addicted to the content. It has nothing to do with how easy or hard the technology is to use. In an alternate universe, if some other company poured $billions into evolving IRC, people would just be using that.

> Those protocols are "nice" to you but they're actually not nice technologies to use for most normal people who are not techies.

I used to think this, and then remembered that there are hundreds of millions of people on FB liking AI slop and typing their search term into their "Update my Status" box.

The Facebook interface is absolutely unusable now, and I'm saying this as someone who signed up for it ~20 years ago. They've intentionally made it a disorienting content firehose now that they've captured however many users.

Not every technology will permeate 100% of all possible users. Even if it could, it wouldn't be desirable make that permanent. FB's design decisions suggest technology can be 'made easy', as long as its in the interest of the maker to do so. That can be rescinded at any time. That's why I'll always support interoperable protocols over proprietary.

Right, but those technologies are like 20 years old now.

Imagine if Facebook didn’t come along and we had 20 years of development and improvements over those base protocols instead of today’s social platforms.

>they're actually not nice technologies to use for most normal people who are not techies.

They were "polite", to put it in another frame. for RSS and IRC: You controlled the platform and essentially you decided to connect to services to extend your own platform. But corporations decided that you must use their platform or leave.

> The web couldn't have "stayed as RSS & IRC" unless it also stayed a small niche community for geeks.

I don't think it needed to be. People complain so much these days about finding another streaming service or games store or... well not music these days. The model they want is the one they abandoned.

Imagined you have a "netflix" as a UI and you simply browse for services to subscribe or unsubscribe to. Then your UI controls all the sorting, filters, libraries, etc. That was essentially RSS for articles. Of course, people with Plex or Emby don't need to imagine this. But an ethical framework would have been nice. I wouldn't call Plex's UI any less intuitive than any private platform.

The only argument that may hold weight here is that "you're not gonna get a good UX scheme without someone in the private sector being paid 200k/yr to figure it out". But if that's the requirement for progress, I question how my country did anything the first 200 years.

>it means you still haven't truly stepped outside your mind to internalize why users have different preferences and priorities on how to interact with the web.

Sure, people don't care about ads and I vehemently hate them in my media. I understand, I just highly disagree. I don't want an easier experience at the cost of all my personal data extracted to Morgan who calls me 5 times an hour about my extended warranty. I don't want a company being the sole factor in deciding on what I want to watch, or especially search for. Yadda yadda.

But apathy reigns supreme.

EDIT: I'll also address one argument in the RSS article: I think it's a bit biased to say "people don't follow cooking recipe websites"... on a forums focused on mostly technical topics. Most people don't follow literally everything. I'm sure you can definitely find a community of cooks and find their versions of Cory Doctorow or John Carmack or Sam Altman if you engage in such cooking discourse. But if you don't engage, then some relatively slop of "how to bake a chicken" suffices just fine, similar to any slop article in tech on "how to fix blue screen" that is just telling you to reset your computer

You don't make a community out of lurkers. But modern platforms sure do profit off them.

And Usenet groups for discussion.

A lot of the traffic (especially in pre-Google times) was due to organic networking, i.e., not an AI algorithm for "engagement", but people on their websites recommending cool websites—knowledge, humor, and jokes (it was big things before social media), interactive experiences (especially Flash, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43225560), fun projects, personal social profiles with GeekCode, etc.

Do you remember when FB chat was just Jabber and you could get RSS feeds from there?

Pepperi... I remember. I think I still have the local chat logs somewhere :D

But at one point they figured out the most valuable thing a social media site has is the content and the graph between users - and they locked it down first (APIs with limits). Then started turning off the API endpoints completely, just selling the aggregate data.

The bots and troll farms don't care, they can just use browser automation instead.

> Admittedly it still wasn’t easy for everyone to have their own website

At least by the Geocities stage it was incredibly easy. Probably about as difficult as making a PowerPoint slideshow. Lots of non-techy kids were doing this in the 90's and early 2000's.

Blogging was the first big degradation of the web that I noticed. There was a big shift from evergreen content to churning out quick dopamine hits matching the time sensitive nature of blogging.

It was not easy. Everybody was copying and pasting "HTML templates", because HTML stops being readable the second you want your layout to have more than one column.

I really think you're forgetting what most web pages looked like back then. A simple background, often just one or two columns of text, a few images put in there, some HTML links. Maybe frames for the more complex sites.

Here's some popular pages from back then:

Maddox's Page[1]

Marathon Story Page[2]

Both of these could be recreated by someone who had no previous knowledge of HTML after studying HTML for one or two days.

And a lot of people's sites were even simpler - just text thrown up their with some images and links. But the thing is - people don't really need much more than that. Most Tweets, Blogs, articles, etc., are still just test and images when it comes down to it. The vehicle to deliver the content has gotten much more complex, but the content itself is usually (though not always) about the same as it was 30 years ago.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20021112205429/http://maddox.xmi... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20000815234125/https://marathon....

Yeah HTML5 + CSS3 were not a thing yet. They were one of the last missing pieces to the puzzle of solving desktop publishing. I think after all these things (rss, usenet, irc, html5, css3, etc...) the only thing left was search. I don't think a user friendly solution for search ever came along. The original algorithm was good enough, and if google wanted to be good at search I think they could have combatted set spam. The problem for search was always money.

Yeah, some sites were simple. Most sites people wanted to build required more sophisticated layouts, and thus began the great <table> age. Dreamweaver was a successful consumer product because of HTML and CSS' learning curve.

would you say making a powerpoint is "easy" or that "everyone copy/pastes a template they think looks good because design is hard"?

Yes, PowerPoint is orders of magnitude easier, because it is a GUI-based app that's fully WYSIWYG with snap guides for aligning items. HTML + CSS is non-WYSIWYG and that alone will weed out a good 50% of the Word/PPT/Excel crowd.

Even if they used Word and exported to HTML, that's just step 1 completed. How would they put that page online? What's SFTP? Why do I need SSL? Why doesn't the page look right on mobile?

> Creative Commons for establishing a legal framework to choose how you wanted your stuff to be shared

I'll disagree a bit on this. Absolutely nothing against the broader spirit of Creative Comments but I'm pretty against the Chinese menu of no derivatives and, especially, non-commercial with even CC basically threw its hands up about defining in CC 4.x.

I'm also not sure why setting up a personal website is still a relative headache. I suspect that a lot of the designers who put together templates overly prioritize glitz over simplicity.

I mean, it's a license. They can't enforce what they want if someone else wants those factors. If CC didn't provide it then we go back to the wild west of custom licenses.

The website question is easy. The biggest clients are in fact webdevs who help people make the website anyway. A layman can navigate through it, but many people will just throw a few hundred to a "wordpress developer" to whip up the site in a few days. And of course, when your audience is tech, they prioritize features over simplicity.

WYSIWYG is also just really hard to do when you're making it yourself.

> Admittedly it still wasn’t easy for everyone to have their own website

It wasn't _that_ difficult, tbh, with blogger, Wordpress, livejournal etc.

Most people creating websites want feedback too. Those platforms all had comment sections, but by the late 2000s, automated comment spam became impossible to manage. Remember all the blog comments linking to Prada and Air Jordans using nonsensical sentence structures?

All of those people who once had thriving blogs quickly moved to Facebook after that, preferring to have them handle moderation. In exchange FB took their audiences and locked them inside. Which is why every website now begs you to sign up for their mailing list as soon as the page loads.

I think that's _slightly_ ahistorical; Facebook showed up in 2005 or so, and the golden age of blogging (certainly blogging with comments and backlinks and so on) was somewhat later, really only ending around 2012 (IMO the death of Google Reader was the last straw, though it had likely been in gentle decline for a bit at that point). Comment spam was a problem throughout, but not an intractable one, and many blogs _did_ use authentication with third parties (including Facebook) to try to stem it.

Also, most people who had blogs did _not_ move to Facebook. They moved, mostly, to _Twitter_, which wasn't locked up until Musk broke the logged-out view, though it was certainly less convenient for non-logged-in users to view than a blog.

The idea that Facebook replaced blogging just doesn't hold up at all, I don't think; it primarily replaced other social networks, and Craigslist and similar services.

I was around at the time. Facebook started in 2004, I had my acct in 2005 when it was US colleges only. General availability began in 2007, and then came the flood of parents and grandparents, causing college students to rapidly sanitize their pages and switch communications to Messenger instead of posting directly on people's pages (then known as 'walls').

The flood of 'normal users' led to creation of "groups" and "pages", that were effectively blogs. Discoverability of Groups and Pages was far easier compared to climbing the SEO mountain, so many moved to FB.

One of the biggest blogs/websites that moved were the webcomic The Oatmeal, and the author has written (or illustrated) what happened when he moved.

https://theoatmeal.com/comics/reaching_people

I believe that since these things have not ceased to exist once FB came up, we were never close.

These all still exists no? Why do everything have to be popular. In fact popularity kills the fun.

Also I don't understand how people liked IRC. Is there any reason I am missing? Surely discord has everything that IRC had.

IRC was simple and light. It went (and still does) under the radar for many. There are channels on IRC that are older than many people here. I'm still on the same channel with my school friends from class of 1999.

You could easily see who can see your messages, especially on smaller channels with no lurkers or unknown bots.

The only major problem with IRC was that it requires an active TCP connection at all times. So you either had to have your Windows machine with mIRC online all the time or have a shell with either ircII/irssi+screen or a bouncer.

Modern-ish solutions like IRCCloud kinda-sorta fix that.

> Also I don't understand how people liked IRC. Is there any reason I am missing? Surely discord has everything that IRC had.

"Discord in Early Talks With Bankers for Potential I.P.O." https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/05/technology/discord-ipo.ht...

As someone who was very active on IRC back in the day and is now forced to use Discord (because that's where certain communities are now), from a design and user perspective Discord is so much worse. It's like looking at something that was designed by 14 year old boys pounding oreos, Mellow Yellow, and adderall. Like it was built by "the Carver."

I am comparing IRC protocol with discord. For valid comparison you need to compare IRC servers with discord, and many of them were operated by scummy people.

popularity isn't needed. But they are futher abstracted (by design) and it perpetuates this idea that RSS feeds need to be super techy to work.

>Also I don't understand how people liked IRC

same as RSS: decentralization. You control the platform. As is, you're stuck with Discord servers and any alternatives require you to leave discord. You get an IRC client and you can connect to anything that implements its interface. Which could theoretically include discord servers.

Nothing is wrong on the surface until discord does something stupid in your eyes and now you need to disconnect. Same trap as all the other big tech.

Decentralization: IRC wasn't as decentralized as people make it to be. All the top servers were in freenode and other centrally managed networks.

Discord trap: IRC was non persistent. For that comparison you can shift away from discord quickly. If you care about persistence and search of messages then yes discord has a lock in, but again this wasn't even a feature of IRC.

Perhaps RSS makes a comeback in some shape or form, as a way for LLMs/agents to fetch the latest content from sites?

RSS still exists, it's just hidden. Like you can just add any Youtube channel page to an RSS reader and get a feed for it - instead of visiting youtube's algorithm-generated front page.

I just a month ago started moving all my feeds to a self-hosted FreshRSS installation. It lets me create feeds from pages without RSS using XPath[0] or CSS selectors to pick the elements.

I also did a handful of Go applications that generate and/or modify existing feeds to be actually usable instead of just the title. I run those from cron daily and add the generated feeds to FreshRSS

And with FreshRSS I can filter out the "XXX (YC xx) is hiring" posts from HN feeds automatically :)

[0] https://danq.me/2022/09/27/freshrss-xpath/

fb/xitter/tiktok/rednote/applemusic/podcastas those things replaced only open air TV, radio and magazines.

if you were reading quality content you probably never even had a fb account.

if you moved entirely to those things, i habe bad news about what demographics you really belong to.

You still have all of those things; but no the 95% also have it (albeit in a walled garden). It's more "Others are participating, but not how I want to" than anything I think.

I do wish more tech oriented communities ran off RSS/blog/etc instead of Twitter though.

>but no the 95% also have it (albeit in a walled garden)

They have it but are in a prison or a butchery, which sort of defeats the entire spirit of the before-tools.

>It's more "Others are participating, but not how I want to" than anything I think.

You could phrase it like that. I dont want Musk to tell me who to subscribe to. I don't want Google to hide specific articles I searched for, even when I surround with quotes. With my feeds, I would simply unsubscribe from such muck. Here, you surrender your feed to the platform. But apparently the majority love being shepherded into whatever makes the company the most money. Content is content in their eyes.

It's not how I want it. I also speak out against it because how they are doing it is dangerous. But perhaps it is too late these days.

there are a lot of them, actually. I added the Kagi Small Web feed to my RSS reader a few days ago and I'm kind of overwhelmed.

considering where I am in my personal journey (discovering a ton of bloggers) this whole thread is so weird to read but increasingly I feel like I live on a different planet

It almost feels like people are annoyed the non-technical population has options now.

Don't forget the webring,

i deeply miss the curating of the webrings ...

Once the big providers disappeared webrings became harder to create. They are making a bit of a comeback and the largest management system is now onionring.js - https://garlic.garden/onionring/ , but there are loads of others - https://brisray.com/web/webring-tech.htm

We could fix this!

> I think the web itself could have been the platform.

The web itself does not suggest new content.

People really want novelty. They want a feed of new and interesting stuff, without having to make too much curatorial effort of their own. So there's been generations of "link aggregator" sites: slashdot, k5, digg, reddit, HN itself. As well as that being a key part of twitter and now bluesky use. Providing a feed is also crucial to youtube and TikTok - the recommendation algorithm for TikTok is ultimately what got it "banned" in the US, and then unbanned when they agreed to change the propaganda to something more favourable to Trump.

I use bluesky, but I'm not really optimistic about it any more. It's doomed by the all-consuming US news cycle.

Yes, I agree. Search/discovery was not something that was solved in a way that respected the commons. Probably the biggest hole in the 'web is the platform' model. Sometimes I wonder if something like PageRank could have been implemented in a more fundamental way, like DNS, for the public benefit.

Anyways, I think if regulation had happened earlier then a lot of the things you mentioned would never have taken root. They should have just made it unprofitable to hoard and trade consumer data. The industry would have been so much better if the incentives required businesses to compete for consumer dollars.

> Sometimes I wonder if something like PageRank could have been implemented in a more fundamental way, like DNS, for the public benefit.

I immediately thought of https://www.mywot.com . I was surprised to see it still exists.

Though not so surprised to see that it now asks you up top to

> Connect with Google to scan your browsing history and see if you've been exposed to untrusted sites.

Sigh.

As much as I enjoy writing and teaching, it feels like a fruitless endeavor when your content doesn't get any visibility. I've written on Twitter, Bluesky, and self-hosted my own blogs (I've even been front-paged on HN before), and each time I give up eventually because it's so hard to build a consistent readerbase.

Of course, I’m self-aware enough to recognize that it might be because my writing is terrible or because I’m covering topics no one cares about. But the point is, I don’t blame people for posting on Twitter instead of going through the effort of setting up a blog. The vast majority of written content gets little to no reach, so choosing the platform with the lowest barrier to entry makes the most sense.

> Of course, I’m self-aware enough to recognize that it might be because my writing is terrible or because I’m covering topics no one cares about.

I've hard similar issues with you, and actually think the opposite to be the case. When I was trying to build an audience, I actually found that it was the low effort nonsense that would get the most traction. At a certain point I was attempting to try to get followers by making a lot of those, and then trying to mix some quality posts in, and had some success. But I started asking myself, to what end? What kind of community am I building that's only interested in low quality junk?

And one thing I noticed about Blogging and Twitter is that they're extremely cliquish. From what I've seen, most people would rather interact with popular Bloggers/Twitter users that they hate or say are idiots than they would with users who have a low follow count/seldom read blog. Sure, there are ways you can juice your follower count so that you're large enough that the big guys will think you're worth enough to pay attention to. But again - what's the point? When you see the complete vapidity of many of these supposed thought leaders, is it really worth it? So what, you can get into the daily Twitter slap fights that they seem to love so much?

I mostly wish their were more places were thoughtful people to find and chat with each other, without having to get involved with petty blog/Twitter vanity games.

That's a good point, and I completely agree. It's not that I was seeking fame or attention, but rather I wanted to put out ideas and find like-minded people (in my case, saas founders/"indiehackers") to talk shop with. Even if it were just a couple people each time, that would be plenty, but I still felt that was beyond reach.

Even this HN reply thread alone is more engagement than I would normally get on social media ;). I'm not saying this to complain, I'm okay with it and it's just the nature of the internet with all its noise. But to get back on topic, I can totally see why people don't choose to maintain a blog as much anymore.

Maybe I'm just not a Real Artist, but I don't understand this focus on "engagement" and "visibility" for casual writers and other online publishers. Assuming they are not doing it for revenue, where their income depends on huge readership, why are they so concerned with how many readers they are getting? When I share some source code on GitHub, I don't care in the slightest whether anybody or nobody uses it. It doesn't really affect me. Same for comments on HN. I get no benefit if 10,000 people read a comment vs. 100.

Whenever you talk about blogging vs. more popular platforms, someone always chimes in with this "but I get so many more eyeballs on Twitter!" and I legitimately don't understand why that matters.

Sure, if you are doing it for a living and your income scales with the number of readers, then yea, of course, it's obvious why you want "engagement."

>Assuming they are not doing it for revenue, where their income depends on huge readership, why are they so concerned with how many readers they are getting?

Are you including indirect revenue in your assumption? There's lots of hopeful incentives that don't immedialy lead to money:

- you get a reputation and get professional gigs or invitations or whatnot. Fame, in a word.

- You get a reputation and that makes it easier to validate your next pitch for some dream idea you have. For better or worse, saying "a lot of people like this" is very effective pitch material.

- you want to meet other like minded people and organically network. These can lead to future opportunities you would have never considered.

- You have some larger societal mission, and that requires society. If you have some altruistic goal of say, teaching everyone to code (to pick a cliche idea), then you need people to participate to realize your goal. Something like Khan Academy still needs to advertise itself.

Your view only really applies to people who want to do Art for themselves. But we are still a social species, we have a natural urge to share our creations, for profit or not.

One of the things is wanting to be part of the discourse. For instance, this has happened to me several times - big players are talking about a particular topic. I dig through the primary sources, and see that many of the assumptions people are making about it are wrong. I try to bring it up, but - where? Blog/Tweet about it, and with no audience you're yelling into the void. Sometimes I try contacting the big players, but like I said, it's a pretty cliquish environment, and if you're a nobody you get ignored. Another option is to spit out a lot of garbage dopamine hits to build up a big enough audience to the point where someone might pay attention to your good points.

In the end I just gave up, because I realized the state of discourse in these spaces is terrible. It's a shame, though, because there are a lot of small, overlooked voices that do similar things, diving through primary source material and data and uncovering very important stuff that's gotten ignored. Occasionally, I've seen these people break stories that eventually get the attention of the national media - but it's hard, and this usually only happens for the really huge stories.

Meanwhile, the big players in these spaces are usually intellectually incurious and busy churning out vapid engagement bait.

unless you're writing about current news, write and wait. even books backed by huge publishers don't sell well the first years.

>I mostly wish their were more places were thoughtful people to find and chat with each other, without having to get involved with petty blog/Twitter vanity games.

Sadly a lot of that moved to Discord. So, you can't really search it up. You have to simply follow a rabbit trail of people and forums until you find that community. It's tough.

But maybe that semi-elusiveness is a feature. You let anyone in and you may start to fall into that Eternal September where the low quality vapidness wins out

Maybe pop your Bluesky profile id in your Hacker News profile?

Write for yourself. I (rarely) write on my website because I am terrible at it and I want to improve, though most of my writing is on private journals. I don't check analytics and don't even have comments: I don't care to know what randos have to say. Sometimes a person directly contacts me via email to discuss a post, which I appreciate much more as it feels like talking to a fellow human.

As you started with "I enjoy writing and teaching", just do that. Not everything has to become a venture centred on growth and engagement.

(No offense, just being a bit cheeky here: your profile says you're into influencer marketing.. that might be the reason of your disappointment in your blog's performance. Fuck metrics and KPIs, man. Enjoy what you enjoy.)

Sure, I do journal for myself and do a lot of in-person teaching/coaching, but presumably the original article is geared towards those who still choose to write publicly, which I now rarely do.

No offense taken, but I had been blogging _way_ before my marketing tech startup (which itself is almost a decade old). It's not so much about the metrics, it's that there are far higher-leverage things I can do than publish articles that only a handful of people will ever see.

In any case, advertise your personal blog in your HN profile. I find it's a better source of "organic engagement" than Google or social media, that don't like third-party links as they want to keep people within their walled gardens.

Honestly, I find it quite simple to "blast out" a text that may not be the most concise it can be, but still is helpful for organize my thoughts.

But putting that into the format that fits a twitter thread (or mastodon, really) is just one more effort I need to make.

Compare that to the "effort" of using a hosted blog with ghost, wordpress, or sth else... I really don't see how twitter threads are lower effort.

Twitter and platforms like it encourage snippet-based thinking. I've noticed a communication trend recently where, instead of a few well constructed paragraphs, you get a pile of half-finished thoughts in 200 charachters each, strung together in a stream of consciousness. This passes for written communication in some places.

Not only are blogs easier for the reader. It's a more expressive medium for writers as well. To the extent writing is a reflection of thinking, writing microblog threads reflects a scattered and haphazard approach to solving problems. It poisons how we think, not just what we read.

I've said this before but it becomes more clear every year - your biggest professional advantage, the skill you need to work on more than any theory or leet code, is written communication. The number of people who simply cannot or will not write a coherent paragraph is way too high. We have people in top professional positions that are functionally illiterate.

These aren’t mutually exclusive. I sometimes begin with a thread as a rough draft while I’m still thinking, and then move it into a more polished blog post. It is also (at least in last years when Twitter/X had a better SNR) a great way to get people to quickly consume ideas. But most importantly, the thread format gives you instant real-time feedback about which portions of the thought process resonate with readers, whereas a blog is all-or-nothing.

Hard to find a perfect example, but here’s one I learnt developed bits of: https://x.com/matthew_d_green/status/1800291897245835616?s=4...

> The number of people who simply cannot or will not write a coherent paragraph is way too high. We have people in top professional positions that are functionally illiterate.

I feel this deeply in my day-to-day at a mid size public tech company.

But how do you turn this into an advantage when your audience (colleagues and leadership) are either functionally illiterate as you describe, or simply refuse to read?

After I publish a blog post, I sit back and look at the published post. At that point, I feel a lasting moment of fulfillment. Whether or not I get views on that post doesn't matter. I write for this feeling of fulfillment.

I don't get that feeling after I put out a post on Bluesky.

> Whether or not I get views on that post doesn't matter. I write for this feeling of fulfillment.

This is an awesome attitude to have! I also don’t like this idea going around that unless your blog gets popular, builds your brand or makes you money, it’s pointless. Blogging can be so much more than for just shallow career-related reasons.

Yep. I like to post my learnings, learning processes, distillation of life experiences. My only criterion is "This feels like a good blog post".

Past discussion from 10/2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28945112

I'm interested in seeing if the sentiment is different now that Twitter has ... changed.

In addition to sentiment changing, you can no longer view tweet threads without logging in. Nitter etc still work so people who know about them can work around it, but most people without a Twitter account or who can’t be bothered to log in are probably just going to bounce.

It's one of the worst UX decision ever.

Probably was done to prevent scraping, but still.

If I recall correctly it was done pre-Musk.

> If I recall correctly it was done pre-Musk.

It was sporadically AB tested, IIRC, for _years_, but it was certainly _rare_.

One gets the impression that the first thing Musk did on arrival was demand that every feature flag Twitter had for experimental changes be turned full on; a lot of early Musk changes were things that Twitter had flirted with in the past.

Based on some quick googling, it seems like this anti-feature (login wall for threads) was tested pre-Musk on some users, but it was switched on globally by Musk.

For example here’s a mention from 2021 where some people report getting the login wall and others don’t:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28267774

Login gating was initially made less aggressive when Musk took over, then not long after AI scraping became a big deal and then Twitter clamped down hard, around the same time Reddit started locking down their API for same reason.

It's probably the main reason the organisations I work with are considering an alternative like Bluesky or Mastodon - the ability to have a widget consistently displays your own posts on yoiur website is very handy.

I thought it was just market capture. It was the most popular website in the world, so if you needed to see sports news, or event updates from celebrities, or your government representatives make an announcement (ugh, I still hate that): well, you need a profile for us to monetize.

Just the fact that you can't share tweets (or Instagram posts/reels) on most platforms and have the preview show you anything has a massive effect on people just not bothering with sharing stuff.

I'm not clicking a link without a preview, why would I?

For me the sentiment is even stronger, further amplified by the presence of AI. Big reason why I started a personal blog around New year.

Thousand times yes! I am always completely confused why a smart person that should know better would make a 35-tweet thread instead of just writing a blog post. There are about a hundred advantages for the latter and not a single one for the former I can see. Of course you can use thread unrollers etc. but why make things broken and use special tools to fix it if you can just do it the right way? Opening a blog on any modern platform takes like 5 minutes, and unless you're planning to make business out of it, it matters not which one, any would do.

People like Twitter threads because they’re great for engagement. The author says it’s bad that someone can retweet some random tweet in the middle of your thread without context - but what if that’s actually… good? Not necessarily for the people reading it, and definitely not for our societal discourse, but it absolutely will get people to click. Same reason every long YouTube video starts with a flash-forward “coming up” clip now.

People can rant all they want about the way information is presented these days, but we’ve come to do things this way because it works.

>it’s bad that someone can retweet some random tweet in the middle of your thread without context - but what if that’s actually… good?

Depends on your lens. If you're reading on twitter it's a nightmare (and is why I never really got into twitter). If you are just focused on engagement it probably doesn't matter. I only accepted how twitter works in my head when I realized it's just like its namesake: a bunch of birds all cheeping in a cacophony. Not necessarily to each other, just in a way to become known and try to stand out.

>Same reason every long YouTube video starts with a flash-forward “coming up” clip now

Not really a fan of those either. If it's <10 minutes, I'm going to see it soon, if it's more than like, 30 minutes, then the en media RES better strongly resonate with the thesis, otherwise it's just a strange proprechy I'll forget long before it comes true.

>People can rant all they want about the way information is presented these days, but we’ve come to do things this way because it works.

We do it this way because coporate billionaires shoved ads down everyone's throats to pretend it works. I've never heard anyone say Twitter is efficient, not even in its heyday. Twitter wasn't meant to be this facade of a forum/community center, it was meant to emulate a tickerboard you see on the side.

But as I've seen from 3 decades of Javascript, people will in fact hammer a square peg into a circle hole rather than migrate to the actual square hole. As is, we do things this way because we're selfish and all want to be noticed. And Twitter has a lot of eyeballs.

Using long threads is an abuse of Twitter format. While people do that? Well, because some of them have a large enough audience there. So, better to use a suboptimal solution than not being read. Yet, I think it is both bad for reading (even in the Thread wrapper), for public access (Twitter changed to X, and who knows what will be available only after logging in or disappear forever), and generally for preserving quality content.

So I really, really recommend self-archiving and having a working copy (I admit, I am biased here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43137616). With current LLMs, asking it to edit it for a blog post is easy. I mean, it's not even rewriting, just a minimal edit, so it works as a separate blog post. You can link both ways to get the best of both worlds.

Again, posting is easy. If you like tinkering, there are many great static site generators. If not, Substack looks like the way to go as of 2025.

Also, I often hesitated to post otherwise outstanding content here on the HN, as it was a chaotic mess. Should I post to the core tweet (which is unclear without the context) or to the root one (which does not yet indicate that the content is worth reading)?

> who knows what will be available only after logging

Nothing from Xitter is visible to not registered people, only the top post. Media from the top post is only visible in previews. Lately I don't even bother using xcancel to read linked threads, I just consider xitter a black information hole and never interact with the site, regardless of the supposed quality of the post or the author.

And if you're logged in and not paying, you're still only allowed to read a few pages before it tells you to pay or come back tomorrow.

I don't think people use suboptimal tools provided by social media simply because they "have a large enough audience there".

I think they start doing it mainly because it's their best shot to get a large audience anywhere.

The kind of archival you describe is tedious for anyone not skilled enough to set up an appropriate automation, and getting audiences to move en masse is also hard.

But established people will still do those 20-tweet "articles" instead of linking to a proper blog post. It cuts both ways. You get a large audience easiest on popular platforms, and you keep them by posting on popular platform.

I was trying to get at that with "getting audiences to move en masse is also hard", but thanks for making it explicit.

I too think that the idealized solution is to post the first tidbit to twitter followed with a link to the rest.

The problem is most of the web is trash. And a link might be stupidly slow to open, and then require the user to click away cookie banners, sign up forms and ads before getting to the content.

This is a problem on HN as well and imho why so many comments without reading the article.

There’s a few more mechanics specific to twitter threads. The format pushes the author to end every paragraph with a hook for engaging the reader to read the next. And the format also baits the reader to continue because “it’s just one more tweet”

As to what to post to HN, write a short blog post about the exchange. Summarizes the context, link and quote the core, sprinkle a bit of opinion and save everyone on HN a click to twitter

> The problem is most of the web is trash. And a link might be stupidly slow to open, and then require the user to click away cookie banners, sign up forms and ads before getting to the content.

Same goes for Twitter link. If you are not logged-in (like most people are not). You meet nag-ware just after it loads - if it loads at all.

Also Twitter specifically penalizes outside link posts, so if you do this you have to put the link in the second comment in the thread.

>The problem is most of the web is trash

no no no. The web is great, and despite my numerous complaints, the base web framework of HTML/CSS/JS is more than fast enough for web.

Corporate chose to make it trash because they care nothing for optimization nor decent-mindedness. Even on template blogs you may have defaults jammed with trackers, ads, invasive cookies, and just plain bad code. As well as locking content behind account servers.

Those are all man-made problems. That may be another reason why many hackers want a metaphorical "return to form" of web 1.0, before all this junk ruined the free web. Some of those marketing tools can still be put in, but they absolutely cannot bloat the load times by 10,000x+. If you gonna make hooks, make them as subtle as possible.

I think I commented something similar when this was last posted.

Blogging is better in so many ways, and if you have built up a community of people who visit your blog and engage with it, it can be very fulfilling and fun. Even without an audience it can still be fun.

But what the author seems to miss is that people like doing things where their community is. When I used to use Twitter regularly, I loved posting stuff there as I had friends (both real world and online) who I knew would engage and talk to me there. It felt like being in a busy pub where I could chat to loads of different people, and while sometimes something I shared would get no traction, other times we could chat for days.

That is why I posted things there, not because blogging is beyond me, but the effort to build an manage a community of your own is so much harder, than piggybacking on a social network.

----

Actually it seems my point was a little different last time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28945797 - I still agree with it though (though I have totally bailed on Twitter now as it is terrible.

"It felt like being in a busy pub where I could chat to loads of different people"

This is one of the best descriptions of how social media feels (when it's at its best, anyway) that I've seen

The only issue I have with the Pub of Twitter analogy is that the Pub also has 24/7 CCTV recording all conversations not whispered (DMs).

And if someone doesn't like you, they can - free of charge - go through years and years of that CCTV material to find something you said and take it out of context to use it against you.

Case in point: James Gunn. He was on Twitter in its infancy, before it was mainstream, and did some typically edgy humour for an indie horror director that was ok-ish at the time. Then a decade later some right-wing people didn't like him and they dug through his old stuff and blasted it out, resulting him from getting suspended/fired from Disney.

When I was on Twitter I had a 6 month auto delete running on all my tweets just because of that. Me 5 years ago isn't me of today and today me doesn't want to suffer from brain farts 5 years ago me had in public.

Very true - you are right, I far far prefer the real world pub.

Today this simplifies to: Forget Twitter.

Is there a blog i can host at github with a mobile app (or PWA) that lets me draft posts offline? Ideally an app that doesn't require a pricy IAP or subscription.

If you use GitHub Pages, you can then use the built-in local VS Code (“github.dev editor”, which is separate from Codespaces) to create and edit posts. I wrote about it here: https://anderegg.ca/2024/10/16/using-github-as-a-cms

I ended up using this on my iPad for the posts I wrote over the Christmas break.

Since Elon took over Twitter, you can't even see a Twitter thread unless you create an account.

So if you use Twitter threads I, and many others, can no longer read it.

I'm pretty sure if you use thread unroller, it'd still work. Just feed it the url of the first post of the thread and it'll make it readable. It doesn't require any login so it won't be relevant whether you have an account.

Sure, but that's an awful user experience. If you've got something useful, and long-form to say a _micro_blogging platform might not be the best place.

Totally agree, just saying if it's already there and you want to read it anyway, there are ways without making an account. Putting it on the blog would be better, ideally.

Twitter threads are something that people have been doing since forever and it's crazy to me that the platform in all these years has not made it simpler to make them or easier to navigate them.

It's one of the few cases where a platform knows with absolute certainty that its userbase is expressing a certain behavior but they do nothing to encourage it.

As with all services, it comes down to "engagement".

If there's a single long post, people only argue under that post.

But if your long idea is split into 10-20 tweets, you can have a different argument under every tweet, and every tweet under that can again have another thread of arguments.

Resulting in: engagement.

Twitter is not, and has never been, a platform for discussion. It's either for shouting your stuff into the universe or arguing.

I think it’s better to write primary information on a blog and share the link on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook to retain ownership of the content instead of giving it to them.

Twitter also supports blog posts nowadays, but you need a premium account

I imagine that the average writer will simply pay for X premium instead of going through the trouble of setting up a blog.

There are platforms like Substack where it's easier to set up a blog, but X makes it easier to build an audience as well.

I currently write on my personal blog, but I have to spend time syndicating my posts to other platforms in order to get any visibility. I'm thinking about moving the whole thing to Substack or just use X premium because I can't be bothered to go though that every time I post something.

> I imagine that the average writer will simply pay for X premium instead of going through the trouble of setting up a blog.

Everyone can see your blog. People who don't have a Twitter account will either get an error message, get redirected to your profile, or will get the first post only, on Twitter, depending on phase of moon. Unless you're catering exclusively to an audience of Twitter users it's a pretty horrendous user experience.

I agree. But on X, at least people will see and read your post. On your blog, you have to wait for it to show up on Google, or you have to find a way to drive traffic before anyone see it. I have a few posts on my blog that received 0 visits after months of being online.

I 100% agree with this, and much prefer reading blog content than micro-blogging threads (regardless of platform). I no longer read anything anyone links to on Twitter, since it now requires a login to see replies to tweets. Whenever I see a link to a Mastodon instance or to Bluesky, I sigh, but usually still click through if it sounds interesting.

But at the same time, I get it. Setting up a blog may not be hard, but it's still more work than starting a Twitter thread. And there are some people who have claimed they just don't have the attention span to write a blog post, so if they were forced to do that (instead of form their thoughts as a series of tweets), they just wouldn't write at all. I think that (if true) is a bit sad, but it is what it is, and I have a lot of respect for people who find something that works (for them), rather than continuously banging their head against something that doesn't, just because it's "the right way to do things".

Nowadays, though, considering the direction Twitter has gone in, I frankly find it a little gross that left-leaning people still use it.

I mean, threads can be awkward discussion mediums, but what’s democratizing about them is that they can atomize engagement. If every tweet is a roll of the dice, it raises your odds of reaching an audience when you have a bunch of them. And if you hook someone with just one, odds are that user will be super-engaged by the end.

It’s also worth noting that social networks like Twitter tend to discourage just sharing links, whereas a thread that sucks someone in REALLY engages them. It’s interesting that he chose to cite Doctorow here, who is probably one of the more aggressive thread-sharers around. On Mastodon, where he still does it, it can clearly feel like a lot, especially given that there’s no algorithm.

On Bluesky, threads are honestly a little less effective because links are not downranked. But the downside is that people may never click the link, leading to context collapse. Some of that is on you, the creator, to set the expectation. Some of that is on the end user. But the algorithm (yes, Bluesky has one) can make it hard for you personally to set that tone.

As a blogger/newsletter guy with a decent-sized audience, I tend to favor Kev’s stance. But I think you have to consider what social networks are doing—and how much it reshapes/misshapes what you create. I don’t post on Threads because I find its algorithm too aggressive and believe it harms context (and it also discourages linking). But Bluesky and Mastodon are pretty good at avoiding that issue.

In other words, I see it both ways.

You can write blog posts on Twitter. You couldn’t do it before, but now you can.

I find that feature very annoying. I don’t like long form text interspersed with micro-blog posts/disussion.

Needed feature (partially why they acquired Revue) but implementation was botched. Also now many individual tweets in a thread are too long and expanding and scrolling through them is busted UX as well.

You can, but it feels like running Doom on a pager - you're probably not getting the best experience and the tool isn't meant for giving you one.

Here's the link to the blog post from that twitter thread: https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/16/sociopathic-monsters/

So, really, this is a case of writing a blog post and cross posting it to twitter.

(now there are obviously other writers who don't do this, but Doctorow always does)

Imagine if using a fedi service instead that allows like 10 000 characters or more

Pleroma's default is 5000, and there's also WriteFreely (allegedly).

RSRSSS

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]