Comment by mrkramer
1 year ago
>A personal site is a lonely place. That's why blogs, after an initial burst of creative energy, languish. People nowadays seeking online to fulfil their social inclinations go elsewhere, to the platforms better optimised to harness that social energy.
A personal site or blog might be a lonely place in the early days but then came comments section and people started discussing your articles but then came the question of persistence of your profile and I think Disqus is a pretty good web commenting solution to that regard.
The biggest problem of big social platforms is content discovery; there is so much content out there that you can not find the content that suits you the best. That's why you see "Discover" feature in every app because they became aware of that problem. That's also why TikTok took off so wildly because they glued together short attention content (short videos) with powerful recommendation system.
Like somebody already said, web and social platforms push only new content to you, they are sort of like TVs but there is vast amount of content and websites that are never discovered and visited because the right incentives aren't there to show you old content and old websites.
The advent of commenting did mitigate the lonesomeness of independent blogging. Then social media sapped away much of that social energy, returning blogging to its natural state of solitude. Bloggers can try to nurture community, but it's a hard task. Maybe the advent of reader-funded blogging will re-energise the practice. I hope it will.
Disqus seems good on paper. Seems something like Disqus is in a position to facilitate content discovery: it has ads so it could also add related or recommended links to other stuff in the ecosystem.
>The advent of commenting did mitigate the lonesomeness of independent blogging. Then social media sapped away much of that social energy, returning blogging to its natural state of solitude. Bloggers can try to nurture community, but it's a hard task. Maybe the advent of reader-funded blogging will re-energise the practice. I hope it will.
Web blogging was fragmented across independent web sites, Blogger and walled gardens like Tumblr, Medium and Twitter and it couldn't thrive on all of them and at the end it didn't thrive on any of them. The best solution is open web and that is independent web sites. Open web provides you freedom to customize whatever you want and you can play with Atom, RSS, comments section etc. Some people are not tech savvy enough to blog but Blogger seems like a good solution because it is easy to use and it is open but unfortunately Google didn't invest in it for years and will probably shut it down sooner or later.
I am pro open web. I like the remix-ability of its tools. But walled gardens are easier to use, as they've invested in design, and designed for non-power-users. Open web enjoyers need to build better tools, and/or accept that it's going to be a smaller domain of the tech-savvy, or try to raise the technical abilities of the general public (perhaps via better tools?).