I'm still around.. I'm just not writing here
78 points by jcd
78 points by jcd
Another sign of the times? Anyone likewise keeping an offline log, or sharing with a closed group instead of blogging?
I miss forums.
I keep a vanity site, currently with nothing on it. I have some things that I would like to have there, but the work of writing it is an ordeal, half the time what I want to write is a half-baked idea, and I don't know where I would end up. In forum days I would have started writing, and a conversation would hopefully have started, and things would have gone from there.
The new pattern of link-sharing sites (reddit, hacker news, lobsters) requires you to prepare the material beforehand (to a higher threshold of completion) and then share it. I guess I would have to like the writing work for its own sake. In the case of lobsters, there's the additional nail of the no-self-promotion-rule, which requires one to accumulate a readership who would need to be suitably impressed to share it. So it's a much longer path if the writing is some sort of social expression.
On the other hand, I'm a member of a forum for one of my hobbies, it's slow moving because of the niche-ness of the hobby not counting that a lot of people probably only go to reddit, but I don't really post in that forum either.
I guess I miss the old times including the old me that would participate in forums.
You’re posting on a forum right now.
No, we're a link aggregator. With the exception of the rare meta text post, all discussion has to be anchored to a particular link.
One of the main goals of a link aggregator is to show you the best-performing new links, instead of keeping the same stories on the front page forever. The flip side of that is that the lifetime of each thread is short. Compare this to old-school forums, with threads shown in bump order. Link aggregators (including reddit) just aren't suitable for long-term discussion.
Strictly speaking yes, but I see what OP means.
In "classical" forums threads sometimes went on for years, had no points system / algorithm (some had "reputation", but that's more a vanity thing than something that affects threads) and threads were primarily self-posts (something Lobste.rs for example heavily discourages, except for the once in a blue moon ask threads).
Besides a couple outliers that somehow remained, Reddit's convenience of needing only one account to access an arbitrary amount of subforums, combined with its algorithm always showing interesting things basically killed this whole genre. Which is a pity, because what convenience we gained was paid for in many communities simply dying and being replaced with "a bunch of people with the same interest".
what convenience we gained was paid for in
Feels like this is the theme of the age, the stark coming due of the debt we have paid for all this convenience.
I don’t think you’re discouraged from writing your post in the text box here at all. You are discouraged from using lobsters as seo without engaging with the community.
I would love a lobste.rs-offshoot forum so much. A place for slower, longer, more general discussions, but with a roughly similar community. I think the two could complement each other well.
I get the urge to write some forum software from time to time (I have some Opinions there), but I also feel like I'd be a horrible fit for actually running one. But hey, if someone reading this is bold enough to think they have the chops to run a community... :)
I do still blog online. Probably would share the author's views if what I wrote had more of an educational slant than it does though. There isn't that much to actually extract from what I write.
I think online life in almost any way you participate is very taxing right now, for a plethora of reasons.
The web of 2026 is an irredeemable shit-tornado of astroturfing bot accounts, state sponsored psy-ops, and mentally ill people who have spent too much time exposed to the former two (likely the cause of, if not a severely exacerbating factor in their mental illness).
Dipping out is probably the sane choice. The less time I spend online the more I appreciate the peace of mind you can find if you're not having ten gallons of industrial strength clown juice injected directly into the amygdala every day. It is kind of amazing. Voltaire was really onto something with his gardening advice.
The communities that you used to be able to find online that largely made it worth while are mostly just not there anymore. Like you used to be able to find really knowledgeable people with interesting things to say, or people who had spent a lot of time working on something that you could ask questions and they'd share their unique insights. Those types of people mostly seem to have dipped.
I think it was ~ploum that shared a meme on mastodon a while back contrasting people of the '90s going online to escape offline reality, with people of the '20s going offline to escape online reality. It do be like that sometimes.
Anyone likewise keeping an offline log
Almost all my notes are on paper (more than a thousand pages between notebooks since 2006), but I have a lot of computerized notes as well.
I only post a small number of things I write. My primary purpose of writing is to clarify my own thoughts.
Anyone likewise keeping an offline log, or sharing with a closed group instead of blogging?
That is a very interested idea. By log do you just mean taking handwritten notes? What would you share with your closed group?
I see escape in primitive non-commercial spaces fueled by enthusiasm: gopher, reticulum, fido-net.
I’ve been thinking of making sneakerweb things paired with (and distributed by) physical editions.
I'm bothered by this as well, but I'm still blogging. To stop would feel too dehumanizing. I write to share my passion and ideas, and that hasn't changed.
I block AI crawlers on my own site using the ai.txt spec. It looks like rachelbythebay blocks anyone who accesses that path, so I'm now blocked too :(
Her site is set up with some pretty aggressive blocking.
Misbehaving feed readers is one thing she cares about and has written about in the past. I looked at her feed in the wrong way and got what I presume to be a 24-hour block on my IP address.
When I was writing a custom RSS feed reader by hand a few months ago, I didn't pay enough attention to caching at first and got blocked by a few sites. :(
I'm torn between producing a new version of my blog and actually using Patreon to paywall my opinions... like, a website should just be advertising for monetizing myself; since the LLMs are DDoS-ing the internet to death, my personal site should be more lightweight.
The trajectory of the open web from pioneering, to excitement, to popularity, and then intense decline in just three decades is such a painful thing to experience. Imagine if the same abuse happened to other infrastructure, like a road or the power grid. Imagine if the same abuse happened to other cultural heritage, like paintings or architecture.
I care less about the wrong people reading my stuff than affordably maintaining the trustworthy infrastructure to do what I please. So I moved to static files on shared webspace under my authority, as blogged about at https://blog.mro.name/2024/10/scaling-infrastructure/. I block bots where I can.
This was true before the bots came and holds to this day IMO.
I share the feelings expressed in the article, but I still blog. Writing is an important part of my own learning process that I do not want to give up. The "assholes of Open Source" and the "assholes of Free Software" will not take that away from me.
Way back in 2018, I wrote about the notion of people having private/secret repositories where they worked on things without sharing
This also resonates with me. I have a bunch of open source projects, all started before LLMs. For now I continue to maintain them, but I haven't released any new projects in a few years. Looking at this you may think that I have stopped writing software, but that is not what happened. I actually continued to create stuff, but I really see no point in putting these projects on public repos, because the "assholes" can get much more annoying when you publish a piece of software than when you write a blog. It's sad to be sitting on a bunch of things that only have myself as user.
First I thought that reducing FOSS to a chance of assholes was probably too extreme, even if it all depends on what you're working on.
But then, in current context of Claude Code enabled people, I totally understand and I have to agree. I got a bad experience recently and I'm considering seriously if there's any point in sharing anything I do.
I can't access the site from any of my fat browsers. Archives are also barren. But it works in NetNewsWire. Oh well.
I was around at the beginning of the World Wide Web and seeing this from someone who I’ve followed over the years, and who has influenced me as a technical person, is incredibly sad.
The worst part is that I agree with her 100%.