[rhacker]

Get out of the software development blogging bubble. Spend 3 minutes looking at each of the following: Look at woodworking blogs, recipe blogs, gardening blogs.

One thing you'll note is that those are all filled with a shit fuck ton of ads and are completely unusable.

I know this because my wife wades through that stuff and the only way she can is by using a blocker. I don't use a blocker because very few of the software specific websites I visit have ads (generally).

Recipe blogs are the worst - here's a sample from pinch of yum:

https://imgur.com/A4e53R5

[Spivak]

I would hesitate to call recipe blogs "blogs." They're ad farms with good SEO and the thinnest veneer of content to get clicks.

There are actual cooking and baking blogs of the quality you see in software where professionals or hobbyists talk about their craft but they won't show up on Google with terms like "$food_name recipe" and it doesn't really make sense for them to. Cooking blogs are for cooking nerds -- people who have notebooks and scrap books full of recipe clippings from old magazines and cake boxes and a shelf of random dog-eared culinary textbooks and recipe anthologies that could knock a person out if you got hit with them. These blogs are full of crappy unflattering photography, zero web design skills, okay-ish writing, and cult-like followings.

[watwut]

It would actually made sense of them to show up. What google chooses to show does not make sense to show up. When it comes to cooking, google is just horribly bad.

[Finnucane]

Is there a "Hacker News" equivalent for cooking/foodie blogs? If not, there probably could be.

[tekknolagi]

Sure there is. There's a super well-frequented bread forum that is kind of like HN. Experience reports, recipe recommendations, etc.

[saagarjha]

You can't say that it exists and not share the name of it!

[tekknolagi]

Ah sorry. It's the fresh loaf.

[markdown]

breadit

[qznc]

There is a subreddit for everything they say.

[munchbunny]

Do you have any examples of good cooking and baking blogs? I've been looking, but as you say, SEO is a problem for organic discovery for me.

[ghaff]

There are tons.

Food52

SpruceEats

Tiny Urban Kitchen

Serious Eats

A lot depends on your food and style preferences.

[erikbye]

As mentioned, not by me, elsewere in this thread, people seem to have trouble separating businesses from the kinds of blogs that are sorely missed. They were not the kind that tried to sell you anything.

I only checked two of these, Food52 and Serious Eats, these are businesses, not personal, quirky blogs. I am 100% sure that these are not the kind author of "If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs" miss. And if the author of "Blogging Is Not Dead," think so, he too, has misunderstood.

I guess many, especially the younger crowd, is now just so inundated by these types of websites that they have no idea what we are talking about.

[shadowprofile77]

And every single one of these has regularly appeared for me on page one google searches when I look up something like "Recipe for X" or "Best X recipe" So maybe Google search hasn't quite yet been completely murdered by SEO for garbage as some of the comments here claim.

[mr_tristan]

Unfortunately, blogs == spam in a lot of the non-technical world.

The /r/woodworking subreddit used to have a strict "no blogs" rule that finally got relaxed to just be more "no blog spam".

I noticed similar problems in Pinterest, where you'll find pins that have beautiful images but lead to spam garbage. So, there might have been a page that was initially hosting the image (probably copied from somewhere else), but then, it gets swapped out with an advertising garbage site. And the pin goes up in popularity because most users just don't care about the backing site.

The wider the potential audience, the bigger the potential for spam. And it sure doesn't seem like there's a great, consistent way to filter spam. Search engines do not appear to have kept pace since the rise of walled garden social networks.

At this point, I would pay for curated, interesting updates. It's just hard to see how a product like that would easy to find these days.

[hombre_fatal]

That's a weird double standard.

People say they miss blogs of yesteryear (like in the HN submission in TFA) as if they don't still exist. And then people hold up made-for-ads spamsites, like you, and go "see? blogs are dead!"

Why not use the same standard of yesteryear and find some good blogs.

My thoughts on this topic is that everyone who says they miss blogs just stopped looking for them. Our internet usage patterns have changed. Blogs still exist but we just stay in our Reddit/HN bubble and assume it's just wasteland outside of it. It's a silly mistake and something you see HNers condescendingly accusing the masses of, thinking the internet=Facebook.

[elliekelly]

> Our internet usage patterns have changed. Blogs still exist but we just stay in our Reddit/HN bubble and assume it's just wasteland outside of it.

I agree, but I also... don’t really know how to look for them anymore? Which I know sounds silly. Thinking back to some of my favorite blogs that I read in the early 2000s I found them via IRL word of mouth, Asking Jeeves random stuff, links from message boards, and interesting bloggers commenting on blogs I read.

Other than HN and some niche subreddits I guess I don’t really know how to find cool/unique content on the internet that someone hasn’t paid for me to stumble across. I periodically ask interesting people here if they have a blog but the answer is usually no. Maybe hnblogs.ycombinator.com is in the five year plan? As soon as someone figures out how to clone dang...

[DJHenk]

A good way is to pay attention to where the linked articles on HN/Reddit are published. A few months ago, I made a habit of searching for an RSS feed whenever I read an article that I liked. Searching is the right word here, usually I have do View Source and search for 'rss' or 'atom'. If there is a link, I'll add it to my reader. Sometimes the feed link is not present on every page of the site.

It will be a slow start, because the more interesting and personal blogs don't update daily. It takes time to write a good article and the good ones also wait until they have something interesting to write an article about. But over a couple of months, I already have over 70 feeds in there and now opening the reader to see what is new is a fun activity.

Pro-tip: it is hidden well, but one can also follow Youtube users and channels with RSS and avoid the spammy front page.

[taejo]

I'm curious what reader you use. I almost never have to do the searching you describe, I just paste the main URL into my reader app (The Old Reader, https://theoldreader.com) and let it find the feed.

[chc]

I use recipe blogs all the time. I'd guess it's just a matter of choosing the right ones, because they do have ads, but they're hardly unusable — they're better than, say, my local CBS affiliate.

[llbeansandrice]

Those aren't blogs, those are businesses. They have a lot more in common with other websites that use content as a motivator for ad revenue. More like awful news websites than just someone writing articles.

I guess it's semantics but I've never considered recipe "blogs" as anything near like rachelbythebay or other plain programming blogs.

[http-teapot]

These blogs recommend products where in reality it’s an ad in disguised. They recommend the products because they are paid to do so.