[pddpro]

Maybe someone somewhere will come up with a NLP based solution which will cluster people with similar ideas (by means of their blogs) so that you may find people who share your interests within the cluster or explore other idea clusters. Would be a great way of making friends if nothing else.

[lumenwrites]

I think that subreddits work extremely well for finding people with similar interests, they're basically the perfect tool for that. Discord servers too. If anything, the issue is that they're too good, so I get addicted, and have to force myself to stop.

There could be some kind of solution, based on NLP, or maybe even just finding patterns and clusters in links. But it'd suffer from the same problem subreddits and google do - instantly getting hijacked by the spammers and SEO people trying to promote their stuff.

To the degree that having a popular blog is valuable, people will be motivated to find ways to promote it. And when people want to promote stuff, they'll try game whatever system is available. And so the system will have to implement the anti-spam measures, leading to moderation and probably banning most of the blogs.

Hmm... Maybe that's why we ended up with HN comments and subreddit text-posts working so well. Yes, you can't get the "networking" value out of them (because nobody cares about your username, and there's no such thing as subscribers), but it's not a bug, but a feature - without the personal value there's no incentive to game the system, so you just have people posting for the sake of the conversation.

But that would also mean that becoming even a "micro" celebrity will always be at least somewhat difficult - to the extent that it's valuable, there will be people trying to game the system, and measures trying to stop that, and competition.

[rhizome]

I think this could be achieved by indexing only tags on blog posts. Aside from having to groom the tag corpus (maintaining sets of synonyms would probably be a big part), this would seem to be a fairly pain-free way of deriving some of these associations. It could be extended into "hmm, what other things are the people I share this with also interested in," which happens to be just about where I think the entire field of recommendation engine research should have ended. But I digress.

Yes, you would have to use tags to participate if you weren't already, but that just makes it opt-in.