Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by nonrandomstring 706 days ago
Musicians and audio freaks have a similar ritual lament on how music went to shit; electric killed the blues, digital murdered analogue, nobody knows how to mix/master any more... Amidst such an old-man's cloud-jeering session someone said to me "You know they make more vinyl than ever, and it's better than it's ever been". So I checked, and they were right. I bet there's more great blogs than there's ever been. Discovering them? Sure.
1 comments
giantrobot 705 days ago
So many of those statements aren't really true. In no way is anyone "making more vinyl than ever". That's just absurd. Vinyl is currently seeing a resurgence as a collector item but is very very far from its peak unit sales in the 70s[0].

There's no really more blogs than ever either. There's a lot of content masquerading under the blog label trying to appear like organic grass roots content but it's really just content marketing astroturf. The web is lousy with SEO spam "blogs" with thousands of words whose only real purpose is to get you to see ads run on the site. There's a whole industries of assholes that write completely disingenuous content, as in completely fictional reviews/reports, using SEO spam to get eyes on advertisements or clicks on affiliate links.

Google does nothing about obvious SEO spam because they make money off of it. Since "everyone" uses Google all they see for any search is SEO spam content which has a decent chance of being entirely fictional. Just because a spammer uses WordPress doesn't mean their ad copy is a blog.

[0] https://www.statista.com/chart/7699/lp-sales-in-the-united-s...

link
nonrandomstring 705 days ago
Could be. That conversation was a decade ago when people trusted information online. As you say the most popular means of getting information are defective.

On the problem of critical information existing inside the dishonest systems and companies who have an interest in distortion I previously wrote:

  "With opportunities to fix our digital world from /within/ the system
  vanishing, book publishing remains a bastion of open intelligence.
  What you hold in your hands (or have as a non-DRM file) may soon be
  one of the few remaining means to circulate critical opinions that
  would quickly be censored online."
That's why I still write books intended to be printed and read as real-world paper objects. I don't think it's paranoid or over-stating things to say there's more to the "disappearance" of blogs than SEO and the old being buried by the new. There are understandable reasons why Google, Facebook and other surveillance rackets - giant social engineering scams at enormous scale - want to suppress authentic speech. Burying it in a tide of noise may be tactical, not some unfortunate side effect.
link