Content is King? - How it sucked out the joy of personal websites
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Content is King?; I was wrong about it
https://jeena.net/content-is-king
https://jeena.net/content-is-king
It would be fun to bring back web rings. Alliances of websites that promoted similar content.
Those were the really fun days of the internet.
When surfing the web was actually an adventure and you'd actually discover things.
Not that I could ever go back to dial up speeds, but damn those days were fun.
That's why I loved StumbleUpon when it first came out. I discovered so many cool niche things that way.
StumbleUpon was my jam. I could procrastinate my homework for HOURS with that toolbar!
The temptation to explore felt real. Not like clickbait.
It was that wonderful time on the internet where you got the chance to enrich your knowledge without having an algorithm force stuff on you because it thinks it knows what you like.
I love being surprised and love learning new things. The algorithms, AI, and SEO have stripped all of that curiosity and discovery away.
StumbleUpon was incredible. I actually engaged with the larger internet, rather than mostly sticking to the kiddy pool of comment sections. It's actually where I met my longtime partner, and now very good friend, so it had "real world" implications for me as well
I love being surprised and love learning new things. The algorithms, AI, and SEO have stripped all of that curiosity and discovery away.
I feel this as well. Everything I see or read now is accompanied by the slight suspicion that I'm reading fake content. Like is this picture or article something that another human put time and effort into, because they were trying to communicate something, or is it just generated based on what will garner eyeballs?
I'm having this internal debate as well.
I run a blog. I write content and I'm surprised at what gets visits. But I also don't care about popularity. It's a place where I can relay information.
My friends have YouTube/twitch. They're extremely popular, in the 100k+ range. They all quit their job (I did not). But they're so incredibly involved in every single "drama" that every talk about coding with them ends up being about how x-person on Twitter is a jerk or how to game the system.
Seems exhausting, and I wonder if it's worth it.
Same here. At this point I've effectively become an internet 'hermit' and avoid social media. Sometimes I'd even avoid Youtube because of how overstimulating the content are. I don't know how useful this will be for my wellbeing though, since I don't even 'touch grass' either. And yes, I'm autistic so the current state of the web is borderline intolerable for me.
Good for you, I'd consider my online "diet" to be the same, although I do count lemmy and masto etc as social media, just not quite so pernicious as the mainstream corpo ones
I still like to make video content, so I post it on my self hosted PeerTube instance instead: http://tube.jeena.net
That way I'm far awaybfrom fame but also drama ^^
My friends have YouTube/twitch. They’re extremely popular, in the 100k+ range. They all quit their job
That's surprising to me. Are 100k+ really enough to make a living?
On youtube barely, on twitch for sure. Generally you would have more income streams like a patreon and some such. Maybe even merch. If you're doing it all solo, you can easily earn 4-5k per month with these numbers and that's often better than many full time jobs.
Im definitely fudging the numbers. They probably have more in other places and use all sorts of other social media platforms. And I don't really bother to verify since I start to tune them out when they go into "getting more traffic by optimizing TikTok shorts" or whatever.
Username checks out.
I'm kidding, it can be good to have friends who aren't the same as you. But seriously that sounds so TIRING. Like omfg just get a job at that point, so you can at least forget about it when you aren't working.
When I came back from winter holidays to my job I didn't remember ANYTHING. It was glorious
How do you count your visits? I don't even see whether mine has visits or not lol. I am not even sure if counting people would count as "tracking", so I am not sure whether it's acceptable in my books. The only feedback I got were a couple of emails.
I set up Google analytics on it years ago and only check for visits. Ive been meaning to switch to an open-source alternative but I'm extremely lazy on that end, since I'm not interested in monetizing.
Just turn it off. If this isn't a business then you don't need it. Free yourself :)
I remember having something parsing the apache logs and counting people. At some point I'd look at the stats several times a day ruining all the fun. I uninstalled it and now only write for myself. Couldn't be happier about it!
On that point, great article by the way! I shared it with my partner and we've been talking about it this morning. She's in comms, so for her social media has had all the joy sucked out of it long ago, and not it's just a tool.
For me the internet was a big part of my socialisation, so I miss the old, more fragmented, internet much more.
I found this search engine that helps find non commercial sites. www.marginalia.nu
Might be useful for finding those kind of sites again.
Intersting, I searched for myself and didn't find myself but other people related to the Indieweb community mentioning me there.
You can add yourself for the next crawl via a pull request on GitHub, or simply mail the developer, and he will add you.
I love this search engine. I've already found several new sites that I never knew I needed in my life.
When I've got some time to kill, I like to browse kagi.com/smallweb/ occasionally. It's sort of a curated random list of personal blog posts.
That's pretty cool. I've recently started a little blog thing myself too. It's pretty shit but I think I'm getting the hang of it. Looking at other blogs certainly help as well.
Blog: https://liluzibird.github.io
Rss feed: https://liluzibird.github.io/index.xml
Edit: hmm my rss feed is cut off for some reason. Might need to find a way to fix that.
Interesting posts you have there I also have also tired github.io pages (https://jackdavies.github.io) I've had it rattling around for a while post to it now and again. I want to use it more (still learning how to use its quite basic and probably broken in places) I've got some more projects/posts I want to put on it but currently updating the whole thing to separate posts/projects and improve the overall look and feel. Often struggle with time and motivation to work on it though
I'll definitely follow up with yours as well. Us small time bloggers need to keep it tight. Do you have an rss link for your blog?
Edit: ahh found it, it's at the bottom.
Thanks. It's a shame personal blogs are dieing off, although I have seen a bit if a resurgence of them since github io pages have been a thing. I have also found that people use mastodon a lot to microblog/provide updates to new posts on their personal sites so there is hope I'VE updated the RSS link so it's at the top as well so its easier to find
For some reason, my rss feed cuts off and I'm having issues trying to make it put out my full blog.
That's strange, are you using Hugo to generate the site? I am currently using jekyll, it seems to put the full post into RSS content field and the summary text used on the home page in the RSS summary field. I have tried Hugo in the past and might switch to it, haven't tested its RSS generation though
Yes I'm using a cool template I found. I didn't want to spend any more time than I already did as I just wanted to jump straight in snd start blogging.
I read about your home partition troubles. I ran in to that recently as well. Similarly I thought I would quickly try stable diffusion. Ended up not being as quick as I had hoped. I had to boot gparted and resize root and home. I had done that before at some point; but I keep forgetting how to do things. I was unsure if it is safe to do that without the latest version of gparted, so to be safe I redownloaded it and updated my system as well. Of course I have some old Nvidia hardware that tend to make my upgrades painful, so that took not so little time too.
I'm not really sure why having a separate home partition is even beneficial to begin with. Next time I make an install, I might just go without that.
Came here to suggest exactly this. I've been really enjoying it. It's like a priority version of StumbleUpon from back in the day
Why not both? I love my site and always work to make it unique. But I also like to write and have “useful” content. Check this out to find more cool things on the IndieWeb https://shellsharks.com/indieweb#explore-the-indieweb
I’ve always considered that I make my personal site for me and write for my own knowledge management. So a lot of my writings are guides on how to do something so I won’t forget.
I’m also not a great writer so I don’t know if I would want the wider internet looking at my stuff
Yeah that's definitely how I approached my site to begin with. A. a place for me to write about stuff I personally want to remember and go back and look at. and B. a place where I could share information I have that I repeatedly tell others. Over time though, I found that people did indeed like to read what I had to say and found it useful. This is always a bit shocking for people who write, it's a great feeling to know others read your stuff haha. I think I'm an OK writer but I certainly have a unique-ish style. The world needs more indie writers with unique voices and styles. Too much of the Internet has become SEO farming trash and AI generated nonsense. Us "real", authentic humans have to take it back.
I absolutely agree on that last point. The web has become so SEO and algorithmically focused and that’s why I’m so all in on the fediverse to put power back into the hands of the people and not whoever can use an LLM to crank out content to exploit the algorithms