TL;DR: We should bring blogs (self-publishing) back instead of putting all our knowledge into other people’s websites.
For years, people have posted their anecdotal or technical useful information on reddit because it was the most popular centralised but community-based website. So much that, this created the “<search query> + reddit” phenomenon.
We shouldn’t have put all of our eggs in one basket: with the slow and painful downfall of the centralised network, we suddenly realised that most of our cumulative knowledge has been hosted on someone else’s website of which owners don’t give a damn about its users.
reddit is a link aggregator, it was meant to be used to discover other websites but it time, it turned into the website. This was a massive problem. Now that we’ve got the threadiverse, it makes me worry that we’ll repeat the same mistake all over again.
Normally, I would’ve posted this on my blog and link it here but for years we’ve gotten accustomed to not “self-promote”. This behaviour caused all traffic and engagement to stay in one place. There was nothing wrong with self-publishing; we left, spammers stayed.
Yes, there will always be that person with a bloated Wordpress blog with articles that sound like it was written by AI but, honestly, it’s easy to block a domain, we’ve got the tools. We can fight off the spam and find gems on the internet.
The threadiverse is a beautiful thing, but accessing information shouldn’t depend on it. Thanks for reading my blog post.
We could also bring back the old Webring concept for discoverability. Might even be able to decentralize and federate that bit.
Yeah, if something like a combination of a webring/blogroll with actually good UX (I don’t like the “which random website will I get plopped down on next?” aspect) could emerge, that would be cool.