💾 Archived View for idiomdrottning.org › re-genuinely-useful captured on 2024-05-12 at 15:59:11. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

RE: Genuinely useful

First, yes, Marginalia is awesome.

Kevin at susa wrote:

I’ve kind of assumed that good content is still being written elsewhere, just that it’s difficult to find. But I wonder if that’s even true? I wonder if people just get sucked into platforms like Medium, get tempted by get-rich-quick bullshit and wander off into the land of shills?

This is true. The web is in a much worse place. This becomes even more apparent from Europe, because of GDPR. You go onto what seems like someones own personal homepage, like “these are my cozy recipes”, and you’re overwhelmed by a ton of cookies, tracking and JavaScript.

So where are people writing, these days? I do know of some places, some good, some bad.

Reddit (and similar sites like HN and Lobsters) is basically the new usenet. Except proprietary and centralized. RIP Tumblr, which sucks now.
Forums and boards, there still are a few, like Strat-Talk or the Piazza.
Like Kevin, I agree that Medium destroyed a lot of the world’s writing by wrapping the texts in layers of garbage. It’s extra frustrating since its original selling point was the veneer of faux minimalism.
Substack is pretty much the new Medium in that it hides a lot of stuff behind a paywall.
Blog sites like Blogspot, WordPress, and Write.as still has some gems. Rarer still are stand-alone Blosxom, Hugo, or Jekyll pages.
Of course, a lot of writing is still happening on Facebook, Twitter, and Insta. They killed a whole generation’s worth of Internet and that generation is still stuck in there.
And a lot of today’s writing isn’t presented as text at all, but as podcasts or video essays.
Saved the best for last. Wikipedia. Now, they have a “no original research”-policy which means you can’t put stuff in there that you figured out yourself. So if you know a lot of stuff, ask yourself one question: did this knowledge come from books, papers, journals, studies etc that you didn’t participate in yourself? If yes, Wikipedia might be the best place for it.