<story><title>Experimental blog that is only available to read through a feed reader</title><url>https://theunderground.blog/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bunderbunder</author><text>I recently stumbled across a neocities site where the author specifically called this factor out as a reason why she uses a 90s-style personal site instead of posting things to social media or Medium or whatever. She observed that she&amp;#x27;s grown tired of the modern Web&amp;#x27;s obsession with accumulating Whuffie (my choice of words, not hers), and thinks it&amp;#x27;s probably an emotional net negative. With a personal site, she feels freer to treat her Web presence as a personal project that she does purely for her own personal satisfaction. And, because of that, she gets more joy out of it. She specifically called out that she doesn&amp;#x27;t have any traffic counters because she feels she&amp;#x27;s better off not worrying about that.&lt;p&gt;For my part, I also enjoyed browsing her site more than I do modern blogs. It was a refreshing reminder of what the Internet was like back when spending hours browsing it was called &amp;quot;surfing&amp;quot;, and the term &amp;quot;doomscrolling&amp;quot; hadn&amp;#x27;t been invented yet. I&amp;#x27;m seriously considering creating my own Neocities site (or similar). If I do, I won&amp;#x27;t be worrying about engagement metrics, either.</text></item><item><author>kwhitefoot</author><text>Surely the biggest problem that most bloggers have is that no one reads what they write.  Doesn&amp;#x27;t this make it worse?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>giantrobot</author><text>I much prefer the &amp;quot;homepage&amp;quot; model over the &amp;quot;blog&amp;quot; model. A blog and the ecosystem around blogs has an implicit need for constant content. Blogs are typically displayed by feed readers sorted by time. If you don&amp;#x27;t post for some period of time your content will fall out of view. If blogging isn&amp;#x27;t your main interest it&amp;#x27;s fucking tiring.&lt;p&gt;A homepage can feel &lt;i&gt;finished&lt;/i&gt;. You build some pages around your interests and can stop. You don&amp;#x27;t need to be a &amp;quot;blogger&amp;quot;, you can just share your interests. A homepage doesn&amp;#x27;t even need tending. It can just be a self contained thing. You &lt;i&gt;can&lt;/i&gt; constantly update it but you don&amp;#x27;t need to.&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately Google punishes any content that wasn&amp;#x27;t published recently. In order to just be &lt;i&gt;found&lt;/i&gt; by most people you have to jump on the content generation treadmill. It&amp;#x27;s commendable when services like NeoCities bubble up existing content to new viewers. Same with Marginalia which does a good job finding content based on your search terms and not the fact it carries their ad network and claims to have been updated in the last nanosecond.</text></comment>
<story><title>Experimental blog that is only available to read through a feed reader</title><url>https://theunderground.blog/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bunderbunder</author><text>I recently stumbled across a neocities site where the author specifically called this factor out as a reason why she uses a 90s-style personal site instead of posting things to social media or Medium or whatever. She observed that she&amp;#x27;s grown tired of the modern Web&amp;#x27;s obsession with accumulating Whuffie (my choice of words, not hers), and thinks it&amp;#x27;s probably an emotional net negative. With a personal site, she feels freer to treat her Web presence as a personal project that she does purely for her own personal satisfaction. And, because of that, she gets more joy out of it. She specifically called out that she doesn&amp;#x27;t have any traffic counters because she feels she&amp;#x27;s better off not worrying about that.&lt;p&gt;For my part, I also enjoyed browsing her site more than I do modern blogs. It was a refreshing reminder of what the Internet was like back when spending hours browsing it was called &amp;quot;surfing&amp;quot;, and the term &amp;quot;doomscrolling&amp;quot; hadn&amp;#x27;t been invented yet. I&amp;#x27;m seriously considering creating my own Neocities site (or similar). If I do, I won&amp;#x27;t be worrying about engagement metrics, either.</text></item><item><author>kwhitefoot</author><text>Surely the biggest problem that most bloggers have is that no one reads what they write.  Doesn&amp;#x27;t this make it worse?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>khrbrt</author><text>&amp;quot;Whuffie&amp;quot; is a reference to the Cory Doctorow novel &lt;i&gt;Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom&lt;/i&gt;. It&amp;#x27;s set a post-scarcity society, Whuffie acts as a sort of currency and is earned from clout and social status. The protagonist goes from being wealthy in Whuffie to destitute and needs to earn his way back up.&lt;p&gt;I read it a long time ago as a weird story. Might be time for a reread.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingdom&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_King...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>