Yes, it occurred to me that his audience already had a background in IPFS and I wasn't his prospective audience; yet, then why craft the title to seem like it was meant for people who have no idea what IPFS is, because surely those with prior knowledge of it, would already be able to answer for themselves "Why... IPFS?"
I think my main problem with this blog post, and many others, is that they come off too "stream of consciousness," instead of something more structured, and easily-digestable.
It's obvious the author can write[0], but at risk of being presumptuous, it seems like it was hastily written and submitted to HN for the sole purpose of generating traffic.
It's pieces like these that remind me why good writing skills are important, and one shouldn't stray from the basics unless they're fully aware of the trade-offs. For this article, it would be: write a better hook, and make sure to include a rudimentary thesis statement, because I wasn't able to deduce what you were trying to persuade me of, within the first few paragraphs.
With a title like "Why build this blog -- or anything -- on IPFS?" You were trying to persuade me, right?
I had to read through what is essentially every single cooking recipe on the web, before I got to the actual filling. I.e a whole lotta aimless wandering and musing, that is only tangenitally related to the topic at hand, before giving me what the title promised. Similarily to cooking blogs, this page is 2/3 filler, and 1/3 actually giving me what the title promised "So……why IPFS?"
> 1. Ownership, control, censorship
The author goes on to chastise Medium's censorhsip practices, but not too long ago he mentioned self-hosted Wordpress and staticly-generated Github pages. Wordpress and Github pages get over these hurdles and are easier to setup than IPFS.
> 2. Resilience
Suffice to say, the point of this pargraph was "DNS and HTTP unrobust, webservers fail under unforseen circumstances." Ok, well how does IPFS do things differently? You never explained how IPFS works, much less how it gets over any of the aforementioned issues you outlined.
> 3. Elegance
> But I will say that content addressing strikes me, and many software people who come across it, as obviously superior to host-based addressing along certain dimensions.
Never touched upon or elaborated.
> Plus, it's super cool. You should try it!
Atleast you have a call to action. Otherwise, this post fails to even come close to making me interested in IPFS.
Over the long-term, Google's algorithm will connect the average person to the page most likely to benefit them, more than it won't.
There is no "best result."
Any page falling under "thrown-together comparison sites without actual substance but lots of affiliate links" are temporal inefficiencies that get removed after each major update.
Will more pop up? Yes, and they will take advantage of any ineffeciency or edge-cases in the algorithim to boost their rankings to #1.
Will they stay there for more than a few months? No. They will be squashed out, and legitimate players will over time win out.
This is the dichotomy between "churn and burn" businesses and "long term" businesses. You will make a very lucrative, and quick, buck going full blackhat, but your business won't last and you will be consistently need to adapt to each successive algo update. While long-standing "legit" businesses will only need to maintain market dominance -- something much easier to do than break into the market from ground zero, which churn and burners will have to do in perpetuity until they burn out themselves.
If you want to test this, go and find 10 websites you think are shady, but have top 5 rankings for a certain search phrase. Mark down the sites, keyword, and exact pages linked. Now, wait a few months. Search again using that exact phrase. More likely than not, i.e more than 5 out of 10, will no longer be in the top 5 for their respective phrases, and a couple domains will have been shuttered. I should note that "not deep info" is not "shady," because the results are for the average person. Ex. WebMD is not deep, but it's not shady either.
I implore people to try and get a site ranked with blackhat tricks and lots of starting capital, and see just how hard it is to keep ranked consistantly using said tricks. It's easy to speculate and make logical statements, but they don't hold much weight without first-hand experience and observation.
Many websites do have "hacked" (blackhat/shady) SEO, but these websites do not last long, and are entirely wiped out (see: de-ranked) every major algorithm update.
The major players you see on the top rankings today do utilize some blackhat SEO, but it's not at a level that significantly impacts their rankings. Blackhat SEO is inherently dangerous, because Google's algorithm will penalize you at best when it finds out -- and it always does -- and at worst completely unlist your domain from search results, giving it a scarlet letter until it cools off.
However, the bulk of all major websites primary utilize whitehat SEO, i.e "non-hacked," i.e "Google-approved" SEO to maintain their rankings. They have to, else their entire brand and business would collapse, either from being out-ranked or by being blacklisted for shady practices.
Additionally, Google's algorithim hasn't changed much at all from pagerank, in the grand scheme of things. If you can read between their lines, the biggest SEO factor is: how many backlinks from reputable domains do you have pointing at your website? Everything else, including blackhat SEO, are small optimizations for breaking ties. Sort of like PED usage in competitive sports; when you're at the elite level, every little bit extra can make a difference.
Google's algorithm works for its intended purposes, which is to serve pages that will benefit the highest amount of people searching for a specific term. If you are more than 1 SD from the "norm" searching for a specific term, it will likely not return a page that suits you best.
Google's search engine based on virality and pre-approval. "Is this page ranked highly by other highly ranked pages, and does this page serve the most amount of people?" It is not based on accuracy, or informational-integrity -- as many would believe by the latest Medic update -- but simply "does this conform to normal human biases the most?"
If you have a problem with Google's results, then you need to point the finger at yourself or at Google. SEO experts, website operators, etc. are all playing a game that's set on Google's terms. They would not serve such shit content if Google did not: allow it, encourage it, and greatly reward it.
Google will never change the algorithm to suit outliers, the return profile is too poor. So, the next person to point a finger at is you: the user. Let me reiterate, Google's search engine is not designed for you; it is designed for the masses. So there is no logical reason for you to continue using it the way you do.
If you wish to find "deep enough" sources, that task is on you, because it cannot be readily or easily monetized; thus, the task will not be fulfilled for free by any business. So, you must look at where "deep enough" sources lay: books, journals, and experts.
Books are available from libraries, and a large assortment of them are cataloged online for free at Library Genesis. For any topic you can think of, there is likely to be a book that goes into excruciating detail that satisfies your thirst for "deep enough."
Journals, similarly. Library Genesis or any other online publisher, e.g NIH, will do.
Experts are even better. You can pick their brains and get even more leads to go down. Simply, find an author on the subject -- Google makes this very easy -- and contact them.
I'm out of steam, but I really felt the need to debunk this myth that Google is a poor, abused victim, and not an uncaring tyrant that approves of the status quo.
You wrote a very poorly structured, punctuation-less, run-on sentence in the GP comment.
You did so again here.
In both instances it is unclear what you're trying to convey.
Coupled with taking a neutral comment personally, the simplest conclusion to make is that you're not writing for the benefit of anyone else, besides yourself.
Language's primary function is to communicate information. Our minds are like compilers that translate human-readable language into simplified neural impulses. If you write code with poor syntax, the human mind will still compile it, but you're going to get a lot of unexpected behavior, i.e "what the fuck is this guy trying to convey?"
Would it be correct to say your brother is also not the type to network with others easily?
An automated system is the last-line in hiring; recommendations -- internal and external -- are the first-line. If one finds themselves in a position where they're manually submitting cold resumes, it's almost always more productive to start networking into the companies you want to work at, and getting the recommendation firsthand, turning your resume into a hot one.
My connotation of armchair psychology is more informal and doesn't match the more rigorous, APA definition.
I'll make one note: the psychological profile I wrote of, is based on first-hand experience, as well as pieces of mental notes recovered from internet-addiction and FBI profiling papers.
The above was from personal experience and observation from having been a part of many online communities -- pre-dating reddit -- in all ways including: here-and-there member, first-hand maintainer and manager, and antisocial member causing a ruckus.
Armchair psychology? No, I've made many friends and acquaintances, both online and in real life. The ones that bubble around posting online heavily, have developed antisocial tendencies that were reinforced through social exclusion. A self-fulfilling prophecy. I know this, because I know those people well and because I was there at one point in my life as well.
Neither is it condescension. Perhaps I may have been in-exact and may have offended some that do post online very regularly, but there must be a distinction between what they consider "regularly" and what I consider "heavily." Heavily, in my observation, is someone that puts aside a significant amount of time, usually involuntarily, to do nothing but interact with online communities for the sole purpose of social interaction. No value judgements were made either, but those characteristics are common among the aforementioned group.
I won't address your hypothesis, because I'm not here to argue.
Ranking individual pages is vitally important in the website traffic game.
Suppose Mozilla's goal for its blog is to generate a lot of organic traffic so that people are aware of Moz Corp's continuing development efforts. If that were the case, individual ranking of pages matters.
A domain name has a certain "rank," that's based entirely on on-page SEO -- or all of the indexed pages and site as a whole -- and off-page SEO -- or all of the domains and pages that link to it.
One of the algos in determining on-page SEO is cumulative ranking of all pages under that domain. That is, a single page's ranking is not an isolated variable based purely on that page and its content alone. The other pages that fall under that same domain impact every other page on said domain.
If Mozilla published a poorly SEO'ed blog article, that would negatively affect the ranking of all other articles under the blog.mozilla.org name -- and more severely any other pages that link to it or are linked inside of it.
That's only the first part. Suppose they wanted to generate traffic for this individual press release? Then that's a whole nother ball of wax.
> “Why Reddit is like this” is a whole other essay; I think it’s built into reddit’s structure itself.
Classic Eternal September.
Around 60k subscribers, the cultural identity starts degrading, as the amount of "old guard" is outmatched by "new blood." Therefore, the old "monkey see, monkey do" phenomenon, where new users would slowly mimic the culture of the prevailing older users to "fit in," is replaced with new users mimicking other new users, and the culture shifting towards the platform's identity instead of retaining the sub's identity.
Generally, the type of person to post on Reddit frequently enough, has social cohesion problems that may preclude him from fulfilling his social needs through more healthy avenues, like real life. The same is true for the majority of people that post online frequently. Usually the pyschological profile that follows that point is one built on abrasiveness, distrust and aggression towards authority, an inability to adopt social manners and participate in social contract, low emotional intelligence, etc.
All of the aforementioned behaviors culminate into the toxicity and vitriol you usually see -- and as well why it's so prevalent.
Google crawlers treat the first few paragraphs as an abstract, and weigh it heavier than the sections that follow after.
The balance between SEO and readability has already been struck, and an equilibrium has been reached. Changes will only happen when Google ships out new major algorithm changes. They're relatively often though, and always shake up the field.
If people were really interested in fixing this problem, they would start writing and campaigning for more transparency and democracy from Google. Do you think that would affect their own rankings? ;) Rhetorical question.
We all have to do things in our own self-interest, especially when there are higher powers bearing down upon us.
They're not off the hook, but they're not the biggest fish that needs to be fried. Going after them won't solve anything except the need to vent one's own emotions.
The cycle will continue to repeat for other websites and other people. We've established that it happens often, and we've even established the root cause. Idling on "who's at fault and what should their punishment be" is just that: idling.
Is it entitled? Most would agree, "very" (but that's not my concern nor judgement to make)
Did the maintainer screw over people that were using Actix? Very likely.
I sympathize with both sides here. I've been the unthanked, punching bag contributor on a few notable projects, and I've been a user of software whose leadership got into drama and squabbles, that ultimately fucked me over.
There were times that I pulled certain projects and essays, that had greatly helped people, and taken my ball home because I was fed up with the people I was catering to. There is no correct answer here, dealing with people and their emotions, but there is a way for both sides to handle things without contributing negatively to other's lives.
That marketing babble is there for the same reason the majority of YouTube videos are >10 minutes and filled with the same filler: Google's ranking algorithm.
For YouTube videos it's mean watch time. Filler babble pumps up those numbers.
For Google, it's mean read time. Filler babble also pumps up this number. However, it also ranks higher directly because it's considered a "long form" piece instead of a soundbite, and because it's more unique than similar pages (f.e compare all news outlets covering the same story -- it's all relatively the same).
Blame Google, for its algorithms that are directly shaping our communications and culture. Hell, blame all tech companies that use algorithms to determine culture (see: Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Quora, and yes, HN). Whether this is good or bad, is someone else's argument to write.
Mozilla, and every other website owner, must play the game in order to drive organic traffic to its pages through search engine optimization. Otherwise, you might not be reading this article right now, and it would be solely shared by word-of-mouth from people who check the site or are on a newsletter.
Can you elucidate on that line of reasoning some more? I am unconvinced.
It has been my experience -- which some more "keepin it real" journalism concurs with -- that New York's outlandish infrastructure costs, as well as the majority of the USA's public projects, are primarily due to two main agents:
1. White collar bureaucracy
2. Blue collar "bureaucracy"
Both parties -- and the multitude of agents that operate within them -- are all too able to align their "piece" of the project towards their own interests.
These interests very much involve time and money.
For money, it's simply rerouting costs. And for time, it's "making one's mark," by misallocating resources to personally-enriching matters, that do not benefit the project as a whole, and usually hinder it.
It's late, and I'm not at 100% to go into detail, but surely this is well-known already?
Depending on the size of the microplastic particles, they will be absorbed through the roots. Most common sources are usually contaminated water and fertilizers. Other times, regular pollution (f.e air and runoff)
I think my main problem with this blog post, and many others, is that they come off too "stream of consciousness," instead of something more structured, and easily-digestable.
It's obvious the author can write[0], but at risk of being presumptuous, it seems like it was hastily written and submitted to HN for the sole purpose of generating traffic.
[0] This is a much better piece, albeit short: http://teetotality.blog/posts/think-do-build/