[HN Gopher] Nobody cares about your blog
___________________________________________________________________
Nobody cares about your blog
Author : alexmolas
Score : 298 points
Date : 2023-07-15 22:47 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.alexmolas.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.alexmolas.com)
| andreyk wrote:
| "But all of these things [reasons why people don't care about
| your blog] are not a problem, because you shouldn't care even a
| little bit about what other think."
|
| I mean... Maybe you should care sometimes? Maybe it is good to
| try and not repeat others and try to express original and useful
| thoughts?
|
| I have written some stuff in the past that was purely for me, but
| have also written explainers and other stuff that was actually
| meant to be of benefit to people who found or read it* (even if
| very few people did read it). This all-or-nothing stance is kind
| of silly. The title is also rather misleading, but I guess that's
| good for upvotes...
|
| * I won't link to it as I don't mean for this to be a plug, but
| just as an example - I wrote "Things Everyone Should Know About
| Depression", because I found most articles of that sort lacking.
| And I put in a lot of work into making that a good post because I
| did care about its impact on potential readers, and I do think it
| probably helped some people.
|
| Not everything has to be just written with only yourself in mind,
| even if fundamentally the reason to write should be that you want
| to write moreso than for the potential of getting lots of
| readers.
| 50 wrote:
| > I mean... Maybe you should care sometimes? Maybe it is good
| to try and not repeat others and try to express original and
| useful thoughts?
|
| reminded of dfw: "true heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year
| upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity
| and care -- with no one there to see or cheer. this is the
| world."
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| The original blogs were about utterly mundane topics. One of the
| favorites was a guy who blogged what he ate for lunch every day.
| There may or may not have been photographs. And the audiences
| came because the WWW was a novel medium, and we just thought it
| was hilarious to have such a personal glimpse into a minor
| feature of a stranger's life.
|
| My supervisor at my last job said I should start a blog. I
| suppose because I always ate at restaurants and I liked
| describing the food and stuff. But I'm not really a foodie, or
| eloquent like a food critic. Perhaps she just said that because I
| talk so much.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > personal glimpse into a minor feature of a stranger's life.
|
| I feel sorry for people that feel this way about lunch. Lunch
| is sacred. It's the part of the day to get away from work.
| Nothing at work is so important that you can't get away from
| it. If you disagree, wait a few years, you'll come around. I
| don't care if it's just a spam sandwich.
| Proven wrote:
| [dead]
| [deleted]
| darkwater wrote:
| Yeah, exactly. That's actually how all forms of public engagement
| should be. Do it for yourself, if people will like it, well, it's
| an extra bonus.
| fmajid wrote:
| I blog very sporadically, a post per quarter or so, but write
| about stuff where there isn't an answer on the Internet. 20 years
| ago, somehow I had become the US expert on how to pair your Palm
| Pilot with your Bluetooth-enabled cell phone to connect to the
| Internet using GPRS for email, SSH or basic web browsing (even
| then the bane of JavaScript had made browsing unusable on the
| pre-iPhone browsers).
|
| That's because cell carriers, uninterested in data, had no
| instructions to tech support on how to make this work, and indeed
| tried to suppress it. I can't tell how much appreciative feedback
| I got for it:
|
| https://blog.majid.info/bluetooth-blues-redux/
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| Yeah, you need internal motives to write regularly. If it's
| entirely about playing to an audience, you probably won't sustain
| it.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Maybe I'm imagining it, but I seem to recall that it used to he
| possible to host Wordpress or Drupal without getting hacked
| within the first fee months because you missed a point release
| upgrade.
| [deleted]
| sircastor wrote:
| >If you have lost time solving a superspecific problem then you
| need to write about it, it can happen that you end up being
| someone's hero some day.
|
| Aside from ramblings, most of my blog is various projects I've
| done and solutions I've found, and I continue to refer back to my
| own writing frequently to see how I accomplished something.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| This is the majority of my blog as well. Basically public field
| notes.
| uwagar wrote:
| sadly, the 100 things before he dies link turns up a 404.
| alexmolas wrote:
| Fixed :)
| megous wrote:
| wayback machine
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| I will go one step further: nobody cares about 99% of content,
| blog or not. Content creation today is not about people caring
| about said content, but about creating little islands on the
| internet for other people to expose their own narcissism or to
| help people create their own content that nobody cares about.
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| Agree with the title. Strong disagree with every bullet point.
| Those bullet points are seemingly true for the authors blog. But
| they don't have to be true for yours!
|
| Blogs are superior to conferences imho. A decent blog post will
| get about 10,000 views via HN/Reddit/Twitter/etc. A conference
| will only have dozens to hundreds of attendees.
|
| I only make a few posts per year. I mostly avoid hot takes. Most
| of my posts I could have turned into conference talks. But
| conferences are kinda gross and blog posts are better so meh.
| donatj wrote:
| I have two blogs. The first[1] was started in high school in 2001
| by myself and a bunch of friends, and outdates _the popular use_
| of the term "blog". The domain name was chosen because I was just
| punching things I enjoyed into a site that gave out free domain
| names, I liked the band Oasis as a teenager, and it was
| available. I keep it alive mostly for nostalgia and posterity. I
| post updates for major milestones like the 20 year anniversary in
| 2021 but it otherwise sees disuse. It contains a lot of teenage
| angst and bad political takes of kids going through 9 /11 and its
| aftermath. A couple friends with very "professional" careers
| understandably had me remove their last names in recent years.
|
| The second blog[2] is a "professional" blog I started in 2009 a
| couple years into my career. "You are only showing the world how
| stupid you are." strikes waaay too close to home on this one.
| Early on I wrote about things I had a somewhat tenuous grasp on.
|
| To wit, the VERY first post is an angry rant about JSONP being
| hard to parse on the backend, "not being valid JSON", and being
| unsafe because when used as intended requires remote code
| execution. This was all because I was peaved about the Flickr API
| returning JSONP. I much later found out that while it did return
| JSONP by default when requesting JSON, there was a flag to
| disable it - thus eliminating the triggering event of my rant.
| Arguably a stupid default but I should have been better at
| reading the docs. It's a really cringe inducing rant to look back
| on.
|
| That's just one example, there are a fair number of those. I have
| unlisted (still available by direct link) a handful over the
| years that I felt had very limited merit.
|
| My blogs are both entirely custom applications, the prior ported
| over the years from PHP 3 all the way to PHP 7.4 and soon 8.x. In
| recent years friends have largely converted their own blogs to
| Jekyll and Hugo and the thought felt very foreign to me. It took
| me a long while to identify in myself why I hated the idea so
| much. It hit me that getting posts published isn't _my goal_.
| It's the sheer joy and creative outlet of building and
| maintaining these little entirely custom applications. They're my
| own little world I can constantly tweak, with no code review or
| other people's opinions. I get to just try out ideas and
| potentially fail in a consequence free way.
|
| That in my book is the main reason to have a blog, getting to
| build and maintain something personal.
|
| 1. https://oasisband.net
|
| 2. https://donatstudios.com
| grzm wrote:
| > _The first was started in high school in 2001 by myself and a
| bunch of friends, and outdates the term "blog"._
|
| That's definitely early, but the term blog predates it by a
| couple of years.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog#History
|
| > _The term "weblog" was coined by Jorn Barger on December 17,
| 1997. The short form "blog" was coined by Peter Merholz, who
| jokingly broke the word weblog into the phrase we blog in the
| sidebar of his blog Peterme.com in May 1999. Shortly
| thereafter, Evan Williams at Pyra Labs used "blog" as both a
| noun and verb ("to blog", meaning "to edit one's weblog or to
| post to one's weblog") and devised the term "blogger" in
| connection with Pyra Labs' Blogger product, leading to the
| popularization of the terms._
| donatj wrote:
| Corrected ;)
| KronisLV wrote:
| > You can say whatever the fuck you want. It's your blog, you
| don't need to follow any rules.
|
| I don't quite know about this. I certainly recall the tone of
| some of my own older blog articles being such that it makes me
| embarrassed now.
|
| Like when our national auth system went down at around 50 RPS and
| prevented COVID vaccination signups, with around 8k EUR a month
| expenses for maintaining it, I chose some strong language to
| describe that situation:
| https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/manavakcina-lv-and-apturico...
|
| I'm still leaving the article up because of that being how I felt
| at the time, but nowadays I try to be a bit more charitable with
| my assumptions and a tad more milquetoast/neutral in my tone.
|
| Other than that, I mostly agree with the article about having
| your blog, it's nice to have a place to jot down some notes and
| thoughts sort of in public, without a lot of pressure on you.
| omershapira wrote:
| > You're not an expert in your field, otherwise you wouldn't be
| publishing in a blog, but writing papers and giving interviews
|
| At least in the field I'm in (computer graphics), the penalty of
| publishing is months; blogposts (and patents) cost days. Papers
| have perverse incentives in style and fact presentation. Where do
| you prefer the knowledge ending up?
| crashingintoyou wrote:
| > It's cool to maintain a blog, even it's only from the technical
| perspective.
|
| I do run a blog, but having to ensure that it gets patched in a
| reasonable amount of time is to me the one significant drawback
| of the process.
|
| I'm really not looking forward to the next time I'm forced into a
| major-release upgrade (deadline is early 2025 given that I'm
| running Drupal 7).
| [deleted]
| stevenicr wrote:
| There a short time when google and other search engines promoted
| blogs in the main results.
|
| There was a time when sites promoted blogs via web rings and blog
| rolls - recent discussion ->
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36728870
|
| Google penalizing sites for linking to other sites and people
| getting paranoid about bleeding pagerank and getting penalized
| for unknowingly linking to 'bad neighborhoods' - quickly changed
| how many people would peruse your blog..
|
| Removing blog rolls, web rings, pingomatic, technorati... some
| blogs adapted, most did not.. google is the reason blogs aren't
| read these days.
|
| On top of things mentioned in the post.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Why write a blog when you can make a YouTube channel instead.
| You're sure to get ranked well by Googs then. Hell, why write a
| blog when you can just TikTok it?
|
| There's lots of reasons not covered in the blog about not
| blogging trying to convince why to blog.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| In my case, it's because videos take a _long_ time to make. I
| don't just film stuff and put it up. Postproduction takes
| three or four times as long as filming.
|
| Writing, on the other hand, seems to "just flow," and I spend
| a bit of time, after publishing, correcting and tweaking the
| prose. Nothing, compared to video postproduction.
|
| As it is, I have barely written anything in the last couple
| of years, because I have had a fairly consuming project.
| megous wrote:
| Maybe you don't want to have who knows what ads forced into
| your content. Maybe you don't want your content to be forced
| into this demented "shorts" format without an option to
| disable it. Maybe you want more control over formatting (code
| snippets, embedded videos/images) and content placement.
| Maybe you don't want to fight the stupid copyright
| enforcement tools. Maybe you dislike the UI overall. Maybe
| you don't want interactions with your audience to happen over
| google platform, but more individually over e-mail. Maybe you
| want an ability to modify past content easily. Maybe you get
| your audience from outside youtube, anyway, so why send them
| to the youtube attention sucking vortex.
|
| Plenty of reasons why someone would care.
| stevenicr wrote:
| You make a good point and we seem to agree that sharing
| content on the internet seems to be better discovered via
| tubes or toks than google.
|
| I think there are plenty of great reasons to blog, and there
| will be more in the future.
|
| Google really kneecapped the written word with a few sites as
| exceptions. Wordpress has struggled to make blogging better,
| along with the other publishing options..
|
| However the written words are often a better way to
| communication certain things as you can have easy to follow
| links and more formatting that makes things sink in well.
|
| Although 2023 is a perfect time to sing the 'video killed the
| radio (and written word) star' ... some things are aligning
| where that could shift.
|
| Now that mobile theme styling is getting better, all it's
| going to take is a few changes like 'nofollow' links by
| default, easy to moderate web ring additions, animated
| talking heads and AI pics to include and we will see a re-
| emergence of great story sharing again, and google won't be
| needed for them to have impact far and wide.
|
| I see activity pub helping with this in the future, and a few
| other things that are starting to get traction.
| dylan604 wrote:
| The original intent was meant tongue in cheek about the
| discoverability via googs. Admittedly, it seems like it was
| a bit too buried. I abhor googs retuning video links to
| something much more better suited as text. The fact people
| are getting better results because they took an SO answer
| and turned into a video of just the text with no other
| reinforced benefit from being a video is maddening
| impissedoff1 wrote:
| Because gaping mouth video clickbait is dumb. How often do
| you even see a video cover with someone having a closed mouth
| and normal facial expression?
| corobo wrote:
| Presumably if you're allowed to write a blog even though
| it's boring etc etc you're also well within your rights to
| not gape all over your YouTube thumbnail.
| rocqua wrote:
| These days I think about 15% of the thumbnails I see are
| gaping mouth. That would be easy to tweak down by stopping
| with watching LTT.
|
| There is plenty of space for quality and thought out
| content on YouTube. Especially if you don't need to make a
| living. The kicker to me, seems the extra time required to
| get production value to a tolerable point.
| philwelch wrote:
| Good question. Let me scroll through my YouTube home page.
| This is every video where the cover image shows the
| presenter's face and the presenter is making a natural
| facial expression. Sometimes the presenter's mouth is
| slightly open because they are talking, but they are not
| outright "soyfacing" as it's sometimes called.
|
| https://youtu.be/PPWzsaAwOjQ
|
| https://www.youtube.com/live/UAUg6y2UX88?feature=share
|
| https://youtu.be/4sEFinMiSco
|
| https://youtu.be/RdoKv0oojM8
|
| https://youtu.be/SbeqNFHoU_8
|
| https://youtu.be/v7CFo0XKLmo
|
| https://youtu.be/cl-lZeLu2cg
|
| https://youtu.be/-eJcJq2aWq8
|
| https://youtu.be/YEW4U9DUtrw
|
| https://youtu.be/WUwJteu_FqU
|
| https://youtu.be/n0vLnHcz68I
|
| https://youtu.be/FYCV5Ot4pcQ
|
| https://youtu.be/1NZoWqs1T_s
|
| https://youtu.be/X0QuB2v5rLw
|
| https://youtu.be/4FRlV70lvYk
|
| https://youtu.be/p3O6bKdPLbw
|
| I stopped most of the way down the page. Here are the
| exaggerated facial expressions:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/live/CN5bnEn9YZA?feature=share
| (sort of an exaggerated :|)
|
| https://youtu.be/Iu7gAS4egEI
|
| https://youtu.be/iQ190Bf-6J0 (the only actual "soyface" I
| could find)
|
| https://youtu.be/zs6sEYEzsKo
|
| https://youtu.be/VOVO0Mr4n-A
|
| https://youtu.be/fpnd1OboPPs (borderline soyface maybe?)
|
| So that's 16 normal facial expressions, four slightly
| exaggerated ones, and 1, _maybe_ 2 soyfaces. And a much
| larger majority of videos that didn't show the presenter's
| face on the thumbnail at all.
|
| Edit: It occurs to me now that it's not that easy to see a
| YouTube thumbnail after you click through to the actual
| video.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "You can say whatever the fuck you want."
|
| Maybe personal websites should be the "public square", not third
| party "social media" websites. Most folks probably won't bother
| with maintaining personal websites because they do not have
| anything meaningful to say. Instead, "social media" websites
| encourage all people, many of whom are only using these sites to
| communicate with friends and family, who otherwise have nothing
| worthwhile to say to the general public, to "share" their every
| thought. All in the name of exploiting these serfs/sharecroppers
| as ad targets for obscene profit. We have seen the results. It
| isn't pretty.
|
| Just because "[y]ou can say whatever the fuck you want" to the
| entire web does not necessarily mean everyone will. At least,
| this is how I remember the web before so-called "tech" companies
| and "social media" hijacked it. The social media websites are
| desperate for others to create content for them, for free.
| jmye wrote:
| Absolutely. Even if everyone got their shit together to create
| a personal blog, you're not going to find much readership if
| the sum total of your posting is mean, petty, one line trash
| talk, and whatever the blog version of subtweeting is.
| Discourse would _instantly_ improve over the social media sewer
| (personal irony /hypocrisy notwithstanding).
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| You can't hide behind Section 230 if it's your own website
| with your own content.
|
| If facing potential personal liability, there is a
| disincentive to trash talk on a personal website. Whereas
| with social media there is an incentive to trash talk as it
| apparently leads to "engagement".
| DoItToMe81 wrote:
| 'Everyone' had a personal blog a couple decades ago, and all
| it turned out to be was concentrated narcissism that was
| taken over by microblogging, which was all the same with none
| of the maintenance effort.
|
| Social media very much has its roots in bloggers who couldn't
| see the internet as much more than an extension of their
| living rooms.
| impissedoff1 wrote:
| Have you heard about the good news of mastodon?
| Agentlien wrote:
| I blog about some things I do at work. A mix of things I found
| particularly interesting and some others asked me to write about.
|
| It's partly a way to get approval to talk about some work details
| outside of the office, but also a bit of a behind the scenes
| thing from games I work on because I love reading that from
| others.
|
| While I enjoyed this post, I can't say I agree with the
| motivating bullet points.
|
| > Your blog is not original. [...] You're just probably repeating
| things you've read in another place.
|
| I'm usually not writing fluffy think pieces, but rather detailing
| specific technical solutions from a game I worked on. My
| solutions may not be original, but the context definitely is and
| this serves as a vehicle to share details about my work and start
| discussions of it with my friends.
|
| > You're not an expert in your field
|
| I am certainly not a leading expert, but I do have expert
| knowledge which I know some find interesting and have learned
| from. Several blog posts are based on lectures I've held at work
| which fellow programmers seemed to really enjoy, so I'm happy I
| get to post about them publicly.
|
| > You are only showing the world how stupid you are.
|
| > If someone, at some point, cares about your blog will be only
| to criticize it.
|
| These two points were my biggest worries before I started my
| blog. Luckily, it's proven unfounded. People generally have
| positive things to say about it and the one time someone
| questioned something led to an interesting discussion from which
| I learned a valuable trick I've since used in my work.
|
| I even published a tool I made at work and got some encouraging
| comments and a few stars on GitHub, which is fun given how
| ridiculously niche it was.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| Not true. I care about my blog.
| killjoywashere wrote:
| I disagree. Nobody cares about your blog ... until they do. You
| might think everything you ever said could trivially be published
| on the front page of the New York Times, and yet, a journalist
| courting a well-placed source, who happens to not like you and is
| in the habit of working with journalists, might find bits in
| there, over time, to use against you.
|
| I'm not saying you shouldn't write a blog. But keep in mind your
| future self's wellbeing. Your very future, responsible for
| hundreds of employees, 2 kids, a spouse, and significant economic
| or national responsibilities.
| flashback2199 wrote:
| Exactly, and the author's list of reasons "why you should care
| about your blog" are reasons to care about your _journal_
| because none of them argue in favor of making what you write
| public on the web...
| 38 wrote:
| body { font-size: 2vh; }
|
| please, PLEASE dont do this. this completely fucks peoples
| ability to change the size using Ctrl+mousewheel
| julianlam wrote:
| Text is absolutely minuscule on my television. Had to end up
| using Reader mode to even read the blog post.
|
| But that's ok, he doesn't care about what we think ;)
| zzo38computer wrote:
| I agree. Don't use font sizes relative to the viewport size.
| Furthermore, it is unlikely that anything should ever be
| relative to the vertical viewport size (except in paged media,
| perhaps). Font sizes should not be relative to the horizontal
| or vertical viewport size. However, maybe there is exception if
| you want to set a maximum font size based on a percentage of
| the width so that all of the letters will fit. But, in my
| opinion it would usually be better to just avoid setting them
| by CSS anyways so that it uses the user settings or default
| settings instead, which should hopefully be set up for the
| specific display and user. (I often just disable CSS because of
| the mess they have made.)
| the-printer wrote:
| That has to be a mistake.
| zagrebian wrote:
| > Your blog is not original.
|
| Wrong. Literally everyone can have an original idea. Is this
| article parody?
| [deleted]
| aksss wrote:
| Write your blog - be the Internet content you want to see. I keep
| one, it's focused, highly obscure, and a boring but nerdy niche
| interest that depends on a lot of research into materials mostly
| out of print. I share what I learn as I learn it. It's a labor of
| love, but I like it and occasionally others appreciate it.
| devd00d wrote:
| You had me there in the beginning.
| jxf wrote:
| > You're just probably repeating things you've read in another
| place.
|
| This one is a very poor argument to me. Should textbooks not
| exist because they're just "repeating things you've read in
| another place"?
| okeuro49 wrote:
| Dear people writing small blogs about some obscure bug you fixed:
| please continue doing so, because I often find them on the long
| tail and they're often better than Stackoverflow.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| 99% of everything ever written is crap, so you need filtering the
| huge quantity of brain manure the humanity keeps producing.
|
| And hand written blogs by somebody for several years is very high
| in my filter list to check out something.
|
| So I care very much about your blog.
|
| Besides, the best way to make sure there is more quality content
| in the world is to produce it. And that's why I write
| https://bitecode.dev. Because I want others to have what I wish I
| had when I needed it.
| HighlandSpring wrote:
| Writing blog posts is the lowest barrier of entry there is to
| contributing to the sum total of knowledge for some particular
| keywords, problem space. Sometimes even, years of blogging gets
| edited and expanded upon into an entire book but I suppose no one
| cares about those either.
| hsn915 wrote:
| The notion is highly misguided.
|
| What actually hides being it is: unless everyone cares about it,
| then no one cares.
|
| What if only one in a thousand people care? That's a huge number.
| You could have 10k or 100k readers.
|
| It's a minuscule number compared to everyone, but it's a huge
| number for a blog.
| nithinbekal wrote:
| I started writing my blog as a devlog for myself refer to later,
| and didn't expect anyone else to care. However, it eventually let
| to a job interview that in turn led to my current job.
|
| The team I joined worked on a Ruby codebase, and there were
| people with background in other languages, where method
| visibility worked differently. A short post I wrote [1] was being
| shared around in the team, and the manager decided to interview
| me.
|
| Funnily enough, that same post was quoted to me by a colleague
| during a code review a few months later! So it turned out that
| it's still working as intended - as a reference for myself. :)
|
| [1] https://nithinbekal.com/posts/ruby-protected-methods/
| bullen wrote:
| That is why my blog is written from scratch, web server and all:
| http://sprout.rupy.se
| voytec wrote:
| > Nobody cares about your blog
|
| I do. I write not just for others but also myself.
|
| My little blog of few posts exists to satisfy my expectations and
| fulfill my rare urge of writing and the need of getting some
| thoughts out of my head. As long as nobody cares enough about my
| blog to monetize it, I'm perfectly fine with the status quo.
|
| > If someone, at some point, cares about your blog will be only
| to criticize it.
|
| And that's great! I may be able to learn something or at least I
| may get to know different view points.
| tonetheman wrote:
| Similar to this
|
| https://stevenpressfield.com/2009/10/writing-wednesdays-2-th...
| bandyaboot wrote:
| > But all of these things are not a problem, because you
| shouldn't care even a little bit about what other think.
|
| I think this is one of those things that people say without
| thinking it through. I certainly agree that you should not care
| enough about what people think to allow it to cause you to not
| share your thoughts and opinions. But as a general and absolute
| rule, it's a great recipe for never learning anything from anyone
| and having no friends.
| 2-718-281-828 wrote:
| there are two points missing at the end:
|
| - maybe a few people will actually enjoy your blog.
|
| - maybe it turns out your blog is going to be one of the very few
| which are actually successful on a broader scale.
|
| ---
|
| for me it seems blogs are no longer fitting into my life or how i
| use the internet. but i still fondly remember the mornings during
| my days as a student more than 15 years ago where i have been
| regularly reading blogs.
|
| mainly (all german):
|
| - basic thinking
|
| - nerdcore
|
| - law blog
| jaylittle wrote:
| I love this post. This perfectly lays out why I have operated my
| own blog for over 20 years now.
|
| I liking having my own space where I can say what I want. There
| is also real value in me going back and reading what I said a
| year, five years or even ten years back. My blog posts have
| proven to be a useful way of reminding future Jay of what past
| Jay was going through as I have a tendency to look at the past
| through rose tinted glasses.
|
| This morning's blog post is no different, though more self-
| deprecating than most of the things I have written.
|
| https://jaylittle.com/post/view/2023/7/i-am-on-the-mcnulty-s...
|
| I dare to dream of a world where I can reread that years later
| and say, "It's okay past Jay - it's all going to work out for the
| best, just stay the course"
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| Lots of people throughout history - with names that are well-
| known _today_ - have written at length about topics for which, in
| their day, the audience was _very_ small. Herodotus, for one
| early example. Same is true for scores of important discoveries.
|
| The audience for complex math proofs is _very_ small. At first.
| Same applies to a lot of creative works ... paintings, photos,
| poetry. van Gogh sold _almost nothing_.
|
| A composer once asked me 'what do you care more about - _how
| many_ are listening, or _who_ is listening? "
|
| Amazing how many blogs have shut off their feedback.
| Spivak wrote:
| I feel like it's a weird question that really wants you to say
| who but the situations where it's actually better is
| vanishingly small. If you want to be a professional musician
| you're way better off having a large fanbase making music snobs
| turn their noses up to then be a brilliant composer with 1000
| monthly listeners on Spotify. Van Gogh realized none of the
| spoils of his work. I couldn't care less if I'm famous or
| influential after I'm dead, I only get these 80 years or so.
| Being the influential underground artist that inspired the
| people who got famous is an empty victory.
|
| Even for something as simple as a blog having a large following
| is exposure. You have a better chance of finding quality
| discussion given more eyeballs.
| antegamisou wrote:
| I don't think comparing the writings of probably the most
| prominent figure of history writing to the platitudes (which is
| the 99% of 'blogs' being promoted here) generated by the
| average techbro grifter is the way to go with this...
| GuardianCaveman wrote:
| 2000 years ago Herodotus was talking and writing and nobody
| cared and his buddy was probably like, hey man remember that
| one guy from 300 years ago nobody knew who he was but look at
| him now! Everyone knows his name! And then some snarky roman
| was like, "I don't think comparing the great works of that
| guy from 300 years ago and the platitudes of this Herodotus
| guy is the way to go with this... " and he used the ellipsis
| even to indicate how little he respected this opinion to
| imply that he would say more but really what's the point with
| fools like these...
| pjmlp wrote:
| The difference being that I don't believe the digital
| archives of today will survive the test of time, as well as
| the Herodotus manuscripts.
|
| Assuming we don't kill ourselves out of the planet, good
| luck to whoever will be digging hard drives 3000 years from
| now, and trying to understand what is stored in them,
| assuming the magnetic field is still readable.
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/1683/
| impissedoff1 wrote:
| Most blogs will die in the abyss when server storage payments
| are no longer paid due to death.
|
| Physical publications have a chance at existence though
| ekianjo wrote:
| Physical publications are routinely burned on schedule even
| by libraries. You can be sure of one thing is that almost
| nothing will remain from what we have 100 years from now
| mariuolo wrote:
| There's the Internet Archive.
| rikroots wrote:
| I've put my trust in the British Library Web Archive
| bl.uk/collection-guides/uk-web-archive
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Over the years I made numerous notes and lost those notes over
| and over again.
|
| So this year I decided to just put those notes into my website. I
| don't think that they'll be useful to anybody but me (although
| I'll be happy if someone would save some time learning from those
| notes).
|
| It's pretty empty right now, although I hope to slowly build it
| this way. So basically it's my storage of information which I
| spent some time researching for.
|
| And some place to express my approach to design is always nice to
| have. At my work we always hire designer who will produce shitty
| (IMO) flashy designs that I have to implement. Well, I like empty
| and content-rich designs, without custom fonts or heavy CSS,
| almost pure minimum with very few touches.
| hamzakat wrote:
| > Nobody cares about your blog
|
| That's exactly why I prefer blogs over the fake social media.
| Being exposed to people's perspective makes one prone to show
| what people want, not what he truly want and believe. Keep
| blogging and writing.
| azubinski wrote:
| Yes, your blog is not interesting to anyone. Even the search
| engines are not interested in it, because they are not looking
| for something interesting. And HRs are not interested in it,
| because HRs generally do formal work and they are not interested
| in details. And the worst person in any crowd is the one who
| sticks to everyone "did you read my blog?".
|
| It's true.
|
| But people blog and will do it because...
| ahmadmijot wrote:
| I don't care if nobody cares about my writing. I just need
| somewhere to vent.
| Tade0 wrote:
| As it stands nobody can even care about my blog, because I
| foolishly hosted a badly secured Wordpress instance on its
| subdomain(side project), so Google put my domain on a list of
| addresses trying to scam people.
|
| I've applied for it to be delisted, but since this is Google, I
| don't think that will ever happen.
|
| What I'm saying is that if you ever use Wordpress for anything -
| especially blogging - you might want to start with setting a
| strong password, so that you don't land with spam posts from bots
| who cracked it.
|
| Was a nice demonstration of password safety to the client though.
| [deleted]
| revskill wrote:
| My blog at https://revskill.dev is not actually a blog. It's just
| my own playground to play with stuff i'm passionate about.
|
| I don't care if it fits any standards, it's not about "People
| don't care" (i'm sure people do care if they want to read more
| about your writings), it's that you don't care what people think
| about your blogs that matter more.
| bool3max wrote:
| None of your posts are loading for me.
| jaylittle wrote:
| Can confirm, that blog appears to be completely broken. No
| javascript errors in the console and turning off ad blocking
| in Brave doesn't help.
|
| /shrug
| revskill wrote:
| My blog is no js.
| revskill wrote:
| Sorry, there's some bug on data fetching. Let me fix. Thanks.
| epiccoleman wrote:
| I like this post. When I restarted my personal site a while back,
| one thing I found mildly limiting was attaching it to my real
| name, which made me feel like I needed to present a semi
| professional vibe. I haven't stopped myself from the odd swear
| word, but there are things I'd like to write about that I would
| prefer to remain anonymous.
|
| I've been considering starting a more freeform, anonymous site
| where I could cut loose a bit more. This post is somewhat
| encouraging in that direction.
| chomp5977 wrote:
| This is something that's held me back a bit. My blog is at my
| email domain which means anyone I talk to could go read it.
| That means potential employers.
|
| I might set up another domain for those topic that I start to
| write and abandon because it's not something I want attached to
| my professional image.
| _moof wrote:
| What timing! I just started an electronics blog and had to defeat
| all the same inner voices. "I'm not the best." "Someone else is
| doing cooler/smarter/more interesting/more creative stuff." "I'm
| just going to embarrass myself." It's amazing how mean we can be
| to ourselves.
|
| My site is part blog, part lab notebook. It's all the stuff I had
| to figure out to get something to work. It's a chronicle of the
| mistakes I make and the successes informed by those mistakes. It
| helps me organize my thoughts and check my knowledge. If that's
| helpful to someone, awesome! I would love that. But if not,
| that's ok. I still get something out of it.
| omginternets wrote:
| I'll read it! I definitely know less about this stuff than you.
| Can you share a link?
| _moof wrote:
| Happy to: https://blog.electron.fail
| Ayesh wrote:
| I'm just an average programmer, and English isn't even my native
| language. But i had a blog since I was 18, and although it went
| through some new domains, some of the small blog posts evolved to
| more bigger things that I still affectionately work on.
|
| - I wrote a blog post about a CloudFlare when they were just
| starting, which landed me a gig to provide a technical review for
| a printed book.
|
| - Some reverse engineered router/phone IMEI unlock codes lead to
| a complete website to generate them.
|
| - An Instagram photo/video download tool that got so popular Meta
| sent me a UDPR and a C&D demand to shut down.
|
| - Various talks in conferences, some that even paid me.
|
| - Small web sites that spun off to their own web sites.
|
| I would argue that an average person is exactly who should have a
| blog. Because, majority of us are average, and having a blog or a
| blog post related to a particular topic (even a mediocre one)
| gives the boost to stand you out. Some of these opportunities may
| not generate a lot of money, if at all. But I like the excitement
| I get from them.
| moneywoes wrote:
| How did you drive traffic to this blog?
| qumpis wrote:
| Why did you start the blog? Was the reason to stand out or
| something else?
| mbwgh wrote:
| > You can say whatever the fuck you want. It's your blog, you
| don't need to follow any rules. I just cursed and you can't do
| nothing about it, because this is my blog and I do what I want.
| This will give you a sense of freedom that's really cool imho.
|
| This is unfortunately not true in many parts of the world. Even
| here in Germany, any blog, including private ones, need to come
| with an imprint section including your full name, residential
| address, mobile phone number et cetera.
|
| Even though realistically, nobody would care if I omitted this
| imprint section, it makes you think again whether you should
| actually go trough with self-hosting a blog.
|
| In other countries it's of course way worse (think censorship and
| social scoring), so blogging just because you can seems to me as
| good a reason as any.
| guy98238710 wrote:
| > Even here in Germany, any blog, including private ones, need
| to come with an imprint section including your full name,
| residential address, mobile phone number et cetera.
|
| How can this be consistent with GDPR? AFAIK, WHOIS data had to
| be concealed because of GDPR.
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| How does the law define a "blog"?
|
| If you had an account on LiveJournal, would you have to put an
| imprint in the profile? What if you're microblogging on
| Twitter? Vlogging on YouTube?
| mbwgh wrote:
| I am not sure about that. Even for conventional blogs, I
| would say that the legal situation is not really clear.
|
| Non-legal advice often is "if it's non-commercial, you don't
| need an imprint", see e.g. documentation by Hetzner [0].
|
| On the other hand, if you visit pages that do offer legal
| advice, the situation is suddenly way more nuanced. This page
| ([1], German, but you will surely be able to translate it)
| makes the following points and describes the situation as I
| remember it: * Commercial page targeting a
| German market or residing in Germany: you need an imprint
| * Some blog that generates 1 cent of ad revenue: you need an
| imprint * Private blog which reaches a large audience
| and publishes on a regular basis: You need an imprint
|
| The last one is of course not well-defined (what is a large
| audience, at what point do you publish regularly). And I
| think you can always assume that you have the "intention" of
| reaching a large audience, e.g. if you blog about anything
| that is not obviously irrelevant to the majority of people,
| like something technical.
|
| So in summary, many lawyers advice you to add an imprint
| section even for a private blog, just to be on the safe side.
|
| [0] https://docs.hetzner.com/general/others/impressum-faq/
| [1] https://www.abmahnung.org/blog-impressum/
| rmuratov wrote:
| I did not know about it. Sounds like a violation of privacy.
| omginternets wrote:
| > Even here in Germany, any blog, including private ones, need
| to come with an imprint section including your full name,
| residential address, mobile phone number et cetera.
|
| This is likely a moment of cultural incongruence, but this is
| outright shocking to me. Generally, when I am shocked by such
| things, it's because I'm unaware of the reasoning behind them.
| What is the reasoning behind this law, exactly?
| swilliamsio wrote:
| It piqued my curiousity too so I had a little look. It's
| called an Impressum. I think OP is incorrect that personal
| websites need to list a phone number and address - it seems
| to just apply to commercial entities.
|
| https://law.stackexchange.com/a/23395
|
| https://www.ionos.co.uk/digitalguide/websites/digital-
| law/a-...
| mbwgh wrote:
| See my reply to another commentor [0]. In short, the
| situation is a little confusing since even though your
| private blog may not be commercial, it may be regarded
| "businesslike" nontheless [1].
|
| That being said, this legislation has been in place for
| some years now. I am not aware of any private person
| actually having had to face legal ramifications because of
| this and personally I would just omit it and say bring it.
|
| Still, you see lots of private German blogs which do have
| an inprint, if you look out for it.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36745481
|
| [1] https://www-checkdomain-
| de.translate.goog/blog/bloggen/fortg...
| dgb23 wrote:
| I think there's an even bigger wisdom in here.
|
| We tend to overburden ourselves with these negative thoughts all
| the time. What other people might think, and other forms of self
| sabotage.
|
| In a sense it's a good sign. It's good to care and put ourselves
| into the shoes of others. It's also good to be self-critical,
| it's a powerful tool that prevents us from stupidity and harm.
| Being critical also helps us to develop taste and make things of
| higher quality.
|
| But it can easily be too pessimistic, too hindering and too lazy.
| It's so easy to say ,,It's going to suck anyway, let's not do
| anything." But that's not being self critical, it's being lazy
| and self harming.
|
| To build confidence, one has to actually do something and keep at
| it. Let self-criticism be a tool used iteratively and not a
| burden that prevents us from going forward.
|
| It's the priorities and goals, our inner value system that helps
| us choose whether we do something or not.
| OldGuyInTheClub wrote:
| A blog is still a fine thing to have if you don't have any
| expectations for it. A couple of times a year I am moved by
| something I've seen or heard enough to post about it. The act of
| turning that need into a few coherent paragraphs is very
| satisfying even though no one reads it. But, someone might
| someday under a bizarre set of circumstances. It's a message-in-
| a-bottle without contaminating an actual ocean.
| rambojohnson wrote:
| oh wonderful, some neckbeard edge lord from his blog telling me
| my blog doesn't matter. I'm all eyes and ears!
| user6723 wrote:
| I post cool shit on my blog and it got me laid a couple times. I
| am gonna keep posting.
| p0d wrote:
| Everyone is I :-)
|
| My blog is 15 years old and entirely private. It's a great way to
| process thoughts. Looking back, I am amazed at how often I
| revisit the same questions and musings.
|
| This realisation of recursion has led me to create mini
| manifestos. For example, a lot of my financial thinking/planning
| is summed up in half a dozen points in one of my blog posts.
|
| I would recommend blogging for circular thinkers as myself as a
| way of maturing your thought process.
| sweetjuly wrote:
| Kinda a strange post that I don't quite agree with. Particularly:
|
| > You're not an expert in your field, otherwise you wouldn't be
| publishing in a blog, but writing papers and giving interviews.
|
| Blogs and self-pub are often the only ways some information is
| shared by nature of the fact that academic publications _don 't
| publish_ things that don't obviously advance the state-of-the-
| art.
|
| For example, one area I'm close with is computer security. While
| academia does some quite interesting work here, most major
| journals balk at the papers which discuss security mitigation
| _defeats_ unless they 're particularly zany (say, breaking ASLR
| using transient side channel attacks). Blog posts which detail
| how these mitigations work (ex. Siguza's post on Apple's
| proprietary APRR [1]) and how they can be defeated (ex. Project
| Zero's post which builds on Siguza's work to explore how APRR can
| be defeated in Safari's JIT [2]) provide considerable value to
| both security researchers, people who develop mitigations, and
| software people in general who are interested in learning how
| attackers think.
|
| These sorts of works don't really belong in journals but that
| doesn't make them any less valuable.
|
| [1] https://blog.siguza.net/APRR/
|
| [2]
| https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2020/09/jitsploitatio...
| Agentlien wrote:
| Another great example is graphics studies of video games, a
| trend started by Adrian Courreges[1]. I learned a lot from his
| blog and it really motivated me to start doing my own similar
| analyses of games I enjoy. I mean, I'm already comfortable
| using these tools from work, so why not?
|
| Maybe I'll even post about it on my blog, sometime...
|
| [1] http://www.adriancourreges.com
| cyclotron3k wrote:
| All four of those bullet points are flawed, and I think that's
| the point. They are _perceived_ reasons to not blog, rather
| than actual, legitimate reasons. That's my take anyway.
| Agentlien wrote:
| That would have made sense if the second half would actually
| refute them.
|
| Instead it seems to assume they are truths but argue that you
| shouldn't care that your thoughts are unoriginal and others
| laugh at your stupidity.
| ginsider_oaks wrote:
| The point is that the first list is a series of (flawed)
| reasons that the author, and probably many others, have
| been discouraged from blogging.
|
| And even if you know they're flawed, it can still get in
| your head and discourage you, so the author provides a
| different list of reasons to still blog in spite of that.
| It's not meant as proving/disproving any of the points, but
| simply as motivation to keep going.
| isykt wrote:
| That's only your take away because you read the entire post
| where the author negates all of these points and reaffirms
| his belief that blogging is worthwhile.
| guy98238710 wrote:
| > To release ideas that you have in your head and that you need
| to get out.
|
| This. Getting ideas out of my head is the reason not only for
| blogging but also for all my opensource work. BTW, never sign an
| NDA. Locking ideas in your head will drive you nuts.
| travisporter wrote:
| Sometimes I feel the entire field of mathematics is like this
| lol. But who cares. It's refreshing to see something original.
| kaba0 wrote:
| I think many people failed to get the message of the author: it's
| not a discouragement to blogging. The first list is more of your
| "inner voice" that tells you to stop/don't even start writing.
|
| For me personally it did help a bit, as I was thinking about
| writing my first blog post for a long time, and I also have been
| fighting with quite a lot of items on the first list. (Especially
| about the being considered dumb part). While I find the title a
| bit click-bait-y and that's likely the reason why many didn't
| read the whole thing/misunderstood, by critiquing I would just
| confirm one of the negative items, so let's leave it that :D
| Modified3019 wrote:
| >I think many people failed to get the message of the author
|
| Consider the opposite: The author didn't properly communicate
| their intent to the audience. A blog is mostly if not entirely
| one way communication, and as such the understandability of it
| is the responsibility of the speaker, not the audience.
|
| This can be learned from and fixed easily enough, but only if
| one correctly identifies the problem.
| lapcat wrote:
| Let's be honest about the reality of the situation: Some
| internet commenters are lazy, careless, and dumb. (Yes, even
| and especially on HN.) It's difficult to help these people
| understand, because they don't want to understand; they want
| to be spoon-fed everything instead of _thinking_ for
| themselves and putting in a little effort into reading.
| kaba0 wrote:
| Sure, and it is fair to criticize it constructivel.
|
| Nonetheless, we should try to look behind the exact content
| and discuss the topic at hand. I don't see much value in
| arguing against a straw man.
| alexmolas wrote:
| You completely got it right!
|
| I have to admit the title is a little click-bait-y, but it's my
| blog and I do what I want ;)
|
| Every time I've shared my posts with other people I've received
| critiques and comments of people telling that what I wrote is
| dumb. But I've also received a lot of comments of people with
| constructive comments and I've learnt a lot from them. And in
| my experience the good is much better than the bad. So I
| encourage you to go there and write your first post!! And
| please, share it with us once you finish it please :)
| nextaccountic wrote:
| Your blog post reads like a depression simulator, or rather,
| a simulation of the overly critical internal monologue and
| rumination of persons with depression
| slenk wrote:
| Is that a bad thing? That's just him maybe.
| kaba0 wrote:
| Thanks for the motivation!
| thomashabets2 wrote:
| The blog lists pros and cons. I disagree with all cons.
|
| > There are hundreds of blogs out there, what makes you think
| yours is different?
|
| Because it's mine. My friends care. Recruiters and hiring
| managers have cared (in a good way).
|
| > You're just probably repeating things you've read in another
| place.
|
| Maybe. But some are hidden in a locked library basement behind a
| door labelled "beware of the leopard". The information is not
| useful there.
|
| Also I sometimes write the documentation I wish existed before I
| learned. Maybe it was written, but not in the way I found useful.
| If ever someone who thinks like me reads it, it'll save them more
| time than I took to write it. And people have thanked me, so I
| guess they exist.
|
| > You're not an expert in your field, otherwise you wouldn't be
| publishing in a blog, but writing papers and giving interviews.
|
| So there is no need for teachers and textbook authors, because
| they don't advance state of the art?
|
| And actually, when I've asked questions, I've had people refer me
| back to my own blog, as if it's a reference. (I'd not forgotten,
| I was asking about the next step)
|
| > You are only showing the world how stupid you are.
|
| I do that every day. The only way to become (and therefore look)
| smart is to look stupid. :-)
|
| > If someone, at some point, cares about your blog will be only
| to criticize it.
|
| No. The only real criticism I get for my blog is from Bitcoin
| idiots telling me I'm stupid, but they never "have the time" to
| explain what exactly I'm not getting. Sure, buddy.
|
| > Your work is trash, and exposing it will make people notice
| you're trash as well
|
| I'd rather leave a mark of who I actually am, than some fake
| Instagram persona lie of who I am.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| It's interesting to me how even covering well-trod ground with
| a blogpost can be useful because the long tail of unique
| experiences is so long.
|
| Mastodon has a well-documented setup process. I'm still going
| to do a blog post about setting mine up because I used an
| unusual hardware configuration and an unusual server config
| that aren't covered in the mainline-supported tutorial. I was
| only able to succeed because other people had done the same at
| some point.
| alexmolas wrote:
| Author here. Tbh I don't actually believe all the cons, these
| are things I was telling myself to stop writing. It doesn't
| mean I believe they're right, but these were just excuses I was
| making to stop writing. The list of pros are the ones that were
| useful for me to continue writing on my blog :)
| [deleted]
| thomashabets2 wrote:
| Yeah I sensed something like that. But I don't just think
| that the pros outweigh the cons, I think the cons are all
| wrong. :-)
| haswell wrote:
| > _these are things I was telling myself to stop writing_
|
| I think some of the feedback here is because that's not how
| you explain the cons in the post:
|
| > _Here's a list of why nobody cares about your blog_
|
| While you do go on to tell people they shouldn't care about
| these cons, I'd go a step further and say these aren't even
| real things most people who encounter your blog will think.
|
| Your framing sets this up as a current of negative sentiment
| out there against which you must steel yourself to write.
|
| A different framing is that this negative sentiment primarily
| exists in your own mind (mine too), thus not a problem.
|
| I think there's a meaningful difference between the two,
| especially if you're not writing due to anxiety about
| reception.
|
| The overarching message is great. I just worry that your list
| kind of reifies the notion that those are real reasons.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| Honestly, I think it's the failing of the readers. It's
| clear he doesn't believe this list of cons, and rather,
| it's illustrative of the things some people believe or say
| about writing a blog. These are all real things I've heard
| people say about creating.
|
| This is a perfectly acceptable style.
|
| This is a problem in comprehension. People aren't thinking.
|
| "these aren't even real things most people who encounter
| your blog will think"
|
| But these are real things real people think about a lot
| when they think about writing or creating and sharing it.
|
| Honestly, the lack of comprehension is a gentle reminder to
| me that HN isn't any smarter than any other place. It just
| tends to lean toward topics I'm interested in, but the
| people making up the discussion aren't necessarily smarter.
| haswell wrote:
| > _Honestly, I think it's the failing of the readers._
|
| I'd argue that it's a failing of the engagement-driven
| information economy.
|
| The Internet is full of posts with lists of hot takes
| that are completely literal. It is in this landscape that
| a reader finding a post like this must decide how to
| interpret what the reader is trying to say.
|
| > _It's clear he doesn't believe this list of cons_
|
| For the reasons outlined, this was not clear at all. It
| was clear that the author felt someone shouldn't care
| about these cons, but that is quite different than
| concluding that the cons aren't even worth believing.
|
| There are times that cons are true, and those cons are
| outweighed by the pros. There are times when the cons
| win.
|
| This is a time when the cons are false. Mentioning that
| would be helpful. This is my primary point.
|
| > _But these are real things real people think about a
| lot when they think about writing or creating and sharing
| it._
|
| Yes, and my point was that the issue can be very easily
| solved by just framing it as such with almost zero change
| to the overall content.
|
| "None of these are _true_ " vs. "You shouldn't care about
| these cons". It's a small change that completely shifts
| the meaning of the list and brings more readers onboard.
|
| > _Honestly, the lack of comprehension..._
|
| And let's say for sake of argument that the primary
| problem _is_ one of comprehension. That implies a broader
| trend that requires corrective behaviors, and concluding
| that "that's just their problem" doesn't seem to be very
| useful for anyone involved either. If this is the new
| state of readership, authors have some choices to make.
|
| I deeply support the underlying message the author is
| trying to convey: write stuff, and don't listen to bad
| reasons for not writing! I don't want my comments here to
| be misconstrued otherwise.
| lapcat wrote:
| Here's the thing: many people here had no trouble
| comprehending the blog post. We understood the author's
| intent just fine, despite living in the same "engagement-
| driven information economy" as everyone else.
|
| Most blog posts are unpaid labor. It's not blogger's job
| to explain everything to everyone, because blogging is
| not their job. As a frequent blogger myself, if I had to
| dumb down my blog posts for the dumbest, most inattentive
| readers, then that in itself would be a good reason not
| to blog at all. I'm just not interested in that crap. I
| write for an "intelligent" audience, and I don't care if
| that sounds elitist.
|
| If you paid for a product, then you have the right to
| complain. But with blog posts, you're consuming text for
| free. You can choose not to consume it fully, and that's
| fine, but pedantically telling bloggers to change their
| writing style is stepping over the line. Bloggers have no
| obligation whatsoever to cater to the inattentive, or
| whomever you believe they need to cater to.
|
| If _everyone_ was missing the point of a blog post, that
| would indicate a problem with the writing. But that 's
| not the case here.
| haswell wrote:
| I agree with almost everything you wrote here, and as a
| blogger, I'm sensitive to the same things you're calling
| out. I just argued something similar re: 'don't complain
| if you didn't pay' in an unrelated thread.
|
| I shared a piece of feedback earlier in the thread based
| on what I saw to be the source of confusion.
|
| I'm not arguing that bloggers have to explain everything
| to everyone.
|
| I'm not arguing that bloggers have an obligation to cater
| to the lowest common denominator.
|
| And I'm not arguing that everyone is missing the point.
|
| To bring this back to where I started, in a meta-
| discussion about people getting confused about the
| meaning of the words written, the only point I was trying
| to make was that this is happening for an understandable
| reason, and this reason goes away entirely with a slight
| reframing without fundamentally changing anything.
|
| I'm not even arguing that my specific reframing is the
| best way to do it or that the author must go change
| anything.
|
| I think my perspective may make more sense if you imagine
| that I'm trying to understand _why_ people are
| misunderstanding, and that I find it interesting to
| explore those reasons. I find this interesting for
| admittedly selfish reasons: like most bloggers, I want
| people who care enough to read my stuff to understand the
| words I write. Discussions like this help clarify where
| the pitfalls exist.
|
| In a post about writing blog posts, such an exploration
| seems appropriate.
| lapcat wrote:
| > this is happening for an understandable reason,
|
| I agree.
|
| > and this reason goes away entirely with a slight
| reframing without fundamentally changing anything.
|
| I disagree, because I disagree with your diagnosis of why
| it's happening.
| onetokeoverthe wrote:
| [dead]
| Given_47 wrote:
| The point about providing ur own perspective is what makes
| blogs so (sadly) refreshing.
|
| I've stumbled onto so many random blogs and read a post on a
| topic I'm already familiar with because I hope to find a
| different perspective on it.
| romusha wrote:
| So basically, as the old saying goes, you were "merely
| pretending"?
| jimnotgym wrote:
| I got that from reading it. I enjoyed the article. Nobody
| cares about comments from people reading things too literally
| ;)
| ozim wrote:
| Looks like a lot of people read first list, got triggered
| started writing comment and did not think about full scope of
| the text.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| Lack of any comprehension. It's amazing. It's a good
| reminder that most people commenting here read the
| headline, and react, rather than put any thought into what
| was written. They believe that because they "read the
| comments first" or are posting here is indicative of their
| intelligence.
|
| Shameful.
| MichaelRo wrote:
| Not really, it's a feature of modern times.
|
| A long long time ago, before the Internet and the wide
| availability of electronic content, I used to read books
| and would even send physical letters.
|
| Once I entered the corporate world and email, I had people
| telling me that I have to change my writing style. Pre-
| modern world and me included would use what I would call
| the "epistolary" style (long, detailed text). I was taught
| it by the literature I read or enforced in school by the
| style of writing I was expected to write. Essentially a
| bottom-up approach where you start with the premises and
| gradually build up your conclusion, presented at the end of
| the "novel".
|
| Well problem's in the modern world nobody has the time to
| read your novel. I think reformulating "Nobody cares about
| your blog" to "Nobody has time to read your novel" would be
| closer to the truth.
|
| It's not that people don't read novels anymore, it's that
| the quantity of content has increased 100x. Literally
| there's no time to go in depth over each and every wall of
| text you are confronted with.
|
| So better adjust your writing style to modernity and use a
| top-down approach. Start with the conclusion and gradually
| build up the premises that led you there. Some people might
| read the whole content if it captures their interest but
| 99% will just read your summary and skim through the high
| level part of your content (assuming you stick to the top-
| down, so it gradually breaks into more and more complex
| parts).
|
| I'd say there's nothing wrong with the approach and gotta
| keep up with the times we're living.
| njroute22 wrote:
| Compared to a few decades ago, far fewer people
| "contemplate" issues - and instead immediately go into
| "knee-jerk reaction" mode. Gone is the subtle art of
| "thinking things over."
|
| Sure - times have changed - but not necessarily for the
| better.
| briHass wrote:
| I had a similar awakening as I got older. Mine was mostly
| driven by reading non-fiction books, where the author
| drags a concept that could be adaquitly explained in 10
| pages into a 350 page book. It just feels disrespectful
| of the reader: learn how to make your point in the fewest
| words possible.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| Another "con" against the blog then: there'll be people
| who only flash scan the blog then pick out a bunch of
| fairly incorrect conclusions they jump to without
| considering. Which supposedly is a wide number of time
| starved people in the world.
|
| And the "pro": you don't care what modern times are like.
| This is a blog. You get to pick who you write for. If
| time-short people who only want maximally-concise
| hand_holding business text are not your target, that's
| fine. You get to pick how you want to write. You can pick
| to ensure only better classes of readers.
| lapcat wrote:
| > Some people might read the whole content if it captures
| their interest but 99% will just read your summary and
| skim through the high level part of your content
|
| If people don't want to read everything you wrote, that's
| not inherently a problem.
|
| The problem is that people want to _comment_ on things
| they haven 't read, and that's a problem the writer can't
| solve. Lazy, superficial commenters are a pox on all
| writing, and the internet has enabled them. It's a
| feature of modern times because the internet has given
| superficial, super lazy commenters a platform they never
| had before. Anyone in the world can sign up for a social
| media platform and start spewing text with practically no
| effort or ability.
| beebeepka wrote:
| This reads like a cheap shot at people don't have the
| patience to deal with walls of text that can be
| summarised in a couple of well constructed sentences.
|
| Long form speakers often do so to obfuscate the content.
| It's a hiding place.
|
| The only long form I read is fiction.
| lapcat wrote:
| > This reads like a cheap shot at people don't have the
| patience to deal with walls of text that can be
| summarised in a couple of well constructed sentences.
|
| No, it's a criticism of people who _make_ cheap shots in
| comments.
|
| Again, if one doesn't have the patience for reading
| something, that's fine. But just walk away from the
| article, don't proceed to comment on something one
| doesn't have the patience to read. That's a disservice
| both to the author and to the people who did read the
| text.
|
| "There's too much stuff to read on the internet" is a
| reason to walk away. It's not a good reason to stick
| around and comment.
| lapcat wrote:
| > Looks like a lot of people read first list, got triggered
| started writing comment and did not think about full scope
| of the text.
|
| In other words... nobody cares about your blog. ;-)
| haswell wrote:
| If they're triggered and writing angrily, they care.
|
| They just care about it for the wrong reasons.
|
| Reasons that can be eliminated by adapting the structure
| of the content to a modern audience.
| lapcat wrote:
| > If they're triggered and writing angrily, they care.
|
| They may care about the subject matter of the blog post,
| but they don't care about the blog post, which is just an
| excuse for them to rant about the subject matter.
|
| > Reasons that can be eliminated by adapting the
| structure of the content to a modern audience.
|
| c/modern/lazy
| haswell wrote:
| > _they don 't care about the blog post, which is just an
| excuse for them to rant about the subject matter_
|
| This kind of framing/sweeping generalization doesn't make
| sense to me. There will always be people who will rant
| for the sake of ranting, but this isn't universal, nor
| should it be the base assumption about a
| reader/commentor.
|
| > _c /modern/lazy_
|
| This carries the problematic generalization further. The
| modern media environment has drastically impacted
| people's attention span.
|
| There are plenty of critical things to be said about the
| effects of this trend, but painting this as just a matter
| of laziness misses the bigger picture.
|
| Especially important if you want to create content that
| encourages people to cultivate attention and stop
| consuming attention-destroying content.
|
| Writing for a "modern" audience isn't about catering to
| lazy people, but recognizing what people are up against
| in an information landscape that increasingly churns out
| bad information, making it necessary as a reader to
| assess the content quickly enough to know if it's time to
| move on, because there isn't enough time or attention in
| a day to give every post a full read.
|
| I'm not saying lazy readers don't exist, but that's not
| why I think it's useful to think about content structure.
| lapcat wrote:
| My comment "In other words... nobody cares about your
| blog. ;-)" was intended to be joke, with the wink
| emoticon, riffing on the title of the blog post. It
| wasn't intended as a serious sweeping generalization.
|
| Nonetheless, many good jokes have a grain of truth. Such
| commenters who rant for the sake of ranting obviously do
| exist, as you admit, and they are pervasive.
|
| > making it necessary as a reader to assess the content
| quickly enough to know if it's time to move on, because
| there isn't enough time or attention in a day to give
| every post a full read.
|
| It's interesting that you said "move on" rather than
| "comment", which is precisely the distinction I discussed
| in another comment here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36746673 Moving on
| is fine. The problem is staying and commenting without
| reading carefully.
| ozim wrote:
| That is interesting take.
|
| But I still don't understand how come people feel like it
| is worth to spend time writing comment on something they
| don't have time to read through.
| analog31 wrote:
| I think there are many good reasons for people to write, even
| if they're not at the cutting edge of a field, or doing
| something totally original:
|
| * Information that's derivative of cutting edge knowledge,
| but not worth the bother for the academic researchers to work
| on, especially in the area of turning it into practical
| things.
|
| * Stuff that can't be documented by the experts because they
| can't write, unless it's for an audience of fellow experts,
| or they feel no reason to. Virtually all technical
| documentation is impenetrable without supporting commentary
| or explanation, often written by non-experts.
|
| * Practical projects, that might have only one interested
| user (myself), but whose pieces might be of interest to
| others. This is most of my blogging.
|
| * Keeping old arts and obscure techniques alive.
|
| * Invitation for critique. Am I wrong? Show me. Make my day.
|
| So far as writing papers or giving interviews, some folks
| might feel that the "overhead" of doing those things does not
| justify the benefits. For instance I have no academic career
| to advance.
| ly3xqhl8g9 wrote:
| There was a trend in the paper blogs, the diaries of 1930s [1],
| probably when they were at peak, of authors whining about
| authorship, perhaps due to an _esprit du mal_ of the epoch: to
| whom does one write for? And the answers were usually, (i) one
| writes for the others of today to obtain worldly benefits,
| which is gauche in the eyes of the diary writer, (ii) one
| writes for the others of tomorrow, which is somewhat more
| acceptable, (iii) one writes for oneself, which is the pure
| form of the art.
|
| However, a fourth option appears today: one writes for the
| language models. The language models will always care about
| your blog.
|
| [1] Julien Green is probably the most famous for his _Diary_ ,
| 1919-1998 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julien_Green
| sanderjd wrote:
| > You're not an expert in your field, otherwise you wouldn't be
| publishing in a blog, but writing papers and giving interviews.
|
| This one is especially far out there. Lots of experts in their
| fields write blogs or newsletters or articles for other
| publications, etc. Not every field is an academic discipline.
| And quite frankly, academics would themselves be far more
| impactful if they didn't only churn out academic papers, but
| also wrote in a blog-like format. And many of them do, and they
| increase the impact of their work by doing so.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| It's good to see you agreeing with the blog.
| camillomiller wrote:
| > You're not an expert in your field, otherwise you wouldn't be
| publishing in a blog, but writing papers and giving interviews.
|
| I understand the point and why that could pop up in a blogger's
| mind as a way to stop writing, but this is a wrong framing
| problem.
|
| Academia for example is a gigantic citation game. The reason
| why you're writing a paper is not necessarily because you're an
| expert, but because you need to establish yourself as one in a
| very narrow field based on a self-reinforcing score scheme.
|
| "Giving Interviews" also implies an objectivity that does not
| exist. Establishing yourself as an expert has a lot more to do
| with personal branding than actually being the best experts.
| Plus, especially fo TV, you don't call the utmost experts of a
| field, you call someone who's expert enough or prepared enough
| AND knows how to talk in front of a camera and for the tv
| interview format, which is a superficial medium.
|
| Getting interviews or being perceived as an expert is a
| "business" that has its own marketing strategies. A blog could
| even be part of that strategy and it's been in many cases, but
| it has to be structured as such. On the other hand, it's ok to
| put your words out there without this specific agenda. In that
| case a blog and blogging shouldn't be judged by the metrics of
| popularity, because it sits in a very different domain.
| MichaelRo wrote:
| >> There are hundreds of blogs out there, what makes you think
| yours is different?
|
| Precisely this one. There are billions of people out there
| breathing, your own personal breathing is so unremarkable and
| trivial that since only being original at all costs matters in
| this world you should cease to breathe effective immediately!
| brightball wrote:
| Exactly. Thanks to articles that have made it here on HN, I've
| met people in different states that remembered my blog.
|
| And one more...I write because it helps me organize my
| thoughts. When something is on my mind for a couple of months,
| I often can't stop thinking about it until I write it down.
| That's the entire reason I blog.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| I think this is the most important; I write because it
| organises me and I remember things I wrote. If I didn't
| journal and blog, I would forget things.
| FourthProtocol wrote:
| >> You're not an expert in your field, otherwise you wouldn't
| be publishing in a blog, but writing papers and giving
| interviews.
|
| >So there is no need for teachers and textbook authors, because
| they don't advance state of the art?
|
| This. I have a web site that in places you might call a blog.
| It's got a section for work stuff, some photos, hobbies, and
| random pages like explaining how to drive off-road. Those off-
| road pages (specifically this single page - https://www.wittenb
| urg.co.uk/offroading/Concepts/Gearing.htm...) gets more hits
| than all the other pages combined. I wrote it in 1998.
| hef19898 wrote:
| I'll be damned, back when I stared off roading like six years
| ago, I did read that page!
| [deleted]
| mooreds wrote:
| Blogs have value even if no one else ever reads them. The very
| act of publishing something to the world is an achievement and,
| I find, enforces a level of editing and quality beyond jotting
| notes.
| [deleted]
| Buttons840 wrote:
| > You're not an expert in your field, otherwise you wouldn't be
| publishing in a blog, but writing papers and giving interviews.
|
| This is a thought I had _before_ I read many papers. After
| getting over my fear of reading papers (mostly) and actually
| starting to read them I 've realized their quality varies
| greatly.
|
| Taking a step back from the glamour of academia. The random
| blog without ads is written out of love. The published paper is
| written as part of a job, and probably to meet externally
| imposed deadlines (and there _might_ be some love in the paper
| too). Judge for yourself which you want to read.
|
| Sometimes, as a beginner I want a beginners perspective. We
| imagine that we only gain through study, but we lose our fresh
| perspective, and no amount of study can restore that fresh
| perspective, which does have some merit.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| I have found a lot of blogs, often written by people who are
| or could be professors, which are much higher quality than
| the average academic paper.
|
| Papers are honestly just a lot of work, and unless you want
| to be cited by other academic papers, putting your work in a
| blog just lowers the friction of publication.
| [deleted]
| mochaki wrote:
| wow i enjoyed your counter-points
| imadj wrote:
| I think the reason for all these misconceptions comes down to
| prejudice. People try to group personal websites/blog into one
| bucket according to a perceived notion they have. Many have these
| stereotypes:
|
| - personal website = portfolio and trying to look special
|
| - personal blog = you're some sort of aspiring failed writer
|
| Social media and blogging platforms have made the idea of
| personal websites so alien now to people.
| t0bia_s wrote:
| Whenever I decided to write a blog post, I realize how terribly I
| know the topic and how worthless it is when finished. So writing
| for myself doesn't make sense.
|
| If I would write it for my close friends, I would rather make
| conversation with them about this topic, but then I'm not sure
| how beneficial those conversations would be since it's not topic
| that they are educated enough. So making blog for my friends
| about topics that they are not interested enough doesn't make
| sense to me either.
|
| Only reason why write blog for me is to manage my notes and write
| down my thoughts. But I can do it privately as well. So it brings
| me back to first.
|
| I would say you need some kind of narcissism to write blog.
| [deleted]
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| That's a lot of projection and built up anger.
| nvarsj wrote:
| Hi Alex, great blog post. I know exactly what you're saying! I
| should blog more too - it is time consuming but it always makes
| me feel good. Like you say, we should blog for ourselves foremost
| and not worry about what others think. It's always a net positive
| no matter what.
|
| P.S. I also like the design of your blog, I might steal a few
| ideas :).
| alexmolas wrote:
| I'm glad you like it :) I just redesigned the blog completely,
| I'm happy you like it, feel free to copy all the ideas you
| want!
| azhenley wrote:
| I used to think this way too, until I actually started my blog.
| It immediately got 50k views the first month, so apparently
| someone cares.
|
| Still going after 4 years.
| alexmolas wrote:
| Wow, that's impressive. How did you get 50k views in a month?
| I've been writing for two years and I've got at most 10k visits
| in all this time
| azhenley wrote:
| Make a bunch of people on HN angry.
|
| Type inference has usability problems.
| https://austinhenley.com/blog/typeinference.html
| alexmolas wrote:
| Haha that sounds like a great strategy.
|
| I just skimmed over the blog and it looks super
| interesting, I'll add it to my list of blogs to follow ;)
| guy98238710 wrote:
| I would add a point to the pros:
|
| - Even in the (very unlikely) case that nobody actually reads
| your post, language models will. They have to, because there's
| never enough training data. Your ideas will be merged into the
| text that LLMs synthesize and perhaps that will save someone's
| day.
| lapcat wrote:
| I would add that to the cons. You just convinced me to stop
| blogging. ;-)
| guy98238710 wrote:
| Why? What's wrong with having others promote your ideas for
| free?
| lapcat wrote:
| Promote? Will I get any credit? I doubt that.
| guy98238710 wrote:
| Personally, I don't care about getting credit, but if you
| do, then avoiding blogging wouldn't get you any credit
| either.
| iopq wrote:
| My blog has some of the latest English-language information about
| running a proxy that is resistant to state-level blocking
| rootw0rm wrote:
| the main reason i have my little blog is to motivate me and shame
| me into actually finishing something
| chantepierre wrote:
| Nobody reads my blog.
|
| But last week, someone contacted me via e-mail to tell me that a
| workaround I published to run interferometry software under MacOS
| was now not needed anymore because he made the porting work to
| run this software natively.
|
| I then realized I ranked high for "<software> mac" and updated my
| post so people easily find his work.
|
| That's a win to me !
| patrick451 wrote:
| I don't have a blog, but I learn a lot from people who do. The OP
| seems to think that if your idea isn't novel, it's not worth
| writing down. Much less share with the public That's only true in
| the bizarre, petty world of the Academic, where the currency is
| novelty rather than quality of exposition. To the rest of us
| plebs just trying to learn something, reading four different
| explanations of the same (academically) boring thing is useful.
| alexmolas wrote:
| Author here. I don't believe that, these are things I was
| telling myself to stop writing. It doesn't mean I believe
| they're right, but these were just excuses I was making to stop
| writing.
| [deleted]
| ilaksh wrote:
| This makes a lot of sense, and these are the reasons I had a blog
| for a few years. But I looked at my analytics and realized that
| it was almost certainly literally only bots and my brother very
| occasionally reading the blog. So I stopped.
| alexmolas wrote:
| This is exactly my case as well! Don't stop writing just
| because of that, having a blog is cool even if nobody reads it.
| And you never know when it's going to be read anyway.
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