[HN Gopher] A blog post is a long and complex search query to fi...
___________________________________________________________________
A blog post is a long and complex search query to find people
(2022)
Author : lxm
Score : 210 points
Date : 2023-11-04 02:02 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.henrikkarlsson.xyz)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.henrikkarlsson.xyz)
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| I try to never write my Internet comments for me. I write for the
| imaginary bored teenage version of me who ran across what I
| wrote, at 6 pm on a Thursday night, and found it interesting, or
| at least amusing.
| timetraveller26 wrote:
| You mean like in Interstellar?
| mrcsno wrote:
| The Death of Google Reader was a canon event and only recently do
| we seem to be moving back towards the kind of internet that can
| support these kind of blogs instead of the Big Centralized
| Platforms.
|
| Granted it could support it all along but, for a time, people
| wanted to see what the fuss was all about at the Big Platforms.
| I'm glad that bloggers kept blogging and that talented writers,
| old and new, are still going at what I consider my favorite part
| of the internet since it's modern inception in the 90s.
|
| Reading will always be my performed form of content despite more
| and more people moving to YouTube for better exposure and money
| but for all you who feel the need to write: KEEP IT UP!
| Euphorbium wrote:
| Any form of art is.
| celeritascelery wrote:
| This makes me wonder if I should be writing on substack. I
| currently use a static site generator and host with netlify[1].
| This is great because it is simple and I have complete control
| over the site. But at the same time I can't see when people visit
| my site and there is no comment section. I rely or external
| forums like HN, lobsters, and Reddit to have a discussion. And I
| have no way of knowing when my content gets shared because I
| can't see the traffic.
|
| But my purpose of writing is the same as the authors, to find
| like minded people and have a discussion with them. It's kind of
| cure for intellectual loneliness.
|
| [1] https://coredumped.dev/
| kentrf wrote:
| I've got the same setup. SSG and free tier on Netlify. The only
| "free" metric is bandwidth usage.
|
| I paid for stats for a while, but it was depressingly low. But
| I'm chugging along for myself, like a public notebook.
| zorr wrote:
| When you don't care about the discussions being in the public
| record the comments don't necessarily need to be integrated in
| the blog.
|
| I have my email on my personal site and when an article reaches
| the frontpage on HN I usually get some emails related to the
| post.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Same.
|
| I don't want my website to be a distribution channel. The
| last thing I want is to be managing visitors to my home.
|
| I'll let the distributors do their thing to pass my content
| around and I'll own/manage my own content on my homepage.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| My approach is to prioritise notes over comments (or use
| comments as abstracts of future articles):
|
| https://untested.sonnet.io/Instead+or+writing+a+comment%2C+w...
|
| Substack is neat, but I'd prefer a nice, self-hosted
| alternative.
|
| (or POSSE - "Publish (on your) Own Site, SyndicateElsewhere").
| kkyr wrote:
| You might want to look into using giscus[1] for a commenting
| system on your blog. All it needs is a public GH repository to
| host the discussions, after which you simply embed a script
| into each blog post, and visitors will be able to leave a
| comment using their GH account.
|
| [1] https://giscus.app
| chubot wrote:
| A few years ago it was Medium, and to me it seems like most of
| the Medium content has "rotted" now ...
|
| Substack does look better, but not sure if it's sustainable
| tonystubblebine wrote:
| I would love for you to keep an open mind. Medium changed a
| lot last year and still has a lot more room to go. A lot of
| the content mill and clickbait has effectively gone, either
| disincentivized or removed from recommendations. That made
| room for great stories to come back. (Still a subscription
| though because that's the way to get out of the attention
| economy)
| mminer237 wrote:
| You could use client-side comments like Disqus.
| KiloCNC wrote:
| I don't really know what to say about Disqus, it always felt
| like something in the design of its interface was a bit off-
| putting. For me, Privacy Badger always blocks the embed and I
| think people from privacy-conscious circles would definitely
| avoid loading it.
|
| I (somewhat) recently saw a post[1] from an author I like
| that sent me down the rabbit hole and it seems like Disqus
| also tends to inject ad scripts into the websites that host
| it (which, honestly, makes some business sense because they
| are a for-profit and not a lot of people are using their non-
| free plans).
|
| In that same article, it was also mentioned in an edit that
| Giscus[2] seems like a viable solution. In my eyes, it really
| looks like it's the best client-side comment library out
| there and when I start my blog I'll try to use it for
| comments.
|
| [1]: https://www.supergoodcode.com/adventures-in-
| linking/#first
|
| [2]: https://giscus.app/
| ipaddr wrote:
| You could throw google analytics to handle stats.
| klabb3 wrote:
| > The more precise and niche the words I input, the better the
| internet would match me with people I could forge meaningful
| relationships with.
|
| Relatable and counter-intuitive. I have this reflex when I write
| that I'm trying to reach an imaginary broad audience. But
| whenever it's extremely specific, to the point when I don't
| expect anyone to even know what I'm talking about, it tends to
| drive more "engagement", in a good way! In a way it makes sense,
| when I'm reading some generic truism, I don't get any itch to
| engage, even if it was well written.
|
| If you, like me, have been stuck writing and it's slow and ends
| up bland, I can recommend just changing the mental "audience".
| Just assume you're talking to someone who really gets you -
| perhaps your younger self or a nerdy friend. Don't be defensive,
| trying to convince a hypothetical, hyper-intelligent skeptic.
|
| To me it can make the difference from dreadful and tedious to
| pure delight.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| This, 100%. The audience varies slightly, but 99% of time I'm
| talking to a friend or a colleague. And, it's not even about
| the subject matter, but rather the voice I use.
|
| > If you, like me, have been stuck writing and it's slow and
| ends up bland,
|
| To me this is a sign that I'm either tired or don't care about
| the subject, but haven't realised that yet. Write about the
| things that matter to you (harder than it seems).
| jseliger wrote:
| _To me it can make the difference from dreadful and tedious to
| pure delight._
|
| Yes. My wife worries a lot about this; she was worried that her
| 16,000-word, three-part essay guide on how to find clinical
| trials, and what the process was like for us
| (https://bessstillman.substack.com/p/please-be-dying-but-
| not-...) would be too long and peculiar. Instead, it's found a
| wide audience, and perhaps most vitally, she's gotten a lot of
| great emails and comments from readers. Astral Codex Ten in
| particular has great readership. I'm not sure whether she's
| forged meaningful relationships that way yet, but the potential
| is there.
|
| And if some people are put off by the peculiarities and
| quirkiness, so be it. To be for everyone is close to being for
| no one, as you mention.
| sebmellen wrote:
| Hey Jake, good to see you are still here! I've been following
| your story from afar and it's wild to see a comment from you
| on HN. Hope all is (as) well (as can be) given the
| circumstances!
| threetwoonezero wrote:
| It's an aspiring idea, it will probably change my approach to
| writing a bit
| Whooping7116 wrote:
| >I tell her that the internet is like an alien intelligence. We
| don't know exactly what it is; it has just landed, and only the
| first ship. We are trying to figure out how to talk to it. The
| first generation of explorers have noted that by making certain
| finger motions you can make the aliens show you images of cats
| and clothes, or tell you all the ways the world is falling apart.
|
| That seems like a weird way of explaining the internet to your 5
| year old daughter?
| winter_blue wrote:
| > I tell her that the internet is like an alien intelligence. We
| don't know exactly what it is; it has just landed, and only the
| first ship. We are trying to figure out how to talk to it
|
| Uh, what a way to make things sound needlessly complicated. He
| could have just said _" the Internet is a way for people all over
| world and in far flung places to talk to each other"_.
| ShamelessC wrote:
| I guess the author's complex search query has filtered out
| people like you, then. ;)
| cmur wrote:
| how is that needlessly complicated? it's just a simile
| commenting on how communicating on the internet is
| fundamentally different than anything before it. it sure is
| much more fun than your suggestion.
| detourdog wrote:
| One big thing the internet did as far as connecting people,
| that the bell telephone system did not is reduce the cost of
| communication to almost nothing. I think you're correct that
| their explanation of the internet was a description.
|
| Finally we know exactly how it works and its based on an RFC
| system. We may not comprehend the the societies built on top of
| the internet.
|
| I do believe a blog is a form of search query.
| dewbrite wrote:
| The point isn't that people can communicate over the Internet
| though. That's easy to explain.
|
| What's harder to explain is the emergent behavior that comes
| from that. I like to think of this as "meta gaming".
|
| Generally when people start playing a new game, they don't care
| much for picking the optimal team/items/tools, they just play
| to have fun. As they play more, they recognize that some
| combinations are stronger than others. Some people will theory
| craft those combinations.
|
| Over time, the general population will inherit those
| combinations, or perhaps build against it. That's kind of like
| the Internet before and the Internet now, but on a much larger
| and more complex scale.
| irrational wrote:
| > I was born in July 1989, which means I am of the last
| generation who will remember the time before the internet.
|
| The internet or the WWW? I was in my late teens in 1989 and we
| had been using the Internet in our home for years by that point.
| Swizec wrote:
| Author probably means the web and forgot that the internet ever
| existed. Which is funny because kids these days use the
| internet a lot more than they use the web.
|
| That said, I'm from ye olde 1987 and we only got internet in
| the house in 2001. The library started having it around 1997.
| Or that's when I found out about it. I think my mom's work had
| something like a WAN in the early 90's.
| nkrisc wrote:
| Feel free to tell me I'm wrong as well because I too was born
| in 1989, but to the best of my knowledge of the times before I
| was born, the internet was not a ubiquitous part of society and
| culture. The reason I believe that is I saw it myself go from a
| peripheral part of a society to taking a central role during
| the 90s and become mainstream. My dad had an internet-connected
| credit card terminal in his store, but the internet wasn't a
| mainstream cultural phenomenon.
|
| I was playing StarCraft online in 1998 and even then most of my
| friends (middle and upper class in Chicago) didn't do much
| online, or only used the internet for schoolwork which was a
| pretty new thing for us at that point. Even at that time I was
| still using our Britannica Encyclopedia CDs for school
| projects.
|
| So, paraphrasing and specifying a bit more, I do agree with the
| author. I too feel like I was part of the last generation who
| remembers a time before the internet, and the World Wide Web,
| completely proliferated society.
|
| Again, I was a child while all this was happening in the 90s,
| so perhaps my perspective is skewed, so I'm interested to hear
| if anyone older thinks that's completely off-base.
| chubot wrote:
| For reference, I used BBSes before the Internet around 1993,
| in middle school/high school.
|
| When I got the Internet in 1994 or 1995, I used Gopher as
| well as the web.
|
| College was a big upgrade with broadband, and I used it all
| through-- 1997-2002. Everybody used e-mail at college, but
| there were few "regular people" on the web, except maybe
| professors/scientists and programmers. It was mostly "web
| pages".
|
| I started my first job in 2002, programming in the Bay Area,
| and the funny thing is that I didn't have Internet access at
| home for 3 months. I guess it wasn't really necessary or
| worth the cost for a temporary place.
|
| I just used the Internet at work. These days I think people
| would look at you funny if you only used Internet at work.
|
| So it's hard to say, but yeah in 1997 the web was all over
| the news, because companies like Yahoo started to make money.
| EBay was kinda popular. There was all the IPO talk, so the
| Internet was in the public consciousness.
|
| But most people still weren't on the Internet. It was more
| like the news was reporting on this trend, and I wouldn't say
| it's essential to daily life.
|
| I also think the daily "news" conversation was still on TV at
| that point, not on the Internet.
|
| ---
|
| It's hard for me to remember now, but now I kinda want to
| read what the Internet was like in 2002. Definitely Google
| was a huge thing back then. It made the Internet more
| popular, because it was easier to find things.
|
| I started using it in summer 2000, when I lived at Stanford,
| after a research co-worker told me about it!
|
| There was no Facebook/Reddit/Twitter/Stack Overflow, etc. The
| whole thing was just less important, and you did less on it.
| The web continuously grew over 20+ years, so yeah everyone
| feels they were "early" because it kept growing a lot after
| they started using it! It kept taking over more and more of
| life.
|
| But I think I saw more or less the whole thing since I used
| gopher before the web. I didn't see all of the Internet
| though. I remember talking to people on Usenet that had been
| on the Internet since the 80's, 10 years before me.
|
| Usenet was really big for me -- I learned a ton of stuff
| about playing guitar and drums -- but I think the 1989
| generation probably never touched Usenet. For that generation
| maybe ICQ was more formative, etc.
|
| ---
|
| For someone my age, Klosterman's recent book the 90's is
| kinda fun for remembering what things were like before the
| Internet
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Nineties-Book-Chuck-
| Klosterman/dp/073...
|
| He's kind of an information hoarder, an extreme trivia master
| (of musics and sports and pop culture), and he makes some
| interesting points about the nature of memory and how the
| Internet changed us and our memories.
|
| Kinda summed up by this comic - https://www.reddit.com/r/funn
| y/comments/tuy27/thats_a_damn_s...
| sebastiennight wrote:
| Your comment makes me think that it would be cool to have a
| browser that would only allow you to browse the Web of a
| certain era (eg you could pick 2002, as per your post).
|
| Content would be automatically sourced from the Internet
| Archive or similar sources, so that you could actually get
| the experience from back then.
| chubot wrote:
| Yeah by 2002 I think the web had mostly taken over. But I
| used Usenet in 2002 through Microsoft Outlook Express, a
| mail reader that was also a news client. Not a web
| browser. My e-mail was still through Outlook too, and my
| work e-mail at my first job was through Outlook.
|
| But in the mid 90's you would need a Windows 3.1 virtual
| machine to capture the online experience.
|
| All the PEOPLE I interacted with were actually on BBSes,
| which had ANSI graphics, which I used through MS-DOS.
|
| The web was a separate thing -- I switched into the
| Windows 3.1 GUI, which had fewer programs. And I probably
| downloaded Netscape Navigator over a really slow modem
| connection. Browsers didn't come with OSes!
|
| And then I would visit a web page -- there was a good
| site about guitars hosted at MIT. Maybe Yahoo or Alta
| Vista, and later eBay.
|
| For regular people, AOL or Prodigy was more popular than
| the web. The reason is that they were CURATED. I think
| they had professional writers and they had games portals
| and all that. Probably some stock quotes and news.
|
| You couldn't really play games on the web then, not until
| Java applets became popular. I'm pretty sure Java games
| and Flash games came much before JavaScript games.
|
| And AOL and Prodigy and Compuserve had e-mail. I think
| most regular people had AOL addresses. So it was kind of
| this walled garden, that they mostly kept you on, and the
| web was a separate thing.
|
| It was only around 2004 that Gmail and Maps and Facebook
| came out, and then the "open web" properties became
| dominant. Of course they repeated the playbook of AOL and
| tried to keep you on their site! The young companies
| always advertise themselves as open, and when they get
| users, they close down.
|
| So yeah I'd say the 90's was online, but for most people,
| the experience was mediated by some kind of "online
| service" like AOL/Prodigy/Compuserve. I had both -- my
| parents used AOL and I used the pretty much all the
| network-connected services I knew about.
| nkrisc wrote:
| Yeah that's how it seemed to me - as much as I can
| remember. I obviously don't remember 1990, but by 1997 or
| so it was clear to me that all this web stuff was a new
| thing to most people. Before that it was just a technical
| thing that the computers at work used.
|
| Almost parallel was remembering what things were like
| before everyone had cell phones. I remember going around to
| my friends' houses and their parents telling me that my
| parents called and I have to go home now. I used to have so
| many phone numbers memorized. But I also remember getting a
| cell phone in high school and calling my friends all the
| time, and eventually texting - if my parents weren't
| complaining about the phone bill from all my texts.
|
| > Usenet was really big for me -- I learned a ton of stuff
| about playing guitar and drums -- but I think the 1989
| generation probably never touched Usenet. For that
| generation maybe ICQ was more formative, etc.
|
| ICQ maybe, AIM and MSN Messenger and others were more
| likely in my experience at the end of the 90s and early
| 00s.
|
| Usenet was what my uncle who's basement reeked of cigarette
| smoke that stuck to the server fans used. He was also the
| one who wired our house's phone lines and ran Cat-5 to
| every room when my parents remodeled a new house in 1999.
| chubot wrote:
| _Usenet was what my uncle who's basement reeked of
| cigarette smoke that stuck to the server fans used_
|
| LOL smoking cigarettes was indeed more popular in 1999,
| and in 1989 ...
|
| Yeah I didn't have a cell phone until 2002, after
| graduating college. None of my friends used cell phones
| -- there was not really a reason to.
|
| I still have memories of my "answering machine" and
| people leaving messages on Friday at 5pm to go out later,
| and so forth. It seems so quaint now. To have to be home
| to get a call to meet up with somebody !!!
| tessierashpool wrote:
| that 1989 thing is just Eternal September on the generational
| scale.
|
| we'll probably see it happen on the centuries scale too. (we as
| a culture.)
| llm_nerd wrote:
| Someone who entered their teens in the early 00s talking about
| being "pre-internet" is really something. Beside the weird "woke
| in my guest house" flex and the bizarre take on how to explain
| the internet, I just cannot comprehend how this piece is doing as
| well as it is on here.
|
| I suspect a lot of people are clicking up arrow because they
| reminisce about blogs or something, because it seems unlikely the
| actual content is yielding this support.
|
| There is a pummelled, low rated post that says this is
| "pretentious and stupid", and I'll take those same lumps and
| agree with them. This reads like the sort of fevered word dump of
| quasi-enlightened noise someone writes when they're a bit high
| and think their takes are brilliant.
| yCombLinks wrote:
| The writing is pretentious, but the post has several
| interesting insights, and you have not engaged with any of
| them.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| Write for your desired audience. That's the insight.
| yCombLinks wrote:
| Alright, sorry you didn't see the same things in it I did.
| SamPatt wrote:
| Or, write what you find interesting, and your audience
| finds you.
| svat wrote:
| "I am of the last generation who will remember the time before
| the internet" means "many people in my generation [and no later
| generation] remember a time when the internet was not a
| meaningful presence in our lives" -- which is true for those
| who spent a substantial portion of their childhood before the
| internet was used by practically everybody. So I don't see
| what's the objection to it.
|
| And what you're calling "weird" and "bizarre" is exactly the
| author's point about writing to be niche and specific, in
| contrast to "Writing for a general public, you need to be broad
| and a bit bland".
| tessierashpool wrote:
| I got through the first couple paragraphs. I would say the
| writing is bad, and self-satisfied, but not as bad or as self-
| satisfied as you say.
|
| It's just much too long. If he'd pared it down a little, it
| could have been quite good. His big mistake was this:
|
| _I will spend the rest of this essay unpacking those two
| statements._
|
| That's when I gave up. Two blocks of text, each with a few good
| ideas smothered beneath way too many words, and he says "I will
| elaborate."
| malikNF wrote:
| He mentions he was born in 1989, so it makes sense to talk
| about pre internet. Till the mid 2000s the internet was not
| this available. Growing up we didn't have ADSL till around
| 2004-2005. And even then it was 512mb/s. Yes the internet was
| invented a long while before that, pre-internet in this context
| makes sense to me as time before the internet existed this
| widely, and at these speeds.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| I think you might have picked up a magnitude there.
| itronitron wrote:
| There was a huge difference between 1992 and 1994. The
| internet was readily available by 1995 when the author would
| have been 5 or 6 years old. Some people would argue that 1995
| was peak-internet, not pre-internet.
| gardenhedge wrote:
| Who would argue that? Most people were not using the
| Internet in 1995
| fragmede wrote:
| Exactly. Everybody tired of it being September (since
| 1993!) would argue that.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
| sn9 wrote:
| It was available but barely had any penetration.
|
| Notably this was pre- social media and smartphones which
| were the societal phase change most people think of as the
| line of demarcation.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Yeah, I don't think, being born in 1989, he had much of a
| perspective on the pre-internet world. What was he, 8 or 9 when
| he started using the web? That raised an eyebrow for me too,
| but I didn't want to call it out. There's always some older
| grognard waiting, ready to step in and tell you they were using
| the internet on an acoustic coupler in the basement of Xerox
| PARC before you were a gleam in your father's eye. And even
| that isn't much to brag about anyway. Not as cool as having a
| guest house, even.
|
| In terms of the value of the post: I liked the metaphor of a
| blog post being a search query for human contact, so I got
| something out of the post. On the other hand, I've been running
| the same blog anonymously, with no contact information or
| social media sharing, and all bot indexing and commenting
| disabled, since this author was 11. So, I can't agree that what
| he's saying is always true. Bah, humbug!
| sebastiennight wrote:
| I'm probably, like you, part of the "older grognards"
| compared to the piece's author, but I would venture the idea
| that 2000 is still "pre-web" for the general public.
|
| I think most of the general public don't remember a web pre-
| YouTube (2006) or pre-Facebook (2008-2009).
|
| So I think for most, "pre-internet" is not "right when Google
| came out as Yahoo's search partner" but closer to "right when
| I created my first public online profile".
| mhitza wrote:
| > Yeah, I don't think, being born in 1989, he had much of a
| perspective on the pre-internet world. What was he, 8 or 9
| when he started using the web?
|
| Maybe if he's from the US? In Romania, in my home town, we
| had our first internet caffee when I was 12 years old, around
| the year 2000. Two years later, I had shitty internet at
| home, and 4 more years later we had the best internet in
| Europe (for a while).
|
| I'd believe any 80's kid, living in post communist countries,
| that they've grown in the pre-internet era.
| karaterobot wrote:
| In the article, he clearly brings up this fact in the
| context of his generation--the people born around 1989--not
| about how he's a special case.
| SamPatt wrote:
| I was born in 85, and I definitely came of age in a pre-
| internet-dominated world. Maybe that extra four years makes a
| big difference, or maybe internet adoption among families was
| still widely varying, but I don't think his claim is as absurd
| as you think.
| fullshark wrote:
| There's some interesting ideas here about the desire for human
| connection among the way-too-online, which is richer than
| "interesting stuff gets routed to your inbox" but the writer
| doesn't seem to see it, merely hint at it.
|
| Edit: In fact it kind of mirrors how social media went from a
| tool to foster human connection to a tool to see interesting
| content...
| hodgesrm wrote:
| > You ask yourself: What would have made me jump off my chair if
| I had read it six months ago (or a week ago, or however fast you
| write)? If you have figured out something that made you ecstatic,
| this is what you should write. And you do not dumb it down,
| because you were not stupid six months ago, you just knew less.
| You also write with as much useful detail and beauty as you can
| muster, because that is what you would have wanted.
|
| This is a wonderful idea, the more so because it is so simple to
| apply. I love the way the author thinks in time and sees
| communication as flows. Judging from other comments his point of
| view is not for everyone. I find it a treasury of interesting
| notions. It reminds me of the delightful phrase from a
| translation of Beowulf many years ago:
|
| > the leader of the troop unlocked his word hoard [0]
|
| Many thanks to OP for posting this article. You made my world a
| little larger.
|
| [0]
| https://thesestrangewoods.wordpress.com/2015/01/06/favorite-...
| queuebert wrote:
| > I was born in July 1989, which means I am of the last
| generation who will remember the time before the internet.
|
| Lost me on the first sentence. Author doesn't even know that we
| had internet prior to '89. Kid is 34 and trying to sound old and
| grizzled.
| lubujackson wrote:
| Isn't he saying the opposite? Everyone younger than him grew up
| in an Internet-everywhere world. He was around 5 when dialup
| was hitting so that sounds about right.
| cubefox wrote:
| Yeah. Even in 2000 the world was still much more dominated by
| magazines and TV than by the Internet. YouTube wasn't founded
| until 2005, and big social media sites didn't exist either.
| simmerup wrote:
| If he lost you the search query is working
| queuebert wrote:
| I could route quite a bit of interesting material to his
| inbox, so no it isn't.
| kstrauser wrote:
| That resonates with me. I have a blog, and it's far away from
| being one of the big ones everyone knows about. I write for an
| imaginary audience, partly to help myself think through ideas by
| organizing them into words, mainly just for the fun of shouting
| into the void.
|
| I've had a surprising amount of feedback from strangers who say
| hi or ask for a followup to something I'd written about. It's a
| little gift each time that happens. I can't imagine that anyone
| would care about something I had to say, and yet here's this real
| person who wants to have a conversation about it.
| RationalDino wrote:
| I agree with the thesis of this post. A blog does work as a
| search query to find people. But some queries are easier to write
| than others. For example this blogger hit a key niche with
| discussing Ivan Illich and systems thinking. Both "Ivan Illich"
| and "Systems Thinking" are pretty good search terms on their own.
| Someone who sees those knows pretty fast if they are interesting
| topics. If the content is good, you're good.
|
| By contrast, let's take one of the key questions I am tackling in
| about a week in my blog at https://rationaldino.substack.com/. _"
| How can we avoid cognitive biases when thinking about things we
| care about?"_ I believe this is much harder.
|
| The problem is that it is adjacent to more obvious topics that
| are more discussed.
|
| For example there are long lists of cognitive biases and
| intellectual fallacies that you can find. On the one hand, they
| form a taxonomy where the boundaries are not clear. On the other
| hand, I see very basic things missing from the taxonomy, like our
| tendency to take sides. And such taxonomies don't generally
| address how we can proactively avoid the emotional roots of our
| biases.
|
| On the other hand, there are plenty of discussions about ways in
| which avoiding caring too much can improve our thinking. A lot of
| it is good advice. For example both
| http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html and
| https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-ten-commandments-of-egoles...
| have been helpful to me.
|
| But I have a limited ability to not care about having made
| mistakes as a husband and father. While I agree that avoiding
| emotional overwhelm helps thinking, that advice is not very
| actionable for what I actually care about most.
| seydor wrote:
| I had this idea to build a reverse google, where you search for
| what people want.
| mattlondon wrote:
| I guess this person was not around for Usenet or IRC.
|
| Welcome to the internet - it has always been a two-way street.
| renegat0x0 wrote:
| I was making a research on amiga. When I typed just 'amiga'
| nothing interesting could be found, besides some news production
| sites.
|
| I started writing 'amiga xcopy', or 'amiga workbench', 'amiga
| demoscene' this gave me better results.
|
| Then some results had links. Some to morphos, some to old
| internet forums.
|
| Same goes for diablo 2. To find anything I had to write niche
| things I new forme the old internet. I started writing download
| hero editor or stuff I new was present in the good old pages.
| turtledragonfly wrote:
| As a counterpoint, a blog post is sometimes (often times?) more
| about the writing than the receiving of responses.
|
| Is throwing a bottle with a message in it into the ocean a
| "complex search query to find people?" I wouldn't phrase it that
| way.
|
| The article does say: It will seem like I am
| mainly talking about how to use writing to forge meaningful
| relationships ... But lurking behind it is a larger idea.
| Namely, that you can shape yourself by reshaping your
| relationships. By changing who you are addressing, and the
| responses you garner, you steer your development.
|
| and I don't disagree with that, but at the same time, just
| _forming the words_ helps you shape yourself, regardless of
| whether it involves other people. Or maybe the other people can
| just be in your own head.
|
| I've got countless drawings and writings that nobody else will
| ever see, and likely will die with me. But they were very
| important for my self-shaping.
|
| Maybe this is just a personality difference between me and the
| author -- some people define themselves more in terms of their
| relationships with others than otherwise.
|
| But regardless, I liked the article (:
|
| There is some fine line between just being yourself and "singing
| into the void" as it were, versus trying to use your voice to
| make changes in the world. I must admit I lean towards the
| former, but the idea of "the summoning of a new culture" at the
| end of the article is interesting.
| legerdemain wrote:
| I think the author is reading too much into his past viral
| successes.
|
| It is very possible to write about niche topics with gusto and at
| length, but without finding an audience or a circle of peers.
| Twenty years ago it was common to call this the "long tail," a
| term popularized by a bestselling middlebrow book.
|
| I put my trust in the "long tail" of the Internet audience and
| wrote in public for a few years. The experience did not shape me
| intellectually, as reading a good book or learning a skill might
| have done. And it did not bring me into contact with a circle of
| peers who learned from each other.
|
| The author even offers the example of his wife, who published a
| long piece of writing in a niche different to his and did not
| benefit in the "search query to find people" way.
|
| I think there is a likelier and more specific explanation for the
| author's observations. Namely, over the past decade, guru figures
| like Scott Alexander have popularized a style of academic-
| sounding essay-writing that is diffuse, meandering, and often
| very long. Fans of this kind of writing also reward authors who
| aspire to global or timeless significance by writing about a set
| of "cornerstone" topics that includes Plato, Roman stoics and the
| Roman Empire in general, Tolstoy, Enlightenment-era American
| political philosophy, and popular takes on behavioral economics
| and evolutionary psychology.
|
| Some of this guy's posts struck gold with this audience and got
| widely disseminated through their social networks. I strongly
| suspect that writing about historically and thematically adjacent
| topics (e.g., Russian Realists other than Tolstoy) would produce
| a lot fewer "search results" for the author.
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