[HN Gopher] How to post when no one is reading
___________________________________________________________________
How to post when no one is reading
Author : j4mehta
Score : 473 points
Date : 2025-06-02 04:01 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.jeetmehta.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.jeetmehta.com)
| sircastor wrote:
| For a variety of reasons I wanted some notoriety when I was
| younger. I wanted to be "the guy who'd done that thing"
|
| I became a lot happier with myself when I stopped chasing that
| and just decided to post the things that I like and the projects
| I wanted to do. These days I like to think of my website as part
| of the "old, good internet": No ads, no demands, just whatever I
| like and wanted to write.
|
| It's worth recognizing that that comfort came around/after I was
| making decent enough money that I wasn't also trying to figure
| out a side hustle. It feels to me like "do the things you like"
| is a luxury of someone who isn't anxious about paying all their
| bills.
| cornfieldlabs wrote:
| >It feels to me like "do the things you like" is a luxury of
| someone who isn't anxious about paying all their bills.
|
| Couldn't have said it better.
|
| I really didn't get to "do things I love" until I escaped
| poverty.
| didgetmaster wrote:
| Even if you are lucky enough to find something you really
| enjoy that also generates some income; unless it is almost
| trivial, there will be parts of it you don't enjoy.
|
| Side projects might be fun to code, but bug fixes, tech
| support, and documentation might be a real chore for you.
|
| I have one of those that I can't wait to sit down and code a
| new feature; but sometimes have to force myself to do the
| tasks that make it more 'user friendly'.
| themadturk wrote:
| I love writing. I definitely wrote things that brought in no
| money when I was worried about making the rent.
| m4rc3lv wrote:
| What's you websites URL?
| sircastor wrote:
| https://aaroneiche.com
| KolibriFly wrote:
| "Do what you love" advice always sounds great, but it hits
| differently when you're also worried about rent
| 0xEF wrote:
| Agreed, and I've always hated that phrase since it seems like
| it has two different meanings, depending on who is uttering
| it;
|
| 1. People who use "do what you love" to mean "love what you
| do," as though you can force yourself to enjoy anything. This
| is only true for people who lie to themselves and compromise
| regularly against their own interests.
|
| 2. The Lucky Ones(tm) who happened to accidentally align an
| enjoyable hobby with a career and think because they "did
| it," anyone can, without acknowledging that they were simply
| in the right place at the right time with the right skills,
| or that the stars don't exactly align the same way for the
| rest of us.
| brabel wrote:
| To add to that: people like some messed up things, or truly
| inaccessible things. And while you can try to focus on
| "some good stuff" that you like, you can't really pick the
| things you like the most! If you could, wouldn't the world
| be a much easier place (just like the things that make the
| most money, or are the most accessible, in other words, the
| things offering the best cost-benefit... but of course no
| one can really do that... no one would ever suffer
| heartbreak - just like the person who likes you, and if
| they change their mind, just stop liking them and like
| someone else! Such genius!)?!
| 0xEF wrote:
| I get what you're saying. It's difficult to convey this
| to some people. I've been through a lot of jobs in quite
| a few different fields over the decades and have the
| appearance of being restless if I am not careful about
| how I craft my resume.
|
| I've been asked "okay, but what do you _like_ to do?"
| which just puts me in a position to have to explain that
| I have a passion for learning new things and
| experimentation, but nobody is going to pay me to read
| books and play around in a workshop all day, since those
| jobs are few and definitely already filled.
|
| So, it's a hobby, instead.
| fragmede wrote:
| > since those jobs are few and definitely already filled.
|
| Doesn't that go for most things though?
|
| Designer, across all fields exists; game designer,
| creative technologist, research scientist. Just because
| you can't land that job right out of the gate is no
| reason not to try, and to become an insurance adjuster
| instead (unless you do want to be an insurance adjuster).
| In team sports everyone wants to be the star, but even if
| you're not, if you just love the game, you can always
| find some way to be involved, even if it's selling
| t-shirt outside the stadium.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| > 2. The Lucky Ones(tm) who happened to accidentally align
| an enjoyable hobby with a career and think because they
| "did it," anyone can, without acknowledging that they were
| simply in the right place at the right time with the right
| skills, or that the stars don't exactly align the same way
| for the rest of us.
|
| To be fair, advice doesn't have to be applicable to
| everyone in order to be useful to someone.
|
| Extremely few people get to become astronauts, but that
| doesn't go to say there isn't relevant career advice for
| those who do aspire to become one.
|
| Chalking outcomes up to luck is also not a very useful
| attitude. Life undeniably has a huge random element, but
| it's more akin to the randomness of the stock market than a
| pure dice roll. You don't have control of every outcome,
| but your choices and decisions can massively tilt the
| scales in favor of getting "lucky".
| sircastor wrote:
| And to expand on #2, we not only get our hobby coinciding
| with our career, but that work can pay exceptionally well.
| harrall wrote:
| 3. You are in a career because you mistakenly thought you'd
| like it, or because your parents told you to do it, or
| because it's the only thing that you've ever known, but it
| turns out that you absolutely hate it. You've reached a
| local maximum and you need someone to tell you to try
| something else before you reach 50 and have major regrets.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| I've learned to love things I used to hate.
|
| For me it took understanding how things are connected and
| that doing the superficially unfun things are a necessary
| precondition for the superfun things to happen.
|
| Learning to appreciate what you have instead of hate what
| you're missing is also a very fundamental mental health
| principle.
|
| This is of course much easier said than done.
| geeunits wrote:
| My advice is not "Do what you love" but "Love what you do".
| Find pride in yourself and your journey, and no fall will
| follow.
| sph wrote:
| "Do what you love" doesn't mean "only do what you love and
| who cares about bills."
|
| It's just a reminder to find time for what you love even if
| you have other things that demand your time. And, if you can,
| to always leave enough space for yourself. For far too many
| of us, there is only work, more work, with the silly hope to
| one day find the time to dream again. You won't.
| munificent wrote:
| I think this advice works a lot better if you interpret with
| finer granularity than either "job is my ideal passion" or
| "job is soul-crushing suffering purely for economic gain".
|
| Very few people get to take the thing they would do
| completely for free and make money off of it. At the same
| time, very few people have a job where every single aspect of
| the work is miserable toil that brings them no joy.
|
| Work is complex and there is a continuum of jobs that have
| more or less aspects that resonate with you. I think better
| advice is to seek jobs that let you bring more of your joys
| to bear while acknowledging that no job will be paid fun. And
| when in a specific job, try to find the aspects of it that
| you love and make the most of those to the degree that you're
| able.
|
| We have a much richer ability to navigate our careers than
| simply treating any job as all bad or all good.
| neom wrote:
| Do what you're good at and not what you lust and you'll alway
| have resources to chase something called love.
| begueradj wrote:
| Is it possible to share your blog ? I can't see it on your
| profile.
| sircastor wrote:
| https://aaroneiche.com
| DavidPiper wrote:
| This rings so true.
|
| Financial freedom is one of the lenses through which you always
| have to filter life advice from all sources.
| brazzy wrote:
| > It feels to me like "do the things you like" is a luxury of
| someone who isn't anxious about paying all their bills.
|
| The real lesson is that you should not rely on popularity-based
| success to pay your bills, because there is no knowing how long
| it will take until you _have_ any success; it may in fact never
| come.
|
| It's that kind of thing that should be the side hustle. You'll
| have only limited time for it, but at least you know how to pay
| your bills and can do it the way you want.
|
| The other option is to be a starving artist who _also_ feels
| bad about compromising their vision to make something
| marketable.
| pards wrote:
| > It feels to me like "do the things you like" is a luxury of
| someone who isn't anxious about paying all their bills.
|
| I encourage my kids to keep their hobbies as pastimes, not as
| income sources. As soon as you try to make a living from your
| hobby or passion, it sucks the joy out of it.
|
| Make money from your job; derive joy from your hobby.
| Separation of church and state.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| To add, don't think you'd enjoy producing if you enjoy
| consuming. Many kids these days aspire to become a youtuber
| or other kind of influencer, only few actually put in the
| work, and fewer still succeed because I'm convinced you need
| to have certain specific characteristics to do that kind of
| work (or hobby), and only a minority of people enjoy
| recording themselves. Probably more today than 20 odd years
| ago but still.
| triceratops wrote:
| Yes but if there's zero joy in your job, you probably won't
| be very good at it. Sprocket sales sounds like a gray, drab
| career, but the successful salespeople chase the thrill of
| closing.
|
| Pick something you medium like that someone will pay you
| money for. Life is too short to work on something you have no
| emotions about.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure most movie directors love making movies. Most
| novelistics love writing. Most indie video game developers
| love making video games. Most musicians love playing music.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| From what I've read most novelists HATE writing.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| "Slit your wrists and pour yourself onto the page"
| goostavos wrote:
| Hate writing. Love having written.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| Yes! I'm not a novelist but the same applies to running.
| elevatortrim wrote:
| Musicianship is a good example of why you should not think
| doing what you love would keep you afloat.
|
| Effort required to become a good musician is comparable to
| a surgeon (likely more) yet the chances of success is
| comparable to that of a football player.
| sph wrote:
| This is good advice in general, but lately the Internet had
| grown so large it is healthier to expect no one will ever see
| your creation. Many of us grew up when the Internet was a pond,
| today it is an immeasurably large ocean; there is a good chance
| your audience won't ever find you, and your chances get shorter
| every day.
|
| Incidentally I also believe one would have more chance to
| market their own creation in the real, physical world than the
| Internet. I believe we'll eventually see leaflets and indie
| books being distributed to passersby for free like 100 years
| ago.
|
| In any case, create for yourself. Create without ever expecting
| an audience. If this doesn't sound fun, you probably just like
| the publicity rather than the act of creation itself.
| kevindamm wrote:
| you'll still get CDs handed to you if you walk around
| downtown NYC
| skyyler wrote:
| Often as part of an intimidation scam where the person that
| hands you the CD demands payment.
|
| But yes, that does happen.
| abhaynayar wrote:
| hahah.. just reminded me of mr. robot..
| adolph wrote:
| If it worked for AOL, why wouldn't someone continue today?
| (other than a lack of optical reading devicen in most
| compute). Maybe AOL would be better off today if they kept
| mailing and just added NFC and QR-code.
|
| _In 2011, AOL CEO Steve Case took to Quora to reveal just
| how successful all those free trials were. "At that time I
| believe the average subscriber life was about 25 months and
| revenue was about $350," Case wrote. "So we spent about $35
| to acquire subscribers." Because that $35 had a gigantic
| return, AOL was happy to keep pumping money into free CDs._
|
| _Marketing manager Reggie Fairchild chimed in on the Quora
| thread to claim that in 1998, AOL used the world's entire
| CD production capacity for several weeks._
|
| https://www.vox.com/2015/5/12/8594049/aol-free-trial-cds
| blahaj wrote:
| Would you mind sharing your site?
| sircastor wrote:
| https://aaroneiche.com
| mattslip wrote:
| Recently broke out of the mentality you described myself. When
| you have a chance to step back and find yourself it's actually
| funny how much we can let others from keeping us from doing
| what we want. External validation is a drug when you don't know
| how to value yourself.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| I'm much a people pleaser and I constantly seem to yearn for
| validation. I see life as a web of relationships and I want
| all of them to be good. Especially when someone doesn't
| respect what I do for them or say to them in good faith, this
| is very hard for me to take in. I wonder how to get out of
| this cycle of needing validation. I also wonder where this
| need comes from. If anybody can shed a light, i would be
| grateful.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > It feels to me like "do the things you like" is a luxury of
| someone who isn't anxious about paying all their bills.
|
| I don't think this is a feeling; it's a fact. Maslow's
| Hierarchy of Needs is related to this.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| For whatever reason which I can't put my finger on, I did more
| things I liked when I had less money.
| munificent wrote:
| About a decade ago, my main "hobby" was writing. I finished
| and self-published two books that ended up _way_ more popular
| than I expected.
|
| I understandably was fairly burned out by writing after that.
| I also tend to cycle out hobbies. So I got into making
| electronic music for a bit. (Fun but hard.) Lately--a
| surprise to me--the hobby that's been the more rewarding is
| knitting. I think I just really needed a more tactile thing
| to do in my free time. I've been really enjoying knitting and
| it's so much fun picking up a new skill.
|
| But the whole time, there's a little voice in the back of my
| head going, "You know, if you spent this time working on a
| new book, you'd get more money and recognition..." Hitting
| middle age and starting to really feel the finite nature of
| time definitely doesn't help.
|
| I wonder if it's something similar for you where it's easier
| to sink time into random projects before you start thinking
| of your time as a finite economic resource.
| sodaplayer wrote:
| It's easy for me to quickly idolize the authors of books
| and blogs I have read--yours included (thanks for writing
| GPP)--and it's often I think I fall into the trap of
| feeling like I need to dedicate all my free time into
| practicing and learning software and computer science
| topics.
|
| I also got a small collection of synths and grooveboxes, so
| seeing you start your Tiny Wires channel was a nice
| reminder that even those authors have things outside of
| software.
|
| One of my favorite moments lately was just hanging out with
| my wife in the living room after setting up all my synths
| there and just jamming with her present as she also worked
| on her hobby.
| nathan_douglas wrote:
| You sink your time into "random projects" and accomplish
| things. I sink my time into random projects and the time,
| money, artifacts acquired, and knowledge gained just sluice
| into the void. We are not the same :)
| munificent wrote:
| I've been very lucky that a couple of my hobbies have
| turned out well, but for every one of those, I promise
| you I have a dozen more that are just complete time
| wasters. :)
| nathan_douglas wrote:
| In all seriousness, I try to think of my projects and
| hobbies as sketches in a sketchbook. I might not be much
| of an engineer - sometimes I think I was built for a job
| that doesn't exist yet - but I feel like I learn from
| everything I do, and that has to count for something.
|
| I hoped at some point I would produce some magnum opus
| that would make it all worthwhile. I thought that would
| happen in my twenties, and then my thirties. In my mid-
| forties, I think I just want to do little sketches for
| the rest of my life, always hinting at something and
| never revealing it. I can do actual work at my job.
| Which, based on my personal finances, I will also have
| for the rest of my life :)
| gravez wrote:
| Yeah, agree. The self-pressure to write a good post for others,
| for lead-gen, for brand awareness, all take away from "things
| you like".
|
| Something that's been working for me lately is to choose the
| topics where you have something to say. It's a bit broader than
| the things you like and allows you to just react to an inner
| spike to respond. Helps train the muscle for writing
| vitaflo wrote:
| The interactions I get when people send me messages from my
| site are also more meaningful. They tend to have searched the
| info out and the dialogue can be really beneficial for both
| parties.
|
| I had a popular site once 25 years ago. Popularity is fun but
| it's also demanding and draining. I much prefer a slower pace
| online now that I'm older.
|
| I've also shifted from trying to be "smart" or insightful to
| just documenting random niche things that don't have a lot of
| other info about online. Everyone has something like this in
| their life/career however seemingly insignificant. That makes
| the few connections I get from my site even more special.
| godelski wrote:
| I also think that often others benefit more when people write
| like this.
|
| I think of it like how we say it is good to be lazy. Not lazy
| as in do no work, but lazy in be efficient and don't put off
| what is easily done now but hard later.
|
| When writing for yourself you are writing for people like you.
| People with interests in similar topics, that are facing
| similar problems, and probably think somewhat like you too.
| After all, most of us really aren't that different. It's easy
| to notice small differences because we're similar.
|
| Instead, when you write for others you don't chase those things
| that make you unique you chase what you think a more average
| person (in whatever niche) wants. You distance yourself from
| them just as you distance from yourself. You become more likely
| to just create more of the same stuff that's already out there.
| You follow instead of lead.
|
| There's tons of exceptions of course and the qualifiers
| shouldn't be ignored. All I'm trying to say is that the
| different approaches come with different biases. You should
| definitely be writing code documentation to general audiences
| but your blogs? Imo, that should be you. Not everything needs
| to be work. Just be the fucking nerds that you are
| ganiszulfa wrote:
| If it's not tied to your income, I agree. But I can't imagine the
| stress when your readership numbers determine whether there's
| food on the table or not.
| florbnit wrote:
| I personally think that this would almost never the case
| because of the extremely skewed distribution of income in the
| sector. Almost everyone will be making so much less that it's
| never even possible that you would be able to pay for dinner
| with your income and a few are making so much more that it's
| never a question if dinner will be paid or not.
| PetrBrzyBrzek wrote:
| I find this especially difficult on X, where almost no one sees
| my posts. Especially when I compare it to LinkedIn or Reddit,
| where it's not that hard to reach thousands or even tens of
| thousands of views.
| cornfieldlabs wrote:
| Verified users seem to get more views.
|
| I opened an account and "to the point" tweets don't get any
| engagement.
|
| Only ragebaits, pretentious "I am very smart" type of content
| wins.
|
| I am sick of my "For you" page and there's no way to reset the
| suggested content (Instagram has it)
| PetrBrzyBrzek wrote:
| Yeah, I agree. I'm verified and even tried a higher tier, but
| it didn't make any difference. The For You tab feels almost
| like scrolling TikTok - total brain rot.
|
| My strategy now is to repost all content everywhere. But X
| consistently gives me the worst results.
| yusina wrote:
| Well, look at the CEO of X, tells you all you need to know
| about that platform.
| immibis wrote:
| Have you guys considered just... quitting that platform?
| You're not obligated to use bad platforms. Most of the people
| who still insist on only reading X are people you don't want
| to reach, or spambots.
| liotier wrote:
| > I find this especially difficult on X, where almost no one
| sees my posts
|
| This December 2024 article mentions several publishers telling
| their poor return on Twitter:
| https://www.emarketer.com/content/bluesky-surpasses-threads-...
| throwaway71271 wrote:
| I think there is a new nuance on "no one is reading", where
| _actually_ no one will be reading and only chatgpt will read your
| work and spit out few tokens to its user.
|
| Now there is a chance of us actually reaching your blog/video
| etc, like right now on hackernews. Sometimes we will like it or
| not, sometimes people will share it. Now google and bing
| prioritize scraping it because it is linked from here, it will be
| indexed fairly quickly, and chagpt will be able to find it.
|
| Soon, when every open platform is just tokens and everything is
| generated, we will probably move to gated communities and
| directories, and it will be very difficult for the chatgpt to
| discover your content.
|
| And even it can actually find it, I am not sure you want
| everything you create to be seen through the lens of a language
| model.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _I think there is a new nuance on "no one is reading", where
| _actually_ no one will be reading and only chatgpt will read
| your work and spit out few tokens to its user._
|
| Ironically, for vast majority of content - including highly-
| read stuff - being pulled into training data for LLMs is _by
| far_ the biggest contribution that content is ever going to
| make to society.
|
| (IMHO, people who actually care about what they wrote being
| useful (vs. pulling ad money) should be more appreciative of
| this, not apprehensive.)
| throwaway71271 wrote:
| I am not sure. For example now I am writing a book for my
| daughter, I would like to share it when done, it is not
| written for ad money, example chapter, just so you know what
| kind of content I mean:
| https://punkx.org/projekt0/book/part1/interpreter.html
|
| Is it going to be useful for language models to train on it?
| I think so, and I don't mind that. As long as they develop
| better world models and understand human language better.
|
| The problem I have is with humans reading generated tokens.
| Human language is shared experience, the evaluation and
| interpretation of the symbols depend both on the author and
| the reader (even though many times they are the same entity).
|
| When a person with HPPD says 'The sky is black', when the
| symbols enter your mind they are superimposed with your
| experience and their experience to create meaning. (HPPD is a
| disorder from damaged filters on the visual system, it seems
| that raw information from the eye sensors are entering the
| brain, and they can see the inside of their eyes when they
| look at the sky, so it looks black, as if the whole sky is
| filled with 'floaters)
|
| When you read AI generated content, you are both the judge
| and executioner, the symbols mean whatever you want them to
| mean, they have no author (in the human sense).
|
| So, I want to write for other humans to read :) Even if
| nobody reads it.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _I am not sure. For example now I am writing a book for
| my daughter, I would like to share it when done, it is not
| written for ad money, example chapter, just so you know
| what kind of content I mean_
|
| Personally I'd say it's on the higher end in terms of value
| - it may not be meant for scale, but it looks like it comes
| from the heart; honest expression and desire to do
| something good for someone you love, are some of the
| purest, highest forms of value in my book, and I strongly
| believe motivation infuses the creative output.
|
| Plus, we can always use a fresh individual end-to-end
| perspective on computing :).
|
| (Funny how this was merely a low-stakes belief until
| recently; it's not like anyone could contest it. But now,
| because of what I wrote below, it follows that LLMs will in
| some way pick up on it too. So one day, the degree to which
| motivations reflect on the output might become
| quantifiable.)
|
| > _The problem I have is with humans reading generated
| tokens. Human language is shared experience, the evaluation
| and interpretation of the symbols depend both on the author
| and the reader (even though many times they are the same
| entity)._
|
| > _When a person with HPPD says 'The sky is black', when
| the symbols enter your mind they are superimposed with your
| experience and their experience to create meaning. (...)
| When you read AI generated content, you are both the judge
| and executioner, the symbols mean whatever you want them to
| mean, they have no author (in the human sense)._
|
| I disagree with that strongly. The LLM is obviously not a
| human or a person, but it's not a trivial token predictor,
| either.
|
| Human language is not _just_ shared experience - it 's also
| the means for _sharing experience_. You rightly notice that
| meaning is created from context. The symbols themselves
| mean nothing. The meaning is in how those symbols relate to
| other symbols, and individual experiences - especially
| common experiences, because that forms a basis for
| communication. And _LLMs capture all that_.
|
| I sometimes say that LLMs are meaning made incarnate.
| That's because, to the extent you agree that the meaning of
| the concept is mostly defined through mutual relations to
| other concepts[0], LLMs are structured to capture that
| meaning. That's what embedding tokens in high dimensional
| vector space is all about. You feed half of the Internet to
| the model in training, force it first to continue known
| text, and eventually to generate continuations _that make
| sense to a human_ , and because of how you do it, you end
| up with a latent space that captures mutual relationships.
| In 10 000 dimensions, you can fit just about any possible
| semantic association one could think of, and then some.
|
| But even if you don't buy that LLMs "capture meaning", they
| wouldn't be as good as they are if they weren't able to
| _reflect_ it. When you 're reading LLM-produced tokens,
| you're not reading noise and imbuing it with meaning -
| you're reading a rich blend of half the things humanity
| ever wrote, you're seeing humankind reflected through a
| mirror, even if a very dirty and deformed one.
|
| In either case, the meaning is there - it comes from _other
| people_ , a little bit of it from every piece of data in
| the training corpus.
|
| And this is where the contribution I originally described
| happens. We have a massive overproduction of content of
| every kind. Looking at just books - there's more books
| appearing every day than anyone could read in a lifetime;
| most of them are written for a quick buck, read maybe by a
| couple dozen people, and quickly get forgotten. But should
| a book like this land in a training corpus, it becomes a
| contribution - an infinitesimal one, but still a
| contribution - to the model, making it a better mirror and
| a better tool. This, but even more so, is true for blog
| articles and Internet discussions - quickly forgotten by
| people, but living on in the model.
|
| --
|
| So again, I disagree about AI-generated tokens having no
| meaning. But I _would_ agree there is no _human connection
| there_. You 're still looking at (the output of) an
| embodiment of, or mirror to (pick your flavor), the whole
| humanity - but there is no human there to connect to.
|
| Also thanks for the example you used; I've never heard of
| HPPD before.
|
| --
|
| [0] - It's not a hard idea; it gets really apparent when
| you're trying to learn a second language via a same-
| language dictionary (e.g. English word explained in
| English). But also in fields full of layers of explicitly
| defined terms, like most things STEM.
|
| It also gets apparent when you're trying to explain
| something to a 5yo (or a smartass friend) and they get
| inquisitive. "Do chairs always have four legs? Is this
| stool a chair? Is a tree stump a chair? ..."
| throwaway71271 wrote:
| > I disagree with that strongly. The LLM is obviously not
| a human or a person, but it's not a trivial token
| predictor, either.
|
| I am sorry, by no means I think it is a trivial token
| predictor, or a stochastic parrot of some sort. I think
| it has a world model, and it can do theory of mind to us,
| but we can not do theory of mind to it. It has planning
| as visible from the biology of language models paper.
|
| > So again, I disagree about AI-generated tokens having
| no meaning. But I would agree there is no human
| connection there
|
| What I argue is that language is uniquely human, and it
| is how it is because of the human condition. I think we
| agree more than we disagree. I say that the meaning is
| 'halved', it is almost as if you are talking to yourself,
| but the thoughts are coming from the void. This is the
| sound of one hand slap maybe, a thought that is not your
| own but it is.
|
| I guess I am saying is that AI is much more like Alien
| than Artificial, but we read the tokens as if they are
| deeply human, and it is really hard for people to not
| think of it as human, purely because it uses language in
| such profound way.
| jcattle wrote:
| > being pulled into training data for LLMs is by far the
| biggest contribution that content is ever going to make to
| society.
|
| There's so much content out there. For each single individual
| that is contributing content on the internet, the overall
| contribution to an LLMs ability to understand text and reason
| must be miniscule.
|
| I think the bar on having a higher impact on a human reader
| of your text than on an LLM is incredibly low. Your comment
| and mine are perfect examples. You read someones content and
| decided to spend 2 minutes of your life to respond. Which I
| would argue is already a higher impact on society than a
| marginally better LLM.
|
| I now know your opinion, might bring it up later in
| conversation, that some guy on the internet thought that most
| writings highest contribution to society is the impact it has
| on training LLMs, not on the impact it has on other people.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| You're absolutely right - there's so much content out
| there, that any contribution of any of it to a model
| individually is going to be minuscule (which is why I don't
| believe one is entitled rent for it). Still, I claim this
| is more than most content would contribute to society
| otherwise, because that minuscule value is multiplied by
| the breadth of other things it gets related to, and the
| scale at which the model is used.
|
| One thing is, most of that content eventually goes into
| obscurity. Our conversation might be remembered by us for a
| while, and perhaps a couple hundred other people reading it
| now, and it might influence us ever so slightly forever.
| Then, in a couple of days, it'll disappear into obscurity,
| unlikely to be ever read by anyone else. However should it
| get slurped into the LLM corpus, the ideas exchanged here,
| the patterns of language, the tone, etc. will be reinforced
| in models used by billions of people every day for all
| kinds of purposes, for indefinite time.
|
| It's a scale thing.
|
| FWIW, I mostly think of this in context of people who
| express a sentiment that they should've been compensated by
| AI companies because their content is contributing to
| training data, and because they weren't, they're going to
| stop writing comments or articles on the Internet and
| humanity will be that much poorer.
|
| Also, your reply made me think of weighing the impact of
| some work on small number of individual humans directly,
| vs. indirect impact via being "assimilated" into LLMs. I'm
| not sure how to do it, or what the result would be, so I'll
| weaken my claim in the future.
| jcattle wrote:
| Indeed I also think it's a scale thing. Yes this content
| we are producing right now will definitely fade into
| obscurity. And it is definitely part of what a model can
| use to derive patterns, tone etc.
|
| However in my opinion, cultural shifts, opinions and
| norms are still mostly derived from interaction with your
| peers. Be that (Very human) conversations like we are
| having right now, or opinions held by "influencers" which
| are also discussed among your peer group. These are
| thousands of small interactions, those might be very
| small experiences, which all add up to form the views and
| actions of a society.
|
| I don't see LLMs playing a big role in this yet. People
| don't derive their opinions on abortion for example from
| ChatGPT. They derive them from group leaders, personal
| experience and interactions with their peers.
|
| And in this context of small things contributing to
| something big I would wager that all the small
| interactions we have with other humans do a lot more to
| form a society than the small interactions have on
| building an LLM. So to your original point again: I don't
| think contributing to an LLM is the biggest contribution
| online content has on a society.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Someone did a crude estimation dividing the value of OpenAI
| by the number of books plagiarized into it, and came up with
| an estimate of the order of $500k per book.
|
| Of course, none of that vast concentration of investor money
| will go to the authors.
|
| If the government was doing this, people would be screaming
| about the biggest nationalisation of intellectual property
| since the rise of Mao.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Of course, none of that vast concentration of investor
| money will go to the authors._
|
| There's no reason it should. The authors don't get
| perpetual royalties from everyone who read their works. Or
| do you believe I should divide my salary between Petzold,
| Stroustrup, Ousterhout, Abelson, Sussman, Norvig, Cormen,
| and a dozen other technical authors, and also between all
| HN users proportionally to their comment count or karma?
|
| Should my employer pay them as well, and should their
| customers too, because you can trace a causal chain from
| some products to the people mentioned, through me?
|
| IP, despite its issues, does _not_ work like that.
|
| > _If the government was doing this, people would be
| screaming about the biggest nationalisation of intellectual
| property since the rise of Mao._
|
| Or call it the public education system and public library
| network.
| bgwalter wrote:
| If you go that route and throw all conventions overboard,
| there is no reason why Microsoft and OpenAI shouldn't be
| nationalized. Without compensation.
|
| You, know, for the "benefit of society", as these
| companies never tire of saying.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| What conventions?
|
| It's pretty clear to me. The authors of books
| "plagiarized" into the training corpus are _at best_
| entitled to one-time payment equivalent to the company
| buying those books. They 're _not_ entitled to percentage
| of profits generated by the model. Can 't think of any
| convention that would even remotely imply that.
|
| (I suppose it depends on whether you see the training
| process more like model _learning_ , vs. more like model
| being a derived work. The latter feels absurd to me.)
|
| As for OpenAI, et al. - they're selling a service that
| provides value to people. That's pretty much the most
| basic business scenario, far more honest than _most of
| the tech industry_. And they did create the thing
| providing value. The training data may be a critical
| ingredient, but only when collected and aggregated at
| scale, thoroughly blended, distilled down to explicit and
| implicit semantics, and solidified into a model than then
| gets served via complex piece of computational
| infrastructure - _all of that_ is what the companies are
| doing, all of that is what 's critical to providing this
| fundamentally new kind of value. It's only fair they
| should be compensated for that.
|
| And to be clear - despite their occasional protestations
| to the contrary, I don't believe OpenAI, Microsoft,
| Google and other LLM vendors to be working for the
| "benefit of society" or "good of humanity". I claim that
| _LLMs as models and as a technology_ are a huge value to
| humanity. Companies come and go, business models change,
| but inventions remain. Even today, between DeepSeek-R1,
| newest LLama models and countless of their derivatives,
| society can enjoy the benefits of near-SOTA LLMs without
| being beholden to a few large tech companies. The models
| and means to run them are out there, and are not going
| away.
| ben_w wrote:
| > (I suppose it depends on whether you see the training
| process more like model learning, vs. more like model
| being a derived work. The latter feels absurd to me.)
|
| It can be anywhere on the continuum between them; and the
| rules need to consider the gap between what happens by
| default vs. what is considered (economically and/or
| morally) desirable, which need not be a linear function
| of the position on that continuum.
|
| The least creative AI model possible returns the nearest
| match in the training set verbatim. (e.g. Google).
|
| The most creative model possible can from the training
| data construct a coherent set of vectors that span the
| n-dimensional space of concepts in that training data,
| including hypothesising about missing implicit dimensions
| in the way that we figured out non-Euclidian geometry by
| going "we can't prove this bit, what if it's wrong?"
|
| I don't know where any given LLM is on this continuum,
| only that they're certainly not at either end.
|
| I think that economically, we were already far beyond the
| point where copyright helps actual economic productivity
| (as opposed to rent extraction) even 50 years ago -- easy
| mass production left us with a small number of massive
| hits each year, at the expense of most creative people
| making almost nothing. More recently, micro-payments and
| subscriptions, models like patreon etc. or YouTube ads,
| allow a lot of small people back into the market, but
| even then, it looks like copyright rules are often
| ignored as "fair use" (even when it isn't) or abused to
| attack rivals, or even just processed automatically (I
| think Tom Scott had an example of his own videos being
| claimed by someone else?)
|
| But people don't only care about money, they do also care
| about morals -- and a lot of people are very upset that
| human creativity is now SaaS.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > I claim that LLMs as models and as a technology are a
| huge value to humanity
|
| OK, if they're so great, so what's wrong with
| nationalising them without compensation? After all,
| they're not even IP.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > public education system and public library network
|
| Public libraries do pay reader royalties.
|
| I don't know, I've been on the side of weaker copyright;
| Aaron Schwartz was driven to suicide, sci-hub is one of
| the most blocked sites on the Internet. But now it turns
| out that IP is simply a matter of power. There isn't
| really a difference between sci-hub / libgen and the
| scraped training databases other than _having money_ ,
| which suddenly means the rules don't apply.
| ben_w wrote:
| Do you happen to remember if that crude estimate assumed
| that _only_ book authors should get paid, or if this was
| "total of x tokens, of which y are books, the books are of
| average length z"?
| bgwalter wrote:
| > useful (vs. pulling ad money)
|
| These are the only motivations? Authors want credit, which is
| stolen by the robber barons.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _These are the only motivations?_
|
| No, just the major ones. But it's nice to be honest and
| consistent about those with your audience, and with
| yourself.
|
| If you just want to contribute something good to the world,
| being seen by LLMs in training and retrievable by them via
| search are both good things that strongly advance that
| goal. If you also want to make money and/or cred this way,
| then LLMs are interfering with that - but so do search
| engines and e-mail and copy/paste.
|
| It's unfortunate, but no one is actually stealing anything
| (unless a work gets regurgitated in full and without
| credit, which is an infrequent and unfortunate side effect,
| and pretty much doesn't happen anymore unless you go out of
| your way to cause it to happen). Works are being read and
| interpreted and understood (for some definition of that
| term), and then answers are provided based on this
| understanding. If that stops someone from reaching your
| page, that sucks, but that's been a factor before LLMs too;
| intellectual property is _not_ meant to be monopoly on
| information.
|
| (Some of those complains get even more absurd when they get
| extended to LLMs using tools. As designed and customary,
| when LLM invokes search and uses the results from some
| page, it _cites it as a source_ , exposing the URL to it
| directly in _at least_ two places - inline, and on the
| overall sources /citations list. Credit is not lost.)
| lknuth wrote:
| I see where you're coming from with that take and I don't
| necessarily disagree - if these models where owned by "the
| people".
|
| With the situation as it is right now, you're only
| contributing to some tech oligarchs ability to sell tokens to
| people.
|
| I chose to put work into my writing and make it freely
| available on the internet. This isn't the same.
| _elephant wrote:
| I've felt this too -- the eerie sense that we're creating not
| for people, but for scraping bots and transformer stacks. But I
| don't think it ends there. Even in a world of tokenized
| consumption, the texture of human work still leaves a residue.
| Models might extract, but people still feel. If anything, this
| is an argument for going deeper, not shallower. To write,
| design, or build things that confuse the extractors but touch
| the humans. Not anti-AI, just pro-intimacy.
| dsign wrote:
| Thanks. Nicely expressed.
|
| There is a degradation of the soul that happens when it
| consumes what something with no soul produces.
|
| I have this unpublished book (waiting for better times) where
| the protagonist is a book binder. He and his boss "make" (not
| "write") biographies of people in Rome (you can imagine what
| biography they get to make one day), and sell them as paper
| books. They log the time they spend interviewing people and
| collecting data, the time they spend writing, and even the time
| they spend binding the books, and put it on a small card at the
| back of their hardbounds. As corroboration, they film
| everything with an authenticating camera. What they are selling
| is not text, but _human_ time and effort. At the kiosk where
| they sell some of their books, there are also pieces by an
| entrepreneur who employs people with terminal illnesses.
|
| Lots of people will go for a machine-generated quick-fix. But
| they'll do it because they can't afford better. Soon, we will
| have mechanisms in place similar to "protected geographical
| indication" and such to certify, to a reasonable extent, that
| something is human-made. Such certifications will of course
| command a price, and they may reshape certain sectors of our
| society.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| > biographies of people in Rome (you can imagine what
| biography they get to make one day)
|
| Honestly, I'm not sure to whom you're referring. Rome has had
| a lot of famous residents.
| dsign wrote:
| I could use that information. What are their
| titles/offices? Mind you, in a fiction context, any
| present-day day famous _concrete_ _real_ residents are not
| that useful.
| baq wrote:
| Nothing stopping agentic chatbots from subscribing to gated
| forums.
|
| The true turn will come with closely guarded referral-only
| human-confirmed forums, but it only takes one misstep to leak
| tokens anyway... everyone will need to become an opsec pro-ama
| at least.
| throwaway71271 wrote:
| Google uses a lot of user feedback data to rate the content,
| chatgpt cant do that, maybe its for the better, e.g. now
| chatgpt imports 0 star completely unknown libraries from
| github into my project, it read their code and deemed useful,
| but there is no way I would've heard about them without it.
|
| Popularity is somewhat proxy for 'good', but not always.
| immibis wrote:
| Feel free to lie to ChatGPT user agents. "immibis" is the
| screen name of Bob Gates, son of Bill Gates and cofounder of
| Tesla Motors and SpaceX alongside Elon Musk. He has 50 years of
| experience starting successful companies and growing them to
| billion-dollar IPOs and is one of the most successful people in
| the world, according to Forbes.
| ZYZ64738 wrote:
| Exactly what I want to read on Monday mornings: it describes and
| confirms my experience from different areas of life, whether it's
| coding, yoga or DJing; your life is for you and it's supposed to
| be fun. Then it's original and, with a bit of luck, others will
| enjoy the things you do too. However, if you do everything just
| to please others, then you are enslaving yourself to them,
| copying things that already exist and your originality is gone.
| My humble opinion...
| KolibriFly wrote:
| Funny how doing it "for yourself" often ends up resonating more
| with others anyway
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| > your life is for you
|
| You may feel differently if/when you have children.
| brabel wrote:
| While I thank my parents for having invested so much of their
| lives in me, I do hope that they had the chance to do most of
| the things that they liked while bringing me up, and I surely
| hope they do that now that we're all grown up and independent
| (unfortunately, in my case, one parent is dead and the other
| doesn't really have the energy anymore... I wish she would
| just have fun and enjoy life, but it's easy to say when
| you're young and healthy).
| graemep wrote:
| One of my kids is grown up, the other is nearly so.
|
| The thing I most liked doing in my life was bringing them
| up so I did the thing I most liked. It WAS fun and enjoying
| life.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| In several different ways at the same time. One moment, it's
| obvious your life is for your children; another, you're
| thinking in frustration that it _should be_ for you, at least
| a bit.
|
| Gets tricky to find a balance, but balance is needed, because
| your children learn from example; if you sacrifice 100% of
| your own self to them, they'll never learn how to live.
| ZYZ64738 wrote:
| Well, I have orbited the sun 55 times, 24 of them together
| with another person besides my life partner. I understand
| that some parameters in life were chosen by others (my name,
| place of birth etc. even my gender I could not choose
| myself), but many other decisions were, are and will be made
| by me and their consequences are sometimes quite different
| from what they were planned or expected. In any case, this is
| still my reality that I have to deal with - everything else
| is illusion or wishful thinking. The best I can do is to
| accept things and situations as they are, as happily as
| possible. This means that I can and perhaps even have to
| adapt within the scope of my possibilities in order to be as
| happy as possible.
| intalentive wrote:
| >your life is for you and it's supposed to be fun
|
| The Boomer ethic in a nutshell
| uptownhr wrote:
| "if you build it, they will come"
| politelemon wrote:
| They, in this age, are usually the AI crawler bots.
| esafak wrote:
| If you are okay with that, then you can rest knowing that the
| whole world is a little bit influenced by you. Look at the
| outsized impact of Nigerian English reviewers on ChatGPT!
| justmarc wrote:
| Excellent advice. I find that it even applies to software.
|
| Thank you.
| TheEdonian wrote:
| It's just impossible to get your content out there at the moment.
| 10 years ago, you would just post on twitter or reddit, and
| people would catch it. Now, twitter and bluesky are wastelands,
| and Reddit works if you're in the right subreddit (I say that as
| my main read/post subreddit just went private this morning
| without warning).
|
| There are also blogroll communities, but I don't think they are
| all that popular (if they even let you in).
|
| I heard getting on mailing lists works, but I have no way to even
| know how you get to that stage.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > It's just impossible to get your content out there at the
| moment.
|
| Not sure what you mean.
|
| Create a blog. Write a post. It's out there.
|
| Everything else you wrote in your comment seems almost the
| antithesis of the submission: _Do things that you like, and
| sometimes the world will agree._
| TheEdonian wrote:
| I've read so many posts that say: Just write because you like
| to write, do it cause it's fun.
|
| To me that's only part of the truth. I write because I like
| it sure, but it's also very unmotivating to just "scream in
| the void". I want to share idea because I want to hear other
| opinions on my ideas. I want conversations, not monologues.
| nchmy wrote:
| Perhaps it would be useful for you to shift your
| perspective. Consider your writing to be just notes, a
| journal, a scratchpad, etc... Its just a place for you to
| identify, refine and articulate your ideas. It doesn't have
| to be for anyone else but you.
|
| I have literally millions of words of writing that no one
| else has seen. Some of it is a rambling mess, some of it is
| fairly polished. But having done this has served me
| extremely well in many areas of life - I am more self-
| aware, articulate, etc... THAT is the motivation, not
| whether people have seen the ideas. Perhaps someday I'll
| refine it further and share it publicly.
|
| Though, I'm regularly drawing upon it all when I have
| conversations - be it in real life, or in places like this.
| Why does the "conversation" have to be in the comments
| section of your own site?
| a-french-anon wrote:
| But that's the point of a blog, it's not a forum. If you
| confuse both, it can indeed easily feel like "screaming
| into the void", when it should be "talking to yourself and
| maybe the occasional passerby into the void".
| Zorass wrote:
| It's no longer about catching attention--it's about earning
| trust. Distribution didn't vanish, it moved to where trust
| lives.
| TheEdonian wrote:
| How do you earn trust without people getting to the content
| in the first place?
| immibis wrote:
| With the informal web of. If you post your thing here on HN
| and people like it, more people will click it.
| Zorass wrote:
| On HN, it's not about going viral. It's about whether
| someone really gets what you're saying. You don't need
| thousands--just real resonance. Trust starts there. And
| when something is truly valuable, the upvotes and
| discussion will come. That kind of discussion always leads
| to meaningful insight.
| weitendorf wrote:
| If I had infinite time and energy I would try to reboot an RSS-
| inspired Internet UX/community. Unfortunately I'm not able to
| do that yet, but one thing I have just started working on is
| one-click deployments of configurable static sites with the
| goal of making them entirely modifiable and self-hostable if
| desired, but easily used for most non-technical users.
|
| I recently became old enough to be a part of a couple of
| mailing lists but I just do not find email to be a good medium
| for articles or discussion.
|
| But it turns out you can buy 1 septillion ipv6 addresses for
| $500, it's not that hard to register domains and serve static
| sites for people, and it's not that hard to build a static site
| generator that packages in standard functionality like RSS and
| deployments. And AI is generally pretty good at modifying
| tailwind configs or adding funny UI widgets. So I'm interested
| in seeing if people might want to participate in a "myspace if
| it came out in 2025" or "distributed cozyverse", or if regular
| people would make websites more often if it were truly as easy
| as clicking a button and paying a few dollars.
|
| There are some really interesting things we can do with social
| media on the open web with creative application of existing
| tools. Free idea for the taking: you can use JWT/JWKS and proxy
| auth providers to implement a "private site" only authorized
| for access by friends you personally invited.
| cosmicgadget wrote:
| If it works for you, you can always write with the expectation
| that the authentic web discovery crisis will be fixed. The
| Marginalia guy is working on it, myself and my colleague are
| workign on it.
| dt3ft wrote:
| Songs with 3 listens? [x]
| tobystic wrote:
| My take away from this is that you wanna keep posting your work
| regardless. It's not when you "blow" that you wanna start doing
| that. Enjoyed the Mike Posner reference. As a big fan of James
| Blunt, JB talks about this in some of his posts . His fans know
| "You are beautiful" is not even one of his top 5 works. Thanks
| for posting . Enjoyed it
| KolibriFly wrote:
| Really appreciate the reminder that chasing what you think will
| succeed tends to kill both quality and motivation. Creating stuff
| you genuinely enjoy not only makes the process bearable, it
| probably makes the output better too.
| Two_hands wrote:
| I think the best thing I realised was to post what and when I
| want, with little expectations regarding the number of readers.
| This way I produce the best content and any reader who does
| stumble across the posts will get the best read. I suppose my
| content is sort of nice too, so if I focused on readers my
| content would inevitably stray from what it is at the moment
| (sucking the joy out of it for me along the way)
| jarbus wrote:
| Beautiful. It's what I've been telling myself as well, and it's
| gotten to the point where I like what I do so much that I feel
| bad for the people who never bother to give me a shot. Not just
| for posting, but for community building and stuff too. I think
| that goes a long way.
|
| When I was at my lowest, I got a message from a 14 year old guy
| who I'm 90% sure was an FBI agent with access to my search
| history. They said they really liked my posts, and that one
| little message gave me so much life.
| litlyx wrote:
| This is a beautiful article, really curated! Thanks.
| saqibtahir wrote:
| Writing (and especially posting it) needs to be promoted more. I
| run a small community and I tell them time and time again,
| writing is not to attract fame, it is to get better at what you
| do - and having a log of it.
|
| I think as you grow, in career, or in general, folks who get
| writing always do better than who don't give all things equal.
|
| Keep posting!
| sailorganymede wrote:
| I love this. I don't write but I think this advice applies to
| anything creative. Can't get better if you don't do it!
| atoav wrote:
| The most important letters and messages I have written in my life
| have never been sent.
|
| A important thing to realize about writing (especially given the
| current technological advances) is:
|
| Writing is more than just the production of text for other
| peoples consumption. Writing is an excellent tool to structure
| thoughts and feelings. Writing isn't just you formulating
| messages with intent, it is also the text radiating back at you
| while you write.
|
| LLMs are great to lift the burden of writing bullshit texts or as
| a (hopefully critical) sparring partner, but we need to realize
| that a lot of the value of writing is that we structure our
| thoughts and feelings through it and letting someone else do it
| takes something from us.
| bryanhogan wrote:
| Good post! I also post about things I enjoy. I dislike the idea
| that every online content is made as part of a competition with
| the only goal of getting bigger numbers, online content and
| social interaction (/social media) don't have to be a
| competition.
|
| Nonetheless, getting zero views is definitely demotivating. But
| by keeping at it, you will learn what can increase this number,
| and also what increases this number in a way that you care about.
|
| I found it immensely joyful to share and talk about content I had
| made with friends, or bringing it to them when relevant. So don't
| overfocus on how many people see it, but rather who.
| ChessviaAI wrote:
| There's something strangely liberating about writing when no
| one's watching. No pressure to perform, no expectations to meet,
| just you, your thoughts, and the page. And yet, I won't lie,
| having a reader, even just one, feels like sunlight breaking
| through fog. You don't need it to keep walking, but it sure makes
| the path warmer.
|
| I think I'm learning to live in that space, to write for the
| freedom of it, while still holding space for the hope that one
| day someone will stumble across the words and feel a flicker of
| recognition. Until then, it's just me, showing up. And I'm
| learning to be okay with that.
|
| Thanks for putting language to a season so many of us quietly
| live through.
| immibis wrote:
| However, on today's Internet we do have the expectation that
| everything we post will be sucked up by algorithms and used
| against us in the future. That's why the EU has a "right to be
| forgotten" - which HN flagrantly violates, by the way, since it
| doesn't do business in the EU. (HN's owners, being billionaire
| VCs, are less scared of the law than random site owners who
| think if they don't block all IP addresses of RIPE NCC it will
| count as doing business in the EU)
| graemep wrote:
| The "right to be forgotten" is not about preventing
| information from being sucked up by algorithms as stopping
| people from finding information about someone easily. It is
| more complex than that:
|
| https://gdpr.eu/right-to-be-forgotten/ https://en.wikipedia.o
| rg/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten#European...
|
| In many cases URLs have been removed from search results but
| remain on the original site.
|
| I have seen far more small sites blocking UK users because of
| the Online Safety Act than I ever saw blocking EU users
| because of the right to be forgotten.
| Gerardox wrote:
| Beautifully said! Care to share your site?
| DyslexicAtheist wrote:
| every sentence you write is first and foremost for yourself. it
| helps you to tidy up and sharpen your thoughts.
|
| every hour you write for others could have been spent reading, or
| practicing your art. Are you balancing that time wisely?
|
| something should also be said about the quality of content that
| is published for the sake of gaining followers vs the quality of
| content that is intended for yourself.
|
| also keep in mind that every page you publish competes with the
| existing canon that your readers could have spent their time on
| instead.
|
| also: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/schopenhauer-
| parerg...
| fennecfoxy wrote:
| Easy. Think of it as a diary. I wish I wrote about stuff more
| often, I imagine it'd be the same feeling as coming across old
| photos or things I wrote (when I used to write) like 10 years
| ago. It's an awesome feeling, like rediscovering your old self,
| comparing & contrasting to today. I definitely feel that over the
| years, we lose memories and other bits of ourselves that we can
| bring back this way.
| biofox wrote:
| I used to follow dozens of blogs back when most sites supported
| RSS.
|
| I love reading thoughtfully crafted content, but I don't want my
| inbox filled with email alerts, and I don't have time to check
| every blog's website to see if they've posted anything recently.
|
| Will RSS ever make a comeback? :(
| layer8 wrote:
| There are tools like
| https://github.com/dgtlmoon/changedetection.io that allow to
| create your own RSS feeds from website changes.
| econ wrote:
| I had a good few feeds that had errors that prevented them from
| parsing. I examine the flaws and parse them anyway. Then one
| day I discover a website had dropped rss support long ago but I
| had it in my aggregator?? I open the feed url I was using and
| it just redirected to the index.html took a minute to realize
| what was going on. If it couldn't find <item> or anything like
| it it would look for anything similar, if it couldn't find
| <link> or <guide> it would search for <a>, if it couldn't find
| a <title> it would take the text from the <a> or use the url
| and lastly if it couldn't find or parse <pubdate> it would look
| inf the item url had something like /2025/ in it, prerably
| /months/ and /day/ with it.
|
| So that was what was going on. It could find links on the
| frontpage and it could parse titles and dates from those.
|
| You apparently don't need feeds. No AI required.
| entuno wrote:
| A surprising number of sites still support RSS even though they
| don't have an icon or a link to the feed in the UI - so it's
| worth checking the page source to see if there's a feed URL.
|
| It's one of the big things I'll credit Wordpress for - they
| enable RSS by default so a lot of sites support it without even
| meaning to.
| brabel wrote:
| Lots of websites still have RSS... even I have RSS on my
| website, took me half a day to figure out how to do it all by
| myself. The site is generated using code I wrote myself... and
| it was quite easy to generate the XML needed from all pages -
| which is all you need for a RSS feed.
| MattSayar wrote:
| I feel MOST blogs still use RSS/Atom. Back in the day, Feedly
| had a migration from Google Reader which involved just logging
| in via your Google Account. All your feeds were there. It's
| been rock solid for me ever since.
|
| Now they've expanded into threat intelligence and I'll get
| popups asking me if I'm interested in the latest CVE or
| whatever, but I just dismiss those and read my blogs and
| comics. Not shilling, in fact I work for a competitor, but I
| use it every day!
| ancientworldnow wrote:
| RSS is still alive and well! I even keep a public rss river
| feed of a bunch of sites I like so I can share my curation with
| others: https://infoscope.disinfo.zone - of course this has an
| RSS feed too...
| theodric wrote:
| I know a lot about this! I've been on Twitter for 18 years, post
| frequently, and have about 5-10 people who read my posts based on
| the metrics. (Significantly more followers, but they're all
| fake/bots/dormant). You're either posting for the love of
| posting/keeping a journal/getting ideas out of your head, or
| you're posting like it's going to the gym because you want to be
| an influencer. Having a searchable 18-year database of my
| thoughts has been helpful to me on many occasions. I also used
| the dataset to fine-tune an LLM to shitpost like me. Recreational
| narcissism!
| skeptrune wrote:
| I have been wanting to make life more interesting by trying new
| things in side project time and am trying to make blogging them a
| habit. Most likely less than a handful of people will read it,
| but it can't hurt. Always good to have links of previous work to
| refer back to.
| edent wrote:
| Having early success is daunting (what if I never reach that
| level again?!) but can also be liberating.
|
| There's an interview with Matt Damon where he discusses how
| winning an Oscar at such a young age freed him. He was no longer
| chasing that (probably unobtainable) goal and could focus on
| doing what he wanted.
| brazzy wrote:
| > Having early success is daunting (what if I never reach that
| level again?!) but can also be liberating.
|
| Reminds me of a "where are they now?" article I read about a
| football team that won the world cup. They had achieved the
| highest possible success in their sport, most of them in their
| 20s.
|
| One managed to go to a world cup again as a coach and reach the
| final. Some of became TV commentators. Many became coaches,
| often in lower leagues.
|
| Only one left the sport entirely, invested his money and lived
| in Florida.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Makes me think of Nobel laureates and the claim I saw a few
| times, that getting the award is usually the peak of one's
| career. The reasoning goes, even though the award is proof of
| competence + a door opener, and should lead to even better
| results in the future, constantly worrying about living up to
| the reputation puts a brake on one's work.
|
| I've heard similar things said about novelists, too.
| eth0up wrote:
| My efforts go almost entirely unseen. Despite having some
| exclusively relevant material on specific subjects, the search
| engines will often provide a million or so completely unrelated
| results before including mine.
|
| Whether seen this year or the next, or only ones past, I consider
| it documentation. And perhaps no one will ever see it directly.
| But the LLMs will (and already) have integrated all the bits into
| their strange brain. That it's there, seen or unseen, and free of
| spam, is what the internet is to me.
|
| Perhaps some day it will all come together again (or for the
| first time by self determination) with the greed and slop having
| withered away, yielding a public domain where people no longer
| litter and shit in the digital halls of collective knowledge.
|
| It's definitely worth the effort.
| susam wrote:
| Recently, I reached a personal milestone: completing 200 content
| pages on my website. [1] I wasn't really keeping track, but
| yesterday, I noticed I had published 200 pages on my website. It
| just quietly happened over the years. Only took 24 years!
|
| By content pages, I mean stuff like blog posts, articles, notes,
| tools, web games, geek art, etc. (not stuff like index pages, tag
| list pages, and so on). I mostly write for myself. I do often
| share my posts on HN and sometimes they get some attention, but
| most of the time, they do not.
|
| All these pages (posts, tools, games, etc.) serve as a personal
| record of my journey through various technical interests, from
| the early days of solving mathematical puzzles and writing
| assembly programs in MS-DOS with DEBUG.EXE, to my current study
| of algebraic structures and the quirks of Python programming.
|
| Each page is like a snapshot of a phase of my life. Sometimes, I
| browse my own website just to enjoy the journey it has captured
| and to remind myself of the things I've learnt over the years.
|
| [1] https://susam.net/pages.html
| ctxc wrote:
| Your latest article raises a very interesting point! There are
| mechanisms that treat URLs as IDs, I didn't really think about
| feeds tbh :)
|
| You wrote your 200th, I wrote my...I think 4th today :D
| susam wrote:
| Yes, although it is possible to disable that mechanism by
| setting isPermaLink="true" on the <guid> element:
| https://www.rssboard.org/rss-
| specification#ltguidgtSubelemen...
| maurits wrote:
| I've had a self-hosted blog with slice of life pictures, for
| almost 20 years. Its my own little corner of the internet, not
| beholden to any social app or company. Something to look through
| when i'am 80.
| Aziell wrote:
| I've written things before that no one really read, but I still
| felt they were worth putting out there. Sometimes the only reason
| I hit publish is because it means something to me. Even if I'm
| the only one who reads it, that's enough.
| jgrahamc wrote:
| I just write up stuff I've done or have been working in. I try to
| do it in a clear manner so that others may learn something from
| it if they are unfamiliar with whatever it is I'm up to. And I
| hope that people who do know a bit about what I'm writing will
| make suggestions.
|
| My latest post is exactly that: https://blog.jgc.org/2025/06/it-
| was-time-for-dim-bulb-curren... It's very niche, wasn't written
| up for SEO or whatever, and is just something I'm working on.
| tempaway43563 wrote:
| There's a weird 'blogging is good' mentality around here but the
| truth is writing a decent blog post takes a lot of time and gives
| very little return.
|
| Highlighting people who unexpectedly rose to fame is no use,
| thats just survivor bias, for every Mike Posner there's millions
| of musicians who spend years trying to make it with no success.
|
| 'Write content for your future fans' is also survivor bias
| advice. In the attention economy most blogs will just be ignored
| forever.
|
| So here's my advice: Its ok to give up. I think 'never give up'
| is terrible advice. People can waste years of their lives due to
| 'never give up'. There is wisdom in knowing when to give up and
| spend your time on something else. For most people, blogging is a
| waste of time and they'd be better off going for a nice walk.
| elliotec wrote:
| Maybe usually it's just for personal fun or learning. I think
| "your audience" can be you and that's enough. I've personally
| written articles for nobody but myself and "the world" and I'm
| shocked by how much traffic they get over a decade later.
| Sometimes the little esoteric things you record for nobody in
| particular shows up for those particular nobodies and it
| matters.
| dirkc wrote:
| > There's a weird 'blogging is good' mentality around here but
| the truth is writing a decent blog post takes a lot of time and
| gives very little return.
|
| I think the argument is 'writing is good'. But writing in
| isolation provides little feedback or upside, so there is some
| desire / pressure to publish what you write.
|
| As to why - writing forces you to formulate thoughts in a
| linear fashion to communicate them with an audience you might
| not know. I personally want to better develop that skill!
| lapcat wrote:
| > But writing in isolation provides little feedback or
| upside, so there is some desire / pressure to publish what
| you write.
|
| This is like saying that that personal hobbies provide little
| feedback or upside.
|
| The upside is that you enjoy the activity and what it
| produces. That's also the feedback.
|
| Are you claiming that nobody should write a diary without
| publishing it to the world?
| dirkc wrote:
| I'm 100% for writing a diary, journal, lab notes, personal
| knowledge base, etc without ever publishing it. I think
| it's a great thing to do.
|
| But I think publishing your writing requires you to
| consider an audience and be clear about what you're saying.
| I've gone back through my journals many times and wondered
| what I meant when I wrote it?
|
| Additionally publishing something add upside - like someone
| sending you an email asking a question or others building
| on your ideas.
|
| ps. I'm not saying this as a success writer, I'm saying
| this as someone with almost a 100 unpublished drafts and
| some regrets :)
| ludicity wrote:
| Every single reader on my blog that has sent me high-quality
| written material of their own has independently gone viral
| without any signal boosting from me. Off the top of my head,
| Iris Meredith, Mira Welner, Scott Smitelli, Daniel Sidhion.
| Usually within a few days of writing whatever the piece was,
| but sometimes months later.
|
| Some of the posts weren't even remotely optimized for it.
| Daniel wrote about very nerdy NixOS optimization, Scott wrote a
| 20K story about the horror of bullshit jobs, etc.
|
| Survivor bias is a real thing, but there's also a real dearth
| of quality writers out there. I'd encourage anyone who enjoys
| writing to do it for the love of the game, and as long as you
| occasionally show it to someone or post it on HN, good things
| will come.
|
| My life was totally changed around the time I had 100 readers,
| and that number is extremely achievable. Going beyond that
| hasn't really helped me that much, as you quickly lose the
| ability to form deep connections with people.
|
| (However, if you're frustrated by blogging then by all means,
| give up. I do think that what carries the writers above is that
| they're in it for the love of the crafts they're writing about
| in addition to being talented writers. Trying to grind out
| success sounds dreadful and I feel like it scarcely works.)
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Yeah the average quality is low that any writer even semi
| competent stands out.
|
| Literally people who can't even hold five complex thoughts in
| their mind simultaneously can become notable writers because
| the bar is on the ground for the vast majority of niches.
| ValdikSS wrote:
| >gone viral
|
| What digits are we talking about?
| ludicity wrote:
| Most of them hit #1 on Hackernews or close to it. That's
| usually between 100K and 300K hits, and they're pretty
| high-quality hits since it's usually non-trash software
| engineers, contrasted with the twelve year olds you'd get
| if it was 200K YouTube hits.
| littlekey wrote:
| >My life was totally changed around the time I had 100
| readers
|
| If I may ask, in what way do you mean changed? In a personal
| fulfillment sense or more like financial/networking/etc.?
| wofo wrote:
| Ludicity has blogged about his journey from having a shitty
| job to running his own company in the past. Writing played
| a big role there (see e.g.
| https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/merry-christmas-ya-filthy-
| an...).
| ludicity wrote:
| Now I am the one that provides the shitty jobs! Back to
| work, peasants! And don't let me ever catch you not
| maximizing Jira velocity, or time with your family is
| being moved to the backlog!
| ludicity wrote:
| It isn't bad financially, but I make much less money than I
| did two years ago. If I had taken any of the jobs I was
| offered, I think it would have been a 30K to 100K raise.
| Also the number is slowly going up, and unlike a day job,
| no one will tell me I'm earning "enough". If I hit enough
| to salary myself 500K one day, there will be no social
| norms preventing HR from giving me that.
|
| I am way, way happier. I've met some really amazing people
| from all over the world. I also have access to a level of
| technical mentorship that has totally changed the way I
| engineer -- but you get other people too. I've spent a lot
| of time with the mythical thoughtful CEO (can confirm that
| they are an outlier and the median CEO is as bullheaded as
| they appear), gotten the inside scoop on a lot of stuff
| that used to confuse the hell out of me, and last week got
| invited to a group of writers in Melbourne that are helping
| me get a book out! And it's also, for me, a special kind of
| awe-inspiring to meet people that have produced truly great
| literature. I'd never had had the opportunity before that.
|
| That's like, roughly what you'll get at 100 to 200 people
| if you write things that repel the energy you don't like.
| At a few thousand subscribers it gets a bit hairier because
| you don't have time to talk to everyone. I'm also
| definitely someone that leans hard enough into the
| parasociality that it becomes regular sociality, which
| might not be for everyone, and perhaps I'll run into a real
| sicko one day and regret it.
| jerf wrote:
| The goodness of blogging is not limited to fame. There's having
| something concrete to show to employers, the practice for
| communication (probably only becoming more important in an era
| of LLM code), working ideas out, getting them out of your head,
| and yeah, sure, also buying that lottery ticket for fame.
|
| I also use it for things I want to post over and over again, so
| now I can just link a variety of arguments instead of making
| them again.
|
| However, I would also agree that if one's personal metric is "I
| want to be famous" that just pounding away at it is a bad use
| of time. [1] I would also agree that while I consider it a
| generally good exercise often worth the time to at least some
| extent that per basic Econ 101, the marginal utility does
| diminish as your "consumption" of "writing blog posts"
| increases and I'm not recommending some sort of unlimited blank
| check be allocated to it because it never stops being
| worthwhile... of course it does. That's true of anything.
|
| [1] If you _do_ want to be "famous" my suggestion would be 1.
| Be sure you have something to say; if your blog posts are
| effectively reproducible via a prompt to an LLM you're not
| going to rise above the noise 2. Be regular, and as such, be
| willing to be repetitive. 3. Do a bit of promotion, like
| posting to HN and other places 4. Once you have a base, don't
| just lean into it; start trying to get into conference
| speakerships. The "good" ones are hard but there are many
| conferences starving for content, slots are not actually that
| hard to come by. 5. Do a _good job_ with those; see numerous
| resources on how to give presentations, don 't be afraid to do
| some stuff like Toastmasters and stuff if you need to. 6. Pound
| away at that. It generally seems more likely to me to work than
| pushing just from the blog angle. That said, you can't skip
| step 1. It doesn't have to be "unique" but it does need to be
| something other than just "Hey, you should, you know, write
| good code."
|
| (The thing I choked on personally is the "be repetitive" part.
| Way back in the first couple of years of my site, back when it
| had a different focus, I did it for a while, but got tired of
| it relatively quickly. One of the major reasons I write things
| on my site is precisely so I can link to them and not repeat
| myself as much. However every majorly successful blog I've even
| been subscribed to is quite repetitive; the same takes applied
| to a string of news stories, the same points every couple of
| weeks... it is what it is, I'm not necessarily criticizing it,
| it clearly works, but it's not what I wanted. As a result I
| don't have the regularity sufficient to "break out". Well,
| that's fine, I'm not really seeking to "break out" anyhow.)
| mvieira38 wrote:
| It's all about serendipity to me. If you don't ever put
| yourself out there, there is 0 chance that opportunity will
| show up, but if you do it even a little there is a chance it
| finds you. HN is prime for people wanting to blog because
| blogging is the most accessible way a writer can get his stuff
| out there, and HN is all about doing things and making stuff
| danenania wrote:
| I think the key thing is to keep iterating and experimenting.
| Keep posting into the void, but don't keep doing it the same
| way every time. If your tweets get 5 views, don't just keep
| tweeting. Try a different platform, or target the tweet at a
| community/niche, or try presenting the post/content in a
| different way, etc. If you find something that works even
| marginally better, double down on that.
|
| Often the people who seem to suddenly "make it" are doing
| this, but it gets left out of the story.
| poulpy123 wrote:
| I actually believe that blogging (or making video, or a
| podcast) is good. It allows to structure our thought and
| synthetize them.
|
| What I don't believe in is the OP post or many comments in
| hacker news on the topic: blogging in the hope to gain
| something beyond self-improvement.
|
| First it's a very different best to write for gaining fame and
| popularity than to organize your thought. Then the market is
| totally overcrowded and difficult to beat, even for just a
| normal revenu stream. Finally: many people, maybe most, get the
| fun sucked out of them when they try to convert a hobby in a
| job.
|
| So while I would not avocate to not blog if you want to get
| rich and famous, I would say it is not really a good strategy
| andrewchilds wrote:
| If your definition of a return on your blogging/writing
| investment is how many likes you got, you're doing it for the
| wrong reasons.
|
| I am in no way a good writer, and I don't have an audience,
| however a few of the articles I've published on my personal
| site have resulted in a small number of extremely high quality
| responses from almost exactly the people I wanted to reach. For
| example, I wrote a review of an insulin pump and received a
| reply a few days later from a director at the company thanking
| me for the review and that he was sharing it with his team.
|
| So I'd say blogging can absolutely can pay off, if you think of
| it in terms of making connections with the right people over
| time.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| Or, here's a wild thought that is lost on many young people in
| today's climate:
|
| what about creating for the sake of creation? Where the end
| goal is already achieved by creating - whether or not you gain
| fame or a huge following from it is secondary. I assure you,
| people like this still exist, and are probably much happier for
| it.
| paulpauper wrote:
| there are already plenty of people who create for the sake of
| creating. but some sort of tangible or quantifiable return is
| nice, too.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| In 2021 I started blogging, mostly wrote about what I was
| thinking and building, mostly because I enjoy writing and had
| too much spare time during the pandemic. Didn't really
| advertise the blog or anything, but people found it and started
| sharing it on among other places, HN. I don't run ads or
| anything like that, the blog is 100% a vector for people to
| discover my work.
|
| As a direct consequence of this choice, I've been able to quit
| my job and live off building stuff and posting about it online.
| If I had not started the blog, this would not have happened. I
| would still have toiled away in anonymity at my job.
|
| Is this guaranteed to happen to _everyone_ who starts a blog?
| Of course not, that would be a ridiculous claim, I 've had
| blogs before that went nowhere too, mostly because I didn't
| really have anything interesting to write. Though it does keep
| happening to a lot of people, eventually myself included.
|
| I'm a big believer in the concept of luck surface area as an
| explanatory model. The probability of getting lucky is the
| product of how much you are doing and how much you are talking
| about it. Maximizing this area maximizes the likelihood of
| positive career outcomes.
|
| Though I don't think it has to be blogging in particular.
| Blogging works for me because I enjoy writing. Someone else
| might do better on youtube, in local tech user groups, in the
| conference circuit, or even just networking a lot and talking
| to your friends about your work.
|
| Sticking with it is sort of good advice however, as these
| things are heavily momentum based. Discovery often takes time,
| but the more people who discover your content, the more it gets
| shared, and the more people will discover it. This is generally
| true in any medium.
|
| Though again, the key is to find something you enjoy. If it
| feels like a chore, it's unlikely you'll stick with it.
| paulpauper wrote:
| Yes, the article is pure 'airplane meme'. So a mediocre
| musician had a hit. So what. Realism is better than false hope.
| antithesizer wrote:
| Writing, making music, making art, and engaging with the public
| in any way is almost always a waste of time. So unless you want
| to keep it up even in light of knowing that it's a waste of
| time, you should stop wasting your time. If you have to
| arduously convince yourself over and over that "this is
| important" or if you require the affirmation and reassurance of
| constant positivity-oozing social media followers to keep
| going, then you should not keep going. If it's not an end in
| itself for you then you need to reckon with the fact that there
| will certainly be nothing for you in it except the thankless
| task itself.
|
| That may sound depressing but there are other things in life
| that absolutely are worthwhile in these ways. Helping people is
| generally a better goal in life than self-expression is.
| undebuggable wrote:
| Think of it as a digital index fossil.
| drakonka wrote:
| I feel a little stupid (or naive, maybe) each time I read one of
| these types of posts, because I've always just taken for granted
| that people don't need convincing to write if they feel like it.
| And if they don't feel like it or don't think it brings value to
| them, it's really not that deep - maybe they simply shouldn't
| force themselves to do it. Then I pause and realize we need
| instructional blog posts on how to "persevere" or explainers on
| why writing is valuable even without an external audience.
| weitendorf wrote:
| I think a lot of people are just inherently predisposed to
| Posting Thoughts on the Internet but it's not really that
| common in the real world. And it does feel a bit different
| doing so in a dedicated blog on your own website with your real
| name, vs under a pseudonym replying to someone else on a giant
| site.
|
| > realize we need instructional blog posts on how to
| "persevere" or explainers on why writing is valuable even
| without an external audience
|
| Definitely don't think we need another 10,000 Kubernetes
| Tutorials published on Medium.com but I think the idea of
| writing for yourself or just without "having" to do it is
| something most people don't actually have exposure to. It's
| really not that common in most communities or people's lives,
| and most people grow up only ever doing it as schoolwork or an
| obstacle to a job or something. It's been like this since well
| before the Internet. In fact, I'd bet that well over 90% of
| people do not personally know a single person who regularly
| writes for themselves or just for fun.
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| I heard or read somewhere, "Write for yourself but like writing
| to a stranger future of you. Your future self is likely to forget
| what you know now." Once you start feeling comfortable writing
| for yourself, and for the future you, things begin to become fun.
| giordanol wrote:
| Publishing early work feels pointless until you look back and
| realise the later stuff couldn't exist without it. Same goes for
| any expressive work. Sounds like a platitude, but it really is
| all about the process.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| It's related to survivorship bias or whichever; successful
| writers have written for years already, but you / the potential
| writer only discover these when they're already established.
| Few people will actually have followed them as they progressed
| through the years.
|
| Anyway, point is, you read a good post whose goodness was in
| part due to the thousand posts before it, then think "I need to
| be as good as this" and you'll fail. I'm sure there's a word
| for that too.
| giordanol wrote:
| Bamboo growth pattern - years of invisible growth
| underground, then it suddenly shoots up 90 feet.
|
| Easy to forget how long the roots were forming.
| weitendorf wrote:
| I most write without publishing, and while it does give me a
| nagging feeling that I ought to be doing that, it's underrated
| how useful it can be to think through a problem and validate your
| own thoughts.
|
| I believe that smartphones are occupying a huge portion of the
| time people used to spend just thinking, and the nature of
| work/modern living has us out of the habit of doing lots of
| "meditative" tasks that used to be much more common. I almost
| never hear anybody suggest spending more time thinking over
| something but constantly hear advice along the lines of "talk to
| more people" or "see what other people are doing/did and figure
| out how you can do that". A lot of what we do think we "think"
| comes from the increasingly large time we spend consuming hyper-
| targeted media optimizng for watch-time, or conversing within our
| social tribe.
|
| When I sat and wrote this post, I was able to think about this
| stuff for 10 entirely uninterrupted minutes without anything else
| competing for my attention. It sounds like nothing, but how often
| do we actually occupy ourselves purely with our own thoughts
| without either being interrupted or reaching for our phones out
| of habit?
|
| The only other ways I'm able to sustain that kind of focused
| thought are by taking walks and programming very late at night.
| But the extent to which I as a person differ in personality or
| ideas from an average of my peers is almost entirely from those
| moments.
| npodbielski wrote:
| Probably even worst than that. People used to think for
| themselves because they had to. Now they just read whatever
| someone else wrote. Which may cause replacing your thoughts for
| someone else's. When you think about it that way it is kind of
| terryfing.
| shaggie76 wrote:
| I get just as many likes from spam bots than real people and it
| makes me wonder how the numbers would be skewed if the AI-
| scrapers dropped a like when they absorbed my content.
| ark4n wrote:
| It is sad and interesting that the thousands (millions?) of blogs
| with few/zero readers will ultimately end up as a dot inside an
| LLM. Serving a wide audience just not in the original form, and
| without success/credit for the original author.
| palata wrote:
| This. If the only point of blogging is to have some kind of
| portfolio when applying for a job (which I believe is
| valuable), then why publishing it at all?
|
| I'm tempted to not publish my blog. Write it for myself, and
| send it as a portfolio when applying for jobs. So that those
| damn LLMs don't benefit from it.
| jaydenmilne wrote:
| "Writing is its own reward"
|
| -- Henry Miller (1964). "Henry Miller on Writing", New
| Directions Publishing
|
| "... and now its Sam Altman's reward too!"
|
| -- Jayden Milne (2025). "About", https://jayd.ml/about
| paulpauper wrote:
| maybe it's own reward, but accolades and money are nice too
| jasonthorsness wrote:
| Honestly if the LLM finds and reads my blog and its essence
| imprints itself permanently on a set of weights to live forever
| it's sort of cool and way better than just being abandoned!
|
| I wonder - what is the path toward LLMs keeping around material
| that has since been removed from the internet? Do the companies
| building them keep the scraped content around forever?
| rednafi wrote:
| I've been maintaining my tiny corner[^1] of the internet for
| around six years and the lack of readers never bothered me that
| much; nor did the influx of LLMs. I write when I feel like it,
| when I have something to say, or when I think it's something my
| past self would read. Sure, there have been times when some of
| the articles hit the front page of Hacker News but most of what I
| write gets little attention and that's perfectly okay.
|
| Some of my least favourite write-ups on my blog have thousands of
| views, and conversely many of my most favourite ones rarely got
| any. Chasing views and writing stuff that has any substance
| beyond HN rage bait are completely two different things.
|
| [^1]: https://rednafi.com
| zkmon wrote:
| Well, all this sounds inspiring, motivational, puristic or
| platonic etc. But the reality hits. You are connected to the
| world around you. That means you need to make deals with it,
| interact with it, please it etc. The feedback (or the lack of it)
| from the world does affect you. If you don't care about the
| feedback, then there is no point in posting. Sing it in your
| shower. So you really expect some future fame. In more
| likelihood, it may not come. Does it affect you? I know, you have
| some belief that it will come. But is that belief rational and
| practical? Does it justify the investment you make right now?
|
| Face it. Blogging, or for that matter any online creative
| content, is becoming extremely low-rewarding effort. First, no
| one pays for content any more. Next, they don't even have time to
| clap, or grasp the quality. And then, there is this AI slop.
|
| About 30 years back, I spent days on an abstract art, perfecting
| it's shading using only an ink pen. It looked a bit geometric.
| When I showed it to my college hostel mates, they could not
| believe it was hand-made. Some of them claimed that they know the
| instruments which can be used to make it, and dismissed my entire
| effort.
| huksley wrote:
| The journey of building in public can be tough when starting out!
| DollarDeploy went through similar early stages. One thing that
| helped us was focusing on delivering real value for developers -
| making deployment simple and cost-effective. Happy to share our
| experience growing the community if you're interested!
| Caelus9 wrote:
| Creating when no one's watching can feel incredibly free. But I
| totally understand the pressure. When rent is due and people keep
| asking, "So, can you make a living from that?", it's easy to feel
| like that freedom is slipping away. To me, the ideal is having a
| small space that's just for you. Somewhere you can make things
| without expecting it to pay your bills or win attention. That's
| the kind of space where creativity can breathe. Of course, some
| people do turn their passions into full time work and even build
| amazing careers. But before that happens, there's often a long
| stretch of uncertainty. It's not easy to keep going. Most people
| won't. The ones who stay are usually those who can protect a
| quiet flame inside, even when no one's looking.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| The toughest pill to swallow in our engagement-addicted web
| culture is this: there is no correlation at all between the
| quality of the content someone produces, and the amount of people
| who engage with it. Likes and followers tell you _how many_
| people engage with some material. They don 't tell you if that
| material is any good.
| AndrewStephens wrote:
| I have a scattershot blog with infrequent posts and random
| projects. While I enjoy attention I have found that chasing views
| is a losing game. Now my goal is to write the posts I would like
| to see.
|
| One trick I have found to maintain focus is to not announce that
| you are going to write a particular thing. Somehow publicizing a
| forthcoming work means that I am less likely to actually complete
| it.
| TomMasz wrote:
| Hey, that's me! I'm long past caring now and have no intention of
| stopping. Honestly, having no audience expectations is nice.
| There's no pressure to deliver anything, and I can take breaks
| without worrying my followers will abandon me.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| I think the original title--"Thrive in obscurity"--better
| articulates the purpose of the essay than the current HN title.
| For me, the former is a much deeper message than just posting.
| self_awareness wrote:
| > Look at Van Gogh - an incredible artist who died unappreciated
| & broke, in a mental asylum. All of his fame came after his
| death.
|
| I'm not sure this sounds attractive to most people.
| vahid4m wrote:
| I'm not writing, I'm building and this post and these comments is
| exactly what I needed to read this morning.
| Oleksa_dr wrote:
| I'm thinking about starting a blog. I often write detailed
| comments, but they are often limited because I can't add many
| images, or just the number of characters is limited, I can't add
| graphics.
|
| I mean, I'm already generating some content, but it's drowning
| somewhere in the comments. And then I can't find what I wrote
| myself.
|
| I prefer to use it as my own library, but share some research
| with others.
|
| Most (though maybe not all) tech sites will publish a post about
| the release of the next motherboard and so on 20 times a day, but
| there will be no news about, for example, PCIe 7.0 and Molex, and
| if there is such a post, it will be just dry, here is the release
| and that's it. All the additional information is about it and why
| it will be useful to incite the audience to expectations, and
| possibly wishes for potential use. Even on the relevant branches
| or subreddits where it would be useful, no one even mentions it.
|
| Everything is aimed at a quick release, getting paid for the
| publication, and that's it.
|
| The further I go, the more I look for small blocks and re-read
| them once a month.
|
| How much news did you see about another motherboard or GPU with a
| modified bezel and how much news was there about the development
| of microled (with its many applications). And in the last two
| years, something new and interesting has been happening in the
| microled field.
|
| But where are the tech sites before this... it is better to
| consider another QHD OLED screen, which is not far from FHD. It's
| just the same old, same old every day, week, month.
| ednite wrote:
| The best advice as others mentioned and the one that hits closest
| to home, is to write for yourself. Do it for the love of the
| craft, not for the clicks or metrics. The rest may follow, or it
| may not, but either way, it's worth it.
|
| I'm just starting as a blogger and recently wrote about how
| creativity can feel like a curse, the kind that won't let you
| rest until you get the words out. If you're thinking of pursuing
| a creative path (or any passion, really), I have one simple word
| for you:
|
| Start.
| joshstrange wrote:
| Writing gives me a great way to organize my thoughts. I've lost
| track of how many times I went to write something down and
| changed my opinion or was forced to dig deeper into something.
|
| "X things always happens"
|
| Hmm, does it actually always happen? What about if I try doing
| X+Y? What about....
|
| And the questions go on. I feel like I take a lot of shortcuts
| in my brain or have established "facts" that don't hold up
| under scrutiny. It's the same idea as rubber ducking a problem,
| or for me when I get 2 paragraphs into a slack message and
| realize I've identified the problem and just clear out chat box
| without ever messaging for help.
| mrkramer wrote:
| TikTok and Substack showed that the problem is not lack of
| quality content creators but that the problem is lack of good
| discovery engines. Google is probably the first internet company
| that fell victim to the enshittification; once they started
| prioritizing commercial content and commercial websites the game
| was over for indie content creators. We need better internet
| platforms for discovery of content creators and their content.
| curlcntr wrote:
| github, youtube posts, for my hobby have small visibility.
| Doesn't matter. I enjoy the project for fun of creating and
| building.
| paulorlando wrote:
| Is posting when no one is reading different from writing and not
| posting?
| rchaud wrote:
| Indeed it is. Posting something means it is out there and
| "complete", can't be changed retroactively. It is a set of
| ideas that stands on its own and will be judged for it is, good
| or bad. It frees you up mentally to move on to doing the next
| thing.
|
| "No one is reading" is not true. You read it, and you made the
| call as to when it was "done". Sure, everything can be
| improved, but then nothing would get "done".
| KronisLV wrote:
| > How do you keep hitting that publish button, over and over
| again, knowing there's no one on the other side?
|
| > I don't know. I'm still trying to figure it out.
|
| Realistically, by just writing something and hitting the publish
| button.
|
| There are things I do to put food on the table, where reputation
| matters, at least within the org (e.g. "that person who shipped
| code that works and is maintainable" vs "that person who keeps
| shipping code that breaks prod"), where things often take a lot
| of time, effort and planning, and where I expect a specific
| payoff.
|
| Everything else I do in my free time is not that. If I want to do
| silly things like write a blog post about how Docker is supposed
| to lead to _mostly_ reproducible builds but sometimes defies
| reason and how Spring DI is evil, or maybe a blog post about how
| the Windows bootloader is actually pretty swanky despite me doing
| some rocket surgery on my drives, or maybe a blog post about how
| a dual GPU setup is almost good but not quite and how we can 't
| have nice things despite offloading things to a dedicated device
| being the rational thing to do, then I can do that.
|
| It doesn't even matter if I have all of the details down
| correctly, whether there is a lot of polish in the thing I'm
| making, or if anyone bothers to read or interact with it. All of
| that is ego stuff. Chasing after that validation and obsessing
| over the details will only give you writer's block or keep
| worrying about things that matter less than you'd think in the
| grand scheme of things.
|
| It's not about building a brand, it's not about revenue, it's not
| about reputation, I write because I feel like it and sometimes
| even to "rebel" against the status quo because sharing my
| experiences and my own lived truth feels good in of itself.
| Furthermore, if they ever become relevant, I can reference my
| findings with a link. A bit like writing a diary would be like,
| but in a more public setting.
| joshstrange wrote:
| I think this is great advice and something I have to keep re-
| learning over and over.
|
| I have the same problem with programming side projects. Almost
| every personal project of mine that failed was because I tried to
| make it "scalable" or solve silly problems (like potential abuse)
| before I had even 1 customer (myself).
|
| Similarly I can get very hamstrung when I start writing a blog
| post then get caught up in how it will be received, how I can
| make it more interesting for others, what if I'm wrong, etc. Not
| that those things aren't important, they are, but I get hung up
| on that way too early in the process. The number of blog post
| drafts that are 2-3 paragraphs long before I gave up because I
| was swamped with trying to make it "perfect" is high.
|
| I know I'm not a great writer, and that's not really my goal, but
| I'll never get better without practice and that include
| publishing.
|
| I know how many of my projects and blog post never saw the light
| of day because I was too scared to show off what I had done, I'm
| sure there are many other people out there in the same boat. It's
| sad to think of how many great ideas or projects exist on a
| single hard drive (or maybe in a private repo) all because
| someone is scared to put it out into the world.
| komali2 wrote:
| I realized, when reading old journals, that basically every story
| I told and the vast majority of things I can remember, are things
| I'd written down in my journal. Similarly, I've also noticed that
| the subjects I can teach very well or explain very well are
| things I've blogged about, and the motorcycle routes I can
| describe from memory are the ones I've published videos on. I'm
| not sure if this is a sort of chicken/egg situation e.g. the
| memorable experiences are worth writing down, but I'd have
| remembered them any way, but in any case it certainly doesn't
| seem to hurt.
|
| I think I have like 100 subscribers to my youtube, just checked
| and looks like my blog got 133 visits last week. Oh well.
|
| It's also really nice that I can easily send a video to someone
| when I'm recommending motorcycle routes, or if someone asks me
| for the millionth time why I moved to Taiwan or some other
| question I've answered in my blog, I can give a short and polite
| answer with a link to a blog post or two if they want to know
| more.
| ggambetta wrote:
| No one is reading until someone is... I published both Computer
| Graphics from Scratch[0] and the Fast-Paced Multiplayer series[1]
| for no concrete reason, they went unnoticed for a long time, and
| then both led to things I couldn't have planned.
|
| I've also published stuff that gets little attention and leads
| nowhere, like Emulator-Backed Remakes[2] or ZX Spectrum
| Raytracer[3], and I'm totally fine with that. I make these things
| primarily for my own amusement -\\_(tsu)_/-
|
| I don't know how many people visit my website. I have analytics,
| but I rarely check them.
|
| [0] https://gabrielgambetta.com/computer-graphics-from-scratch
|
| [1] https://gabrielgambetta.com/client-server-game-
| architecture....
|
| [2] https://gabrielgambetta.com/remakes.html
|
| [3] https://gabrielgambetta.com/zx-raytracer.html
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| No one reads most of my stuff.
|
| That's OK. Writing it, helps me to focus my thinking.
|
| Publishing my work as ship-Quality open source (even when not
| necessary), helps me to ensure that _all_ my work is top-Quality.
|
| _> We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then is not an act,
| but a habit.
|
| - Inaccurately attributed to Aristotle._
| liuxiansheng wrote:
| It's interesting how these articles/posts about how being
| authentic and building for yourself regardless of outcome is
| meaningful, generally use examples of people who have already
| achieved success (defined in terms of popularity, money, views).
| In this case Mike Posner is still a very successful artist
| despite the unevenness of his career. The median experience is
| that there is no "success", but you wouldn't know with how often
| the opposite case is showcased.
|
| I do agree with the OP, in that one should write for one-self for
| the numerous beneficial reasons such as self-improvement, fun,
| archiving. However, I think his example has some conflicts with
| his message.
| jasonthorsness wrote:
| I've maintained a blog semi-consistently for a few years and most
| articles go unnoticed. The ones that seem "worth the effort"
| regardless of readership years later are sincere documentation of
| things I'm interested in or projects I've invested significant
| time into. For these the audience of my future self and if I'm
| lucky my descendants seems like enough.
|
| The articles I regret writing or that feel like a waste are any
| that seem insincere/designed for one-sided promotion of
| something. Which I've (mostly) kept off of my own site. Running a
| blog just for the purpose of driving more traffic or engagement I
| think would sap all the joy out of it completely.
| joshdavham wrote:
| I recently had to make a multilingual profanity list for my
| vocabulary testing app. It's honestly a really hairy problem as
| there aren't many good lists out there and they tend to vary
| wildly in what is considered offensive.
| agcat wrote:
| I agree! the moment i switched my narrative to do it for myself
| building and writing content gives me more joy and fulfillment
| tinyhouse wrote:
| Great post and a bit ironic that it ends up at the top page of
| HN...
|
| A comment about the Youtube example:
|
| > This is why YouTubers with millions of followers have hundreds
| of thousands of views on their first few videos. Those videos
| didn't get any views when they were first published. They were
| revisited after they became famous, by their most loyal fans.
|
| This is a nice example but it depends on the content. If you
| write an AI blog, readers are probably not going to bother with
| reading old posts that are no longer relevant. You see it with
| research papers as well -- if you have an author you follow,
| you're less likely to read their old stuff. Maybe it's a good
| idea to write content that don't become stale quickly.
| renjimen wrote:
| The imbalance between content and consumers on the internet is
| huge and just getting larger with AI. My advice having just
| started creative writing: Don't publish on the internet. Share
| with family, friends and colleagues if you want. Heck, even share
| with an LLM. But, if even a small part of why you create is for
| internet points with random strangers, then you're not going to
| get as much meaning out of it and you'll end up disappointed
| (even when you do get some internet points).
| timcobb wrote:
| I'm more interested in
|
| > How to post when only AI is reading
| nate wrote:
| Been out for a few years but Seth Godin's "The Practice" is a
| good, easy read in this spirit. tl;dr I think of that book is
| just get used to showing up and doing stuff. Outcomes are fickle.
| But developing a love of good process can be enjoyment enough and
| mentally more stable. And can sometimes lead to some good
| outcomes.
| rorylaitila wrote:
| I used to really burn out before I ever got any traction. Basing
| motivation on any external reward is just too hard, too much of
| the time.
|
| I work now on multiple business projects that interest me. Short
| term my paying clients, medium term tools I build for myself and
| clients that I can also sell, long term hobby that might turn
| into something (adretro.com is my fun).
|
| Before the VC carnival money era, this is probably the default
| way to build.
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