Writing on a blog is a very inexpensive way to establish your credibility about different subjects. This pays off later down the line when you can link people to things you've written in the past.
Credibility is a very valuable commodity. It's worth investing in ways to build more of it.
Don't assume people will stumble across your content (though they will eventually via Google). Actively send links to people who you are already engaged in conversation with.
It's not the number of readers you have that matters: it's their quality. I'll take a dozen people reading my stuff who might engage with me usefully or lead to future opportunities over a thousand readers who don't match that criteria.
I was starting https://golfcourse.wiki and I read a bunch by Jimmy Wales, and he focused on his own credibility and openness being a linchpin to wikipedia.
I thought I might as well start a blog then, because in a world of golf media, with few exceptions is mostly a just corporate funded advertisement-as-entertainment slop. I figured I could at least stand out by openly talking about golf in a very different way, by just writing for me, with my target demo being my best golf friend, who sadly passed about the same time I started the blog.
I've got myself a small audience (a few hundred subscribers, and maybe a fourth of that read regularly. I'm more than happy with that. My ideas are almost diametrically opposed to much of the golf world, but I spend a ton of time on almost all of the articles, and I'm very proud of them. I think it lets people who might use the wiki know how serious I am about the wiki as something good for golf not as some way to get rich. I think it does a good job, and it's a good way to waste a few hours/days/weeks.
I regularly have conversations with people that end up with some form of "Let's not belabor this over beers but I'll send you a link to something I wrote. It may be a little bit stale but let me know what you think and we can follow up."
Blogging has internal benefits of organizing thoughts or even just being a fun hobby. But it's external validation as well. Sure, writing a book is even more but that's probably 100s of times more work.
> "Let's not belabor this over beers but I'll send you a link to something I wrote. It may be a little bit stale but let me know what you think and we can follow up."
How is it being received by those people? I can't help but imagine the response being:
"Okay but then what's the point of us sitting here with beers?"
EDIT:
If I was hanging out talking with someone, and have them terminate an interesting conversation topic by plugging their blog article, I'd feel cut off, and might even start to wonder if they're really seeing me as a friend or colleague, or is this networking for them?
It's not the blog reference itself, but rather cutting off a conversation topic this way, that would irk me in such situation.
I agree. Mentioning blog in the end is probably a better way. Finish the conversation, chain of thoughts and then before switching over to next topic or when saying byes or even a day or two later send them your post. But not in the middle of a conversation.
Maybe I didn't get the nuance in the best way. I think it would be more in the vein of we've probably explored this topic as much as we feel like it at the moment but maybe we can continue the conversation via some more deeply-thought sources.
Yeah I agree, someone saying they don't want to talk anymore because they've already written about something stops it being a discussion and makes it into some sort of lecture but without the notes. If you're insisting on telling someone you wrote about the current topic of conversation, you can just mention it and carry on with it. Like authors who go on podcasts, they'll say "Like I wrote in chapter X, I think that..." - the conversation shouldn't be killed off. Comes off as a bit arrogant.
Agreed, after a year or two, blogs become your experience logs to prove experience and credibility once the landscape is killed by GenAI slops and SEO scams.
Anyone can generate a big portfolio of projects these days(be it graphics, video, software, writing etc) but blog posts from 2023 and before are proof and undeniable.
> Anyone can generate a big portfolio of projects these days(be it graphics, video, software, writing etc) but blog posts from 2023 and before are proof and undeniable.
I always read blogs if people include them in resumes.
It’s really cool when an applicant has a blog with unique and interesting content, but I can’t remember this happening without us already having been very impressed by the candidate’s resume.
More commonly, blog content was ambiguous about the applicant’s skills. For example, when someone applies to an embedded job but has a blog of beginner level Arduino projects, is that because they’re an expert creating tutorials for beginners, or because they are a beginner and these entry-level projects represent their skill level?
I also think people greatly overestimate the idea that someone will LLM their way into a great blog, and they greatly underestimate the difficulty of forging timestamps. Even git timestamps are easy to fake. Your interviewers aren’t going to scrutinize the Wayback machine for evidence, but not being indexed isn’t proof that it wasn’t there anyway.
> is that because they’re an expert creating tutorials for beginners, or because they are a beginner and these entry-level projects represent their skill level?
You can tell by reading one of them though, right? For a subject I'm an expert at, I can tell the difference between an expert talking about the basics, and a beginner doing the same.
But in my experience reading a lot of applicants’ blogs, it’s rare to even find a recent post. The most common scenario I see is that the most recent posts are 3-10 years old. Even if you can get enough information out of their blog, you’re getting at best a snapshot of where they were a long time ago. The truth is that often people blog the most when they are beginners in a subject.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that the ideal optimal blog that people imagine writing is an extreme rarity. I’ve seen so many people start blogs with high ambitions but then the farthest they get is a couple posts that are now so old that it barely corresponds to their current resume level of skills.
So you’re left doing a lot of guessing and extrapolating.
Maybe it’s different in embedded, but as a mech e: any moderately complex hardware project will likely cost orders of magnitude more than a software project to prototype and manufacture. Off the self electronic parts have become much cheaper, but if you need more than some plastic, 3D parts it’s still expensive.
This isn’t true at all. Even custom PCBs are so trivially cheap that you can get 4-layer boards from China shipped for under $10. An ESP32 module is a couple bucks.
Electronic projects are extraordinarily cheap right now. I’ve built moderately complex PCBs for less than the price of a nice dinner.
A four layer board is not “moderately complex”, it’s child’s play. IMO moderately complex is in the 10-20 layer range with controlled impedance, buried vias, etc. or a mechanical assembly with hundreds of parts.
Everything definitely has gotten significantly cheaper than when I started working in mechanical/electronic engineering 15 years ago but a moderately complex board with assembly is still hundreds or thousands per board on short (1-2 week) notice. That’s what the GP means when they say that hardware prototypes are orders of magnitude more expensive (sans NRE) and I’m pretty sure they’re talking about the much more expensive mechanical side too, which also had gotten cheaper but not overwhelmingly so.
I've been treating public Git repository commits in the same vein - a receipt of incremental changes that show that an individual can do some programming. Granted this is not fool-proof - like all things that are complex, it needs to be evaluated with a suite of other factors and conditions to be determined valid. A website written in a personal voice is one of these factors.
A dark pattern on your self hosted blogging website is to backdate blog posts and make yourself seem very good at predicting future trends.
There is no reason why you have to write a blog over a long period of time, you could quickly pump out several blog posts and link to them to establish credibility quickly.
If I were to write a dozen blog posts today, and then straight up dump them on my blog, dating each of them so they're spaced roughly evenly since Jan 2021 to today, and start each of them with a preamble saying "I wrote this in my journal around [backdated timestmap]; publishing it now ([real timestamp]) as part of my 2025 blog revival commitment" - what would you say then? This little preamble explains both the sudden appearance and lack of any prior traces on the Internet corresponding to claimed creation dates. Are you going to call me a liar?
No, if someone with even half a brain wants to fake expertise this way, you won't be able to tell. If anything, what will give them away is anachronisms in text. Like idk. an off-hand remark about ChatGPT in a post dated 2021 could make you wonder.
I guess you can use a third party like archive.org, if the blog is crawled by it, the owner doesn't get them to delete it, and there is no politically motivated revisionism going on based on the archive.org maintainers.
I would be suspicious of a reasonably popular blog claiming to have predicted stuff and not being able to back that up with an archive.org capture (or raw scraper data), though I guess it is somewhere where storing a hash on a blockchain may offer some benefits for edge cases.
If I find 10 backdated articles appear out of thin air in Waybackmachine I'm not going to ask the author to explain it. It just lowers their credibility in my mind and I move on. I'm not interested in proving to them or in a court of law that they backdated articles.
>"Anyone can generate a big portfolio of projects these days"
LOL. I could easily do it "back in those days". The difference is that in my particular case (I specialize in developing new software products for clients) I also have long list of names with actual phone numbers, emails, addresses etc. So anyone can call and verify.
Whether or not someone has written up or is willing to write up their opinion is a good way to determine how seriously to take that opinion.
Using that as a first pass has led to more time engaging with thoughtful people about well considered ideas, and less time listening to the noise that shows up when you solicit opinions.
Many people wrote about why it is important to blog, but I never heard of what you just stated about credibility.
That's the best and most convincing thing I ever heard.
Thank you very much for having shared it here.
That trivializes it, I think. A ton of what people do related to their jobs is marketing at some level. A lot of people here probably resent marketing and self-promotion (to a certain level) but that's the way the world works. If no one has any idea what you do, either directly or through your manager, guess who is getting the chop if the company cuts back even a little.
I ran a personal blog ~2007-2013, retiring it after one-too-many'a THC-infused evening of personal expression.
Several of my posts received 100k+ views, one with 1M+, typically exploring minor technical hacks. A couple posts resulted in minor sales of bespoke hardware adapters, which was a nice "side hustle" for a few years. None of this would ever had made me rich, but it was a neat introduction to information sharing.
My resumé still lists several articles written about my blogposts, in publications including Wired, Hack-A-Day, &c... although the links obviously haven't worked for over a decade.
I've recently registered a new domain for my next blog attempt, which will mostly just be a record of things I find interesting on that particular day. If you ever read Whole Earth Catalogue, my hope is for my own modern-day version of the excellent WEC-inspired https://kk.org/cooltools/ [not me/mine].
The initial reason behind my blog was sharing fun solutions from my work. If I get it approved in a blog post then I can talk about it publicly. Working in game development that's a fairly rare opportunity. I usually share my posts on Reddit for just a handful of nods and a random question or two.
However, I recently had an interview where the interviewers had read my blog and used it as a basis to steer their questions. At that point having put such thought and effort into it felt well worth it. I do believe it's a part of what got me the job.
This is precisely why I am suspicious of most "free" online resources out there. When one writes to establish themselves as a credible source or as authority on a subject, they are flipping the target of the writing. They are making it all about the author, and not the reader/student. This is similar to what happens with academic writing, where using an approachable tone of voice can be seen as hurtful to the author's image of authority. Unfortunately, by the time someone actually tries to learn from this type of resource, a lot of damage is already done.
Academic papers are supposed to be about the author... They're meant to be an author's work put forth to an intended community of "colleagues", not students or general public. No one should think that a general learner is supposed to turn to academic research papers as their main vector of learning content.
I personally never thought academic papers were about the author. They might have turned into an ego game, but I always assumed that the goal of academic writing was to effectively communicate complex ideas and research findings to the reader. If not, then it's no wonder our voices are the first ones the public ignores in a time of crisis.
> Writing on a blog is a very inexpensive way to establish your credibility about different subjects. This pays off later down the line when you can link people to things you've written in the past.
Unfortunately, these days writing a publicly-available blog is also a great way to train AI to replace you at the very job you're establishing credibility in.
Alas, that ship has sailed. So keep writing blogs.
Totally tangential, but I was thinking this morning about my experience as a kid when my parents forced me to be an alter boy at our local church. There are these occasional observances where the church is obligated to put on a special service, part of a liturgical calendar. Sometimes these happen at like 11am on a Wednesday. It was nice to get out of school to go and burn some incense and follow the priest around while he mumble prayers, instead of sitting bored out of my mind memorizing times tables or whatever.
For the majority of these minor observances, almost no one showed up. Maybe you'd get a couple of old ladies but otherwise the church was completely empty. We'd be doing this elaborate stage show for no one.
It made me think of a history YouTube video I watched about some ancient religion. The priests had a complex daily ritual including setting out meals for the Gods, saying certain prayers including certain physical movements like bowing, prostrating, raising their hands. They would have to do certain cleaning rituals including incense and sweeping. Super elaborate stuff. But it was all in an inner chamber and no one would come and even watch them. They just did this ritual for no one.
I suppose I think it is interesting to see a parallel here. Like, us tech people are spiritual hermits, cargo-culting our own incantations. We're keeping a tradition alive that in only rare cases actually has an audience because we have a some faith in its utility.
I think your comment highlights a fundamental difference in how most modern people understand religion from how our ancestors did.
In the pre-1970 Catholic mass, the priest faced the altar and spoke in Latin. The mass was changed in 1970 so the priest faces the people and speaks in the vernacular. The shift in understanding is clear. Religion used to be about God, and about our obligations to and relationships with Him. This was true across all religions. Now, most people think of it as primarily a community building exercise. This modern mindset is the only context in which your comment makes sense. Premodern catholics would be baffled at it
I think it may be the case that your possession of a tidbit of trivia and your particular interpretation of changes/reforms that came after Vatican II is causing you to interpret my comment in a different light than it was meant.
I was actually envisioning something closer to the monastery that Alyosha was a part of in The Brothers Karamazov. It reminds me of the cliché admonishment of priests that pray in the streets (something that pops up in the Bhagavad Gita long before it does in the words of Jesus). It is worth pondering the lengths to which monks would go to prove their holiness was genuine and not the result of seeking attention.
It is true that at the time of my writing the comment, the top comment was a popular blogger extolling the benefits of clout that one might gain from writing a blog that gains some following. But in general, that is a feat most will never achieve. For the rest, they are more like the premodern adherents, doing the ritual for some other reason. The blog post we are discussing is literally about that kind of self-justification.
If you know you will not (or perhaps should not) blog to gain an audience, why should you do it?
In the spirit of the tangent because you know contemporary success is vanity and you should aim at what's eternal. The western tradition is filled with admonitions since the Greeks about these things-- Seneca's letter 7 "on crowds", everything written by Epicurus, the entire life of Diogenes... Montaigne "on glory"
Why not? As an atheist you are probably best positioned to notice the ostensible pointlessness of it all and come to the conclusion that rituals are and have always been about the people doing them. It’s always been for our sake. Just like funerals are for the living to get closure, since the dead body at the center of proceedings can’t possibly give a damn.
I can't answer those questions, but I have some comments. My question, which you quoted, was intended to be rhetorical and perhaps your questions are as well.
There is nothing exclusive about being atheist with regards to those questions. Belief in God (especially a deist or non-interventionist God) doesn't provide any clear answer. You may be thinking about a specific religion or spiritual dogma proposing answers to that question, but that would require some kind of revelation in the form of a prophet, inspired scripture, mystical/divine encounter, etc.
Another idea that pops to mind is again related to the Vedas, the oldest spiritual texts that I am aware of. I couldn't find the exact percentage but most commentaries I have read indicate that a significantly large portion of those scriptures are dedicated to ritual observance. Things like weddings, births, funerals, etc.
Some of the oldest archeological sites, like the notorious Göbekli Tepe, appear to be ritual sites. There is a lot of work to do there so I don't think our understanding is definitive at this point. But it does show how far back in our history that rituals appear to go (several thousands of years). It might even be worth pondering the question: what came first, ritual or a belief in god(s)?
So it is not really surprising that the shadow of ritual appears even within the most secular and rationalist modern contexts. What that means and how it should effect your own decisions is something I believe is a personal matter.
It was in Canada although I don't imagine that has any bearing on the situation. It was also at a Catholic private school that shared the property with the church. I literally walked like 20 meters from the school building across the parking lot to the church and it typically only took 1 hour or so. In my own memory, people would get out of school for all manner of reasons, from sports to even family vacations, for entire days with no one batting an eye. I find it hard to imagine any school system so strict that a kid couldn't get dispensation for 1 hour of extracurricular activities during the school day.
I blog because once a post of mine made the front page of HN and you guys crashed my VPS with traffic for 2 days straight - including my work site hosted on the same server. I will cherish that moment of excitement and terror for the rest of my days
That is hilarious. HackerNews was also the source of my blog's highest day of traffic. IIRC I quit a job and wrote about it and somehow a lot of people read it.
I often feel I _should_ blog more, but then I don't. And every now and again I go and read something I wrote ten years ago and feel a little embarrassed by my past self. But every so often I read something that makes me feel that I _did_ know a few things, or did some cool things, and even if no one else ever read about them it made me feel better ten years in the future and _that_ alone is worth it.
Also, my name is Tom and I'm also a juggler. Weird coincidence to be replying to your username... :-)
I document technical things on my blog and hardly anyone reads it.
But later on when I need that thing again, I just go there and I have the perfect documentation available for the topic (it's perfect since I wrote it hahaha).
I used to do that, now I just keep a OneNote with the things that would have been blog entries once upon a time - it's available across all my devices and I can export it to PDF when I do need to share something with someone - and I don't have to worry about someone defacing or hacking the site hosting it.
Same. I keep a couple of blogs on different topics and try to write up any challenge I come across. Not only does it help to cement ideas in my head and expose areas I'm foggy about, but I've referred back to my previous experience this way countless times.
I don't know. I stopped bothering to look, since it's never going to drive income or anything. It's worth it to me because 1) I get to help others, which brings satisfaction and 2) I can read what I wrote from anywhere and send someone a link if necessary.
This happens to me all the time. I could make notes about how I did something and lose them, or I could spend an hour or two extra and convert it into a blog post, and I'll be able to refer to it over and over again.
Same, I created https://softuts.com exactly for this, to write fixes to technical issues I encounter, when I can't find another solution via a Google search.
There starts to be some traffic, I am happy to assume that any person visits my blog for a fix will probably save a good amount of debugging time.
Your intention is still to pass on the knowledge though regardless of traffic otherwise why even publish if it’s just for you? What is the difference from the Documents dir at that point?
I can stay in my browser and use Google, DuckDuckGo, or even my on-site search (I use Apache Solr, I'm a little weird compared to the typical hosted blog) and don't have to go into some webapp or search on some local notes app.
I can also add permalinks to any of the posts from anywhere, and share them in public documentation or bug reports and such, a handy feature.
I do not understand the need to never-leave-the-browser especially with modern window tiling, but I respect it as a preference that other people have. As for syncing I just use file sharing (Syncthing), I hardly live collaborate on documents and if I did everyone else in the group ended up doing the typing. Otherwise it’s write then get reviewed then reiterate. So unfortunately nothing about the online text editors really strike my fancy. I also find the browser almost too distracting and often get sidetracked while using it for research during writing time.
If you nominally have an audience (if you feel like you do, regardless of the reality), you'll perform differently, same as with speaking. This may be a good thing.
I generally blog about things that took a week+ of research and I want to save some other poor bastard the pain of what I had to piece together.
This is especially useful because link-rot means that resources I was able to uncover might not be available in the future. A few years ago I did a massive amount of research into internals of old unixes for data recovery and maintenance of said systems in the modern era(machines attached to million dollar pieces of testing equipment go away when the machine does). I was maintaining and upgrading(mostly scsi2sd) and backing up systems that all predated y2k. Most of my research references are now dead links to nowhere. I now print to pdf as well as take archive.is links of all my referenced sources.
I'm generally terrible about blogging, but I'm changing that for 2025. I'm now in a position where I'm solutions architecting a lot of things as my primary day job. This makes easy blog post subjects that not only clarify my thoughts and understanding, but end up being the basis for the internal documentation on the subject.
A lot of what I now do is in terraform, cloudformation, golang, or Python. I make sure when I publish my blog post, I include a complete working example. For all my terraform, all one has to do is clone and run terraform apply, after satisfying the barebones prerequisites.
I use Zotero[1] as a personal web archiver. It downloads the page locally, placing most of the resources inside a single html file (pictures become base64 encoded pngs, for example). I find it the best way to have the content available offline and also to be able to reference it easily, seeing as it is a citation manager first.
A lot of the comments here are about blogging to nobody (which I do) but I wanted to share how much I love reading people's personal blogs.
I follow a bunch of developers (surprise surprise) and read mostly technical blogs, I've found a lot of developers mix writing blog posts about their personal and family life alongside technical posts. As I've been reading I've found those are some of my favourite posts, as someone who balancing professional and open source development with parenting, I really love hearing about other people's experiences doing the same. It's not a side that I read much about elsewhere outside of personal blogs.
That's a long way of me saying, keep on blogging strangers, someone might be reading!
I concur! Several of us also subscribe to your blogs' RSS feeds. If you're one of the nice people who put the full content of their blog posts into their feed, you might not see me as a visitor, but I definitely read and enjoy your blog.
As an occasional blog writer myself, I also like to announce manually on my social platforms I use (Mastodon and LinkedIn) when I blogged, and send a link to those socials post. The [full rationale is here][1]. They make it feel less like shouting in the void, which helps me stay motivated. I would be lying if I said I didn't enjoy the occasional likes and boosts I get from these, too :)
Simon Willison also has [good advice on how to write more][2], that I must admit I'm struggling to follow myself.
Big one for me is that I follow blogs of developers for open source projects I'm interested in. If I see someone is working on a cool project I'll check out their github profile, and that sometimes turns up a personal blog.
Over a decade, I've learnt to blog as if no one will ever read my blog posts. With social referral traffic now completely dead, the only traffic I get to my blog is when my posts appear on Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=minimaxir.com), and even that is going down year-over-year.
However, the process of writing a blog post forces me to invent new workflows and is in itself very educational, so it's not a waste of time or a mistake even if no one reads it.
> With social referral traffic now completely dead, the only traffic I get to my blog is when my posts appear on Hacker News
Not being a blog writer, that seems rather crazy to hear with how "social" the WWW has supposedly gotten. WP claims, there's 33 sites "with at least 100 million (monthly) active users". [1]
Top sites are up at multi-1000 million / month. Sure, some of the top sites (Youtube, Instagram, TikTok) are very heavily video based. Yet, it still seems amazing that with that many users there's so little "sharing" in terms of long form written essays or blogs. That the situation was actually better in terms of referrals before there was all the sharing? Now there's actually less organic referral traffic, and Hacker News is apparently one of the best. Walled garden issues? Better fit of the subject matter to readers? Completely videos everywhere? Decline of reading in general?
Compared to somewhere like Facebook that supposedly have 3070M monthly uniques, yet apparently produce almost no referral traffic whatsoever, that's a wildly disproportionate ratio of effectiveness for the audience size.
Edit: Taken another way, in what seems like a pessimistic view. If only 1% of Facebook still read long form writing. And only 1% of those actually decided a post was worthy of clicking on. That would still amount to 300,000 views. That seems like a lot.
I think we have seen a general trend towards centralized platforms on the internet. Where you had many individual niche sites before, now you have a few all-encompassing platforms. There are some exceptions, but I generally find that many of those platforms want to maximize your time on the platform itself. As a consequence, they do what they can to keep you from leaving the platform via a link to some other website.
From my anecdotal experience, of what my close friends share with me via DM these days, sadly it is indeed 95% video, and it is indeed 95% Instagram / TikTok / Facebook / Twitter / YouTube (in descending order). I continue to share with them 75% long-form articles, and 75% personal web sites / mainstream media web sites.
I actually looked a bit yesterday, and checked FB particularly to see what the situation was, and maybe have my own anecdotal take.
At least part of what I found was that there did not seem to be much actual discussion. It didn't really even matter whether it was a video, a text article (like making food), or an event. A huge percentage of "conversations" ended up being nothing more than notification references after the first 20-50 comments. It was really rather surreal to look at. I hadn't logged on in a while.
Initially, I couldn't even tell what was going on. Comment after comment where people just stated someone's name and then someone replied with someone else's name. In most cases, once the back-and-forth name reffing started, all actual conversation died quickly.
It's technically "sharing", since they're notifying FB members of being mentioned somewhere. Yet it doesn't really go anywhere externally, and very quickly kills off all further discussion in thread.
Yes, I see that all the time on Facebook too, top-most 10% of a thread is actual comments, bottom-most 90% is "Friend McFriendface" name reffing. It's quite annoying.
I agree with the detachment part but when I write about technology, books, ideas/ thoughts, etc. I generally find it 'easier' to imagine as if I am talking to someone in front of me and write in a conversational style. I liked that a couple of my favorite fiction writers used this style and sort of followed it.
One important aspect I learned about blogging is that a post effectively "ships" a side project, deeming it complete. A blog post allows me to move onto the next thing. It is closure of sorts (glouw.com if anyone is interested in the style).
I have a personal rule that the cost of doing a side project is I have to blog about it. No regrets on that at all, it's a small thing that can greatly increase the value you derive from the project.
I do the exact same thing! I think this pairs well with OP's point.
In the moment, writing a blog is a nice way to indicate to myself that something is done. But the process of writing the blog forces me to find some lessons and takeaways, and that makes my next project better.
>
Remember when maintaining a blog was THE way to build your developer brand?
Jeff Atwood's (co-founder of Stack Exchange) Coding Horror comes to mind, and how the teenage me was amazed at how someone got offered such a good job with such an amazing office [0] because of blogging.
The smaller, more intimate internet was truly something else.
I am often writing stuff anyways on various open-group or closed-group social media, which is where the interactions are (at least for my case). The blog however becomes a way to collect all those in a single place and where I have more control.
Definitely! I see social media, in part, as a place to write initial drafts. If I write a comment somewhere and end up with something I think is decent at explaining something, I will often expand it into a blog post.
Surface area. Networking. Openness to those that for whatever reason click and might become friends, business associates and romantic partners. Few will click, but those few will have shown at least some interest in you and what you do. It took divorce and loneliness for me to understand the concept of surface area, to exist, to not be invisible and anonymous, but create tiny opportunities for connection. It's pretty much all we can do as busy adults.
Is this a way to make me feel less bad about gaining a bit too much weight?
Joking apart this is a very valid point, often you can just fall onto something where people have taken the time to put something out there, you documented your thought or your little haven of work, whatever it is, for other to find eventually. It is nice and valuable.
In a day and age where everything needs to have meaning or be productive, it is healthy to make things that serve no other purpose but to be. It will be eventually lost to time and noise, but so is everyone existence on this earth.
I've used mine as a personal knowledge base that happens to be public. It's silly how many times I've come up in search results months or years later after I'd forgotten having solved this problem before.
A semi-related story:
Freshmen year in college, I was about a week ahead in the sci curriculum and I blogged regularly about novel errors I encountered and how I fixed them. During lab late in the semester, I happen to look up into the next row. I found the duo there reading my blog post.
I was chatting about a related topic with my wife today. The premise was that there are many technology related blogs and not enough blogs about obscure topics (e.g., chocolate, woodworking). People interested in those obscure topics struggle to find genuine information because very few people are writing about them, much less making any content about them.
I think most of us in the technology field tend to forget just how many resources are out there for technical topics and often see blogging as a waste of time or a "whisper in the hurricane" when we should be encouraging people to keep writing about technical topics and more.
And also how searchable it is. The great thing with blogs for me is that I can relatively quickly skip to the part where the information is that I want, because usually I don't need all of it.
Admittedly I do subscribe to a woodworking YouTube channel but I would love more written content for the reasons you describe about skipping and skimming.
I write both technical, and non-technical posts on mine. It is literally one of the few corners of the universe where I can say what goes, what shows, and how it all flows. It is a garden I tend for myself, but others are free to inspect.
I write in the hope that nobody ever reads it. It's all sad and depressing stuff.
I could, as some have suggested, write but not publish it online. But... probably in some way it's the habit from older times when I wrote about programming. In any case I do delete most of the stuff without ever uploading it, and frequently delete a lot of the stuff I did upload.
I write because it helps me seeing it written down. I write because I don't speak much with anyone any more.
The things I write currently about, it's been a couple of years I guess. I do put it up on my blog, yes. Not all of it, and as I said I do delete some after a while. In general I do consider anything I write as temporary. Deleting things it's also part of the process or something.
All things are temporary. What I write at a certain moment may be good to do at that moment. And it's sometimes good to remember it afterwards. But sometimes it may also be good to just let it go and not cling to that memory or sentiment.
Some stuff stays. Some goes away. In my case, a lot of it goes away, but of course it doesn't have to be that way for anyone else. However I still think it's good to sometimes go back and clean up, deleting things that are no longer helpful to keep.
Thank you for describing your process. It's an interesting concept. As I've just started writing, and discovered it's therapeutic effects, it feels alien to delete the thing that has helped. But i can see how it's therapeutic.
If you feel comfortable, I'd love to read your blog. Or we go off on our merry way and hopefully run into each other again.
Recently, I paid for OpenAI for Deep Research. I asked it about a topic I'm actively working on and researching: reactivity and effect systems. Deep Research ended up using my blog as a part of its research.
At first, I wasn't sure what to make of it. But reading the source, my blog post reminded me of some ideas I had consciously forgotten. The Deep Research report gathered some of those idea and repurposed it in an interesting way. So writing a blog is now a way to resurface ideas you might have forgotten yourself back to you, a kind of "memories" or "timehop" feature.
This is very interesting. I worry about having AI on my machine, but also love the idea of having something that can scour the different files and ideas on my computer to make connections and maybe even remind me of ideas I'd forgotten.
> Future you. Your posts become a time capsule of your evolving mind.
Sometimes, I am the main beneficiary of my blog posts. But there is a much more practical point than bookmarking my progress — it is a polished resource with carefully selected references.
> One right person. Maybe one day, someone stumbles across your words at exactly the right moment. And that changes something for them.
Sometimes one. Sometimes a few.
In general, I have found that blog posts have a larger impact than my conference talks. At a conference, say, with 100 people in the audience, perhaps only 20 find it relevant. With a blog post, we may feel disappointed that only 1,000 people read it — which is small by blogging standards, but still way more than one would reach at a conference.
You can also write txt files to blog, you don't even have to worry about formatting, and search engines are able to generate titles and descriptions for you (source: I got a txt file somewhat popular on hn a few years ago, and google decided to index it very quickly, and generate a title & a small description).
Absolutely, I created this txt blog to prove a point to a friend that you can get started to blogging in seconds instead of minutes if you really wanted to.
I still believe in blogging. For anyone keen on getting started or switch providers, I recenly launched a no-nonsense service: https://LMNO.lol. The experience feels more like taking notes than blogging (low friction).
> If I write it, they will come. They won’t. There are billions of blog posts out there. The internet is an infinite void, and your blog is a whisper in a hurricane.
This has not proven to be true over a long enough window.
I've kept a blog of some kind since 2005 and I'm always surprised looking at the traffic what posts get picked up by Google and end up driving traffic for one reason or another. One of my posts is prominent enough that I recently started to notice inbound traffic from ChatGPT (I assume it is being cited as authoritative on the subject).
A few years back, I started on Medium with 0 readers and just started writing. 100 ticked by and it was a small milestone. Then 500, then 1000. Just write in your authentic voice; don't think about an audience.
There are literally thousands of videos on recipes for omelettes (example) on YT, yet more are published every day. The thing is, there's a video and a voice for every audience.
The market for TODO list apps is 1 for every person in the world, everyone has a slightly different subjectivity and therefore has a slightly different optimal experience when it comes to TODO lists. Subjectivity is formed over time and through the course of events, therefore the market for TODO list apps is 1 for every person in the world for a given timeframe.
It's an obvious hyperbole but I think it stands to show that, in a similiar fashion, there is a reader (and by some aggregation readers plural) for everything you might think of writing.
How to get started with web development in 2025? What is ray-casting? How to emulate a piece of hardware in <language>? What I had for dinner tonight!
It may not be that everything is viral or a hit but you should find that most of the content you right will resonate with _someone_ and potentially help multiple _someones_.
Sometimes being satisfied with that 10-100 readers is all there is to it.
There's a point to writing, but is there a point to publishing your diary on the internet? You could just keep it under your pillow, or on your own computer.
I blog so that other people read my writing, and fortunately they do, at least sometimes. I don't think I'd continue if there was no public interest.
I disagree. I write differently when I anticipate an audience (even if they never come).
Maybe parallel: I notice when, for example, I edit videos in my own world I have a very different take on the edit when I am showing it to someone for the first time.
Thinking to myself: "Now as I watch someone else watching it, I am become aware that this scene goes on a bit too long. This cut is a little abrupt, disorienting."
I know what you mean. I'm not very reserved (is that the word I want?) though and don't mind speaking my mind — public or otherwise. Perhaps having left the job market, having passed 60 years of age makes me give less of a shit.
That said though, "publishing" keeps me honest. (In the same way I find using my actual name on the internet "keeps me honest". I'm disinclined to shit-post.)
I am more inclined to, if not fact-check all points I make, just drop indefensible things I might have said altogether. (And sometimes I learn just why a thought of mine is indefensible, ha ha.)
Usually it's a good thing, yes. Because you are forced to communicate clearly, cut the jargon and not dump your stream of consciousness. Instead you pay attention to whether what you're saying is of any value to another person.
> Because you are forced to communicate clearly, cut the jargon and not dump your stream of consciousness. Instead you pay attention to whether what you're saying is of any value to another person.
Why is that good, though, if you're the only reader?
I don't think I am really "anticipating" an audience. Or it might be my greatest grandkids after I am long dead that I are my audience. It doesn't really matter to me. It's more of a mindset.
Valid point, wonder why it was down voted.
I was thinking that question myself, yes write down your thoughts in a journal digital or analog and you can always refer back to that time and place but what benefit do you get by giving it away for all to ignore or consume?
Writing helps me think. Posting a thought in public forces me to commit to an idea and clean up how I communicate it. I learn more about the subject and myself along the way.
I journal daily about a topic I pull off a backlog of ideas. After the end of my allotted journaling time, if I think “there are more threads here to uncover,” I spend more time on it. If I feel confident, I clean it up into a blog post.
That’s why I write everything. It helps me assemble my thoughts on a topic and share them with others in the future.
I often have difficulty getting topics out of my head until I write them out. Some thing I will publish that I’ve had bouncing around for a year or more and then it just stops once I publish it.
I’ve been lucky to have a few things I wrote get traction on here over the years and that’s been pretty cool.
> "If it’s finished, the applause, the thanks, the gratitude are something else. Something extra and not part of what you created. If you play a beautiful song for two people or a thousand, it’s the same song, and the amount of thanks you receive isn’t part of that song." (Seth Godin, The Icarus Deception: How High Will You Fly?)
A question for everybody on counting your visitors : How do you do it? I am self hosting my blog on archlinux + nginx using an old laptop. I proxied it behind cloudflared tunnel. On my Nginx access logs, All I see is mostly bots and for any visitor that does not identify as bots, I feel like they are still bots. I really can't be sure. And Cloudflare analytics suggest that I have a little shy over 1 thousand of visitors in the last 1 month, which also seem quite unlikely.
I would love to hear your experiences on this! Thanks
I just look at the numbers Google Blogger spits out. I'm sure they're overstated with respect to real users but I don't actually care.
(I use blogger and, in fact, after much deliberation just decided to roll everything (personal and business) together on my existing template.) Anything else was just too much trouble and probably cost. Zero interest in self-hosting.
Blogging also creates something that never existed, and likely never would have existed.
If you believe consciousness is a way for the universe to know itself, then expressing your truth in a blog is a way to participate in that process. The random assortment of atoms that make up "you" are gifting the universe a novel creation that could not have existed otherwise.
Whether you think this is of value is a different topic, but at the very least, it's a neat mindset to slip into IMO.
People do read it. I mention things in conversation and people say "I know, I've read your post", so that's cool. People also email me about my post, or mention them in unrelated emails.
I treat my blog as a sort of extended dating profile or resume. It's extended in both scope and completeness, attracting all sorts of people for all sorts of purposes, and telling them much more about me than a mere bio. It's a search query for other interesting people, as someone else put it.
Writing something for others is teaching, and teaching is one of the steps of the Feynman technique. Even if you don't follow it, writing and teaching forces you to organize the subject in your head. You force yourself to make the subject clear to your audience, and you are part of your audience.
If someone will read it or not is out of your control, and it's completely unpredictable.
Using some examples of mine:
1. Once I wrote a blog post about writing a quicksort in Python using only lambdas, based on the lambda calculus theory which I found very interesting and challenging to explain in clear way. Some people liked it, but it was not proportional to the hard work involved: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38848905
2. Once a friend asked me why I write my scripts in Ruby, I told him a few reasons and I wrote in my blog just as a personal reference, to have in hands if someone else asks me the same thing. Turns out that it reached the #1 here in HN and even the creator of Ruby tweeted about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40763640
So, don't do it for the others. Do it for yourself. And I won't say "keep doing it and someday someone will see", I can't guarantee that, but a least you'll have a chance.
If the main reason for blogging is to get an audience and/or become popular, I'd say it's not blogging. It should be a serious descision to do it as a job, not "blogging". If blogging is a personal project then it could help with following:
1. Blogging is a very good way to help sorting out own ideas and shape thoughts on a particular topic. Unless you write it down and try to express your idea coherently, thoughts are just bouncing inside your head without proper actionable output. I notices from my own experience that ideas form and progress much better when I write them down.
2. Blogging is helpful as a form of journalling about particular topic—to return to later. Sometimes I read my old posts to refresh my memory and often get surprised that it was written by me—after some time I forget what was the logic that led me to a particular idea or descision and old posts look like written by somebody else.
3. Blogging helps to discipline oneself. Writing and editing takes time and effort. Only regular stable blogging attracts any audience at all. Not that it's important, but it's good feeling when somebody finds what you wrote helpful. Many just want to get audience without understanding what it really takes. It's not that easy. So, as a byproduct of the first two points, one learns what it takes to produce good content with a regular cadence.
It takes effort to carefully write, edit, and rewrite. But it really helps with our own thought process, improve ability to shape ideas, helps save sorted out ideas for later, and disciplines ourselves.
So, I'd say blogging is a pure self-improvement exercise—fitness for the mind.
>There’s two lies we tell ourselves: If I write it, they will come. They won’t. There are billions of blog posts out there. The internet is an infinite void, and your blog is a whisper in a hurricane. If nobody reads it, it’s a waste of time.
I never told these to myself. I have been running a blog before it was called blog.
My primary goal was and continues to be as a reference to things I wanted to learn, explore, clarify, digest, break down, track, and so on. The public part is a simple side effect that historically, it was cumbersome to have synchronized devices and such for records or logs. A public "blog" where I am the only one with read/write is a simple way to solve this problem.
It is more of a journal to myself of "to dos" and "here i am in this project" so I can come back to it six months (or years) later and can restart it.
> Blogging forces clarity. It makes you structure your thoughts, sharpen your perspective.
Sure. that is one way to say why I have a log on the web. Has noting to two initial points.
I recently changed my thought process on the responsibility of readers and writers. I think it is the responsibility of the writer to say something interesting, and then publish said interesting thing somewhere where it can be reached by readers. I think it’s an element of the modern freneticism of the Internet that we expect instant eyeballs.
Old writing is constantly reinvigorated by new readers. In fact, that is the only way that it can continue to live. It is the responsibility of the reader to decide whether a piece of writing is important or not in their context.
As such, I’ve been blogging quite a bit. Because posting on a blog allows for the critical mass of future readers. Anything interesting that I happen to say can be found through a medium that reaches billions of people.
Today, or in the future.
HTTP is basically the printing press. And my website is my media company.
Just because billions of people aren’t consistently reading what’s written, doesn’t mean that the writer has lost their responsibility to write.
About half my blog articles are technical in nature, and their purpose is primarily to serve as howto docs / "yay I built this thing" write-ups for future me, and for anyone else that's interested. I enjoy writing those articles a bit, although I usually enjoy the hacking that precipitated the writing more.
The other half are me deep-diving into random corners of history, geography, philosophy, economics, anthropology, politics, and the like. I REALLY enjoy writing those articles: both the actual writing of the words; and the hours upon hours spent lost in a smoky haze of Wikipedia, public datasets, Google Books, journal articles, other peoples' blogs, YouTube videos, and so on. AFAIK those articles get few hits, and that's fine with me, it's just my hobby.
I just wish there was a search engine to find a blog now. It's really hard to find a blog using Google search or at least an easy way to find a personal blog.
"And there’s another thing. My other passion is street photography. Which is a bit like blogging."
That's me. I've made everyday slice of life pictures, walking about, since 2006. Biggest source of traffic is probably my mom. I don't care, its my own little corner of the internet.
Writing is organized thinking, and organized thinking is valuable, now more than ever, in a world more and more people are delegating thinking to LLM everyday.
I once read from a comment in HN or a blog saying that, in the future writing will be like workout; in the past the daily physical labors forced people to build muscle on some aspects, but technology freed people from the labors as well as the muscles. Now if you want to build muscle you have to workout. Writing and organized thinking is going to be like that in the future: only those who wish to and take action to build organized thinking muscle will have them.
That is why to me writing itself is valuable, even if nobody reads it. Bonus points if somebody stumbles across my blog and it somehow builds my credibility.
People do read it. The problem is that you have to consistently prove your content is worth their time for an awfully long stretch. I started my blog[1] back in 2019, and it wasn’t until after I published my 100th post in mid-2023 that some of my articles began hitting the front page of HN. For many, that’s just too long and not worth the effort.
In my case, I wrote because I enjoy writing and often reread my own posts. More than once, I’ve searched for something online only to have the search engine direct me right back to my own site.
I consider blogging, in this modern internet area where most Google search end up with optimized SEO or LLM garbage, to be the right thing to do.
Provide something from one human to the other, just like i would help someone lost in the street and not try to sell him a map, is just the right thing to do.
It doesn't have to make me popular, or benefit me in the slightest way.
If one was to do it only for their own benefit, I'm not sure blogging would be worth it. Other way are either more efficient or just as good but less time consuming. X or Twitter for instance has better reach than a blog.
> Personal sites are dead because the Internet search is broken.
Personal sites are not dead. I've got one, and it is entirely fulfilling its function. Other people have them too.
Internet search is pretty broken, I'll agree with you. That said, Kagi and Marginalia both seem to tackle the problems with surfacing old and/or independent content. And people are bypassing the search-engines by constructing link pages, link blogs and web-rings, and seem to be doing fine.
I think Google should create a walled garden of blogsearch, on the lines of Google Scholar, have some top-down verfication of good content / blogs. In the age of AI, such a product could act as a discovery mechanism for authentic human writings which could be included in training data for LLMs (uncontaminated steel even in age of AI).
1. A walled garden? Run by Google? Aside from locking this discoverability away in a walled garden, how many years before Google kills it out of corporate disinterest?
2. So, blogs with Google tracking promoted higher? Blogs with copyright information excluded as it is not legal for LLM's to train on it? What do you think would happen?
I think if Google hadn't killed Google Reader, the metadata from blogs and reading habits of populace would be so invaluable in today's LLM world. It would be sort of loosely speaking its own kind of social network for powerusers, every other opinion is downstream or rehashing from that.
All kidding aside, it's something great to point at something when applying for a job. I'll just say this as a person looking at a candidate: I'm probably not gonna look at your Github. Especially if it's filled with simple tutorials from a book or from YouTube that a bunch of other people have followed.
Extra points if I read it and applied the knowledge. This did happen one time. I was stoked.
I'm more likely to look at stuff like a blog post if I really want to gauge your expertise on a subject and see your attention to detail.
You might be surprised how many people read your blog! If you hang out in techie places, you might even get some, "oh, I read your blog!", comments from strangers.
Not GP, but he is right; the behavior of your website is semantically incorrect. Looks like you redirect the users to your blog posts by using <button /> instead of <a />.
I also agree that your website should absolutely not require JavaScript to work. Clicking on links is something that is possible with 0 lines of JavaScript.
> I don't have a RSS feed but I have a newsletter with a subscribe button.
This is also not very hacker-friendly behavior. Why should users give you their email addresses when a RSS feed is much easier to implement and use?
> Not GP, but he is right; the behavior of your website is semantically incorrect. Looks like you redirect the users to your blog posts by using <button /> instead of <a />.
I'll fix this. Thanks.
> This is also not very hacker-friendly behavior. Why should users give you their email addresses when a RSS feed is much easier to implement and use?
I'm glad you took it nicely. You should definitely post here when you write a new article.
There's always something to learn! Just remember to do things the easiest way possible; <a> allows you to "redirect" users using HTML-only, while <button> needs an event attached to it using JavaScript. There are many things that people use JavaScript for but that are 100% possible using HTML. We should favor those.
Also, writing a static website removes a plethora of vulnerabilities. Collecting email addresses comes with its legal burden, too (do you delete people's email addresses if they ask you to and are in the EU?).
I say write for yourself. Not even 'future you'. The act of writing alone is rewarding which is why for ages now people have kept journals. Personally, I'd rather keep that stuff offline, but online or offline there's a lot to be gained from the process. Maybe no one else ever finds a blog beyond the AI and data brokers who will eventually scrape it, but that's no reason for people not to blog if it's something they enjoy.
I've been writing blogs for over 5 years, and I've drawn some conclusions:
- Writing is first and foremost a learning process. I've learned a great deal, such as how to write, present, and persuade, not to mention the immense amount of knowledge I've acquired while researching for my articles.
- Writing is a means of self-expression. It may seem a bit vain, but my point is that by writing, you continually learn and improve each day. This makes you better than you were yesterday, and I believe that looking back on your past achievements will never leave you disappointed.
- Writing is a way to inspire others. Have you ever read an article that completely changed your perspective? That's what I'm talking about. And certainly, you can write to motivate others as well.
- Writing is a way to receive empathy. I think I've "bookmarked" numerous blogs by others who share valuable insights with the community.
- Writing is a way to alleviate stress. I'm not sure if anyone else is like me, but I can spend hours fine-tuning my content, and during those times, I feel truly at ease.
- Lastly, I don't want to stop at just writing blogs. I hope to write a book of my own in the future. Just thinking about it motivates me to work even harder.
The comparison to street photography is very apt. My blogs are usually a snapshot of how I feel at a given moment in time. Even if they're just technical posts, they often reflect my understanding when I wrote them.
It's also fun to go back a year later to see how stupid/naive/ignorant I was 'back then'.
Lots of good points about the "why". Here are mine, that I explicitly wrote on my site (lol):
Here I have fun with HTML/CSS, can let the graphic designer within me run amok and will try to post semi-regularly about some of my hobbies: computing (mainly programming) and art (music, films, novels).
This website exists for a few reasons, others than those listed in the landing page:
* I wanted to make a generator in Common Lisp during my vacations (I had a very crude one in sh a long time ago) so I did.
* I dislike the modern Web full of Jabbascript, so I thought I'd explore the limits of static HTML5/CSS3. I'm not fully there on that point, but still pretty proud of the file explorer sidebar thingy.
* Like a lot of millennials, I still remember a web that wasn't exclusively a one-way street carrying lackluster content from corporations and "actors" to clueless consumers. So I consider it a pretty important mission to do what I can to help, even if it's just a little blog full of nothing.
I blog and podcast for work. There's much I can't say due to my employers expectations in content, which I might say on my own space. But, vanity issues abound. I'm acculturated to consider writing in public "showing off" which may not be true by intent, but can happen anyway.
But blogging for work rather subtracts from the pleasure for me. I know people who originate content and blog for pleasure which is consumed for work. That seems to be a better fit.
I agree with much of the sentiment here. You can diarise, a zettelkasten isn't a bad place to be. Inviting readership constructs a binding, a contract writer to reader. It's building commitment: to produce, and to reflect on what readers say, and to correct honest mistakes and accept (some) criticism with good grace. Shame about the negging: George Megalogenis's blog had a byline up top of the comment pages "my blog, my rules" and you can't really object to that. Boring and abusive replies get chucked. Fair enough.
You laugh, but Chat-GPT "Deep Research" cites my technical blog very frequently. With attribution, no less. Within the next ~2 years, I expect that most of the people who read my blog will find it via LLM.
I remember when something similar first happened to me, where an LLM (Perplexity) cited my recent (within a few days) wikipedia edit ("transistor density").
This helped me realize how powerful the legacy of wikipedia is/will be. When I first started editing (2006), people still didn't trust open source encyclopediae. Same thing with bitcoin, just a few years later.
And never attribute anything to you, but I’m sure ChatGPT will be cited. If OpenAI campaigns that DeepSeek is stealing their IP, is DeepSeek stealing your IP or is OpenAI?
Obviously facetious, but I'd hope most people would want their blog post read by LLMs.
I suspect (hope) a lot of blog posts are written to share knowledge. In that regard having that knowledge trained in to LLMs (ideally open ones, but even closed ones) could further that goal.
I pretty much hate the mindset of don't do something if it might make someone else money even if you otherwise want to do it. One of several issues I have with the non-commercial creative commons license.
I didn’t say don’t do something. I said do something and understand a modern consequence. Go ahead publish but don’t be surprised when your work isn’t attributed correctly in the future and empowers people you may not agree with.
Blogs aren’t the only form of publishing and sharing.
Maybe after the AI winter subsides it might make sense again. A world where people were encouraged to publish to share knowledge ended up being publish to support Google’s hold on the net, now evolved to publish so people can read 5% of what you wrote distilled through statistical summation.
It makes all long form content look bad, not just the bad long form content. It continues to enable the societal trend of only consuming short form content. Which in turn enables reactionary and low information behavior instead of critical thought.
I sometimes feel like blogging in the developer world has become something that you copy from the great masters of the craft. Many famous devs blog about the craft. Same in the tech entrepreneur bubble.
i remember times when blogging was as casual as having an instagram account. Then there were times were you would blog stuff that could potentially be helpful to others. Like a problem with configuring our linux audio device that ou were finall able to fix.
For all these topics there are now established communities. The blogosphere is now divided into company blogs (for SEO, maybe also to tell a story or amuse people), and peesonal blogs. And of these personal blogs, some try to copy their role models in writing and thinking (a good way to become inauthentic and lose touch with yourself) and a minority manages to write whatever comes to their mind, no matter how awesome it reads and how many people will like the idea that is transported.
I just started getting into blogging. It was really easy to setup my own site with a blog section using Astro. I've been tempted to add analytics to the website but I find that these kind of stats just cause me mental stress. So it's purely a space for me to shout into the void and it feels so refreshing not caring about vanity metrics.
I did the same with SvelteKit on Github pages but put it behind CloudFlare. That gives me a little validation that more than five people are visiting it a month, without the fine grained statistics or privacy violation of using an analytics package like Google Whatever It’s Called Now.
I have tried many times to start a blog. I usually manage to eek out one or two articles before getting utterly stuck.
I have lots of things I want to write about but I feel completely anxious about putting my ideas out there, even got relatively simple, straightforward things.
How do you push through the anxiety and actually put things out there?
I blog because I have to find it very difficult to take arguments online in very few words without pictures without citation.
I blog because it forces me to understand the subject matter on a deeper level, to write long form, to keep things as interesting as as possible.. and of course the mere active writing increases my ability to retain information.
I don’t really care if you read it, though, if I’m having a disagreement online, I might care in those situations if you would read a specific post.
I really don’t need to be an online celebrity, it’s not important even in the slightest. Ego does not help for anything.
In fact, even when doing public speaking engagements, I often completely omit an introduction to myself. Because the subject matter should speak for itself, it should not be a reflection of my past accomplishments or the name that I have or desire to build into a brand.
I blog to keep a record of interesting things I've learnt and share it on the web, even if the only reader is my future self. After all, it's called a "web log" for a reason! The fact that the process of carefully considering and writing about a subject helps me gain a deeper understanding and strengthens my own grasp on the subject happens to be a bonus!
In fact, my web server logs show that out of the 170 or so pages on my website, only about 7% receive regular traffic from visitors. The remaining 93% have got only myself as the reader.
I've been web logging the last 25 years and I'll probably continue to do it for as long as I can. In fact, 25 years ago, it was just a website hosting a loose collection of pages. It took its current shape and form only around 2006 when blogging became fashionable!
One reason why I started blogging (back in 2007) was to have an easy reference for myself about some specific syntax or config parameter name that regularly came up when working as a consultant at different customers. And access my scripts I used for troubleshooting things. While I couldn't connect my own laptop to their networks to copy anything over, my public blog web-pages were accessible at almost every site went to.
One exception was when I visited a customer in Shanghai, it turned out that my purely technical blog was blocked in China (at least back then) as it was hosted on a wordpress.com subdomain. I then migrated it my own domain and it was accessible in China too.
The other reason is definitely tech-marketing for my business, but hopefully with 99% quality and 1% noise :-)
The author says it's a myth that if you write it then they'll come.
That may be mostly true but with the way recommendation engines like substance and social media get new content in front of people it's a little different.
Last month I started a weekly roundup blog about urbanism and with relatively lite marketing efforts and the help of substack recommendations we have almost 100 subscribers already. So share it with the relevant parties but also take advantage of the algos if you can. That being said, I don't really have a plan to monetize so it's more of a passion project to inspire people to take initiative in their local setting.
Maybe an irony of this blog post is that nobody commenting here seems to have read it, either. They seem to be responding to the title (which more accurately "belongs" to HN, in the sense it doesn't require reading TFA) rather than the content.
The author very clearly states that the reason is the Buddhist "carry water, chop wood": you do it because it needs doing. You do it because you saw something. You do it for yourself.
Yet a lot of the comments here are more of a utilitarian bent, e.g. "one day someone will see it", "it's for networking", "it's proof you know your stuff", etc. Completely unrelated and maybe even contrary to the meaning of this article/blog post!
1. The ability to be able to link to an in-depth explanation, rather than having to remake the points is convenient.
2. Documenting non-proprietary insights and learnings from commercial work with limited source access.
3. Explaining things is hard, so writing it down and reading it a few days later lets you see it from a different perspective so you can rewrite it more clearly. Hopefully, get better at writing in general over time as well.
I've had a number of topics I've been meaning to document for years, but haven't taken the time. Finished the first one just this weekend though at https://roosimaa.ee
Number one learning so far is writing takes a surprising amount of time.
I've oddly had some pieces I've written (without any expectation on my part) get read by a lot of people. Even shockingly had people reach out to me over it and say that its impacted them. So I'm not sure if I agree with this article 100% though I do think its a wonderful read.
If you're going to write - surprise people and be useful. Write for yourself, but also write for others. It will force you to select ideas that have substance.
Anyway, Great read. Saving this to share for others.
I don't check the stats, the pages are small enough that even if it got busy I'd hardly notice. I write primarily to explore ideas I've had or that I've read from others, or where I feel my thinking lacks clarity and I want to gain that clarity. It's also a place where I experiment a little, taking more chances and risking more failure that I would otherwise in a professional environment. Occasionally I'll find reason to point someone int he direction of a post because it touches on a topic or is otherwise an example of some particular type of thinking, like tearing a page out of a personal diary to show someone.
If a blog lays unread in a forest, has it a function?
I would say yes. In my experience, writing your ideas down is an excellent way of learning exactly what those idea are. Until such time as they have been clearly stated, their existence is 'fuzzy'.
This is all true. The only part that is potentially misleading is that the target doesn't need to be a blog. A blog is a fine target, however. The key activity is spending time to articulate a message with enough clarity that another person will understand what you meant and that they will conclude there is some value in it. There are lots of avenues for this.
It's not limited to this, but in the workplace I think of this as "write it down culture". People who write things down often have the most tested and credible ideas, with the first and most important judge being themselves.
In this age of LLMs and hallucinations/deceptions, a personal blog is a best testament of one’s knowledge and musing on various topics. Once AI gets prominent, there will be a time when you can refer to your nice blog and say that, this is you giving untainted opinion on a topic when people can no longer trust anything anymore being original.
If I see someone’s blog today with posts from last few years of longer, regardless of their current situation, I appreciate that they are fairly intellectual person.
Now I will show myself out and try to start my own blog which I have been procrastinating over for decades.
I recently got paid to do a version of a very esoteric side project that I blogged about for years. Had no expectations other than sharing something interesting, someone found my blog and contacted me and $$$
For me blogging acts as a function to learn about something. If I want to understand a particular subject (albeit a small one), I’ll write about it. Do some research on the matter, think over what I am trying to answer, and at the end I always feel more knowledgeable about that particular subject point. Another factor is that it improves my writing, which in turns helps expression which too is very valuable. Sure not many people read it, but honestly putting on some music and just tapping away on something interesting is quite therapeutic.
If trying to solve a problem and errors keep occurring, how does one capture the errors (and inputs that caused the error) in order to blog about later without disrupting the flow of problem solving?
For example, I was writing a terraform script and I kept getting errors. I would change one thing, run plan and apply, get another error, rinse and repeat until I fixed it. I would like to keep a record of all these errors so that I can document it for my future self or colleagues, but I don't want to disrupt the process of trying to fix my problem.
Personally, I keep a text file as a "debugging journal" and just append a line every time I try a new step. For example, this is what I wrote down after recently trying out a local LLM:
llama.cpp
- idk why there's so many llama versions to install on yay
- i went with llama.cpp-bin, because it was built with libcurl and the first one i tried apparently was not
- but i had to remove llama.cpp-git-debug from a previous installation
- remember yay -Q | grep ... to check for installed packages
- the cli interface changes; i ended up with --hf-repo ggml-org/qwen2.5... --hf-file qwen25....
- the huggingface.com page probably has the most accurate and up-to-date instructions
- my goal: fast, offline, generalized/automatic autocomplete
- localhost:8080 to access web ui after running llama-server
They're quick notes, and they actually help me problem solve, not disrupt me. I'm casual about it, though. I'm not copying every input and output verbatim. I think the idea is to leave yourself enough breadcrumbs so that you can reproduce, grab screenshots, and copy error messages later when you're not in the zone. Hope this helps.
Also, note that I'm most likely to publish a blog post in the following days while the problem is still fresh in my mind. If I wait months or years, it's pretty much doomed to stay in /drafts forever.
But I still write. I want to read or research some topics myself and consolidate all my readings in a blog post, clarifies few things for me.
1. It tells me structurally what I understood
2. It creates a structure in my mind for that topic that stays a long time
3. Gives me a place to go back when I want to
4. Sometimes explaining a concept is hard and I would like to write and with some pictures it could mean reader understands my depth of knowledge, and it also clarifies my gap in my knowledge.
I write for myself. I’ve been writing almost my entire life. Every now and then, someone may want to learn a bit more about me, and it will be there, for them. Otherwise, I don’t really care whether or not it gets read.
When I link to my blog entries, here, it isn’t for self-promotion. It’s because the article is relevant to what I’m talking about, and gives anyone that is interested, more info, without burdening others, with prolix prose.
- learn to better do technical communication with people which might not be experts on the specific topic (through without feedback this is just so so)
- sometimes to give HR more insight into your skills
which reminds me I wanted to setup a blog for a long while, I originally wanted to have some "fun" with setup, theming etc. but I think I just should start with some default template until I have time to have "fun" with the setup. Then I would at least already write something....
Most science papers are only read by a tiny circle of experts, maybe a dozen or so. The process still works out. The critical challenge is to have some quality human readership (instead of the AI bot brigade and random zero second clicks).
Theoretically the internet would have enabled the long tail, making tiny domain focused niches viable. In practice discovery is the most gamed algorithm in existence. Unless you have the resources and inclination to spend quality time towards useless "SEO" nobody knows you are alive.
This is a great counter argument to 'shouting into the void', as a friend of mine calls it.
I do the writing, to refine my thinking and identify my cognitive dissonance, but I almost never share, and certainly not in the public domain - why shout into the void?
But then again, why not?
If your not compromising a patent or other monetization path, what's the problem?
Ideas are worthless until executed, iterated and (in)validated.
I should share more.
Thank you @andysblog
There are couple of reasons why I blog. Some of them are the typical ones like to reach my audience, to inform about your products or opinions that I have.
But there is one thing that hasn’t been mentioned here yet.
Sometimes I also blog to put something onto the record.
For example, if there’s something really important for me that the company should follow like our open source philosophy.
I blog about it to make sure that people see it and measure us against it. It is basically a way for me to help we stay on our course because we don’t want to break a public record.
If nobody reads it, you might be wasting effort by washing it down for public consumption, and possibly erasing valuable information as well. Might as well keep a private diary where you tell all.
If we accept that nobody's going to read it, then the content doesn't have to tell it for the audience. Not the content, nor it's tone or style or anything else. You can use obscure references that only you understand as a shorthand, like words that your family made up when you were small.
1) Write to get it out of your head? Instead of therapy, it works.
2) Write to see if others share your opinions? Sometimes they do, sometimes not.
3) To make money. If you have the connections, advertising will come, even with low audience. Look, my readers are top 100 CEOs. How many have time to read? A few. Ads for Porsche will come.
4) To get work. A good blog will draw job offers or will convince your interviewer to hire you.
And probably other reasons.
I mainly blog for myself in the future, but in a slightly different flavor than the author mentions. If there's a complicated ML concept that I'd really like to understand, explaining it to an audience (even if that audience is myself in the future) is a great way to understand it.
That goes double for visuals, which is another reason I use a custom static site. Can't run JS on Medium. I even built out a client-side search and learned a good amount from that too.
The "future you" aspect mentioned is exactly my rationale for blogging. I've been doing it since 2012 and one of the main reasons was because I kept forgetting things I'd done and thought I should start to note them down. I regularly google things and find my own posts with little to no memory of writing them. https://johnnyreilly.com/
Writing is incredibly fun and rewarding for me. It also makes you think harder about things that you’re generally already interested in. And it gives you huge leverage: instead of trying to explain your thoughts to one or two people at a time, you do it once and potentially many thousands of people can read it. It’s also a useful resource years later to look back on, like an intellectual history of your own interests. And the more you do it, the better you get at it.
This seems to be an actual case of the begging the question fallacy.
Why someone writes a blog is very personal. If, and only if, you are writing a blog for lots of people to read it, then you do need to ask yourself if lots of people are reading your blog, and if not, what you're going to do about it.
There are lots of reasons why someone might keep a blog (as many posters here demonstrate), the simplest being "because they want to".
The stats say https://andrew-quinn.me/ gets at least a trickle of traffic, and usually these days for the more obscure stuff I write, like my guide on using `reposurgeon` to convert SVN to Git repos for the first time. I feel the hours I have saved far outweigh the hours I spent writing that article and that's good enough for me.
I write blog posts when I solve a problem that I've been working on. Every couple of months I'll get an email from a stranger who read my blog post on how I solved X problem with Z solution.
It's a great feeling knowing that someone, somewhere not only had the same problem you had but you were able to help them solve it.
If you are writing on the Internet there is a good chance that someone will read it someday.
Writing a blog is always rewarding, but it's a difficult exercise, especially if one's writing in another language. Not only do you have some proficiency in writing fluid sentences and paragraphs, it's sometimes taxing to formulate something in a language that's not your mother tongue.
I'm curious if people around here have tips on diminishing friction and how to write better/more easily.
When I can't convince someone in a technical discussion of my viewpoint because they have their heels dug into a random viewpoint on a blog post penned by a random nobody, I write a blog post and link it back without mentioning the author's identity. Suddenly my words would carry weight.
Not sure how to feel about it tbh.
I also write to keep snapshots of my ideas and thought processes, regardless of how nonsensical they may be.
I blog from 2000 circa. I do very little advertising on my articles in gioorgi.com
I write because I need to put down my throughts on a lot of different topics and/or just to take some notes.
I hope to be able to keep my blog alive for at least 30 years, and to retain my little freedom of saying everything I want.
I do not have adsense, just a bit of amazon affiliate link, used just ad a service to reader.
Edsger Dijkstra kept a kind of primitive blog on paper[1]. Largely, so far as I can tell and with a few published exceptions, it was meant for himself.
It's a goldmine of course. Personally I find some of his snarkier papers entertaining, but the real value is in seeing how his understanding of CS developed.
> You’re not just writing for today’s invisible audience. You’re writing for:
> Future you. Your posts become a time capsule of your evolving mind.
Fully agree with that one. My own blog has become a public diary of my hobby and it's great to see what I've been up to and how wrong I was about certain predictions and assumptions, especially about the ones that say that I'm done reworking my home server setup, multiple times.
This is not an original observation, but it took me too long to realize so I think it bears repeating: your personal website is also the one place where you have control over how much to write, how it looks to the reader and how long it stays up. Even though I'm a proponent of strict moderation on social media, it's ultimately a bad thing to hand over that kind of agency to the platforms.
I have a blog that nobody reads (or very few anyways).
The one exception was that one time i put some vacation pictures from portland. I dont understand how or why, but that got 10x the hits.
It almost feels like there is an inverse relationship between effort and views.
Regardless, the main reason i write is to try and sharpen my writing skills, something i feel like i was weak at historically. It has value in and of itself.
I have no analytics or log analysis on my blog. The only way that I have any indication that it’s getting read are the rare occasions when someone leaves a comment, although in one case, it was the author of a book I wrote about responding to a bit of wondering at the end of the post: https://www.dahosek.com/100-phi-socrates-cafe/
I don't have social media so my blogs are often the only ways my family and friends connect with me. I think this original article is misguided and the big tech brainwashing has us forget that we blog all the time on their social media apps. Those blog posts on TikTok, Instagram, or X are always there. It's a little insidious that there's no mention of that.
Social media posts are not really writing though. You do not write down detailed thoughts on social media it’s often more likely brain farts than anything.
I'm concerned about this one thing, if I write and share my thoughts on my blog (and the internet) wouldn't I become a source for AI training and modeling? Could AI end up resembling me by using my ideas and thought process? I wouldn't want my thoughts and ideas to be used in that way, creating a form of immortality.
People here encouraged my writing. The first year I wrote this blog I kept my name off it. The word spread a bit and I then added my name. But I sometimes miss the early days when felt more like writing for myself.
https://unintendedconsequenc.es/
My blog is my memory extender for it-tech related stuff, some posts are public, some are not. And availability is a killer feature, posts are available literally from every device with web browser. Unlock phone, enter site address and that's it. No need to install some sync software etc.
I tweet occasionally even though I have like 10 followers, of which none have ever responded, basically as an exercise for self accountability. I want to be able to look back on what I said at particular moments in time and know what I thought, in a bite size snippet, and was comfortable putting it out in public.
I blog about really niche local history. I enjoy it because it acts as external motivation for my hobby. The idea that someone could read it makes me research thoroughly and write as well as I can. I don't mind if nobody reads it. I get a few hits but I assume that's people training LLMs.
I do blog mainly to document stuff for my self while I learn new things or figure something out. I often read one of my own blog articles months or years later if I need to reproduce the same thing.
Writing it to my public blog improves my writing skills and sometimes helps others with the same problem which is a great plus.
I think the author and I are mostly on the same wavelength on this matter. I write because I want to write. If people want to read what I wrote, then hey, great.
Someone hit my buymeacoffee link a couple months ago, so someone definitely reads my blog. How many? No idea. My only "analytics" are nginx logs.
I've been thinking about starting an anonymous diary where I can write down what happens in my life and my thoughts, but I really don't want anyone to connect it with my identity. Anyone had experience with that? Did you publish on .onion network or how did you do it?
You blog because what you blog about has value because it interests you, you give it value with your energy and time and because you are thinking and writing about it, not others.
You blog to write.
You write to explore and develop your thoughts ideas and feelings.
You write publicly because you appreciate others who you found doing the same
One thing I think you see here is a lot of emphasis on the "side hustle." A blog may be supportive of the ways you really make money. But, if you're looking at a blog as some sort of reasonably direct income stream that you'd rather not do, you should probably move on.
> If I write it, they will come. They won’t. There are billions of blog posts out there. The internet is an infinite void, and your blog is a whisper in a hurricane.
Where are the interesting, technical blog posts that nobody is reading? Are they being posted to HN? Someone please point me to them.
Surprisieg, but quite alot of people actually visit my blog posts. There is definitely more traffic on loosely written content, than on services & professional fronts. And it is quite easy to turn this traffic into organic & trusting visits to business oriented URLs.
A big reason I blog is that I find writing something down is essential to clarifying my thoughts.
Once it's written down, I might as well put it online, and it has the added advantages that I can simply link to the material rather than having to explain it over and over again e.g. in emails.
Pretty much how I approach this as well. My about page reads:
This website is place where I put some random notes.
It mostly serves to remind my future self of how I configured or solved things in the past, though it may occasionally be useful to others as well.
I don’t blog, but I do journal regularly. Writing helps me process thoughts. But I can understand that there’s also value in trying to be read. Not for validation, but because the act of making something readable forces you to refine your thinking even further
I've been wanting to blog, but I never do it. One of the reasons (excuses) is that I don't know where to blog. Is it better to host your own page, use some newsletter service such as substack, or just open a blog in any blogging plaform?
I think the best thing is to just start. As you're not blogging, there is no one that knows what you need, you probably don't even know. But after you have started with whatever is easiest right now you might discover the things that you want from your blogging tool. Maybe you're happy, maybe you'll play around a bit.
One very important thing for me is to stop the tool from distracting myself from writing. I write simple markdown files that I then publish, there is nothing that I need to do that distracts me from writing (I still get distracted, but at least not by my blog). The writing is the main task, the publishing and everything around is tiny, so I can focus on what I want to do with my blog. Write.
(Just to get back to the point, choose whatever is easy to set up and easy to maintain and if you realize that the tool is not right for you just change it. (This of course works best when you use your own domain))
I blog on technical topics as a reminder to my future self. I increasingly find myself needing the details of some command line or process from long ago, and having my own notes easily searchable is a great time saver. Hopefully it helps someone else too.
Blogging is like all other content creation: the vast majority of the viewership goes to the top 0.1% of creators. This is the same whether you're talking about YouTube, Twitter, podcasts, OnlyFans, scientific papers, traditional books, etc etc.
Because it's a handy way to be able to remember what I was doing, and might help someone somewhere someday (frequently me if it's a slightly non-obvious thing that I find I need to remember later)
For me, the possibility that someone might stumble across what I've written keeps me honest. My blog forces me to be clearer and more organized then when I'm writing personal notes.
I just enjoy reading and writing. My blogging used to be very infrequent tutorials, but I switched over to history. I get read now, but I still do it just because I enjoy it.
When I was younger, I used PowerPoint to create pseudo video games that nobody played, and I only did it because they brought me a lot of joy. Today, I do the same thing with blogging.
Sure, nobody may be reading it today, but eventually something you wrote becomes essential to someone else. Document what works and what doesn't. That helps us all learn.
I blog about things I mess up on but learned something about. That way, I feel less bad messing up and if someone else has the same idea, they can learn too
apart from all the other points mentioned, the blogger can read it.
(I have not read all the comments yet, only a few, maybe someone has already said this.)
obviously you can do that on your own computer too, but with an online blog, you can read it from anywhere, on any usable device, with an internet connection.
you can read your own thoughts or code or whatever from 10 years or more ago.
and you can keep your blog private to yourself if you want, on those blogging platforms that support that.
maybe few different reasons
* sometimes people use it as notebook - just to put their thought on "paper"
* "nobody reads" sometimes depends on the subject - some subjects are specific and the audience is limited
* it is good to "document" your thought event to yourself - you can reed them in years and see what was your point of view back then.
* ....
I humbly share my thoughts from around ~4 years ago on the same subject. It is all too easy to focus on outcome/results rather than the joy of the process.
I tried blogging in the mid-2000's about drones. I was documenting my experience building drone flight controllers (mind you I was using Cortex-M3 cores and early 3-axis IMUs) and had published schematics and source code.
About 5 years later my site had been forgotten, and a company in the UK offered me US$10,000 for use of my schematics and source code.
I was floored. I did ZERO advertising. I was blogging because honestly: I wanted intellectual validation because everyone I admired was blogging and I wanted people to think I was smart, too (I had even joined MENSA that year). I had serious FOMO/esteem problems in my 30's.
Fortunately--somehow--Google connected me with this company through simple search. The company went under, but I got my check for real. My friend at the time was mad at me for not asking 10x that, but so what?
Before ~2010 I stopped blogging and took all my stuff down because I really don't like being known or exposed publicly (I'm still very hard to find on google because someone more famous than me with my name is a top hit!), and I outgrew the FOMO. It doesn't seem to matter anymore because I'm so old: at my level the contacts I developed over three decades matter more than blogs. But it was pretty cool to get an email out of the blue with money attached!
I hate to be terse, but this subject has been covered many times before. Let me phrase the contrapositive: why blog only for people to read?
I see a lot of people (I'm looking at you, pg) that go on at length about how important it is to be precise, plain-spoken, come to a point clearly and then move on.
Sure, when you've reached the point you have nothing new to say, regurgitate it, chew it up good again, think it over, make an insightful, pithy, extremely useful and precise essay.
Congrats. You've now reached AI/LLM status of intelligence. Nothing wrong with that, of course, many times society needs the same point made over and over again in different words until they finally take effect. But the real meat of essay writing is thrashing about semantically until you finally reach a conclusion that you probably knew to some degree all along but didn't really understand all the implications. That means your essays should be thoughtful, researched, messy, creative, self-contradictory, etc.
Guess what? Nobody wants to read that stuff. They all want 2-minute videos on how to lead a meaningful life. I get it: life's short. But you can consume pithy, terse, useful fact-bombs all your life and not know a damned thing aside from how to parrot back others. Writing for others is fine. You might make a difference. Good luck. But if you're not creating refining, and recasting content that nobody reads? You're not getting any personal value from it. Don't expect to write for others and actually make yourself a better person. Most of the time you end up becoming a popular grifter (and this time I'm most definitely talking about pg).
Decide whether you want an audience or not. Unless you're truly that one-in-a-million person with tremendous important insight, I recommend against it. Still, for your own good, please write.
tl;dr - The author presents multiple ways to find a reason for completing work when you're missing a reason. I've found, though, that enjoying the act of writing itself is more meaningful for me. The completed works are incidental and not the end goal that makes it worthwhile. So I'd argue that you should blog because you enjoy writing the blog. If you don't enjoy it, no amount of readership will be worthwhile.
I started at some point with a Medium blog but then to mny surprise, I discovered later on that people weren't always able to read my blog, due to Medium changing to a paid model.
* It'll eventually be scraped into an AI and my factual stuff being in there is good
* It might help some random person who finds it
* Maybe my friends will read it
* Maybe my kids will read it when I die (and if I die prematurely they'll be able to form a shape of what their father is like)
* Simply observing things is worthwhile to me
It's not a brand building exercise or anything. In fact, I doubt very many non-bots visit my blog. Cloudflare reports 11k uniques/month but I think it's all bots. Also, in many cases it's notes for myself for the future. I have mine as a wiki, and I post blog stuff under the blog/ prefix.
My wife and I are expecting a baby in a month or so and I've been chronicling what the process of pregnancy was like. I sometimes just wanted a "here's one path through it" to just get an idea of how this goes and found that hard. Most people write a lot of advice but I wanted to just chronicle the actual experience https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/index.php/Pregnancy
Even though my wife and I have an unusual one (IVF with genetic embryo selection) maybe something in there will be useful through an LLM.
Another one of the things it appears I'm at 99th percentile or higher at is getting facts into Wikipedia that other people have trouble doing. So sometimes I like to write about my experience doing that https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/index.php/Blog/2024-10-17/Path...
One of the other last reasons for me to write a blog is that it's just sometimes so beautiful to read someone's human expression of personality and if I'm lucky someone who feels that way can read mine. A Hacker News Comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40650982) about a deleted Wikipedia page pointed me to an old mathematician's site and it's such a heartwarming and bittersweet feeling reading his joy and sadness: https://www.math.sci.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/m-mat/AKECHI/index.ht... but even Time Cube counts!
Yeah, I did manage to rescue that Wikipedia article too. Made me happy :)
What the blogosphere needs is a “recommendations” page. Like the front page of YouTube but for blog posts (and not ad-revenue-driven). Where you can (quietly and privately) upvote and downvote and it'll adapt to your interests.
the idea that blogs are intended for an audience other than the blogger ( and interested parties, eg. colleagues at work, co-conspirators, etc ... ) is a misunderstanding and probably residue from the late 90s/00s "internet explosion"
In true HN style, many have used this as an opportunity to shill their own blogs. They can't even imagine not being selfish. "If you are not doing it to Get Mine, what's the point?"
I'm sure they're somewhere, but a quick scroll down doesn't seem to indicate this at all. Most of the posts I'm seeing have been people talking about why they blog, I'm not seeing self-aggrandizing.
Credibility is a very valuable commodity. It's worth investing in ways to build more of it.
Don't assume people will stumble across your content (though they will eventually via Google). Actively send links to people who you are already engaged in conversation with.
It's not the number of readers you have that matters: it's their quality. I'll take a dozen people reading my stuff who might engage with me usefully or lead to future opportunities over a thousand readers who don't match that criteria.