As much as I enjoy writing and teaching, it feels like a fruitless endeavor when your content doesn't get any visibility. I've written on Twitter, Bluesky, and self-hosted my own blogs (I've even been front-paged on HN before), and each time I give up eventually because it's so hard to build a consistent readerbase.
Of course, I’m self-aware enough to recognize that it might be because my writing is terrible or because I’m covering topics no one cares about. But the point is, I don’t blame people for posting on Twitter instead of going through the effort of setting up a blog. The vast majority of written content gets little to no reach, so choosing the platform with the lowest barrier to entry makes the most sense.
> Of course, I’m self-aware enough to recognize that it might be because my writing is terrible or because I’m covering topics no one cares about.
I've hard similar issues with you, and actually think the opposite to be the case. When I was trying to build an audience, I actually found that it was the low effort nonsense that would get the most traction. At a certain point I was attempting to try to get followers by making a lot of those, and then trying to mix some quality posts in, and had some success. But I started asking myself, to what end? What kind of community am I building that's only interested in low quality junk?
And one thing I noticed about Blogging and Twitter is that they're extremely cliquish. From what I've seen, most people would rather interact with popular Bloggers/Twitter users that they hate or say are idiots than they would with users who have a low follow count/seldom read blog. Sure, there are ways you can juice your follower count so that you're large enough that the big guys will think you're worth enough to pay attention to. But again - what's the point? When you see the complete vapidity of many of these supposed thought leaders, is it really worth it? So what, you can get into the daily Twitter slap fights that they seem to love so much?
I mostly wish their were more places were thoughtful people to find and chat with each other, without having to get involved with petty blog/Twitter vanity games.
That's a good point, and I completely agree. It's not that I was seeking fame or attention, but rather I wanted to put out ideas and find like-minded people (in my case, saas founders/"indiehackers") to talk shop with. Even if it were just a couple people each time, that would be plenty, but I still felt that was beyond reach.
Even this HN reply thread alone is more engagement than I would normally get on social media ;). I'm not saying this to complain, I'm okay with it and it's just the nature of the internet with all its noise. But to get back on topic, I can totally see why people don't choose to maintain a blog as much anymore.
Maybe I'm just not a Real Artist, but I don't understand this focus on "engagement" and "visibility" for casual writers and other online publishers. Assuming they are not doing it for revenue, where their income depends on huge readership, why are they so concerned with how many readers they are getting? When I share some source code on GitHub, I don't care in the slightest whether anybody or nobody uses it. It doesn't really affect me. Same for comments on HN. I get no benefit if 10,000 people read a comment vs. 100.
Whenever you talk about blogging vs. more popular platforms, someone always chimes in with this "but I get so many more eyeballs on Twitter!" and I legitimately don't understand why that matters.
Sure, if you are doing it for a living and your income scales with the number of readers, then yea, of course, it's obvious why you want "engagement."
>Assuming they are not doing it for revenue, where their income depends on huge readership, why are they so concerned with how many readers they are getting?
Are you including indirect revenue in your assumption? There's lots of hopeful incentives that don't immedialy lead to money:
- you get a reputation and get professional gigs or invitations or whatnot. Fame, in a word.
- You get a reputation and that makes it easier to validate your next pitch for some dream idea you have. For better or worse, saying "a lot of people like this" is very effective pitch material.
- you want to meet other like minded people and organically network. These can lead to future opportunities you would have never considered.
- You have some larger societal mission, and that requires society. If you have some altruistic goal of say, teaching everyone to code (to pick a cliche idea), then you need people to participate to realize your goal. Something like Khan Academy still needs to advertise itself.
Your view only really applies to people who want to do Art for themselves. But we are still a social species, we have a natural urge to share our creations, for profit or not.
One of the things is wanting to be part of the discourse. For instance, this has happened to me several times - big players are talking about a particular topic. I dig through the primary sources, and see that many of the assumptions people are making about it are wrong. I try to bring it up, but - where? Blog/Tweet about it, and with no audience you're yelling into the void. Sometimes I try contacting the big players, but like I said, it's a pretty cliquish environment, and if you're a nobody you get ignored. Another option is to spit out a lot of garbage dopamine hits to build up a big enough audience to the point where someone might pay attention to your good points.
In the end I just gave up, because I realized the state of discourse in these spaces is terrible. It's a shame, though, because there are a lot of small, overlooked voices that do similar things, diving through primary source material and data and uncovering very important stuff that's gotten ignored. Occasionally, I've seen these people break stories that eventually get the attention of the national media - but it's hard, and this usually only happens for the really huge stories.
Meanwhile, the big players in these spaces are usually intellectually incurious and busy churning out vapid engagement bait.
>I mostly wish their were more places were thoughtful people to find and chat with each other, without having to get involved with petty blog/Twitter vanity games.
Sadly a lot of that moved to Discord. So, you can't really search it up. You have to simply follow a rabbit trail of people and forums until you find that community. It's tough.
But maybe that semi-elusiveness is a feature. You let anyone in and you may start to fall into that Eternal September where the low quality vapidness wins out
Write for yourself. I (rarely) write on my website because I am terrible at it and I want to improve, though most of my writing is on private journals. I don't check analytics and don't even have comments: I don't care to know what randos have to say. Sometimes a person directly contacts me via email to discuss a post, which I appreciate much more as it feels like talking to a fellow human.
As you started with "I enjoy writing and teaching", just do that. Not everything has to become a venture centred on growth and engagement.
(No offense, just being a bit cheeky here: your profile says you're into influencer marketing.. that might be the reason of your disappointment in your blog's performance. Fuck metrics and KPIs, man. Enjoy what you enjoy.)
Sure, I do journal for myself and do a lot of in-person teaching/coaching, but presumably the original article is geared towards those who still choose to write publicly, which I now rarely do.
No offense taken, but I had been blogging _way_ before my marketing tech startup (which itself is almost a decade old). It's not so much about the metrics, it's that there are far higher-leverage things I can do than publish articles that only a handful of people will ever see.
In any case, advertise your personal blog in your HN profile. I find it's a better source of "organic engagement" than Google or social media, that don't like third-party links as they want to keep people within their walled gardens.
1. What happens if an employee loses access to the wallet their company-ownership-tokens are on? Is it just a matter of re-emitting new tokens and distributing it to them? How are the old tokens handled (e.g. if the wallet is found at a later point in time)?
2. Could you ELI5 how you correlate the company value with token value?
3. Presumably, if everything works out, this allows your team (as well as anyone else) to sell their ownership tokens at any point, but also buy others' tokens that are available on the market as well right? I can see a few issues with this including insider dealing (some people having earlier access to great/awful news before others and making token transactions based on that).
I think it's an interesting idea but I think there are a lot more details that I'd like to see ironed out based on the little that's in the doc (that also has public-write access on it for some reason)
Seems most people in this thread are on roughly the same page, but here's an anecdote to give you an idea of why people are specifically comparing to the west:
Just today I was walking home from Nakameguro station in Tokyo and saw an orphaned protein bar wrapper on the street. I was shocked, it was the first time I'd noticed obvious trash (most likely not intentionally littered) on this street in years.
While living in Manhattan last year, I grew accustomed to holding my nose when walking past actual piles of garbage strewn about the street. This is not figurative as most people have used this phrase throughout this thread—You simply leave your rotting garbage on the street for trucks to pick up (obviously stray trash would get picked up by the wind and tossed into the air, descending upon Manhattan en masse). Only starting last November did they start using actual trash bins.
There was even a day when I saw multiple public garbage cans lit on fire and kicked into the street (in Chelsea, a fairly nice Manhattan neighborhood). Could you possibly imagine that happening anywhere in Tokyo? It would be news coverage for a week.
For all the nuance and exceptions one has to go out of their way to find when talking about trash in places like Tokyo and Singapore, it's unbelievably ages ahead of New York City, the richest city in the world.
A big part of the problem in Manhattan is that most places don't have alleys. There is nowhere for the trash to be left except on the sidewalk.
Some cities have the trash trucks drive around playing music, ice cream truck style, and you are required to bring your trash out to the truck. Logistically that would probably work in Manhattan. Politically I don't think you would ever be able to get it done.
Most places in the US don’t have alleys. The problem isn’t the alleys, it’s the trash cans. Most modern US cities have cans that can be lifted by the truck, and then emptied. NYC, on the other hand, insists on just leaving everything in flimsy bags, open to the rats.
Most places don't have a mostly continuous street wall with little/no setback from the public street/sidewalk.
Part of the problem in Manhattan has been that many buildings really do not have any place they could store those sorts of bins, or at least not in the quantity of them that they need for their trash output.
Manhattan isn't unique — and as far as I've heard, they've recently copied systems in use in Madrid (bins in parking spaces) and London (wheelie bins) to solve the problem.
Trash fires are definitely a rare occurrence in Tokyo, the bigger chaos generation is some bird poking at a trash bag and causing stuff to fly all over.
Though apparently there are about 50 trash truck fires a year? Mostly from batteries in the trash of course…
One of the best things I've ever seen and I watch quite a lot of TV and film. I'm really only making this comment so that a passerby will see this abundant confluence of support for the show and decide to try it out on a whim. Just a fantastic absurdist, surrealist comedy that's also well-acted and well-written.
This is neat, but I was wondering if anyone has a forum for discussing game product development (i.e. less the code that goes into game dev, moreso the decision making that goes into making quality games, is there a better name for what I'm referring to?)
MightyScout is a bootstrapped and successful B2B SaaS in the Influencer Marketing space. We've been fully remote and profitable since we founded it in 2016 and we're an engineering and product-led organization. We help brands and agencies save time by offering a full-suite of automation tools to solve the trickiest, most tedious parts of the influencer marketing workflow.
Edit: Previously this post mentioned an infrastructure/ops role but we've filled that position.
We're also looking for our first growth marketing hire who wants to apply their creativity at a SaaS with greenfield opportunities.
Apply by contacting me (the founder) at kevin@[the root domain] about what gets you excited about your field of work, a bit about your previous working experience, and we'll chat from there :).
I run a successful SaaS and while we have 2 engineers including myself, sometimes there are issues that are outside of my skill level (usually devops or db-related) or just aren't worth it for me to deal with on my own. I would likely pay 3 figures a month (maybe low 4?) just to have the privilege to field technical questions a couple times per month and ensure I can get good advice/help quickly.
It's not that I don't have developer friends, it's moreso that I respect their time and would rather not bother them for tech problems related to my business. I would love to pay for help, but at the same time my friends would never accept my money, so you can see my dilemma. I've used codementor.io in the past but there's a lot of friction in terms of finding a developer/posting a "job", scheduling a time with them, and so on. I'd like to just field these questions into a discord group, feel zero guilt/shame about it, and feel like someone smart will be able to help me within a reasonable time frame.
Of course, whoever figures this out would need to figure out how to balance the costs and the scope of the problems (i.e. I obviously wouldn't be able to have someone just rewrite my entire app), but for example here are some things that I've recently had questions about that I would love to have solved for me that vary in difficulty:
- What CSS do I need to write for me to get these boxes to look this way given that the widths/heights can be variable? (css questions)
- Figuring out what is going on with node-sass and later versions of Webpacker preventing me from compiling assets. (js problems)
- I have no idea how to do this query in an effective manner, here is my data model, can someone help me write an ActiveRecord or SQL query for this? (DB-related questions)
- We have a massive performance bottleneck in this part of the app, here is the business context of why we did it this way, but also why it ended up being really bloated, I'd like some help talking through a better way of fetching and serializing this data for the frontend. (performance problems)
- Our site is going down intermittently and nginx is giving me weird errors (devops problems).
- Here's a feature we want to implement, what do you think is the best way to execute this in terms of tools, packages, and so on? (general consultative questions)
I know these questions on HN are usually fishing for some 100% automated software solution, but after 5 years of building SaaS, this is the one recurring problem I've had.
Edit: To be clear, I'm not looking to hire a consultant specifically, but rather that I think something like this can be productized if someone were ambitious enough to want to assemble this sort of marketplace.
Please contact me. My Background: founder of successful VC backed company with a successful exit. Professor of Practice at University of Wyoming (now) retiring at the end of this semester. I teach full stack development and database. My product company was a database performance tuning and storage management tool. pschlump@gmail.com
I'm curious about this. What if you could pay for a stack overflow bounty? I'm sure there's folks who would happily earn a side hustle answering questions there at $50-$100/ea
Of course you won't strike gold on the first person you talk to. Be smart about it, talk to people who work in an industry you would like to serve (doctors, lawyers, marketers, mechanics, etc.) and figure out the inefficiencies in their day to day life. It's not as hard as you've made it out to be.
