3 ms·

I completely agree. In 2009 I got a brief 15 minutes of internet fame through a incredibly badly written essay about... a thing (not relevant here). Seven year

I completely agree. In 2009 I got a brief 15 minutes of internet fame through a incredibly badly written essay about... a thing (not relevant here). Seven years later it's still one of the most popular pages on my website, although luckily it's been eclipsed by better content. If I spent half the time writing more blog content (aargh, my last entry was 2015) than I do here, I'd have a really nice corpus of work. Which people might read! I have seen a tool which allows a HN thread to be used as a comment on a external blog post --- it came up a few weeks back. I don't know if this worked by screen-scraping HN itself or whether there's an API, but either way it suggests that your idea would work.

type0 10y ago
> If I spent half the time writing more blog content (aargh, my last entry was 2015) than I do here, I'd have a really nice corpus of work. Which people might read! I think everyone feels like that sometimes when writing long comment, the problem is all the mental burden that comes with trying to structure a blog post. Another thing is that a blog needs to have a theme or be subject specific otherwise it drowns in the oceans of interwebs.
- WorldMaker 10y ago
  There's also the burden necessary to recontextualize. A comment on HN has at least an article's worth of context and possibly a thread of comments it is in reply to. Any attempt to sideline that into a longer blog post needs to spend "set up time" to contextualize the blog post. Certainly one can start such blog every time with HN links and big blockquotes of text that one is responding too, but such easy approaches tend to invite the question "Why wasn't this just a comment in HN?" To do things right you have to write a proper opening establishing the context through paraphrasing as much as linking/quoting, and that certainly can be a lot more effort than just commenting on HN.
Chris2048 10y ago
One day, I intend to scrape all my HN comments, and turn the best ones into blog posts (if still relevant) :-)

type0 10y ago

> If I spent half the time writing more blog content (aargh, my last entry was 2015) than I do here, I'd have a really nice corpus of work. Which people might read! I think everyone feels like that sometimes when writing long comment, the problem is all the mental burden that comes with trying to structure a blog post. Another thing is that a blog needs to have a theme or be subject specific otherwise it drowns in the oceans of interwebs.

WorldMaker 10y ago
There's also the burden necessary to recontextualize. A comment on HN has at least an article's worth of context and possibly a thread of comments it is in reply to. Any attempt to sideline that into a longer blog post needs to spend "set up time" to contextualize the blog post. Certainly one can start such blog every time with HN links and big blockquotes of text that one is responding too, but such easy approaches tend to invite the question "Why wasn't this just a comment in HN?" To do things right you have to write a proper opening establishing the context through paraphrasing as much as linking/quoting, and that certainly can be a lot more effort than just commenting on HN.

Chris2048 10y ago

One day, I intend to scrape all my HN comments, and turn the best ones into blog posts (if still relevant) :-)