3 ms·

The hardest part of writing is writing something people will like. Hard to anticipate reader tastes.

Syonyk 4y ago
Screw that. Write what you want to read. I hate videos on the internet, so I started my blog (see profile) with an emphasis on text and photos. About seven years later, still going strong. Some of it gets traffic, most doesn't. Some of my absolute "shitposts" are the best performing ones (a Mazda 3 oil change post is consistently the most popular one). I mostly write for myself. Forcing myself to finish a project so I can write about it has been good, and I know I write anything weird about it, so I can just flush state after I've finished writing and clear the mental space for it. On occasion, I'll go search for something on the web and realize that I wrote a post on it years back and had entirely forgotten that I even wrote it, which tells me that the goal of "Flush it out entirely" is working. What's funny is that despite an absolute non-goal of optimizing for traffic, I write about weird enough stuff that I've got a lot of first page Google hits. Often enough, a friend will mention that they were searching for something and found my blog as the top hit. About the only effort I've put into "SEO" is to make sure that my site is tight and fast (webp support, image sets, no Javascript required for function), and I'll occasionally start a "howto" post with a list of the tools required. But I absolutely don't try to guess what people will like. I write what I want to write, and if traffic comes, great. If not, don't care either.
- cs137 4y ago
  I hate videos on the internet, so I started my blog (see profile) with an emphasis on text and photos. Funny enough, I have about 50 Youtube videos in my browser that I've been meaning to watch "some time" but haven't. The problem is that, unlike a book where you can skim for content quality and decide whether or not to read for real, these long video essays are very hard to audit for quality without getting engaged ("hooked") enough to spend significant time. Some of them are fantastic, some are mediocre but good when you don't feel like thinking too much... and a lot of them are 17 minutes surrounding 12 seconds of information. Videos have a similar discoverability problem to novels--it takes time investment to get a sense of whether the content is worth your time at all--but, with video, you can get a sense of quality (if a flawed one, and maybe an outright misleading one) based on pictoral production values.
  - anothernewdude 4y ago
    1.5x speed along with searching transcripts for topics to skip to helps.
iLemming 4y ago
If I'm not mistaken Stanislavksy once said something like: "the worst thing for an actor is to want to be liked by the audience...". I think similarly, great writers don't write for the likes, they just love telling stories. And a good story never dies unappreciated.
- _blu 4y ago
  Personally I like sell-outs, writers who aim to please and are complete morons. It's schlock and I love it. In fat, i'm thinking of paying imbeciles who can't write to write me something so I can enjoy it's utter blandness, incompetence and naivete

Screw that. Write what you want to read. I hate videos on the internet, so I started my blog (see profile) with an emphasis on text and photos. About seven years later, still going strong. Some of it gets traffic, most doesn't. Some of my absolute "shitposts" are the best performing ones (a Mazda 3 oil change post is consistently the most popular one). I mostly write for myself. Forcing myself to finish a project so I can write about it has been good, and I know I write anything weird about it, so I can just flush state after I've finished writing and clear the mental space for it. On occasion, I'll go search for something on the web and realize that I wrote a post on it years back and had entirely forgotten that I even wrote it, which tells me that the goal of "Flush it out entirely" is working. What's funny is that despite an absolute non-goal of optimizing for traffic, I write about weird enough stuff that I've got a lot of first page Google hits. Often enough, a friend will mention that they were searching for something and found my blog as the top hit. About the only effort I've put into "SEO" is to make sure that my site is tight and fast (webp support, image sets, no Javascript required for function), and I'll occasionally start a "howto" post with a list of the tools required. But I absolutely don't try to guess what people will like. I write what I want to write, and if traffic comes, great. If not, don't care either.

cs137 4y ago
I hate videos on the internet, so I started my blog (see profile) with an emphasis on text and photos. Funny enough, I have about 50 Youtube videos in my browser that I've been meaning to watch "some time" but haven't. The problem is that, unlike a book where you can skim for content quality and decide whether or not to read for real, these long video essays are very hard to audit for quality without getting engaged ("hooked") enough to spend significant time. Some of them are fantastic, some are mediocre but good when you don't feel like thinking too much... and a lot of them are 17 minutes surrounding 12 seconds of information. Videos have a similar discoverability problem to novels--it takes time investment to get a sense of whether the content is worth your time at all--but, with video, you can get a sense of quality (if a flawed one, and maybe an outright misleading one) based on pictoral production values.
- anothernewdude 4y ago
  1.5x speed along with searching transcripts for topics to skip to helps.

iLemming 4y ago

If I'm not mistaken Stanislavksy once said something like: "the worst thing for an actor is to want to be liked by the audience...". I think similarly, great writers don't write for the likes, they just love telling stories. And a good story never dies unappreciated.

_blu 4y ago
Personally I like sell-outs, writers who aim to please and are complete morons. It's schlock and I love it. In fat, i'm thinking of paying imbeciles who can't write to write me something so I can enjoy it's utter blandness, incompetence and naivete