15 ms·

Nobody cares about your blog

• azhenley 3y ago
  I used to think this way too, until I actually started my blog. It immediately got 50k views the first month, so apparently someone cares. Still going after 4 years.
  • alexmolas 3y ago
    Wow, that's impressive. How did you get 50k views in a month? I've been writing for two years and I've got at most 10k visits in all this time
    • azhenley 3y ago
      Make a bunch of people on HN angry. Type inference has usability problems. https://austinhenley.com/blog/typeinference.html https://austinhenley.com/blog/typeinference.html
      • alexmolas 3y ago
        Haha that sounds like a great strategy. I just skimmed over the blog and it looks super interesting, I'll add it to my list of blogs to follow ;)
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• tonetheman 3y ago
  Similar to this https://stevenpressfield.com/2009/10/writing-wednesdays-2-the-most-important-writing-lession-i-ever-learned/ https://stevenpressfield.com/2009/10/writing-wednesdays-2-th...
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• epiccoleman 3y ago
  I like this post. When I restarted my personal site a while back, one thing I found mildly limiting was attaching it to my real name, which made me feel like I needed to present a semi professional vibe. I haven't stopped myself from the odd swear word, but there are things I'd like to write about that I would prefer to remain anonymous. I've been considering starting a more freeform, anonymous site where I could cut loose a bit more. This post is somewhat encouraging in that direction.
  • chomp5977 3y ago
    This is something that's held me back a bit. My blog is at my email domain which means anyone I talk to could go read it. That means potential employers. I might set up another domain for those topic that I start to write and abandon because it's not something I want attached to my professional image.
• 8bitsrule 3y ago
  Lots of people throughout history - with names that are well-known today - have written at length about topics for which, in their day, the audience was very small. Herodotus, for one early example. Same is true for scores of important discoveries. The audience for complex math proofs is very small. At first. Same applies to a lot of creative works ... paintings, photos, poetry. van Gogh sold almost nothing. A composer once asked me 'what do you care more about - how many are listening, or who is listening?" Amazing how many blogs have shut off their feedback.
  • Spivak 3y ago
    I feel like it's a weird question that really wants you to say who but the situations where it's actually better is vanishingly small. If you want to be a professional musician you're way better off having a large fanbase making music snobs turn their noses up to then be a brilliant composer with 1000 monthly listeners on Spotify. Van Gogh realized none of the spoils of his work. I couldn't care less if I'm famous or influential after I'm dead, I only get these 80 years or so. Being the influential underground artist that inspired the people who got famous is an empty victory. Even for something as simple as a blog having a large following is exposure. You have a better chance of finding quality discussion given more eyeballs.
  • antegamisou 3y ago
    I don't think comparing the writings of probably the most prominent figure of history writing to the platitudes (which is the 99% of 'blogs' being promoted here) generated by the average techbro grifter is the way to go with this...
    • GuardianCaveman 3y ago
      2000 years ago Herodotus was talking and writing and nobody cared and his buddy was probably like, hey man remember that one guy from 300 years ago nobody knew who he was but look at him now! Everyone knows his name! And then some snarky roman was like, "I don't think comparing the great works of that guy from 300 years ago and the platitudes of this Herodotus guy is the way to go with this... " and he used the ellipsis even to indicate how little he respected this opinion to imply that he would say more but really what's the point with fools like these...
• ilaksh 3y ago
  This makes a lot of sense, and these are the reasons I had a blog for a few years. But I looked at my analytics and realized that it was almost certainly literally only bots and my brother very occasionally reading the blog. So I stopped.
  • alexmolas 3y ago
    This is exactly my case as well! Don't stop writing just because of that, having a blog is cool even if nobody reads it. And you never know when it's going to be read anyway.
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• Ayesh 3y ago
  I'm just an average programmer, and English isn't even my native language. But i had a blog since I was 18, and although it went through some new domains, some of the small blog posts evolved to more bigger things that I still affectionately work on. - I wrote a blog post about a CloudFlare when they were just starting, which landed me a gig to provide a technical review for a printed book. - Some reverse engineered router/phone IMEI unlock codes lead to a complete website to generate them. - An Instagram photo/video download tool that got so popular Meta sent me a UDPR and a C&D demand to shut down. - Various talks in conferences, some that even paid me. - Small web sites that spun off to their own web sites. I would argue that an average person is exactly who should have a blog. Because, majority of us are average, and having a blog or a blog post related to a particular topic (even a mediocre one) gives the boost to stand you out. Some of these opportunities may not generate a lot of money, if at all. But I like the excitement I get from them.
  • qumpis 3y ago
    Why did you start the blog? Was the reason to stand out or something else?
  • moneywoes 3y ago
    How did you drive traffic to this blog?
• andreyk 3y ago
  "But all of these things [reasons why people don't care about your blog] are not a problem, because you shouldn’t care even a little bit about what other think." I mean... Maybe you should care sometimes? Maybe it is good to try and not repeat others and try to express original and useful thoughts? I have written some stuff in the past that was purely for me, but have also written explainers and other stuff that was actually meant to be of benefit to people who found or read it* (even if very few people did read it). This all-or-nothing stance is kind of silly. The title is also rather misleading, but I guess that's good for upvotes... * I won't link to it as I don't mean for this to be a plug, but just as an example - I wrote "Things Everyone Should Know About Depression", because I found most articles of that sort lacking. And I put in a lot of work into making that a good post because I did care about its impact on potential readers, and I do think it probably helped some people. Not everything has to be just written with only yourself in mind, even if fundamentally the reason to write should be that you want to write moreso than for the potential of getting lots of readers.
  • 50 3y ago
    > I mean... Maybe you should care sometimes? Maybe it is good to try and not repeat others and try to express original and useful thoughts? reminded of dfw: "true heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care — with no one there to see or cheer. this is the world."
• NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
  The original blogs were about utterly mundane topics. One of the favorites was a guy who blogged what he ate for lunch every day. There may or may not have been photographs. And the audiences came because the WWW was a novel medium, and we just thought it was hilarious to have such a personal glimpse into a minor feature of a stranger's life. My supervisor at my last job said I should start a blog. I suppose because I always ate at restaurants and I liked describing the food and stuff. But I'm not really a foodie, or eloquent like a food critic. Perhaps she just said that because I talk so much.
  • dylan604 3y ago
    > personal glimpse into a minor feature of a stranger's life. I feel sorry for people that feel this way about lunch. Lunch is sacred. It’s the part of the day to get away from work. Nothing at work is so important that you can’t get away from it. If you disagree, wait a few years, you’ll come around. I don’t care if it’s just a spam sandwich.
    • Proven 3y ago
      [dead]
• forrestthewoods 3y ago
  Agree with the title. Strong disagree with every bullet point. Those bullet points are seemingly true for the authors blog. But they don’t have to be true for yours! Blogs are superior to conferences imho. A decent blog post will get about 10,000 views via HN/Reddit/Twitter/etc. A conference will only have dozens to hundreds of attendees. I only make a few posts per year. I mostly avoid hot takes. Most of my posts I could have turned into conference talks. But conferences are kinda gross and blog posts are better so meh.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
  "You can say whatever the fuck you want." Maybe personal websites should be the "public square", not third party "social media" websites. Most folks probably won't bother with maintaining personal websites because they do not have anything meaningful to say. Instead, "social media" websites encourage all people, many of whom are only using these sites to communicate with friends and family, who otherwise have nothing worthwhile to say to the general public, to "share" their every thought. All in the name of exploiting these serfs/sharecroppers as ad targets for obscene profit. We have seen the results. It isn't pretty. Just because "[y]ou can say whatever the fuck you want" to the entire web does not necessarily mean everyone will. At least, this is how I remember the web before so-called "tech" companies and "social media" hijacked it. The social media websites are desperate for others to create content for them, for free.
  • jmye 3y ago
    Absolutely. Even if everyone got their shit together to create a personal blog, you’re not going to find much readership if the sum total of your posting is mean, petty, one line trash talk, and whatever the blog version of subtweeting is. Discourse would instantly improve over the social media sewer (personal irony/hypocrisy notwithstanding).
    • 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
      You can't hide behind Section 230 if it's your own website with your own content. If facing potential personal liability, there is a disincentive to trash talk on a personal website. Whereas with social media there is an incentive to trash talk as it apparently leads to "engagement".
    • DoItToMe81 3y ago
      'Everyone' had a personal blog a couple decades ago, and all it turned out to be was concentrated narcissism that was taken over by microblogging, which was all the same with none of the maintenance effort. Social media very much has its roots in bloggers who couldn't see the internet as much more than an extension of their living rooms.
    • 3y ago
• 38 3y ago
  body { font-size: 2vh; } please, PLEASE dont do this. this completely fucks peoples ability to change the size using Ctrl+mousewheel
  • the-printer 3y ago
    That has to be a mistake.
  • julianlam 3y ago
    Text is absolutely minuscule on my television. Had to end up using Reader mode to even read the blog post. But that's ok, he doesn't care about what we think ;)
  • zzo38computer 3y ago
    I agree. Don't use font sizes relative to the viewport size. Furthermore, it is unlikely that anything should ever be relative to the vertical viewport size (except in paged media, perhaps). Font sizes should not be relative to the horizontal or vertical viewport size. However, maybe there is exception if you want to set a maximum font size based on a percentage of the width so that all of the letters will fit. But, in my opinion it would usually be better to just avoid setting them by CSS anyways so that it uses the user settings or default settings instead, which should hopefully be set up for the specific display and user. (I often just disable CSS because of the mess they have made.)
• rootw0rm 3y ago
  the main reason i have my little blog is to motivate me and shame me into actually finishing something
• stevenicr 3y ago
  There a short time when google and other search engines promoted blogs in the main results. There was a time when sites promoted blogs via web rings and blog rolls - recent discussion -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36728870 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36728870 Google penalizing sites for linking to other sites and people getting paranoid about bleeding pagerank and getting penalized for unknowingly linking to 'bad neighborhoods' - quickly changed how many people would peruse your blog.. Removing blog rolls, web rings, pingomatic, technorati... some blogs adapted, most did not.. google is the reason blogs aren't read these days. On top of things mentioned in the post.
  • dylan604 3y ago
    Why write a blog when you can make a YouTube channel instead. You’re sure to get ranked well by Googs then. Hell, why write a blog when you can just TikTok it? There’s lots of reasons not covered in the blog about not blogging trying to convince why to blog.
    • impissedoff1 3y ago
      Because gaping mouth video clickbait is dumb. How often do you even see a video cover with someone having a closed mouth and normal facial expression?
      • corobo 3y ago
        Presumably if you're allowed to write a blog even though it's boring etc etc you're also well within your rights to not gape all over your YouTube thumbnail.
      • rocqua 3y ago
        These days I think about 15% of the thumbnails I see are gaping mouth. That would be easy to tweak down by stopping with watching LTT. There is plenty of space for quality and thought out content on YouTube. Especially if you don't need to make a living. The kicker to me, seems the extra time required to get production value to a tolerable point.
• killjoywashere 3y ago
  I disagree. Nobody cares about your blog … until they do. You might think everything you ever said could trivially be published on the front page of the New York Times, and yet, a journalist courting a well-placed source, who happens to not like you and is in the habit of working with journalists, might find bits in there, over time, to use against you. I’m not saying you shouldn’t write a blog. But keep in mind your future self’s wellbeing. Your very future, responsible for hundreds of employees, 2 kids, a spouse, and significant economic or national responsibilities.
  • flashback2199 3y ago
    Exactly, and the author's list of reasons "why you should care about your blog" are reasons to care about your _journal_ because none of them argue in favor of making what you write public on the web...
• devd00d 3y ago
  You had me there in the beginning.
• OldGuyInTheClub 3y ago
  A blog is still a fine thing to have if you don't have any expectations for it. A couple of times a year I am moved by something I've seen or heard enough to post about it. The act of turning that need into a few coherent paragraphs is very satisfying even though no one reads it. But, someone might someday under a bizarre set of circumstances. It's a message-in-a-bottle without contaminating an actual ocean.
• sweetjuly 3y ago
  Kinda a strange post that I don't quite agree with. Particularly: > You’re not an expert in your field, otherwise you wouldn’t be publishing in a blog, but writing papers and giving interviews. Blogs and self-pub are often the only ways some information is shared by nature of the fact that academic publications don't publish things that don't obviously advance the state-of-the-art. For example, one area I'm close with is computer security. While academia does some quite interesting work here, most major journals balk at the papers which discuss security mitigation defeats unless they're particularly zany (say, breaking ASLR using transient side channel attacks). Blog posts which detail how these mitigations work (ex. Siguza's post on Apple's proprietary APRR [1]) and how they can be defeated (ex. Project Zero's post which builds on Siguza's work to explore how APRR can be defeated in Safari's JIT [2]) provide considerable value to both security researchers, people who develop mitigations, and software people in general who are interested in learning how attackers think. These sorts of works don't really belong in journals but that doesn't make them any less valuable. [1] https://blog.siguza.net/APRR/ https://blog.siguza.net/APRR/ [2] https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2020/09/jitsploitation-three.html https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2020/09/jitsploitatio...
  • Agentlien 3y ago
    Another great example is graphics studies of video games, a trend started by Adrian Courrèges[1]. I learned a lot from his blog and it really motivated me to start doing my own similar analyses of games I enjoy. I mean, I'm already comfortable using these tools from work, so why not? Maybe I'll even post about it on my blog, sometime... [1] http://www.adriancourreges.com http://www.adriancourreges.com
  • cyclotron3k 3y ago
    All four of those bullet points are flawed, and I think that's the point. They are _perceived_ reasons to not blog, rather than actual, legitimate reasons. That's my take anyway.
    • Agentlien 3y ago
      That would have made sense if the second half would actually refute them. Instead it seems to assume they are truths but argue that you shouldn't care that your thoughts are unoriginal and others laugh at your stupidity.
• travisporter 3y ago
  Sometimes I feel the entire field of mathematics is like this lol. But who cares. It’s refreshing to see something original.
• sircastor 3y ago
  >If you have lost time solving a superspecific problem then you need to write about it, it can happen that you end up being someone’s hero some day. Aside from ramblings, most of my blog is various projects I’ve done and solutions I’ve found, and I continue to refer back to my own writing frequently to see how I accomplished something.
  • geerlingguy 3y ago
    This is the majority of my blog as well. Basically public field notes.
• Agentlien 3y ago
  I blog about some things I do at work. A mix of things I found particularly interesting and some others asked me to write about. It's partly a way to get approval to talk about some work details outside of the office, but also a bit of a behind the scenes thing from games I work on because I love reading that from others. While I enjoyed this post, I can't say I agree with the motivating bullet points. > Your blog is not original. [...] You’re just probably repeating things you’ve read in another place. I'm usually not writing fluffy think pieces, but rather detailing specific technical solutions from a game I worked on. My solutions may not be original, but the context definitely is and this serves as a vehicle to share details about my work and start discussions of it with my friends. > You’re not an expert in your field I am certainly not a leading expert, but I do have expert knowledge which I know some find interesting and have learned from. Several blog posts are based on lectures I've held at work which fellow programmers seemed to really enjoy, so I'm happy I get to post about them publicly. > You are only showing the world how stupid you are. > If someone, at some point, cares about your blog will be only to criticize it. These two points were my biggest worries before I started my blog. Luckily, it's proven unfounded. People generally have positive things to say about it and the one time someone questioned something led to an interesting discussion from which I learned a valuable trick I've since used in my work. I even published a tool I made at work and got some encouraging comments and a few stars on GitHub, which is fun given how ridiculously niche it was.
• voytec 3y ago
  > Nobody cares about your blog I do. I write not just for others but also myself. My little blog of few posts exists to satisfy my expectations and fulfill my rare urge of writing and the need of getting some thoughts out of my head. As long as nobody cares enough about my blog to monetize it, I'm perfectly fine with the status quo. > If someone, at some point, cares about your blog will be only to criticize it. And that's great! I may be able to learn something or at least I may get to know different view points.
• iopq 3y ago
  My blog has some of the latest English-language information about running a proxy that is resistant to state-level blocking
• patrick451 3y ago
  I don't have a blog, but I learn a lot from people who do. The OP seems to think that if your idea isn't novel, it's not worth writing down. Much less share with the public That's only true in the bizarre, petty world of the Academic, where the currency is novelty rather than quality of exposition. To the rest of us plebs just trying to learn something, reading four different explanations of the same (academically) boring thing is useful.
  • alexmolas 3y ago
    Author here. I don't believe that, these are things I was telling myself to stop writing. It doesn't mean I believe they're right, but these were just excuses I was making to stop writing.
• deleted 3y ago
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• revskill 3y ago
  My blog at https://revskill.dev https://revskill.dev is not actually a blog. It's just my own playground to play with stuff i'm passionate about. I don't care if it fits any standards, it's not about "People don't care" (i'm sure people do care if they want to read more about your writings), it's that you don't care what people think about your blogs that matter more.
  • bool3max 3y ago
    None of your posts are loading for me.
    • jaylittle 3y ago
      Can confirm, that blog appears to be completely broken. No javascript errors in the console and turning off ad blocking in Brave doesn't help. /shrug
      • revskill 3y ago
        My blog is no js.
    • revskill 3y ago
      Sorry, there's some bug on data fetching. Let me fix. Thanks.
• thomashabets2 3y ago
  The blog lists pros and cons. I disagree with all cons. > There are hundreds of blogs out there, what makes you think yours is different? Because it's mine. My friends care. Recruiters and hiring managers have cared (in a good way). > You’re just probably repeating things you’ve read in another place. Maybe. But some are hidden in a locked library basement behind a door labelled "beware of the leopard". The information is not useful there. Also I sometimes write the documentation I wish existed before I learned. Maybe it was written, but not in the way I found useful. If ever someone who thinks like me reads it, it'll save them more time than I took to write it. And people have thanked me, so I guess they exist. > You’re not an expert in your field, otherwise you wouldn’t be publishing in a blog, but writing papers and giving interviews. So there is no need for teachers and textbook authors, because they don't advance state of the art? And actually, when I've asked questions, I've had people refer me back to my own blog, as if it's a reference. (I'd not forgotten, I was asking about the next step) > You are only showing the world how stupid you are. I do that every day. The only way to become (and therefore look) smart is to look stupid. :-) > If someone, at some point, cares about your blog will be only to criticize it. No. The only real criticism I get for my blog is from Bitcoin idiots telling me I'm stupid, but they never "have the time" to explain what exactly I'm not getting. Sure, buddy. > Your work is trash, and exposing it will make people notice you’re trash as well I'd rather leave a mark of who I actually am, than some fake Instagram persona lie of who I am.
  • alexmolas 3y ago
    Author here. Tbh I don't actually believe all the cons, these are things I was telling myself to stop writing. It doesn't mean I believe they're right, but these were just excuses I was making to stop writing. The list of pros are the ones that were useful for me to continue writing on my blog :)
    • ozim 3y ago
      Looks like a lot of people read first list, got triggered started writing comment and did not think about full scope of the text.
• fmajid 3y ago
  I blog very sporadically, a post per quarter or so, but write about stuff where there isn’t an answer on the Internet. 20 years ago, somehow I had become the US expert on how to pair your Palm Pilot with your Bluetooth-enabled cell phone to connect to the Internet using GPRS for email, SSH or basic web browsing (even then the bane of JavaScript had made browsing unusable on the pre-iPhone browsers). That’s because cell carriers, uninterested in data, had no instructions to tech support on how to make this work, and indeed tried to suppress it. I can’t tell how much appreciative feedback I got for it: https://blog.majid.info/bluetooth-blues-redux/ https://blog.majid.info/bluetooth-blues-redux/
• uwagar 3y ago
  sadly, the 100 things before he dies link turns up a 404.
  • megous 3y ago
    wayback machine
  • alexmolas 3y ago
    Fixed :)
• vouaobrasil 3y ago
  I will go one step further: nobody cares about 99% of content, blog or not. Content creation today is not about people caring about said content, but about creating little islands on the internet for other people to expose their own narcissism or to help people create their own content that nobody cares about.
• deleted 3y ago
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• kaba0 3y ago
  I think many people failed to get the message of the author: it’s not a discouragement to blogging. The first list is more of your “inner voice” that tells you to stop/don’t even start writing. For me personally it did help a bit, as I was thinking about writing my first blog post for a long time, and I also have been fighting with quite a lot of items on the first list. (Especially about the being considered dumb part). While I find the title a bit click-bait-y and that’s likely the reason why many didn’t read the whole thing/misunderstood, by critiquing I would just confirm one of the negative items, so let’s leave it that :D
  • alexmolas 3y ago
    You completely got it right! I have to admit the title is a little click-bait-y, but it's my blog and I do what I want ;) Every time I've shared my posts with other people I've received critiques and comments of people telling that what I wrote is dumb. But I've also received a lot of comments of people with constructive comments and I've learnt a lot from them. And in my experience the good is much better than the bad. So I encourage you to go there and write your first post!! And please, share it with us once you finish it please :)
    • kaba0 3y ago
      Thanks for the motivation!
    • nextaccountic 3y ago
      Your blog post reads like a depression simulator, or rather, a simulation of the overly critical internal monologue and rumination of persons with depression
      • slenk 3y ago
        Is that a bad thing? That's just him maybe.
        • nextaccountic 3y ago
• _xivi 3y ago
  I think the reason for all these misconceptions comes down to prejudice. People try to group personal websites/blog into one bucket according to a perceived notion they have. Many have these stereotypes: - personal website = portfolio and trying to look special - personal blog = you're some sort of aspiring failed writer Social media and blogging platforms have made the idea of personal websites so alien now to people.
• chantepierre 3y ago
  Nobody reads my blog. But last week, someone contacted me via e-mail to tell me that a workaround I published to run interferometry software under MacOS was now not needed anymore because he made the porting work to run this software natively. I then realized I ranked high for "<software> mac" and updated my post so people easily find his work. That's a win to me !
• DoreenMichele 3y ago
  Yeah, you need internal motives to write regularly. If it's entirely about playing to an audience, you probably won't sustain it.
• hsn915 3y ago
  The notion is highly misguided. What actually hides being it is: unless everyone cares about it, then no one cares. What if only one in a thousand people care? That's a huge number. You could have 10k or 100k readers. It's a minuscule number compared to everyone, but it's a huge number for a blog.
• nvarsj 3y ago
  Hi Alex, great blog post. I know exactly what you’re saying! I should blog more too - it is time consuming but it always makes me feel good. Like you say, we should blog for ourselves foremost and not worry about what others think. It’s always a net positive no matter what. P.S. I also like the design of your blog, I might steal a few ideas :).
  • alexmolas 3y ago
    I'm glad you like it :) I just redesigned the blog completely, I'm happy you like it, feel free to copy all the ideas you want!
• aksss 3y ago
  Write your blog - be the Internet content you want to see. I keep one, it's focused, highly obscure, and a boring but nerdy niche interest that depends on a lot of research into materials mostly out of print. I share what I learn as I learn it. It's a labor of love, but I like it and occasionally others appreciate it.
• HighlandSpring 3y ago
  Writing blog posts is the lowest barrier of entry there is to contributing to the sum total of knowledge for some particular keywords, problem space. Sometimes even, years of blogging gets edited and expanded upon into an entire book but I suppose no one cares about those either.
• bullen 3y ago
  That is why my blog is written from scratch, web server and all: http://sprout.rupy.se http://sprout.rupy.se
• azubinski 3y ago
  Yes, your blog is not interesting to anyone. Even the search engines are not interested in it, because they are not looking for something interesting. And HRs are not interested in it, because HRs generally do formal work and they are not interested in details. And the worst person in any crowd is the one who sticks to everyone "did you read my blog?". It's true. But people blog and will do it because...
• 2-718-281-828 3y ago
  there are two points missing at the end: - maybe a few people will actually enjoy your blog. - maybe it turns out your blog is going to be one of the very few which are actually successful on a broader scale. --- for me it seems blogs are no longer fitting into my life or how i use the internet. but i still fondly remember the mornings during my days as a student more than 15 years ago where i have been regularly reading blogs. mainly (all german): - basic thinking - nerdcore - law blog
• _moof 3y ago
  What timing! I just started an electronics blog and had to defeat all the same inner voices. "I'm not the best." "Someone else is doing cooler/smarter/more interesting/more creative stuff." "I'm just going to embarrass myself." It's amazing how mean we can be to ourselves. My site is part blog, part lab notebook. It's all the stuff I had to figure out to get something to work. It's a chronicle of the mistakes I make and the successes informed by those mistakes. It helps me organize my thoughts and check my knowledge. If that's helpful to someone, awesome! I would love that. But if not, that's ok. I still get something out of it.
  • omginternets 3y ago
    I’ll read it! I definitely know less about this stuff than you. Can you share a link?
    • _moof 3y ago
      Happy to: https://blog.electron.fail https://blog.electron.fail
• mbwgh 3y ago
  > You can say whatever the fuck you want. It’s your blog, you don’t need to follow any rules. I just cursed and you can’t do nothing about it, because this is my blog and I do what I want. This will give you a sense of freedom that’s really cool imho. This is unfortunately not true in many parts of the world. Even here in Germany, any blog, including private ones, need to come with an imprint section including your full name, residential address, mobile phone number et cetera. Even though realistically, nobody would care if I omitted this imprint section, it makes you think again whether you should actually go trough with self-hosting a blog. In other countries it's of course way worse (think censorship and social scoring), so blogging just because you can seems to me as good a reason as any.
  • rmuratov 3y ago
    I did not know about it. Sounds like a violation of privacy.
  • omginternets 3y ago
    > Even here in Germany, any blog, including private ones, need to come with an imprint section including your full name, residential address, mobile phone number et cetera. This is likely a moment of cultural incongruence, but this is outright shocking to me. Generally, when I am shocked by such things, it’s because I’m unaware of the reasoning behind them. What is the reasoning behind this law, exactly?
    • swilliamsio 3y ago
      It piqued my curiousity too so I had a little look. It's called an Impressum. I think OP is incorrect that personal websites need to list a phone number and address - it seems to just apply to commercial entities. https://law.stackexchange.com/a/23395 https://law.stackexchange.com/a/23395 https://www.ionos.co.uk/digitalguide/websites/digital-law/a-case-for-thinking-global-germanys-impressum-laws/ https://www.ionos.co.uk/digitalguide/websites/digital-law/a-...
      • mbwgh 3y ago
• dgb23 3y ago
  I think there’s an even bigger wisdom in here. We tend to overburden ourselves with these negative thoughts all the time. What other people might think, and other forms of self sabotage. In a sense it’s a good sign. It’s good to care and put ourselves into the shoes of others. It’s also good to be self-critical, it’s a powerful tool that prevents us from stupidity and harm. Being critical also helps us to develop taste and make things of higher quality. But it can easily be too pessimistic, too hindering and too lazy. It’s so easy to say „It‘s going to suck anyway, let’s not do anything.“ But that’s not being self critical, it’s being lazy and self harming. To build confidence, one has to actually do something and keep at it. Let self-criticism be a tool used iteratively and not a burden that prevents us from going forward. It’s the priorities and goals, our inner value system that helps us choose whether we do something or not.
• guy98238710 3y ago
  > To release ideas that you have in your head and that you need to get out. This. Getting ideas out of my head is the reason not only for blogging but also for all my opensource work. BTW, never sign an NDA. Locking ideas in your head will drive you nuts.
• guy98238710 3y ago
  I would add a point to the pros: - Even in the (very unlikely) case that nobody actually reads your post, language models will. They have to, because there's never enough training data. Your ideas will be merged into the text that LLMs synthesize and perhaps that will save someone's day.
  • lapcat 3y ago
    I would add that to the cons. You just convinced me to stop blogging. ;-)
    • guy98238710 3y ago
      Why? What's wrong with having others promote your ideas for free?
      • lapcat 3y ago
        Promote? Will I get any credit? I doubt that.
        • guy98238710 3y ago
          Personally, I don't care about getting credit, but if you do, then avoiding blogging wouldn't get you any credit either.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• darkwater 3y ago
  Yeah, exactly. That's actually how all forms of public engagement should be. Do it for yourself, if people will like it, well, it's an extra bonus.
• KronisLV 3y ago
  > You can say whatever the fuck you want. It’s your blog, you don’t need to follow any rules. I don't quite know about this. I certainly recall the tone of some of my own older blog articles being such that it makes me embarrassed now. Like when our national auth system went down at around 50 RPS and prevented COVID vaccination signups, with around 8k EUR a month expenses for maintaining it, I chose some strong language to describe that situation: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/manavakcina-lv-and-apturicovid-lv https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/manavakcina-lv-and-apturico... I'm still leaving the article up because of that being how I felt at the time, but nowadays I try to be a bit more charitable with my assumptions and a tad more milquetoast/neutral in my tone. Other than that, I mostly agree with the article about having your blog, it's nice to have a place to jot down some notes and thoughts sort of in public, without a lot of pressure on you.
• BiteCode_dev 3y ago
  99% of everything ever written is crap, so you need filtering the huge quantity of brain manure the humanity keeps producing. And hand written blogs by somebody for several years is very high in my filter list to check out something. So I care very much about your blog. Besides, the best way to make sure there is more quality content in the world is to produce it. And that's why I write https://bitecode.dev https://bitecode.dev. Because I want others to have what I wish I had when I needed it.
• vbezhenar 3y ago
  Over the years I made numerous notes and lost those notes over and over again. So this year I decided to just put those notes into my website. I don't think that they'll be useful to anybody but me (although I'll be happy if someone would save some time learning from those notes). It's pretty empty right now, although I hope to slowly build it this way. So basically it's my storage of information which I spent some time researching for. And some place to express my approach to design is always nice to have. At my work we always hire designer who will produce shitty (IMO) flashy designs that I have to implement. Well, I like empty and content-rich designs, without custom fonts or heavy CSS, almost pure minimum with very few touches.
• lloydatkinson 3y ago
  That’s a lot of projection and built up anger.
• jxf 3y ago
  > You’re just probably repeating things you’ve read in another place. This one is a very poor argument to me. Should textbooks not exist because they're just "repeating things you've read in another place"?
• t0bia_s 3y ago
  Whenever I decided to write a blog post, I realize how terribly I know the topic and how worthless it is when finished. So writing for myself doesn't make sense. If I would write it for my close friends, I would rather make conversation with them about this topic, but then I'm not sure how beneficial those conversations would be since it's not topic that they are educated enough. So making blog for my friends about topics that they are not interested enough doesn't make sense to me either. Only reason why write blog for me is to manage my notes and write down my thoughts. But I can do it privately as well. So it brings me back to first. I would say you need some kind of narcissism to write blog.
• ahmadmijot 3y ago
  I don't care if nobody cares about my writing. I just need somewhere to vent.
• Tade0 3y ago
  As it stands nobody can even care about my blog, because I foolishly hosted a badly secured Wordpress instance on its subdomain(side project), so Google put my domain on a list of addresses trying to scam people. I've applied for it to be delisted, but since this is Google, I don't think that will ever happen. What I'm saying is that if you ever use Wordpress for anything - especially blogging - you might want to start with setting a strong password, so that you don't land with spam posts from bots who cracked it. Was a nice demonstration of password safety to the client though.
• crashingintoyou 3y ago
  > It’s cool to maintain a blog, even it’s only from the technical perspective. I do run a blog, but having to ensure that it gets patched in a reasonable amount of time is to me the one significant drawback of the process. I'm really not looking forward to the next time I'm forced into a major-release upgrade (deadline is early 2025 given that I'm running Drupal 7).
• thenerdhead 3y ago
  Not true. I care about my blog.
• donatj 3y ago
  I have two blogs. The first[1] was started in high school in 2001 by myself and a bunch of friends, and outdates the popular use of the term “blog”. The domain name was chosen because I was just punching things I enjoyed into a site that gave out free domain names, I liked the band Oasis as a teenager, and it was available. I keep it alive mostly for nostalgia and posterity. I post updates for major milestones like the 20 year anniversary in 2021 but it otherwise sees disuse. It contains a lot of teenage angst and bad political takes of kids going through 9/11 and its aftermath. A couple friends with very “professional” careers understandably had me remove their last names in recent years. The second blog[2] is a “professional” blog I started in 2009 a couple years into my career. “You are only showing the world how stupid you are.” strikes waaay too close to home on this one. Early on I wrote about things I had a somewhat tenuous grasp on. To wit, the VERY first post is an angry rant about JSONP being hard to parse on the backend, “not being valid JSON”, and being unsafe because when used as intended requires remote code execution. This was all because I was peaved about the Flickr API returning JSONP. I much later found out that while it did return JSONP by default when requesting JSON, there was a flag to disable it - thus eliminating the triggering event of my rant. Arguably a stupid default but I should have been better at reading the docs. It’s a really cringe inducing rant to look back on. That’s just one example, there are a fair number of those. I have unlisted (still available by direct link) a handful over the years that I felt had very limited merit. My blogs are both entirely custom applications, the prior ported over the years from PHP 3 all the way to PHP 7.4 and soon 8.x. In recent years friends have largely converted their own blogs to Jekyll and Hugo and the thought felt very foreign to me. It took me a long while to identify in myself why I hated the idea so much. It hit me that getting posts published isn’t my goal. It’s the sheer joy and creative outlet of building and maintaining these little entirely custom applications. They’re my own little world I can constantly tweak, with no code review or other people’s opinions. I get to just try out ideas and potentially fail in a consequence free way. That in my book is the main reason to have a blog, getting to build and maintain something personal. 1. https://oasisband.net https://oasisband.net 2. https://donatstudios.com https://donatstudios.com
  • grzm 3y ago
    > The first was started in high school in 2001 by myself and a bunch of friends, and outdates the term “blog”. That’s definitely early, but the term blog predates it by a couple of years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog#History > The term "weblog" was coined by Jorn Barger on December 17, 1997. The short form "blog" was coined by Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the word weblog into the phrase we blog in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com in May 1999. Shortly thereafter, Evan Williams at Pyra Labs used "blog" as both a noun and verb ("to blog", meaning "to edit one's weblog or to post to one's weblog") and devised the term "blogger" in connection with Pyra Labs' Blogger product, leading to the popularization of the terms.
• p0d 3y ago
  Everyone is I :-) My blog is 15 years old and entirely private. It's a great way to process thoughts. Looking back, I am amazed at how often I revisit the same questions and musings. This realisation of recursion has led me to create mini manifestos. For example, a lot of my financial thinking/planning is summed up in half a dozen points in one of my blog posts. I would recommend blogging for circular thinkers as myself as a way of maturing your thought process.
• phendrenad2 3y ago
  Maybe I'm imagining it, but I seem to recall that it used to he possible to host Wordpress or Drupal without getting hacked within the first fee months because you missed a point release upgrade.
• omershapira 3y ago
  > You’re not an expert in your field, otherwise you wouldn’t be publishing in a blog, but writing papers and giving interviews At least in the field I'm in (computer graphics), the penalty of publishing is months; blogposts (and patents) cost days. Papers have perverse incentives in style and fact presentation. Where do you prefer the knowledge ending up?
• zagrebian 3y ago
  > Your blog is not original. Wrong. Literally everyone can have an original idea. Is this article parody?
• bandyaboot 3y ago
  > But all of these things are not a problem, because you shouldn’t care even a little bit about what other think. I think this is one of those things that people say without thinking it through. I certainly agree that you should not care enough about what people think to allow it to cause you to not share your thoughts and opinions. But as a general and absolute rule, it’s a great recipe for never learning anything from anyone and having no friends.
• jaylittle 3y ago
  I love this post. This perfectly lays out why I have operated my own blog for over 20 years now. I liking having my own space where I can say what I want. There is also real value in me going back and reading what I said a year, five years or even ten years back. My blog posts have proven to be a useful way of reminding future Jay of what past Jay was going through as I have a tendency to look at the past through rose tinted glasses. This morning's blog post is no different, though more self-deprecating than most of the things I have written. https://jaylittle.com/post/view/2023/7/i-am-on-the-mcnulty-spectrum https://jaylittle.com/post/view/2023/7/i-am-on-the-mcnulty-s... I dare to dream of a world where I can reread that years later and say, "It's okay past Jay - it's all going to work out for the best, just stay the course"
• okeuro49 3y ago
  Dear people writing small blogs about some obscure bug you fixed: please continue doing so, because I often find them on the long tail and they're often better than Stackoverflow.
• nithinbekal 3y ago
  I started writing my blog as a devlog for myself refer to later, and didn't expect anyone else to care. However, it eventually let to a job interview that in turn led to my current job. The team I joined worked on a Ruby codebase, and there were people with background in other languages, where method visibility worked differently. A short post I wrote [1] was being shared around in the team, and the manager decided to interview me. Funnily enough, that same post was quoted to me by a colleague during a code review a few months later! So it turned out that it's still working as intended - as a reference for myself. :) [1] https://nithinbekal.com/posts/ruby-protected-methods/ https://nithinbekal.com/posts/ruby-protected-methods/
• rambojohnson 3y ago
  oh wonderful, some neckbeard edge lord from his blog telling me my blog doesn't matter. I'm all eyes and ears!
• user6723 3y ago
  I post cool shit on my blog and it got me laid a couple times. I am gonna keep posting.
• hamzakat 3y ago
  > Nobody cares about your blog That's exactly why I prefer blogs over the fake social media. Being exposed to people's perspective makes one prone to show what people want, not what he truly want and believe. Keep blogging and writing.
• antigonemerlin 3y ago
  I like the meme of the personal webpage, which has sort of fallen by the wayside with the rise of social media. It's one of those ideas that spreads because you see other people doing it: You get the OG blogs still up with 90s styling, student blogs with like 2 posts, and longform explorations of trying to squeeze out every ms of performance from D3 by rewriting parts of it in WASM [1], which link to the posts that it was inspired by, an even crazier attempt which tries to turn off all its safeties. It forms an entire ecosystem, to which Hackernews, Google, et etc, form a kind of gateway into the canopy of a blogosphere. One more thing: can we do more linking? Like, have a section of our blogs that's basically, "here are the blogs of a bunch of people I find interesting"? Is there a reason why we don't do that (spam or harassment)? 1. https://cprimozic.net/blog/speeding-up-webcola-with-webassembly/ https://cprimozic.net/blog/speeding-up-webcola-with-webassem...
• dancemethis 3y ago
  Well, blog is a personal diary first and foremost.
• jug 3y ago
  "Nobody cares about your blog." Isn't it a sign of our times when you maintain a blog only in the hope of others will care for it, more than as an outlet for yourself? Everything is a like symbol nowadays. It's not a popularity contest.
• lakomen 3y ago
  Opinions are like assholes, I don't care about this guy's.