13 ms·

It’s still worth blogging in the age of AI

333 points by gpjt 2y ago

azhenley 2y ago
I think there is a more important reason to blog besides the 3 reasons listed: to force yourself to slow down, organize your thoughts, fill in the holes, and articulate your points. "Writing is understanding."
- tombert 2y ago
  "Writing is nature’s way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is" - Guindon Though admittedly I first heard it from Leslie Lamport and that's who I associate it with.
- gpjt 2y ago
  That's what I was trying to cover with the "make your newly-acquired knowledge concrete" bit, and was my focus in the previous post. This time around I wanted to look into the aspects that might be impacted by AI (and why I didn't think they would be).
- whatever1 2y ago
  Socrates would like a word with you.
- Hamuko 2y ago
  You don't really need to blog for that though? You could just write to a text file on your PC and not throw it online.
rednafi 2y ago
Blogging pushes me to explore things I probably wouldn’t otherwise. That’s been the main reason I’ve stuck with it pretty consistently[1] for the past five years. Getting attention was never the goal, so the rise of LLMs has mostly been background noise to me. There have been plenty of times when I’ve searched for something on Google, only to land on my own page. Over the years, though, things picked up. Now, I’m seeing around 30k monthly readers—way more than I ever expected. More than once, I’ve written about something I barely understood, only for the post to hit the front page. Then people corrected me, and I learned a ton in the process. That’s something I wouldn’t trade for anything. [1]: https://rednafi.com/ https://rednafi.com/
- interludead 2y ago
  Yeah, landing on your own blog post during a search is always a funny (and slightly surreal) moment!
  - rednafi 2y ago
    Funny indeed. I recently needed to set up GNU stow to manage my dotfiles on a new machine. So I searched google and lo and behold, my own stuff was among the top 10 results. https://rednafi.com/misc/dotfile_stewardship_for_the_indolent/ https://rednafi.com/misc/dotfile_stewardship_for_the_indolen...
- gpjt 2y ago
  Me too! These last two posts blogging about blogging are unusual for me. I'm working through a book (Sebastian Raschka's "Build an LLM from scratch") and posting about that at the moment. It's likely not a coincidence that I'm procrastination-posting before going through the trickiest bit...
  - rednafi 2y ago
    I love reading meta-writings at times, as long as there’s a real human behind the keyboard. This was a fun, quick read.
- coffeecantcode 2y ago
  Really enjoyed reading about your blog stack, motivating me to get my own up and running. Love the blog!
  - rednafi 2y ago
    Thank you. One reason I wrote it was to demonstrate how easy it is to spin up a blog where everything is automated and you never have to worry about the infra.
    - coffeecantcode 2y ago
imadr 2y ago
> So, I don't think you can make a name for yourself by blogging alone Or maybe you could if you post bangers like https://ciechanow.ski/ https://ciechanow.ski/ Nice blog either way!
- gpjt 2y ago
  Thanks! And that's a good counter-example... which made me realise, there's also https://waitbutwhy.com/ https://waitbutwhy.com/
azhenley 2y ago
If we don't blog, what will the next big AI models be trained on?!
- gpjt 2y ago
  Good point. "Blog as much as you can, as otherwise the training set will be Twitter!"
er4hn 2y ago
There is also the gwern point of "You should write so that your voice is present in the future LLM": https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PQaZiATafCh7n5Luf/gwern-s-shortform?commentId=KAtgQZZyadwMitWtb https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PQaZiATafCh7n5Luf/gwern-s-sh...
- gpjt 2y ago
  The jokey last paragraph was probably based on a half-memory of having read that, now you mention it...
6stringmerc 2y ago
I’m glad he goes out of his way to mention that, basically, effective blogging is downstream of accomplishments in a prior arena. It’s about channeling expertise and experience into a narrative, to summarize the core assertion he’s making, and he’s right. It also correlates to high-value Video content, such as the YouTube channel AmmoNYC (car detailing), where the high level of professional knowledge is yoked with high quality production. Very spot on follow-up to his initial post.
jaxtracks 2y ago
Anyone here seen an LLM actually produce a really novel thought that hasn't already been written about ad nauseam? The well of new ideas, or re-formulation of existing ideas with perspective and prose that LLMs can't match is plenty deep to be worth hoisting the bucket still.
- BugsJustFindMe 2y ago
  I don't know that I've seen a human blogger on HN produce a really novel thought that hasn't already been written about ad nauseam. This blog post is itself a good example. It may have the author's voice, but it's just another rehashing of something that a million people have said before already. HN loves upvoting blog posts about why you should blog. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=why+blog https://hn.algolia.com/?q=why+blog
  - jaxtracks 2y ago
    I can't find a less snarky way to say this, but why are you here then? I figure there's enough signal in the noise to make it worth it.
    - BugsJustFindMe 2y ago
      Do you mean on HN or in this particular thread?
    - JimDabell 2y ago
      Value is not measured in novelty alone.
  - deadbabe 2y ago
    I’ve seen novel thoughts, but typically they are coming from trolls who are taking impossibly contrarian opinions and presenting horrifying morally bankrupt perspectives. Maybe these ideas are common elsewhere though. All the “good” ideas that can be said have probably been said. Maybe that’s why some people just enjoy trolling: for the novelty.
janalsncm 2y ago
I think that as more people offload understanding to LLMs, being able to deeply understand a topic will make you stand out more and more. Doing things and explaining them are two of the best ways to get that deep understanding. When I write about a technical topic, I open a new markdown doc and just go. You quickly run up against the limits of your own understanding, which is a valuable exercise.
- morkalork 2y ago
  Exactly, reading and consuming information is one thing but teaching it to someone else is something else entirely. If you're not writing with the goal of self-marketing and content-farming, it's still worth it.
- HKH2 2y ago
  You're conducting multiple parts of a dialogue when writing, but discussing what you've learnt can also be quite a good way of solidifying learning and encouraging further thought.
herbertl 2y ago
> You're building up a portfolio of writing about topics that interest you. This reason resonates with me immensely. You're not just writing about what you've figured out, sometimes you're actually deepening your understanding as you write! Writing is the thinking process: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32628196 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32628196 I have been writing every day at my blog for three years now, and it's been very rewarding for me to figure out what I actually care about and seeing patterns. I like thinking about it like a bunch of skateboarders lugging the video camera around to capture the moment. (They did this before social media!) P.S., You may also enjoy the similar sentiment in this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42992159 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42992159
- LostMyLogin 2y ago
  > I like thinking about it like a bunch of skateboarders lugging the video camera around to capture the moment. (They did this before social media!) We sure did! I’ll never forget my first vx1000 with a death lens.
  - nop_slide 2y ago
    VX1000 was peak camera in skateboarding. The one modern camera that seems somewhat close has been the whatever Lumix that the dudes at April Skateboards use. It's hd but has a 4:3 ratio and looks VX like in my opinion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuXqrq7aMO4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuXqrq7aMO4 PS: I run skatevideosite.com, if anyone is interested in helping dev the site and skates hit me up!
mirawelner 2y ago
The main reason I blog is because I work (or am starting out working in) academia and therefore I have to write papers. To write academic papers you have to write terribly, using passive voice whenever possible. I blog so that I know I am still capable of writing coherently, rather than in horrible academic language.
- LPisGood 2y ago
  You can avoid the passive voice and write coherently or even conversationally if you have something interesting enough to say.
GlacierFox 2y ago
Ah, the weekly post about if writing blog posts is worth it with the comments reaching the same conclusion.
- handfuloflight 2y ago
  ...you can do it!
paulorlando 2y ago
I checked out his About page just because he mentioned that only 1% do it. For my writing, the observation that almost everyone moves on is certainly true. But those few who reached out sometimes become new friends. I've never met any of them in person though. It's like a group of friends for whom the connection is that they all read something that I wrote. Also, funny to now see that when doing research I've gotten AI's citing my own past posts as sources. Maybe this means I need to reread my own writing.
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
Related aforementioned thread: Write the post you wish you'd found https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43154666 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43154666
Lastminutepanic 2y ago
I deeply distrust anyone blames AI for "ruining" their creative hobby, or "creative" career. Mostly because the one absolute, will never ever change, always our trump card, is our individual perspective and creativity. AI is a sorting and statistics machine, it can only reproduce (my personal theory about AI hallucinations is pretty simple. AI has been a well known concept for longer than the Internet has been around, pop-scifi and post apocalyptic books, movies, and shows, and causing a societal immune response... And satire, sarcasm, bad photography, bad art, websites with gibberish or incorrect facts just to game SEO algos (many many many that still have generations old SEO text blocks), all being hoovered up by an AI and the techbros supervising it all are MBA dropouts, and/or marketing bros. All their AI datasets are so poisoned by the human condition, and as universal, AI hallucinations/errors are, it just proves there isn't a single model, or a single person, in the AI space who can identify irony. We may be the most destructive thing this earth has ever encountered, but like.. Causing mayhem and chaos so concentrated and complicated it's impossible (so far at least) to write code that can decypher it. So yeah, anyways, I left tech almost a decade ago, I'm a photographer now, and if youve put thought into something. Whether it's writing, how a photo is edited/processed, a joke, its a gift you're giving to yourself, and hopefully some of whatever you felt like creating, a few pieces at the least haha, will be gifts to the world :)
com2kid 2y ago
I started blogging to record the history of projects I've worked on (e.g. Microsoft Band https://meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev/history-of-microsoft-joule-band-v0-part-1 https://meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev/history-of-microsoft... Launching HBO Max https://meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev/only-300-software-engineers-were-needed-to-launch-hbo-max https://meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev/only-300-software-en...) but, perhaps not surprisingly, my only "successful" article has been the one controversial article I wrote cautioning against using SSR for everything. That said I believe documenting history is important so I'll keep sporadically writing down notable events I've been involved in! I also blog a fair bit about AI, and there is no hope getting views there without playing the game.
mukunda_johnson 2y ago
There was a good reminder in the Hanselminutes interview with Shaundai Person about blogging for yourself. It was a while since I listened so I'm fuzzy on the details - all I remember is that I enjoyed the interview and there was some relevance to this topic. Also, blogs are no doubt a major source of AI training, so maybe more worth than before.
arjie 2y ago
I like writing too. Funnily enough, the age of LLMs makes this even better. I wrote a little MCP server (this is trivial with Claude) that interfaces with my blog so it can full-text search for articles and look up articles and look at recent articles and stuff like that and it is pretty good at finding references in what I've written to thoughts I've had. It's a bit trigger-happy when looking up my blog posts (I have to put more in the assistant prompt in the Claude app to get it to stop defaulting there). The other thing that's nice is that LLMs make the process of writing better. When I cite stuff I can just screenshot the website and ask ChatGPT to write the citation and then check it. Things like that are more painful to write than to check and LLMs shine there.
aquova 2y ago
It really fascinates me how the "other" clientele of HN operates. The world of networking, marketing yourself, creating a resume of sorts through your blogging. I'm just some dude with a decent job occasionally writing blog posts because it amuses me. I'd be pleasantly surprised if a dozen people read them before I die. AI doesn't really factor into the calculus of whether or not I want to continue doing it at all.
- aprilthird2021 2y ago
  I have actually cut back on blogging (partly) because I don't want my hard work to be slurped up and regurgitated by an AI. I write for other people. Not for AI
  - dwg 2y ago
    Makes me wonder, how about changing your blog to a mailing list?
    - aprilthird2021 2y ago
      Yeah maybe that's the move. I don't really have a following though, lol
      - chefandy 2y ago
        I don’t think there has to be some practical economic business justification to a) feel bummed out by your creative output getting munged up into something that, for all its better uses, will feed the great fire hoses spraying trillions of gallons of bullshit all over our information landscape, or b) reduce your creative output because of it. It’s weird how entitled people feel to other people’s creative work and get mad when people don’t freely create for and share with them, while simultaneously minimizing the value that work and its authors bring to our society. Despite what many say, the way people receive and interact with your work mentally/emotionally is really important, and all your work being sucked up into these models— often to create commercial products that are openly antagonistic to the people that created the work that made it possible— changes that. It’s sad that AI has devalued creative processes even to the creators themselves.
xenodium 2y ago
While quite a few folks agree blogging is still worth it in the age of AI, please do your bit to support privacy-friendly services (ie. no tracking). Blogs don't /need/ modern web bloat, nor need to resort to adverts / paywalls. I happen to build a privacy-friendly option https://LMNO.lol https://LMNO.lol (my blog at https://LMNO.lol/alvaro https://LMNO.lol/alvaro or https://xenodium.com https://xenodium.com). I'm hoping it's fairly priced at $1.50/month. You pay for hosting and we provide that service (that's the extent of our transation). There are others services to pick from like Bear, Ghost, Nekoweb, omg.lol...
- ericjmorey 2y ago
  I like https://mataroa.blog/ https://mataroa.blog/
gamedever 2y ago
For me, the #1 reason I don't blog more, especially about tech topics, is that they take too long. Maybe you can bang out a useful blog post in 20 minutes. For me it's more like 4 to 8 hours. I have to make samples. Since I do mostly web tech I want the samples to actually work, no "here's some code, trust me". I also need diagrams. And, I have to proofread since I'm terrible at getting it right in one or even 5 checks. I write once, add samples, write some more, add images, write some more. Every time I write I add errors, so it always takes multiple passes.
- gpjt 2y ago
  Proofreading is one place that AI can actually be a friend rather than a foe. If you give Claude your draft and tell it explicitly to call out misspellings and grammatical errors only, it does a really good job.
  - zabzonk 2y ago
    Much like (say) MS Word does? In real time.
    - dc96 2y ago
      AI is a lot more powerful in this aspect. MS Word would find no qualms in this sentence: "I started the car and went for a drive on the highway. There were many other cats on the road but it was nevertheless agitating." Given the correct prompt (that avoids changing your literary style altogether), AI can quickly suggest cats -> cars and agitating -> peaceful, since it's much better at contextualizing.
  - arvinsim 2y ago
    Proofreading is easily done with an editor. I think AI is much more useful for giving critic and advice on how you write your sentences. Setting the tone, refining the main idea, pointing out redundancies are some of the things that I find very useful.
    - 2y ago
dwg 2y ago
I've suggested this elsewhere too, but have you considered a mailing list instead? It ticks the boxes about notoriety—which appears to be the main concern of the OP author—with the added benefit of being more difficult for AI systems to crawl for training data. Perhaps we'll see more bloggers going the way of a bespoke mailing list.
carlosjobim 2y ago
What the hell are people blogging about that is so generic that an AI could write it? The important part of any journalism is to introduce new facts and findings that aren't anywhere else to be found. An AI cannot do that.
zusammen 2y ago
[dead]
AlienRobot 2y ago
Writing things down reveals the lapses in one's own knowledge, and those gaps are opportunities to learn something new. It saddens me a lot that people are now relying on AI to fill the gaps in their knowledge. Humans got where they are thanks to their innate curiosity. If you take that away from us, we become no different from animals.
- HKH2 2y ago
  Not just gaps. Blind spots too. Humans are driven by curiosity and limited by biases. You're only painting half of the picture. > Humans got where they are thanks to their innate curiosity. If you take that away from us, we become no different from animals. Your message is a bit late. We've had people zoned out in front of their TVs for decades.
tiltowait 2y ago
I've been considering starting up a(n extremely) sporadic blog for funsies. What platforms do people use these days?
- xenodium 2y ago
  I built https://LMNO.lol https://LMNO.lol and using it myself https://lmno.lol/alvaro https://lmno.lol/alvaro (close to a year now).
hypertexthero 2y ago
Writing is thinking. So is drawing. To think clearly, come up with new ideas, make and truly understand things, we need to put marks on the blank page ourselves, and not just repeat what teachers or textbooks tell us like the majority of students Richard Feynman had during his time in Brazil — https://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education https://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education LLMs/AIs are useful to help us get farther, faster, like witty, skilled, intelligent friends who sometimes take too many magic mushrooms during conversations. Forgetting about our own agency and individuality is bad for us, and dangerous for society. “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being, with an independent will.” —Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre “Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.” ―Primo Levi, If This is A Man To create and be free like an animal outside a cage, ask, write, and draw your own questions. Look, and find out for yourself, rather than blindly believing what others tell you. Two useful books: Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards https://archive.org/details/DRAWINGONTHERIGHTSIDEOFTHEBRAINHD/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/DRAWINGONTHERIGHTSIDEOFTHEBRAINH... The Hand - How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture by Frank R. Wilson https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/191866/the-hand-by-frank-r-wilson/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/191866/the-hand-by-...
- chefandy 2y ago
  For anyone put off by the dubiousness of the left/right brain thing, rest assured that Drawing On the Right Side of The Brain is no less useful as an introduction to abstract visual creativity because of it.
- noufalibrahim 2y ago
  This comes back to my initial thought on the effect of AI on the "producer" rather than the "consumer". I do a lot of things badly because it helps me develop skills and makes me happy. I wouldn't outsource this to an AI even if it did all these things better and the world benefited more from it. This is for me.
- mvdtnz 2y ago
  Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain is discredited pseudoscience bullshit. The exercises will make you a better drawer but not for the very stupid reasons the author claims, but because they are drilled exercises.
vivekd 2y ago
I wonder if there is a practical test of this question? Are there any moderately successful blogs written purely by an LLM with a human just doing the prompts. As far as I know there aren't any but I look forward to being corrected
timewizard 2y ago
"It's still worth selling steaks in the age of the hamburger." Yea. This will never not be true. I just can't wait for the age of the "silicon valley visionary" to come to an end.
simonw 2y ago
I find that thing where people say "I'm not going to publish anything creative ever again, it'll just be used to train AI" so depressing. It feels like such a dismal excuse to avoid andding any value to the world.
- worthless-trash 2y ago
  It's not an excuse, it is a reality. Why spend your personal time and effort for someone else with a deeper pocket to automatically extract value from your work. There is certainly a line where if you're popular enough and have significant google juice you'll still get organic traffic, many small bloggers can go their entire posting history without getting more than a smattering of hits and now chatgpt is taking away that.
  - simonw 2y ago
    "Why spend your personal time and effort for someone else with a deeper pocket to automatically extract value from your work." That's the exact attitude I'm talking about. Because creating things is good! Because it's good to put value out there into the world, even if someone else might also use it.
    - creata 2y ago
      I think it can significantly change the harm-benefit calculus. (But I'd love to be wrong.) In the past, I could be fairly confident that if someone else uses my work (and I want them to do that! that's the point of sharing!) the good that it causes will outweigh the bad that it causes. It's not like I'm helping people make missiles. But now it's entirely possible (especially if my content is unpopular, such that LLMs make a larger proportion of its readers) that the bad outweighs the good, given the negative effects that LLMs have had and continue to have on our world.
      - mikrotikker 2y ago
        Missiles save lives too.
asasidh 2y ago
yes. The research that goes into it helps be finally learn the concept better. Having a few subscribers also want to spend time to write something and put it out.
TwoNineFive 2y ago
[flagged]
- dang 2y ago
  Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
aqueueaqueue 2y ago
Yes :)
zem 2y ago
am I so unusual in just skimming past and ignoring the AI search results? I didn't think a majority of people outside the silicon valley tech bubble were all that keen on getting their questions answered by a chatbot
zacfire 2y ago
writing for thinking , share ideas with others
movedx 2y ago
The age of AI is the very reason it's even more important that we blog. AI in it current form ingests and repeats what we train it to. I don't think new ideas will "organically" come out of current generation models.
- worthless-trash 2y ago
  If you now make blog entries on new ideas, it will be consumed and regurgitated as new ideas with no attribution or benefit to the original author, giving the illusion of new ideas. Feels dirty to have your creativity stolen easily by unforgiving machines. I'm thinking the only reason to write may be to either have your ideas consumed by AI intentionally (so they are influence AI users) or to add negative value to the pool to make AI more useless when it regurgitates incorrect data.
  - theshackleford 2y ago
    > If you now make blog entries on new ideas, it will be consumed and regurgitated as new ideas with no attribution or benefit to the original author, giving the illusion of new ideas. This was already happening though. I’m not saying it makes what’s happening now ok, I’m just continually surprised to see this raised as though prior to LLMs, average individuals were going around giving attribution all day long after consuming your content. In my mind the only thing to have changed is the scale of it. I always accepted that the moment I published something online, I lost control of what was to be done with it or by who. LLMs have not really changed much in this regard for me. That being said, I only ever really write for my own clarity. If I had to survive off it or something, I’d probably feel different.
    - worthless-trash 2y ago
      I feel it is the honourable thing to reference where ideas come from. Attribution exists so that we can understand the impact that we have on the world. I refuse to be gaslit that LLM's poor facimilie is a positive net outcome for the individual creator or humanity. To use a stolen culture analogy, we can't put the genie back in the bottle, I don't think that anyone should be discoraged for not wanting to help Jafar become even more powerful and oppressive dictator.
jsemrau 2y ago
I believe its even more important now than ever before.
krembo 2y ago
My 2c: AI can give you the answers if you have the right questions. Having the right questions is a journey of human development through self reading, for which blogs are essential.
anonzzzies 2y ago
I blog solely for my own memory. If people find it interesting, ok, but it's because I forget stuff and then will go somewhere thinking it's interesting only to recall I did this already. If no-one ever reads it, it's not really a worry.
pcblues 2y ago
I will more likely believe a blog or website if I know it has been made by a real person, and not some hallucinating AI. The style of the prose is usually a giveaway of when AI is used to generate blog articles or websites. I am starting a Masters in Computer Science, and going to learn Java for the first time. I wanted to know how to use default method parameter values. I searched for it and found this near the top of the results: https://skillapp.co/blog/deep-dive-into-default-parameters-in-java-exploring-the-power-of-customizable-method-arguments/ https://skillapp.co/blog/deep-dive-into-default-parameters-i... Java developers will know that the language does not support default method parameter values. I only found that out when I tried to implement it in a test, was surprised it didn't work, thought maybe my version of Java was too old, etc. But there is no syntax like "void coolFunction(int x=5){};" that other languages have. One more reason that I will value a human-written article, blog or website. Please keep writing them!
ibz 2y ago
It's still worth doing wood work in the age of IKEA. Perhaps even more so.
interludead 2y ago
I think blogging isn't just about getting views, it's more about organizing your thoughts and solidifying what you've learned.
mrweasel 2y ago
Personally I don't have a blog, even though I really want to, but I newer seem to be able to get started. Still, I really enjoy reading what others write. One thing a blog post from a real live person can do, which AI can't, is to inspire you to dive into a subject and try out things for yourself. There are so many things, books, technologies, tips, tricks, interesting solutions I've picked up over the years because someone wrote a blog post and it got posted on HN or some other site. As more and more content is AI generated I've started to enjoy the writing and ramblings of people with weird little blogs so much more. So to those of you who are blogging: Please don't stop.
- theshrike79 2y ago
  Same. I do write stuff on Obsidian just for myself. I just feel too self-conscious to publish it, because it's just for me and not written in a way that (in my opinion) is helpful to others. Never mind that I've fixed my own issues by finding an obscure post in a small blog multiple times.
mediumsmart 2y ago
blogging is zen and zen is who cares?
zoidb 2y ago
> There were a lot of excellent comments, but one thing kept coming up: what's the point in blogging if people are using ChatGPT, Claude and DeepSeek to spoon-feed them answers? Who, apart from the AIs, will read what you write? It's undeniable that AI has changed the utility of blogging as a means to spread knowledge to others. I agree 100% with the author and most of the comments below that blogging for yourself is great, and that showcasing what you are passionate about is also great. I don't think the position people are taking is that blogging isn't worth it because that is no longer important. The point I gather, is that it used to be you could find a small nugget of something technical (for example, on stack-overflow, in a manual, etc) and explain it in a way that is approachable to a select audience. Then, over time that audience comes to appreciate learning new and interesting things. Take for example https://kyrylo.org/html/2024/10/25/why-does-target-blank-have-an-underscore-in-front.html https://kyrylo.org/html/2024/10/25/why-does-target-blank-hav... . ChatGPT can practically write this same post by asking the question, and tailor the explanation to any level of expertise, and can break individual concepts down that is 100% tailored to the person asking the question. That is where I think blogging has been turned on its head.
easwee 2y ago
I dont blog for others, I blog for myself and my joy.
theZilber 2y ago
You writing something personal serves as inspiration to people who just want to write. Many years ago I started writing as a goal to make it something big. But I was very far away from acheiving anything close to my goals, and writing started feeling like a chore. Now I am working on my personal blog as a platform, not only for writing, but for self expression in design and programming. Because I just read your post - it makes me want to speed up the process of finishing my own blog (it contains many engineering quirks that need to be ironed out as it is not a simple website - hence the time taken to make it). So what I am trying to say, when people read your posts - you are moving the needle. You are not changing anything spectacularly, but rather have some influence of people's perception over certain things. And now - you moved me closer to finishing what I started months ago - this should serve enough of a dopamine hit for you to continue doing what you are doing, however you choose to rationalize it :) (assuming you even get to read this comment)
codr7 2y ago
Gwern said something along the lines of: If you don't leave marks in the online world, you're invisible to AI. I have no idea what that's going to mean moving forward, but it makes sense to me.
memhole 2y ago
Strangely enough, doing work with AI helped push me to blog and be more creative. Something about the artificiality of AI and if the machines can start doing what we do, what else is there?
erwan577 2y ago
One always writes for the potential readers. Even if the human readers are becoming rare, the opportunity to be read forever by all these AIs can only boost our ego :-)
- Mithriil 2y ago
  Being read by one human: you deepened their understanding of the thing. Being read by one OpenAI crawler: you deepened the understanding of ChatGPT, thus offering knowledge of the thing to everyone that interacts with it about the thing. One of these scenarios has much more collective impact than the other.
FigurativeVoid 2y ago
The more that we have AI trawling our writing, the more important I think it is to realize that AI is part of the audience. I have been thinking about writing more "cookbook" style posts so that users and AI have good modern examples to look at. CSS-tricks is a great example. It has good code and and is easy to search. One thing that articles that include code need to tag good and bad examples. AI will get better at recognizing the bad, but we should have more comments that say "This is bad. Use the better pattern."
- Mithriil 2y ago
  It is helping out the collective to give AI a tutorial on undocumented matter. Yes, you don't receive anything in exchange (except personal achievment and growth from writing, as many have commented). But making a world a better place is more important for some people than personal fame and recognition. If AI systems are crawling everything we write publicly, we have a certain responsibility to teach it the right things. It's like our common child we're raising through what we leave open on the internet.
prophesi 2y ago
If you're not interested in letting your blog posts be used to train AI, remember to update your robots.txt regularly as AI crawlers come up. This is assuming they respect your robots.txt, and don't change their user-agent. There's a service for this called Dark Visitors[0], though I wish there was a FOSS project to track AI user-agents. [0] https://darkvisitors.com/ https://darkvisitors.com/
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
npvrite 2y ago
Human conscience has not and will not be duplicated by "AI" in the near future. These are simply programs that regurgitate mostly stolen data.
xucian 2y ago
most things are still worth doing in the age of ai
phyce 2y ago
I think it's more worth than ever. The idea that some of my thoughts might be integrated into some AI model by being used as training data is exciting

333 points by gpjt 2y ago

I think there is a more important reason to blog besides the 3 reasons listed: to force yourself to slow down, organize your thoughts, fill in the holes, and articulate your points. "Writing is understanding."

tombert 2y ago
"Writing is nature’s way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is" - Guindon Though admittedly I first heard it from Leslie Lamport and that's who I associate it with.
gpjt 2y ago
That's what I was trying to cover with the "make your newly-acquired knowledge concrete" bit, and was my focus in the previous post. This time around I wanted to look into the aspects that might be impacted by AI (and why I didn't think they would be).
whatever1 2y ago
Socrates would like a word with you.
Hamuko 2y ago
You don't really need to blog for that though? You could just write to a text file on your PC and not throw it online.

rednafi 2y ago

Blogging pushes me to explore things I probably wouldn’t otherwise. That’s been the main reason I’ve stuck with it pretty consistently[1] for the past five years. Getting attention was never the goal, so the rise of LLMs has mostly been background noise to me. There have been plenty of times when I’ve searched for something on Google, only to land on my own page. Over the years, though, things picked up. Now, I’m seeing around 30k monthly readers—way more than I ever expected. More than once, I’ve written about something I barely understood, only for the post to hit the front page. Then people corrected me, and I learned a ton in the process. That’s something I wouldn’t trade for anything. [1]: https://rednafi.com/ https://rednafi.com/

interludead 2y ago
Yeah, landing on your own blog post during a search is always a funny (and slightly surreal) moment!
- rednafi 2y ago
  Funny indeed. I recently needed to set up GNU stow to manage my dotfiles on a new machine. So I searched google and lo and behold, my own stuff was among the top 10 results. https://rednafi.com/misc/dotfile_stewardship_for_the_indolent/ https://rednafi.com/misc/dotfile_stewardship_for_the_indolen...
gpjt 2y ago
Me too! These last two posts blogging about blogging are unusual for me. I'm working through a book (Sebastian Raschka's "Build an LLM from scratch") and posting about that at the moment. It's likely not a coincidence that I'm procrastination-posting before going through the trickiest bit...
- rednafi 2y ago
  I love reading meta-writings at times, as long as there’s a real human behind the keyboard. This was a fun, quick read.
coffeecantcode 2y ago
Really enjoyed reading about your blog stack, motivating me to get my own up and running. Love the blog!
- rednafi 2y ago
  Thank you. One reason I wrote it was to demonstrate how easy it is to spin up a blog where everything is automated and you never have to worry about the infra.
  - coffeecantcode 2y ago

imadr 2y ago

> So, I don't think you can make a name for yourself by blogging alone Or maybe you could if you post bangers like https://ciechanow.ski/ https://ciechanow.ski/ Nice blog either way!

gpjt 2y ago
Thanks! And that's a good counter-example... which made me realise, there's also https://waitbutwhy.com/ https://waitbutwhy.com/

azhenley 2y ago

If we don't blog, what will the next big AI models be trained on?!

gpjt 2y ago
Good point. "Blog as much as you can, as otherwise the training set will be Twitter!"

er4hn 2y ago

There is also the gwern point of "You should write so that your voice is present in the future LLM": https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PQaZiATafCh7n5Luf/gwern-s-shortform?commentId=KAtgQZZyadwMitWtb https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PQaZiATafCh7n5Luf/gwern-s-sh...

gpjt 2y ago
The jokey last paragraph was probably based on a half-memory of having read that, now you mention it...

6stringmerc 2y ago

I’m glad he goes out of his way to mention that, basically, effective blogging is downstream of accomplishments in a prior arena. It’s about channeling expertise and experience into a narrative, to summarize the core assertion he’s making, and he’s right. It also correlates to high-value Video content, such as the YouTube channel AmmoNYC (car detailing), where the high level of professional knowledge is yoked with high quality production. Very spot on follow-up to his initial post.

jaxtracks 2y ago

Anyone here seen an LLM actually produce a really novel thought that hasn't already been written about ad nauseam? The well of new ideas, or re-formulation of existing ideas with perspective and prose that LLMs can't match is plenty deep to be worth hoisting the bucket still.

BugsJustFindMe 2y ago
I don't know that I've seen a human blogger on HN produce a really novel thought that hasn't already been written about ad nauseam. This blog post is itself a good example. It may have the author's voice, but it's just another rehashing of something that a million people have said before already. HN loves upvoting blog posts about why you should blog. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=why+blog https://hn.algolia.com/?q=why+blog
- jaxtracks 2y ago
  I can't find a less snarky way to say this, but why are you here then? I figure there's enough signal in the noise to make it worth it.
  - BugsJustFindMe 2y ago
    Do you mean on HN or in this particular thread?
  - JimDabell 2y ago
    Value is not measured in novelty alone.
- deadbabe 2y ago
  I’ve seen novel thoughts, but typically they are coming from trolls who are taking impossibly contrarian opinions and presenting horrifying morally bankrupt perspectives. Maybe these ideas are common elsewhere though. All the “good” ideas that can be said have probably been said. Maybe that’s why some people just enjoy trolling: for the novelty.

janalsncm 2y ago

I think that as more people offload understanding to LLMs, being able to deeply understand a topic will make you stand out more and more. Doing things and explaining them are two of the best ways to get that deep understanding. When I write about a technical topic, I open a new markdown doc and just go. You quickly run up against the limits of your own understanding, which is a valuable exercise.

morkalork 2y ago
Exactly, reading and consuming information is one thing but teaching it to someone else is something else entirely. If you're not writing with the goal of self-marketing and content-farming, it's still worth it.
HKH2 2y ago
You're conducting multiple parts of a dialogue when writing, but discussing what you've learnt can also be quite a good way of solidifying learning and encouraging further thought.

herbertl 2y ago

> You're building up a portfolio of writing about topics that interest you. This reason resonates with me immensely. You're not just writing about what you've figured out, sometimes you're actually deepening your understanding as you write! Writing is the thinking process: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32628196 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32628196 I have been writing every day at my blog for three years now, and it's been very rewarding for me to figure out what I actually care about and seeing patterns. I like thinking about it like a bunch of skateboarders lugging the video camera around to capture the moment. (They did this before social media!) P.S., You may also enjoy the similar sentiment in this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42992159 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42992159

LostMyLogin 2y ago
> I like thinking about it like a bunch of skateboarders lugging the video camera around to capture the moment. (They did this before social media!) We sure did! I’ll never forget my first vx1000 with a death lens.
- nop_slide 2y ago
  VX1000 was peak camera in skateboarding. The one modern camera that seems somewhat close has been the whatever Lumix that the dudes at April Skateboards use. It's hd but has a 4:3 ratio and looks VX like in my opinion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuXqrq7aMO4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuXqrq7aMO4 PS: I run skatevideosite.com, if anyone is interested in helping dev the site and skates hit me up!

mirawelner 2y ago

The main reason I blog is because I work (or am starting out working in) academia and therefore I have to write papers. To write academic papers you have to write terribly, using passive voice whenever possible. I blog so that I know I am still capable of writing coherently, rather than in horrible academic language.

LPisGood 2y ago
You can avoid the passive voice and write coherently or even conversationally if you have something interesting enough to say.

GlacierFox 2y ago

Ah, the weekly post about if writing blog posts is worth it with the comments reaching the same conclusion.

handfuloflight 2y ago
...you can do it!

paulorlando 2y ago

I checked out his About page just because he mentioned that only 1% do it. For my writing, the observation that almost everyone moves on is certainly true. But those few who reached out sometimes become new friends. I've never met any of them in person though. It's like a group of friends for whom the connection is that they all read something that I wrote. Also, funny to now see that when doing research I've gotten AI's citing my own past posts as sources. Maybe this means I need to reread my own writing.

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

Related aforementioned thread: Write the post you wish you'd found https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43154666 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43154666

Lastminutepanic 2y ago

I deeply distrust anyone blames AI for "ruining" their creative hobby, or "creative" career. Mostly because the one absolute, will never ever change, always our trump card, is our individual perspective and creativity. AI is a sorting and statistics machine, it can only reproduce (my personal theory about AI hallucinations is pretty simple. AI has been a well known concept for longer than the Internet has been around, pop-scifi and post apocalyptic books, movies, and shows, and causing a societal immune response... And satire, sarcasm, bad photography, bad art, websites with gibberish or incorrect facts just to game SEO algos (many many many that still have generations old SEO text blocks), all being hoovered up by an AI and the techbros supervising it all are MBA dropouts, and/or marketing bros. All their AI datasets are so poisoned by the human condition, and as universal, AI hallucinations/errors are, it just proves there isn't a single model, or a single person, in the AI space who can identify irony. We may be the most destructive thing this earth has ever encountered, but like.. Causing mayhem and chaos so concentrated and complicated it's impossible (so far at least) to write code that can decypher it. So yeah, anyways, I left tech almost a decade ago, I'm a photographer now, and if youve put thought into something. Whether it's writing, how a photo is edited/processed, a joke, its a gift you're giving to yourself, and hopefully some of whatever you felt like creating, a few pieces at the least haha, will be gifts to the world :)

com2kid 2y ago

I started blogging to record the history of projects I've worked on (e.g. Microsoft Band https://meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev/history-of-microsoft-joule-band-v0-part-1 https://meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev/history-of-microsoft... Launching HBO Max https://meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev/only-300-software-engineers-were-needed-to-launch-hbo-max https://meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev/only-300-software-en...) but, perhaps not surprisingly, my only "successful" article has been the one controversial article I wrote cautioning against using SSR for everything. That said I believe documenting history is important so I'll keep sporadically writing down notable events I've been involved in! I also blog a fair bit about AI, and there is no hope getting views there without playing the game.

mukunda_johnson 2y ago

There was a good reminder in the Hanselminutes interview with Shaundai Person about blogging for yourself. It was a while since I listened so I'm fuzzy on the details - all I remember is that I enjoyed the interview and there was some relevance to this topic. Also, blogs are no doubt a major source of AI training, so maybe more worth than before.

arjie 2y ago

I like writing too. Funnily enough, the age of LLMs makes this even better. I wrote a little MCP server (this is trivial with Claude) that interfaces with my blog so it can full-text search for articles and look up articles and look at recent articles and stuff like that and it is pretty good at finding references in what I've written to thoughts I've had. It's a bit trigger-happy when looking up my blog posts (I have to put more in the assistant prompt in the Claude app to get it to stop defaulting there). The other thing that's nice is that LLMs make the process of writing better. When I cite stuff I can just screenshot the website and ask ChatGPT to write the citation and then check it. Things like that are more painful to write than to check and LLMs shine there.

aquova 2y ago

It really fascinates me how the "other" clientele of HN operates. The world of networking, marketing yourself, creating a resume of sorts through your blogging. I'm just some dude with a decent job occasionally writing blog posts because it amuses me. I'd be pleasantly surprised if a dozen people read them before I die. AI doesn't really factor into the calculus of whether or not I want to continue doing it at all.

aprilthird2021 2y ago
I have actually cut back on blogging (partly) because I don't want my hard work to be slurped up and regurgitated by an AI. I write for other people. Not for AI
- dwg 2y ago
  Makes me wonder, how about changing your blog to a mailing list?
  - aprilthird2021 2y ago
    Yeah maybe that's the move. I don't really have a following though, lol
    - chefandy 2y ago
      I don’t think there has to be some practical economic business justification to a) feel bummed out by your creative output getting munged up into something that, for all its better uses, will feed the great fire hoses spraying trillions of gallons of bullshit all over our information landscape, or b) reduce your creative output because of it. It’s weird how entitled people feel to other people’s creative work and get mad when people don’t freely create for and share with them, while simultaneously minimizing the value that work and its authors bring to our society. Despite what many say, the way people receive and interact with your work mentally/emotionally is really important, and all your work being sucked up into these models— often to create commercial products that are openly antagonistic to the people that created the work that made it possible— changes that. It’s sad that AI has devalued creative processes even to the creators themselves.

xenodium 2y ago

While quite a few folks agree blogging is still worth it in the age of AI, please do your bit to support privacy-friendly services (ie. no tracking). Blogs don't /need/ modern web bloat, nor need to resort to adverts / paywalls. I happen to build a privacy-friendly option https://LMNO.lol https://LMNO.lol (my blog at https://LMNO.lol/alvaro https://LMNO.lol/alvaro or https://xenodium.com https://xenodium.com). I'm hoping it's fairly priced at $1.50/month. You pay for hosting and we provide that service (that's the extent of our transation). There are others services to pick from like Bear, Ghost, Nekoweb, omg.lol...

ericjmorey 2y ago
I like https://mataroa.blog/ https://mataroa.blog/

gamedever 2y ago

For me, the #1 reason I don't blog more, especially about tech topics, is that they take too long. Maybe you can bang out a useful blog post in 20 minutes. For me it's more like 4 to 8 hours. I have to make samples. Since I do mostly web tech I want the samples to actually work, no "here's some code, trust me". I also need diagrams. And, I have to proofread since I'm terrible at getting it right in one or even 5 checks. I write once, add samples, write some more, add images, write some more. Every time I write I add errors, so it always takes multiple passes.

gpjt 2y ago
Proofreading is one place that AI can actually be a friend rather than a foe. If you give Claude your draft and tell it explicitly to call out misspellings and grammatical errors only, it does a really good job.
- zabzonk 2y ago
  Much like (say) MS Word does? In real time.
  - dc96 2y ago
    AI is a lot more powerful in this aspect. MS Word would find no qualms in this sentence: "I started the car and went for a drive on the highway. There were many other cats on the road but it was nevertheless agitating." Given the correct prompt (that avoids changing your literary style altogether), AI can quickly suggest cats -> cars and agitating -> peaceful, since it's much better at contextualizing.
- arvinsim 2y ago
  Proofreading is easily done with an editor. I think AI is much more useful for giving critic and advice on how you write your sentences. Setting the tone, refining the main idea, pointing out redundancies are some of the things that I find very useful.
  - 2y ago

dwg 2y ago

I've suggested this elsewhere too, but have you considered a mailing list instead? It ticks the boxes about notoriety—which appears to be the main concern of the OP author—with the added benefit of being more difficult for AI systems to crawl for training data. Perhaps we'll see more bloggers going the way of a bespoke mailing list.

carlosjobim 2y ago

What the hell are people blogging about that is so generic that an AI could write it? The important part of any journalism is to introduce new facts and findings that aren't anywhere else to be found. An AI cannot do that.

zusammen 2y ago

[dead]

AlienRobot 2y ago

Writing things down reveals the lapses in one's own knowledge, and those gaps are opportunities to learn something new. It saddens me a lot that people are now relying on AI to fill the gaps in their knowledge. Humans got where they are thanks to their innate curiosity. If you take that away from us, we become no different from animals.

HKH2 2y ago
Not just gaps. Blind spots too. Humans are driven by curiosity and limited by biases. You're only painting half of the picture. > Humans got where they are thanks to their innate curiosity. If you take that away from us, we become no different from animals. Your message is a bit late. We've had people zoned out in front of their TVs for decades.

tiltowait 2y ago

I've been considering starting up a(n extremely) sporadic blog for funsies. What platforms do people use these days?

xenodium 2y ago
I built https://LMNO.lol https://LMNO.lol and using it myself https://lmno.lol/alvaro https://lmno.lol/alvaro (close to a year now).

hypertexthero 2y ago

Writing is thinking. So is drawing. To think clearly, come up with new ideas, make and truly understand things, we need to put marks on the blank page ourselves, and not just repeat what teachers or textbooks tell us like the majority of students Richard Feynman had during his time in Brazil — https://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education https://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education LLMs/AIs are useful to help us get farther, faster, like witty, skilled, intelligent friends who sometimes take too many magic mushrooms during conversations. Forgetting about our own agency and individuality is bad for us, and dangerous for society. “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being, with an independent will.” —Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre “Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.” ―Primo Levi, If This is A Man To create and be free like an animal outside a cage, ask, write, and draw your own questions. Look, and find out for yourself, rather than blindly believing what others tell you. Two useful books: Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards https://archive.org/details/DRAWINGONTHERIGHTSIDEOFTHEBRAINHD/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/DRAWINGONTHERIGHTSIDEOFTHEBRAINH... The Hand - How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture by Frank R. Wilson https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/191866/the-hand-by-frank-r-wilson/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/191866/the-hand-by-...

chefandy 2y ago
For anyone put off by the dubiousness of the left/right brain thing, rest assured that Drawing On the Right Side of The Brain is no less useful as an introduction to abstract visual creativity because of it.
noufalibrahim 2y ago
This comes back to my initial thought on the effect of AI on the "producer" rather than the "consumer". I do a lot of things badly because it helps me develop skills and makes me happy. I wouldn't outsource this to an AI even if it did all these things better and the world benefited more from it. This is for me.
mvdtnz 2y ago
Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain is discredited pseudoscience bullshit. The exercises will make you a better drawer but not for the very stupid reasons the author claims, but because they are drilled exercises.

vivekd 2y ago

I wonder if there is a practical test of this question? Are there any moderately successful blogs written purely by an LLM with a human just doing the prompts. As far as I know there aren't any but I look forward to being corrected

timewizard 2y ago

"It's still worth selling steaks in the age of the hamburger." Yea. This will never not be true. I just can't wait for the age of the "silicon valley visionary" to come to an end.

simonw 2y ago

I find that thing where people say "I'm not going to publish anything creative ever again, it'll just be used to train AI" so depressing. It feels like such a dismal excuse to avoid andding any value to the world.

worthless-trash 2y ago
It's not an excuse, it is a reality. Why spend your personal time and effort for someone else with a deeper pocket to automatically extract value from your work. There is certainly a line where if you're popular enough and have significant google juice you'll still get organic traffic, many small bloggers can go their entire posting history without getting more than a smattering of hits and now chatgpt is taking away that.
- simonw 2y ago
  "Why spend your personal time and effort for someone else with a deeper pocket to automatically extract value from your work." That's the exact attitude I'm talking about. Because creating things is good! Because it's good to put value out there into the world, even if someone else might also use it.
  - creata 2y ago
    I think it can significantly change the harm-benefit calculus. (But I'd love to be wrong.) In the past, I could be fairly confident that if someone else uses my work (and I want them to do that! that's the point of sharing!) the good that it causes will outweigh the bad that it causes. It's not like I'm helping people make missiles. But now it's entirely possible (especially if my content is unpopular, such that LLMs make a larger proportion of its readers) that the bad outweighs the good, given the negative effects that LLMs have had and continue to have on our world.
    - mikrotikker 2y ago
      Missiles save lives too.

asasidh 2y ago

yes. The research that goes into it helps be finally learn the concept better. Having a few subscribers also want to spend time to write something and put it out.

TwoNineFive 2y ago

[flagged]

dang 2y ago
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

aqueueaqueue 2y ago

Yes :)

zem 2y ago

am I so unusual in just skimming past and ignoring the AI search results? I didn't think a majority of people outside the silicon valley tech bubble were all that keen on getting their questions answered by a chatbot

zacfire 2y ago

writing for thinking , share ideas with others

movedx 2y ago

The age of AI is the very reason it's even more important that we blog. AI in it current form ingests and repeats what we train it to. I don't think new ideas will "organically" come out of current generation models.

worthless-trash 2y ago
If you now make blog entries on new ideas, it will be consumed and regurgitated as new ideas with no attribution or benefit to the original author, giving the illusion of new ideas. Feels dirty to have your creativity stolen easily by unforgiving machines. I'm thinking the only reason to write may be to either have your ideas consumed by AI intentionally (so they are influence AI users) or to add negative value to the pool to make AI more useless when it regurgitates incorrect data.
- theshackleford 2y ago
  > If you now make blog entries on new ideas, it will be consumed and regurgitated as new ideas with no attribution or benefit to the original author, giving the illusion of new ideas. This was already happening though. I’m not saying it makes what’s happening now ok, I’m just continually surprised to see this raised as though prior to LLMs, average individuals were going around giving attribution all day long after consuming your content. In my mind the only thing to have changed is the scale of it. I always accepted that the moment I published something online, I lost control of what was to be done with it or by who. LLMs have not really changed much in this regard for me. That being said, I only ever really write for my own clarity. If I had to survive off it or something, I’d probably feel different.
  - worthless-trash 2y ago
    I feel it is the honourable thing to reference where ideas come from. Attribution exists so that we can understand the impact that we have on the world. I refuse to be gaslit that LLM's poor facimilie is a positive net outcome for the individual creator or humanity. To use a stolen culture analogy, we can't put the genie back in the bottle, I don't think that anyone should be discoraged for not wanting to help Jafar become even more powerful and oppressive dictator.

jsemrau 2y ago

I believe its even more important now than ever before.

krembo 2y ago

My 2c: AI can give you the answers if you have the right questions. Having the right questions is a journey of human development through self reading, for which blogs are essential.

anonzzzies 2y ago

I blog solely for my own memory. If people find it interesting, ok, but it's because I forget stuff and then will go somewhere thinking it's interesting only to recall I did this already. If no-one ever reads it, it's not really a worry.

pcblues 2y ago

I will more likely believe a blog or website if I know it has been made by a real person, and not some hallucinating AI. The style of the prose is usually a giveaway of when AI is used to generate blog articles or websites. I am starting a Masters in Computer Science, and going to learn Java for the first time. I wanted to know how to use default method parameter values. I searched for it and found this near the top of the results: https://skillapp.co/blog/deep-dive-into-default-parameters-in-java-exploring-the-power-of-customizable-method-arguments/ https://skillapp.co/blog/deep-dive-into-default-parameters-i... Java developers will know that the language does not support default method parameter values. I only found that out when I tried to implement it in a test, was surprised it didn't work, thought maybe my version of Java was too old, etc. But there is no syntax like "void coolFunction(int x=5){};" that other languages have. One more reason that I will value a human-written article, blog or website. Please keep writing them!

ibz 2y ago

It's still worth doing wood work in the age of IKEA. Perhaps even more so.

interludead 2y ago

I think blogging isn't just about getting views, it's more about organizing your thoughts and solidifying what you've learned.

mrweasel 2y ago

Personally I don't have a blog, even though I really want to, but I newer seem to be able to get started. Still, I really enjoy reading what others write. One thing a blog post from a real live person can do, which AI can't, is to inspire you to dive into a subject and try out things for yourself. There are so many things, books, technologies, tips, tricks, interesting solutions I've picked up over the years because someone wrote a blog post and it got posted on HN or some other site. As more and more content is AI generated I've started to enjoy the writing and ramblings of people with weird little blogs so much more. So to those of you who are blogging: Please don't stop.

theshrike79 2y ago
Same. I do write stuff on Obsidian just for myself. I just feel too self-conscious to publish it, because it's just for me and not written in a way that (in my opinion) is helpful to others. Never mind that I've fixed my own issues by finding an obscure post in a small blog multiple times.

mediumsmart 2y ago

blogging is zen and zen is who cares?

zoidb 2y ago

> There were a lot of excellent comments, but one thing kept coming up: what's the point in blogging if people are using ChatGPT, Claude and DeepSeek to spoon-feed them answers? Who, apart from the AIs, will read what you write? It's undeniable that AI has changed the utility of blogging as a means to spread knowledge to others. I agree 100% with the author and most of the comments below that blogging for yourself is great, and that showcasing what you are passionate about is also great. I don't think the position people are taking is that blogging isn't worth it because that is no longer important. The point I gather, is that it used to be you could find a small nugget of something technical (for example, on stack-overflow, in a manual, etc) and explain it in a way that is approachable to a select audience. Then, over time that audience comes to appreciate learning new and interesting things. Take for example https://kyrylo.org/html/2024/10/25/why-does-target-blank-have-an-underscore-in-front.html https://kyrylo.org/html/2024/10/25/why-does-target-blank-hav... . ChatGPT can practically write this same post by asking the question, and tailor the explanation to any level of expertise, and can break individual concepts down that is 100% tailored to the person asking the question. That is where I think blogging has been turned on its head.

easwee 2y ago

I dont blog for others, I blog for myself and my joy.

theZilber 2y ago

You writing something personal serves as inspiration to people who just want to write. Many years ago I started writing as a goal to make it something big. But I was very far away from acheiving anything close to my goals, and writing started feeling like a chore. Now I am working on my personal blog as a platform, not only for writing, but for self expression in design and programming. Because I just read your post - it makes me want to speed up the process of finishing my own blog (it contains many engineering quirks that need to be ironed out as it is not a simple website - hence the time taken to make it). So what I am trying to say, when people read your posts - you are moving the needle. You are not changing anything spectacularly, but rather have some influence of people's perception over certain things. And now - you moved me closer to finishing what I started months ago - this should serve enough of a dopamine hit for you to continue doing what you are doing, however you choose to rationalize it :) (assuming you even get to read this comment)

codr7 2y ago

Gwern said something along the lines of: If you don't leave marks in the online world, you're invisible to AI. I have no idea what that's going to mean moving forward, but it makes sense to me.

memhole 2y ago

Strangely enough, doing work with AI helped push me to blog and be more creative. Something about the artificiality of AI and if the machines can start doing what we do, what else is there?

erwan577 2y ago

One always writes for the potential readers. Even if the human readers are becoming rare, the opportunity to be read forever by all these AIs can only boost our ego :-)

Mithriil 2y ago
Being read by one human: you deepened their understanding of the thing. Being read by one OpenAI crawler: you deepened the understanding of ChatGPT, thus offering knowledge of the thing to everyone that interacts with it about the thing. One of these scenarios has much more collective impact than the other.

FigurativeVoid 2y ago

The more that we have AI trawling our writing, the more important I think it is to realize that AI is part of the audience. I have been thinking about writing more "cookbook" style posts so that users and AI have good modern examples to look at. CSS-tricks is a great example. It has good code and and is easy to search. One thing that articles that include code need to tag good and bad examples. AI will get better at recognizing the bad, but we should have more comments that say "This is bad. Use the better pattern."

Mithriil 2y ago
It is helping out the collective to give AI a tutorial on undocumented matter. Yes, you don't receive anything in exchange (except personal achievment and growth from writing, as many have commented). But making a world a better place is more important for some people than personal fame and recognition. If AI systems are crawling everything we write publicly, we have a certain responsibility to teach it the right things. It's like our common child we're raising through what we leave open on the internet.

prophesi 2y ago

If you're not interested in letting your blog posts be used to train AI, remember to update your robots.txt regularly as AI crawlers come up. This is assuming they respect your robots.txt, and don't change their user-agent. There's a service for this called Dark Visitors[0], though I wish there was a FOSS project to track AI user-agents. [0] https://darkvisitors.com/ https://darkvisitors.com/

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

npvrite 2y ago

Human conscience has not and will not be duplicated by "AI" in the near future. These are simply programs that regurgitate mostly stolen data.

xucian 2y ago

most things are still worth doing in the age of ai

phyce 2y ago

I think it's more worth than ever. The idea that some of my thoughts might be integrated into some AI model by being used as training data is exciting