10 years of writing a blog nobody reads
flowtwo.io337 points by thejoeflow 5 days ago
337 points by thejoeflow 5 days ago
One of the tough pills I and probably many other developers have had to swallow when maturing is that "non-programming skills" from schools are useful and very valuable, actually. Writing is one of them. Everyone loves a programmer that can explain themselves. An opinion isn't worth having if you aren't able to defend it either. Maintaining a blog therefore seems like a great way of improving your writing skills while also testing your own opinions.
Writing down opinions on things have done wonders for my ability to reason about them, especially when the opinions are built on 10 years of "hunch" and no discussion.
I upvoted but I was not taught this! I have had to slowly figure it out on my own. Writing things down is kind of like augmenting your brain. It's a memory that does not forget. When working through a problem, writing it down tends to point out the holes in your understanding. A corner case is never lost or forgotten when written down, it just stares at you until you write down a solution. The next step after realizing this is to develop the discipline to write things down and to organize your environment so it's effortless to write things down.
Same, I had to learn this the hard way. In fact, I find that many (younger me included) are arrogant about *not* wanting to deal with writing due to it feeling like waste of time. But after maintaining codebases for 5+ years, you begin to appreciate younger you explaining wtf you were thinking.
And now, being at a point in my career where I have opinions on many things and discuss them with peers, I slowly realized writing about it was actually helping me more than anything.
Using something like confluence religiously in a team is a big boon. Write docs about everything. Write to get decisions done, to plan, to celebrate, to retrospect, to architect, to help oncall. Everything! Doesnt need to be beautiful prose - just needs to be famn useful and ideally easy/quick to read.
Maybe in US, if you learn to write in a simple and straightforward way.
In France essays are all about writing in a complex way to show how smart you are. Which not only is not a useful skill to have, it's detrimental because we learn to write in obscure and hard to understand ways.
This is painfully true. I went to a US university after high school in France and had a really hard time adjusting to the American style of essays. So many paragraphs with sentences crossed off for being too long, in particular. Hitting word limits when, in a French dissertation, you'd just be getting started (an exaggeration, yes, but still).
It wasn't a "language" problem because I was already a fluent American English speaker. It was all style-related.
I've recently started reading 19th century French literature again and sometimes I have to reread sentences multiple times because they're so long I come to the wrong conclusion too early.
This reminds me a bit of my Korean professor from college. Perhaps the most memorable thing from his class was when he explained the Korean style of writing essays was to not explain up front what you are going to cover but to "beat around the bush" until the end. He accompanied the bit in quotes with a mime of him swinging a stick at various parts of a really big bush.
For some reason, that image will forever accompany that phrase in my mind.
They still want you to write in an academic style, even if that style is fairly different.
I was once asked to write to then governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, to sway him on some political issue. That's certainly a practical assignment, but I chatted with some classmates about it, and none of us thought the professor would give a good grade to something that might genuinely sway the man.
I've tried a few time to read le Journal du Hacker, the french-speaking clone of Hacker News and each time I've found that the writing level is so low it's basically unreadable.
"One of the tough pills I and probably many other developers have had to swallow when maturing is that "non-programming skills" from schools are useful and very valuable, actually."
It is interesting in how challenging it can be to convince some younger developers of this. Some of the stronger and more technically proficient developers (that are young-ish... mid 30's and down, let's say) have a level of contempt for those skills that is surprising and not trivial to coach them on. They seem to suffer from "smartest person in the room" syndrome and mistakenly believe those smarts apply to everything they deal with rather than the just the technical areas that they excel in.
I agree. But I also think there is an overlap between programming and writing. If you are a good programmer, you have some abilities that can help you explain a subject or argue some point. Especially when it is about something non-trivial.
I write to the computers because sure as fuck wasn't nobody gonna give me no money for writing to the humans. Instead, I am lead to understand that during the formative years of my primary caretakers, what people got for writing was jail time. And the people who put 'em there never actually went anywhere; they just became less visible as they shed the dead weight of the state apparatus.
As a result, computer touchin' is how my entire cohort developed sentience, since computers have the useful property of always responding correctly when asked correctly. Humans, meanwhile, can quite easily become trapped in a permanent low-intensity fight-or-flight state - where they only respond correctly to incorrect statements, and vice versa.
For better or worse, ChatGPT is pretty good at explaining people to you if you describe what you did and what happened and don't leave out the details. Just be aware that you're human too and it'll syncophantically tell you you're right if you leave anything out, which really strokes the ego, but doesn't actually help. Don't fall into that trap. If you're worried about privacy, get a local one instead of ChatGPT.
I'm definitely in the "for worse" camp on that one, and doing my part.
If I was exposed to LLMs when I was a wee atom, I strongly suspect it would've had a massively detrimental effect.
Tbh, an effect not unlike that of the shitfractal of media that our salad days were wasted on. You know, all those endless cultural artifacts that purport to explain people to themselves (in a literally - but at least somewhat more visibly - irresponsible way.) Just ... vastly more so.
Basically, with my socioeconomic background, if I'd had GPT as a kid, I don't think I would have even developed a mind. Exact opposite of a Diamond Age scenario.
Generally, I consider the perspective of people aligned with AI to be a perspective from which a P-zombie is superior in all respects to a conscious being. And I've seen enough of that shit without needing to fucking self-host it, thank you very much, go get an actual therapist, they need to eat too.
One benefit of blogs that isn't mentioned enough is the opportunity to express unorthodox ideas, and the chance to defend them to form a good thesis.
Diversity of thought is pretty valuable. So is training yourself to think independently, come up with your own premises and learning to build sound arguments, which you also get from writing and discussing ideas.
Pithy: "Writing things down is a special way of processing them for yourself."
A fictional example of this that I love is (seriously) the Twilight rewrite Luminosity: https://luminous.elcenia.com/chapters/ch1.shtml. Bella writes everything down in her notebook and is unusually self-reflective.
[Self-promotion warning] My blog that nobody read turned into a published book. An editor for a small publishing firm happened to come across my blog and thought that it might be good as a book. He contacted me and after about a year of work (more than I expected) I finished the book and got it published. It's not that popular, but I'm very happy with it.
My point is that you don't need a massive audience. If you can reach one person and make them laugh, or teach someone something new, or give someone hope when they really needed it, then your writing will be worth it.
I am now intrigued in your blog, if it's still online?
It was my old astrophotography blog: https://neurohack.com/Astrophotography/index.html
And the book it led to is 101 Amazing Sights of the Night Sky: https://www.amazon.com/101-Amazing-Sights-Night-Sky/dp/15919...
Neither is very popular, but it was a lot of fun.
It always pleases me to see pictures of NGC 4216, the edge-on spiral galaxy with a star beside its nucleus. I used to use it as a pointer to the short-period contact binary star CC Comae Berenices back when I used observe eclipsing binaries with my Celestron 8.
Did not expect to see a book about night sky in this post. The book looks great. I'm getting one for my sons.
congrats! fun little story. how much did you make from it?
Not very much. Maybe $10K over 10 years. Do not quit your day job!
But I'm hoping to make $2K from the Anthropic settlement, so I got that going for me.
I have a friend who used to complain about wanting to publish a novel, not being able to finish, blah blah blah. So I made a bet with him that I would self-publish a book before he did. That night, I packed 3 years of blog posts into a PDF and pushed "submit" on Kindle Direct Publishing. It was the kick in the pants he needed to finally finish his manuscript.
"I often write "too much" and struggle to really condense my thoughts into a sharpened essay. Most of my posts are 2000+ words...nowadays I'm trying to restrict myself to 1000 words. The limit forces me to really think about the core idea I want to share."
I clerked for a judge who helped us become really good writers. I know this is shocking to some, but some judges actually really do care and don't try to write thousands of pages. He really cared about trying to write opinions everyone could read and understand.
We would all get together as clerks, read the draft we had written out loud to the judge and the other clerks, and remove excess words, rewrite sentences that were too complicated, you name it. For every sentence, he encouraged us to think about who the audience really was and what we want the reader to take away from it.
If you want to make your writing shorter, this is a good approach whether you read it out loud or not. Lots of engineers write very long things because they are unsure who the audience is, or they don't think about how each sentence helps them convey something to that audience. Or they are trying to guess what questions they will get asked. Pick an audience. Go through every sentence. Remove the ones that don't actually help you convey something to your audience. Be ruthless to yourself. It's better to answer questions people have later than try to guess what they will ask you and answer it in the piece.
If you are trying to be persuasive, i'd double down on making it short, and add "order your writing and arguments in order of strength", and then "remove all the weak arguments". People won't read all the way through most of the time, and either it's convincing or it isn't. If your strongest arguments don't convince someone, your weak ones will probably make people feel like you are grasping at straws, and make the whole thing less convincing overall.
> It's better to answer questions people have later than try to guess what they will ask you and answer it in the piece.
Kind of. Sometimes you can see quibbles coming a mile away and want to head them off at the pass. Without guessing questions in advance, you create a duty for yourself to interact and answer them later, and maybe you don't wanna. Besides, the whole piece is providing answers to questions guessed in advance. That's why you'd put any writing out there. So it's right to do some guessing.
The problem is guessing badly.
The best business writing advice I ever got was "always answer more questions than you raise". It's usually clear when something is going to raise questions. I'm with you wrt guessing what questions readers will have, but reading critically can identify where you have unsupported claims, incomplete explanations, and confusing or conflicting statements.
The "reading out loud" method is something I do, too -- learned it while getting my B.A. in Creative Writing -- it's great for helping you understand when a sentence is awkward or too wordy, or when the rhythm of a longer piece of writing is off. Writing is just speech with the benefit of an extra filter. Use the filter.
Great advice. This works in companies as well! What is the goal of your writing and who is the target audience? Memos (they still exist) can be drastically different for different audiences. Mess this up and you end up on the wrong end of the stick.
A detailed memo is not meant for (most) senior management. They will all individually find a hook to hang up their coat of the week and you will go home a thousand questions, but without the decision you need. Give a senior management memo to technical staff and they will cry for months because you lack the technical skills to understand the problems they face. Give a sales memo to technical people, or the reverse and it will probably be flat out ignored. The key is differentiation. Differentiation is only possible if you practise writing the smallest set of convincing arguments in each memo you deliver.
The scraper bots probably read it and now it is ever so slightly altering the weights in some massive AI model. That's not nothing.
After all we said and done, we will be only a memory in some future AI model. And maybe it will answer the meaning of the number 42.
The answer is: let there be light.
I captured a very similar thought in the footnotes of one of my comments here.
A numerical distillation of our aggregated thoughts will live on for potentially longer than any ordinary person could have hoped for (and maybe wanted).
We actually get our own slice of immortality.
I have no idea about the journey that atoms of my body took to reach where they are now (as me, myself). I wish them good lucky on their future endeavours. I think we should get acclimatized to similar process about "Ideas and Concepts that we think originates from Us". These concepts will be meat grinded into large LLMs and hopefully help someone in future.
If you want happiness through writing, write only for yourself. Never check site visitor analytics, comments, shares. Only care if you're enjoying the writing. To make it easier you can also write under a pseudonym.
Some of my worst habits formed seeing early posts go viral and then getting addicted to that endorphin hit. The amount of time I wasted checking analytics and new subs would probably equal the time it would take me to write 10 more posts or read a couple books.
But congrats at sticking to it for 10 years!
It reminds me of WaitButWhy. [1] The guy had some awesome and insightful writings that eventually culminated in a story about SpaceX and Elon Musk that went way beyond viral. Everything after that went sharply downhill and I think the main reason is that the newfound minor celebrity status really impaired his ability to just sit down and casually shit post without worrying so much about what everybody else would think.
It's quite ironic given this. [2] He simply needs to go mammoth hunting.
[1] - https://waitbutwhy.com/
[2] - https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/06/taming-mammoth-let-peoples-op...
Writing a blog is like talking in the town square. Except because it’s digital, we seem to forget how communication works. If you just start talking in the town square, you’re standing alone talking. Sure a person who passes by might pause, but the odds you’re saying something really relevant to them are low, so they’ll move on.
The whole question of how you get in front of the right people and tweak your message based on their reactions, and then setup a routine so you have a dependable performance-audience, all seem to be lost on many folks.
Related, I think people have stopped.... reacting on the internet? I've been part of the X/Twitter to Bluesky migration and people often mention how 'quiet' Bluesky is.
I think that's not due to algorithmic intervention of product design etc., I think people are just tired. The novelty of shouting at strangers on the internet has worn off - how many internet fights have we gotten into that did nothing in the end except waste time? It's only worse with a coin flip's chance of the other person being an LLM. We're all tired.
This is relatable. I often find myself starting a reply on here, really thinking it through as I type it out, and then hitting delete on what I just wrote. Sometimes I even hit submit, and then delete a few moments later.
It's just hard to justify engaging. Worst case, I get a fight on my hands with someone who's as dogmatic as they are wrong, which is both frequent and also a complete waste of my time. (A tech readership is always going to veer hard into the well, akshually...) Most likely case, I get fictitious internet points. Which - I won't lie - tickle my lizard brain, just as they do everyone else's. But they don't actually achieve anything meaningful.
Best case is that I learn something. Realistically, this happens vanishingly infrequently, and the signal-noise ratio is much, much worse than if I just pulled a book off my shelf.
I suppose this is all an artifact of time and experience. Maybe I've just picked all the low-hanging fruit, and so I no longer have the patience to watch people endlessly repost the same xkcd strips from fifteen years ago, navel-gaze about tabs or spaces, share thrilling new facts that I have in fact known for many decades, etc. And while I'm very excited for them to discover all these things anew (and anew... and anew...), it's just not a good use of my time and patience to participate.
> It's just hard to justify engaging. Worst case, I get a fight on my hands with someone who's as dogmatic as they are wrong, which is both frequent and also a complete waste of my time.
The three mindset changes I found that really help with this are understanding that:
* You don't have to try and get the last word in.
* Other people are not entitled to your time, especially if they're engaging in bad faith.
* Outside of small and curated communities, there's pretty good odds that you're not interacting with a real and honest person.
So whenever I click into the comment box, I always ask myself "Can I really be bothered with this? Is this really what I want to be spending my free time doing?"
And then I often close the comment box and get on with my life.
I wish we got karma points (or maybe "zen points") for every time we refrained from commenting on someone who is wrong on the internet.
It's just hard to justify engaging.
I wonder if it's just creeping apathy, post-covid, current-AI boom. That we're just tired in life. There's a psych study, Dimensional Apathy Scale (DAS)[0] and one of the questions is basically "How much do I contact my friends?" I think it argues that the more apathy we feel, the less likely we are to reach out to others, and I imagine, the less likely we are to react or reply to comments (or even post).
I'm curious if the decline in reacting is matched by a decline in replying and posting in general.
Anyways, I worry that apathy is on the rise as we get overwhelmed with the rate of change and uncertainty in the 2020s and I'm working pretty hard to fight that apathy and bring more empathy, so if you're interested, please reach out to me the contact info in my bio.
[0]: https://das.psy.ed.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/SelfDAS....
I feel this, but also, I am... anxious about reactions? I rarely / never go back on comments I've written on HN. I know it's actually a really bad thing to do because it means I won't allow my views to be challenged, don't engage in debate, just want to get my side out without actively defending it.
Years ago I had a blog and one time I wrote a post in response to another blog post about education vs experience, arguing in favor of formal education. And that one got a link back from the original article, leading people back to my blog. I got engagement, comments, feedback, etc... and it was very uh. Overwhelming? Like suddenly I had to defend my arguments. It made me very uncomfortable, even though it was probably a good thing, all in all.
I don't know how to break that trend. I think I'd rather have realtime communications / chat, but that's another thing that seems to have died, at least in the space I've been at for a long time now.
The simple solution is that whenever you start to write a comment, ask yourself: do I want to have a discussion about this?
If the answer is "yes", then make your comment, check back and interact with the responses (assuming they seem to be in good faith). If it's "no" then just close the comment box and get on with your life.
But then I realise that it's fairly pointless writing this in the first place...
Spot on. Ten or fifteen years ago, participating in the internet was something I got excited about, now I just get excited about getting away from it.
I think the aggressive bots/AI, and bad moderation policy, have poisoned online discourse in popular channels.
You can still find real people in niche communities (like here), where good moderators can maintain a grip on quality. Though perhaps HN has some secret moderator sauce, I’m not aware of.
Humans are just migrating off the old, big platforms that no longer feel real.
Probably more related to progressive culture, people worried about saying the wrong thing. From the outside, it looks exhausting to try and keep up with the latest dogma of the left.
Participating? Or reacting? The internet I look seems plenty full of reactions despite the migrations you mention.
Maybe to YT or Threads instead.
I like Bsky but I don't think the userbase supports much large-scale communication (not a bad thing, frankly)
What if having an audience isn’t the goal?
I saw this Carl Jung quote shared on Substack recently.
"Loneliness does not come from having no people around you, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you"."
I'm using writing as an outlet for an active mind these days. Thoughts that seem important to me and need to come out even if there is nobody there to read them.
Precisely why I maintain a diary. It listens to all of my thoughts, sans judgement. One of the best decisions I've ever made. Wish I did this years ago
> Writing a blog is like talking in the town square. Except because it’s digital, we seem to forget how communication works. If you just start talking in the town square, you’re standing alone talking. Sure a person who passes by might pause, but the odds you’re saying something really relevant to them are low, so they’ll move on.
An optimist take on your statement is this: we need MORE folks writing/talking in town square. More chances to encounter something valuable (to you).
Otherwise, I first read your statement the other way: too many people communicating into the ether with no audience and no feedback. But I suppose I prefer people practice that communication somehow rather than not...
Is your point that people do not understand how to present themselves and a point of view (on anything) in front of anyone? Work presentation to executive. Writing a coherent email. Running a meeting. Etc.
I don’t get this town square analogy. My blog is a “permanent” record of the electronics related projects that I’ve done. Things I’ve learned along the way, techniques that I’ve used, stuff that I’ve made.
I’ve given myself a target of 6 blog posts per year. It forces me to complete something every once in a while, and it also makes me study a subject more thoroughly than I otherwise would: I don’t want to make a fool of myself.
It’s nice if a blog post resonates with a few people every once in a while, but that’s just a bonus.
Look on the bright side. Firstly, I just read it. Secondly, AI will likely read it, so your thoughts may become part of the great AI world consciousness someday. Finally you're really doing this for yourself; I find writing my thoughts out in a blog or a novel gives me some satisfaction knowing I have tried, and now have something out there forever that you or your friends can look back on someday.
100%. I didn't mean this to be a "woe is me" piece, despite the clickbait-y title. I just wanted to talk about the merits of publishing your writing without any actual readers. And some lessons on writing I've picked up.
I do it. I write[0], because it helps me to understand stuff better (tutorials), or because I work on "gut instinct," a lot, and writing it in a manner that explains it, forces me to "formalize" things.
My stuff is too TL;DR, for most folks, these days.
“It's redundant to say "I think" at any point in an opinion piece.”
“But is there still value in human produced writing? Subjectively, yes. Objectively? I'm not sure. I think there's a lot of personal value in writing though.”
There is value because I felt compelled to engage, but if it turns out you’re a bot then I’ll feel cheated and less likely to read other blog posts.
I think it is not redundant - it gives emphasis for a guess, to make sure reader won't mix it up with other things that may be verified to be truthy.
yea, I'm not saying there's no place for that phrase ever. But overusing it was a bad habit of mine and it ends up being unnecessary filler. My wording there was a bit exaggerated.
how will people sharpen their thinking if they don't write their own words? the value in human writing even with llms remains almost the same. you won't get better stuff without it
Ten years? I've been doing it for over twenty. Readership is something you have to chase, and if that's what you want, that's fine. But for some people, like me, it's the writing that's important.
Shameless plug: Submit your blog to https://indieblog.page and you'll get the occasional random reader who might even become a RSS subscriber.
And/or submit it to: https://powrss.com/
Same idea, maybe with a bit more focus on RSS
In 2004 https://paradies.jeena.net/weblog/2004/apr/ersteintrag I started my blog in German. I have a migration background (at 11 years old from Poland to Germany) and that made so I would do a lot of spelling mistakes when writing, even though I could express myself fairly OK. Writing a blog was a way for me to get better at it, and I would encourage my readers to tell me when they found something odd.
Because I moved to Sweden just about a year later, I started a new blog https://jeena.net/something-new where I would write in English, because I thought then both the people from Germany (to a lesser extend) and the people I know in Sweden would be able to read my blog.
It was a good decision to switch to English (which back then I didn't speak fluently at all, but writing was ok), because 5 Years ago I again moved countries, now I'm in South Korea and am still blogging in English.
It definitely helped me to learn English, which now is my main language at work and at home.
Blogs have been good for minority languages. At one point most of the best sites in Gaelic were blogs.
I've self hosted my blog across several platforms (Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, and now pelican) since about 2007 and the best thing I did was disable comments.
I had a friend message me saying they came across my blog googling how to run home assistant on k3s. And that's a satisfaction no money can buy.
Yeah I’ve occasionally mentioned things at work, and had someone say “I think I read a blog post about that once”. Only to discover they read about it on my blog! Incredibly satisfying.
I’ve also seen screenshots of my blog posts show up in random technical talks I happened to watch. I want to shout at the screen - “That was meeeee!”
I also write blogs for 10 years and few people come to read. Actually I don't want people who I know in real life read my blogs. I don't why. Maybe I'm too much an introvert!
I don't want to break his streak, what it is about ?
It even has comments so you won’t be breaking the streak if there ever was any.
Totally random rant.
I have a lot to say. About lot of things.
I don't blog because, most of the time, I'm worried about what people might think. Sometimes I speak up in public and people are confused, so - I think - it will only be amplified online. Sometimes I want to share a bit of code, and I'm not sure if the formatting will please everyone. Or naming convention.
But most of all it's putting it all together.
There was this famous kid who only talked in tweets because he had ADHD. Sometimes series of tweets. Like 20 of them. But always in tweets, because that gave him control, and removed - or add, depends on your point of view - constraints.
Anyway - don't be like me. Speak up. Tell people what you want them to hear.
> Sometimes I want to share a bit of code, and I'm not sure if the formatting will please everyone. Or naming convention.
Do what pleases you. Write and share first and most importantly for yourself. If other people find it interesting or useful they will read, if not, they will not.
Writing is a muscle you need to train, so start with small topics you want to say stuff about, learn, it will become easier. Then do the big topics you want to say a lot about.
> "Writing is a muscle you need to train"
I see this sentiment a lot; I've written tens of thousands of comments on the internet (on different sites) over 25+ years. Am I a better writer? I don't feel like one. Is there anything objectively measurable that could answer that?
as a junior dev I completely understand the code sharing part: no matter if I write the code myself, or followed some guide about code styling/naming conventions/best coding practices, or assisted myself with an llm, the result is the same; I don't share the code at all, due to the fact of how many times I saw on the internet the "Why did you do it that way, no one does it that way" or some other discouraging comments, so no wonder that Stack Overflow was becoming less and less popular even before llm's if there is more people like me and people who were like me don't need such sites anymore since they upskilled since then. Nowadays only people reading my code (and subsuquently having a normal healthy talk, not a discussion - a talk!) is an LLM and my girlfriend or some random friend that asked what I'm up to nowadays when I was in the process of coding.
I encourage you to still share your ideas and thoughts. It doesn't need to be as a blog, but in general. :)
Don't censor yourself out of fear of what others might think or misunderstand.
Many may get confused and some might not like it, but there may also be a small group of people who understand, which if you fall silent couldn't be reached.
When I write in my native tongue I avoid mentionning myself and try to disappear from the text; "I", "me", "my" is forbidden and also I try to compress sentences into the smallest most precise set of words — being precise and concise is the funniest writing game.
Good idea. This strengthens your position and forces you to be more creative with how it's expressed.
I didnt read it, but keep it up.
Recommendation: use Hemingway (hemingwayapp.com) or something similar.
That apps spots problems I often don't see in first drafts. Weakeners like adverbs/passive voice. Complicated sentences. Fancy words over simple words. Etc. Stuff that makes writing harder to read.
Not perfect here at all! Always practicing. But more and more use helps me spot problems in first drafts, or avoid them altogether.
> My goal now is to use less words to convey an idea.
This is what I'm encouraged by Grammarly as well. To some extent, perhaps the book "Elements of style" encourages this too.
However, I read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. She writes long (wordy?) sentences that are clear, and even feels beautiful to read. I really enjoyed her writing.
But I'm not a native speaker. A question for the native speakers: what's your take on this? Has Shelly's writing style gone out of fashion, or are these two (Shelley's style and succinctness) different things?
I've been having fun with my blog for many years. And now it's a big source of revenue for me. Still, I treat it almost the same way as before: a place where I get to share my ideas and discoveries.
The sheer act of writing helps me structure my thoughts and helps others grow. Win win!
What I did a while ago was splitting notes and articles: https://notes.dsebastien.net
Publishing unpolished notes is a great way to remove needless pressure
I felt this. The had the same experience when I blogged some 15 years ago now. Different times, same ghost town, but still had good content and useful information that I could look back on to jog my own memory. So it’s good to keep a diary. It’s usefulness is useful to you if you let it.
My current blog uses Ghost, and this is first time in ages that I convinced myself to use a pre-packaged solution instead of hand-rolling the whole thing. That took a lot of willpower....
The beginning of this article neatly captures why writing your own thoughts -- as difficult as this can be sometimes -- is so crucial. One of my biggest fears from the unchecked proliferation of AI is society deciding that writing "the old way" should go the way of cursive and mentally calculating tips, that is, into the archives.
> My style has certainly improved since my early days of writing. Reading my old stuff is painful.
I've been blogging since 2006 and I feel the same way. The past few years I blog less, but I do try to write more to the point and use less idioms and spoken writing style.
as someone that also has a blog nobody ever reads, i begin to quite enjoy it - I find it really useful when discussing something specific with someone, as i have a very weird collection of random writings
I notice web searches now hide blogs unless you search through that site specifically. All part of suppressing the democratising effects of the internet... Shame I've found some good info via blogs.
It seems like the author wants writing to be a bigger component of their life than it is. I hope the author is able to accomplish that goal. Maybe 100x their output and turn their blog into something a few people read. Hopefully the "20 years of writing a blog nobody reads" is a revelrous experience for the author's handful of readers.
I am not so sure about the "keep all that pondering to yourself buddy" point. The world would be a better place with a little more epistemic humility.
Writing a blog nobody reads is called a diary.
Remember the days when people actually made money out of writing blog posts?
People still do.
But it's not the people who write them, but those who sell the LLMs trained on those blogs.
I found Stephen King's On Writing a worthwhile read for anyone thinking about writing, no matter your opinion on King's other works (I am not a fan). A hard lesson well expressed is using fewer words, which King describes as "kill your babies".
I will never not find it insane that in college they have word minimums for essays, instead of maximums. Imo going to college ruins many people's ability to write clearly.
At university in the UK it's almost always maximums rather than minimums. It's damn hard as well, you never get the word count you actually need to fully cover the subject and always end up desperately counting those last few as you trim it down. My university would cap your grade if you went over the count by a certain % as well.
I do think it made me better at writing though, and it certainly made me aware of how much people are actually willing to read.
I definitely had classes in college that had maximums as well (often assignments were supposed to be 7-10 pages, for example), but generally it's unnecessary and most people struggle to meet the minimums.
blogs made sense before social media.
good times.
your statement suggest they might not make sense after social media (otherwise it's redundant) Why do you imply they don't make sense now?
If you want to become a better writer, write comments, not blog posts. And if you engage with others, it becomes more fun.
Cool. I know 1 person read my WEB site, they sent me a email :) But I do not keep track so I have no idea nor do I really care. So now you have 1 more who read it.
But since then I moved it to Gemini, the real Gemini, not google's thing. I find that far easier to maintain.
Have you considered that your thoughts on Writing Well might be wrong, and that's why people don't read your blog? I tuned out after realizing you have no idea what you're talking about.
But is there a real connection between being wrong and not being read or are you yourself wrong ?
Furthermore, I doubt there are any chances "right/wrong" applies to aesthetical types of philosophical discussions.
> But is there a real connection between being wrong and not being read or are you yourself wrong ?
You don’t need to be a standup comedian yourself to spot bad comedy.
> Furthermore, I doubt there are any chances "right/wrong" applies to aesthetical types of philosophical discussions.
It’s hard to figure out what readers want because you don’t get direct feedback. But if you spend any amount of time in front of an audience, it becomes incredibly clear that some things work on stage better than others. I truly believe charisma is a learnable skill. By treating it as talent we deprive people who aren’t charismatic the chance to improve. Writing is just the same. Claiming that there’s no “right/wrong” here implies that it’s impossible to learn to write in a more engaging way. And that’s obviously false.
I did a clowning course a few years ago. In one silly exercise we all partnered up. Each couple were given a tennis ball, and we had to squish the ball between our foreheads so it wouldn’t fall. And like that, move around the room. Afterwards the teacher got half the class on stage and do it again, while everyone else watched. Then the audience got to vote on which couple we liked the most. It was surreal - almost everyone voted on the same pair. Those two in particular were somehow more interesting than everyone else. In that room there was a right and a wrong way to wordlessly hold a tennis ball between two people’s faces. And we all agreed on what it was.
> You don't need to be a standup comedian yourself to spot bad comedy.
I am not a native english speaker, I don't know anything about humourous form of language in that tongue.
Charisma depends on your audience, and audiences can differ quite a lot. There is no "right/wrong" because what please you as an audience may be considered wrong by another one. "Writing in a more engaging way" aka changing your conceptions of what is right/wrong in order to conform to the current cultural supremacia that is built up everyday by pushing some kind of fast-food culture or idk.
Your story is interesting, and I don't understand how you could be surprised : people that go to clowning classes can share the same taste about what is good/bad ? That's not a very surprising fact ! If you had told me that they were people from different cultures ...
Do you think Baudelaire cared about engagement ? You talked like there were no way taste could dramatically change to the point "ugly" is becoming "good" or vice-versa. Some of the writers and artists I like the most braved the taste™ of the different hegemonic culture of their time, and just trusted their own intuition of what they did want to express, say, create.
Marcel Duchamp is a great example of how a mid level joke can change the art world suddenly (and people's taste with it).
> Charisma depends on your audience, and audiences can differ quite a lot. There is no "right/wrong" because what please you as an audience may be considered wrong by another one.
Yes; one of the most aspects of charisma is being sensitive to your audience. Charismatic people watch how their performance is received, and adjust it on the fly. Not too much, but enough to make the audience feel cared for. This is one reason why there's a sort of magic in live performances.
I also think we're talking about two extreme ideas here that are both wrong:
1. Performances are on an objective spectrum from "right" to "wrong"
2. Nothing is good or bad. Everything is subjective.
The truth is somewhere in the middle. There's no such thing as "the objectively best pieces of music (/art / writing / etc)". But some music, art and writing is enjoyed by many people. And some is junk. There is no objective measure of music. But also, nobody would consider my amateur piano playing to be as good as The Beetles or Mozart.
> "Writing in a more engaging way" aka changing your conceptions of what is right/wrong in order to conform to the current cultural supremacia that is built up everyday by pushing some kind of fast-food culture or idk.
I don't know where to start with this.
Again, there's two extremes that are both wrong: a) As a writer / performer, you should conform exactly to whatever the audience wants. And b) Forget the audience. Write however you want without any regard for them.
Both of these extreme positions will result in bad work. The answer is somewhere in the middle. We don't want a performer to be our slave or our master. We want you to be our friend. Our leader. Our teacher.
In other terms, write however you want. But if you don't care about your audience, don't be surprised if your audience doesn't care about you.
> people that go to clowning classes can share the same taste about what is good/bad ? That's not a very surprising fact ! If you had told me that they were people from different cultures ...
I'm Australian. The class was in France, taught by a French clown. There were students from the USA, Canada, Australia, the UK, South Africa, NZ, Finland, Germany and more.
Not all art works across different cultures, but clowning does. I think if you showed our performances to a group of monkeys, even they would also find it funny and if they could, they would pick out the same favorites.
> The truth is somewhere in the middle
Of course everything is subjective. The fact we're social animals creates the feeling that there's some kind of rules, but that's just a bias. We're biased. There is no absolute junk art-artefact, because humanity potentially extends timewise to so many instances of different humans that you cannot know in advance if something will be considered "good" at some point in time, culture, individusl brain etc...
> Both of these extremes position will result in bad work.
That's absurd, if someone "conform exactly to whatever the audience wants" then everyone in the audience would be pleased, how could it be bad work ?
Side note. Is it really possible for some artist to forget the audience ? I mean "however you want without any regard for them" is possible, but due to the fact you write as you want, it would be an absolute masterclass if you succeeded to be not cared about by anyone.
But yeah, that's not constituent of what is an artwork or not. This discussion is useless to the artist.
> [clown class]
Okay, but mondialization, hegemony of certain cultures etc... Are we truly different cultures ? I don't think so. But anyway, that's not the problem.
The problem is that you were using this example to justify the fact that taste is not relative. I accept that a group of clown students got impressed by the same clowns. But I don't accept that there wouldn't be some differences if the whole humanity (past and future) voted that day.
> [Australia]
Greetings from europe !
(Hi from Australia!)
> There is no absolute junk art-artefact, because humanity potentially extends timewise to so many instances of different humans that you cannot know in advance if something will be considered "good" at some point in time, culture, individusl brain etc...
Look at the number of plays each song gets in Spotify. If everyone had their own, totally unique taste, there would be no mathematical correlation between which songs I enjoy and which songs you enjoy. We would see a uniform distribution of plays of all the songs in spotify. But the distribution is very non-uniform. Some songs get billions of listens. Some songs get essentially none.
However, if we all had exactly the same taste, Spotify would only need a small selection of "the best" songs for everybody to enjoy. This is also not what we see.
Art has fashions. But many of aspects of music and storytelling have remained relevant across culture and across time so far. We like musical rhythm. We enjoy narrative in stories. We enjoy stories about relationships between people. We like some variety, but not too much. And so on. I'm sure tastes will change. But if I just mash my hand on the piano with no skill and upload that to spotify, I doubt even in the fullness of time I'll ever get as many spotify listens as The Beetles.
> That's absurd, if someone "conform exactly to whatever the audience wants" then everyone in the audience would be pleased, how could it be bad work ? [...] This discussion is useless to the artist.
Yes exactly. An artist can't work like this. It wouldn't work. It has the wrong energy.
Its kind of paradoxical, but the audience doesn't want to feel like we're in charge too much. We like it when performers take risks on stage, and show us who they are so we can judge them. Look at the top rated videos on youtube. Or the most popular songs. Or any list of the best movies ever made. All of them will contain a strong, clear point of view of the artist. Stanley Kubrick and Mick Jagger don't ask the audience what we want. They tell us what we want. (And they get it right.)
---
At a broader level, I think this whole discussion is a diversion. You seem to have argued both that all art is subjective. And that creating works of art based on what people want would be submitting to the "current cultural supremacia". Both of these arguments sound like excuses to me. Excuses to not try and become skilled. Excuses to skip being be sensitive to your audience. Excuses that protect from failure. For what its worth, I struggle with this too. My clown teacher told me I need to "try to not die so much" when things don't work on stage. It is very difficult. If human tastes really do change so much across time, then don't create for people in the future. Create for people right now. The people right in front of you, who you can understand.
The most successful clowns, businessmen and writers all care about their audience. But when things inevitably don't work, they acknowledge the failure with lightness and try again.
That is what the audience actually wants.
--- part2
> [spotify streams]
To me, we're in a difficult position because the only way you have to quantify the value of an artwork (music in this case) is the number of streams it has.
Call me a mad man but it is not rare for me to hate most streamed music and to prefer <none> streamed music.
Yet I seriously doubt I am "musically dumb".
What I find instead is that advertisment, reputation, exposure, a good label, radio streams will get you a long way to become a <most streamed> artist.
And no, that's not "an excuse" to not try and become skilled... What sense does it make to say "Dua Lippa is better skilled than J.S.Bach because she has more streams" (or the contrary) or "AC/DC is better skilled than Alan Vega because they sold more disks" (or the contrary).
> If I just mash my hand on the piano with no skill
Okay, that's pretty sure.
Now if you wrote a small piano piece, there is no way you could predict if it will become a hit or not. It depends on factors that are really far from being limited to "the piece in question".
> Now if you wrote a small piano piece, there is no way you could predict if it will become a hit or not. It depends on factors that are really far from being limited to "the piece in question".
This is where I think we really disagree. If I want to make music people like, I’m pretty sure piano lessons would help me. Theory. Rhythm. Learning to sing. Then I need to practice! Making a smash hit isn’t predictable, but it’s not random either. Luck is a necessary but not sufficient quality. As the saying goes, most overnight successes are 20 years in the making. Watch the early stuff from Louis CK. From Trey Parker and Matt Stone. It’s not as good. They got better over time.
You can learn to write better. To be more charismatic. To connect better to an audience. You’re not in control of whether or not an iOS app is successful. But you can’t make it at all if you don’t know how to code. And if you’re bad at design it probably won’t make it. It’s not simply a coincidence that some blog posts get read and others are ignored. Ask anyone successful. By honestly any metric of success. Practice, skill and hard work won’t guarantee anyone cares about your craft. But if you don’t try? Don’t listen to your audience and improve? Good luck.