from Hacker News

Why I Blog

by dguo on 4/6/23, 12:21 PM with 66 comments

• by ethicalsmacker on 4/7/23, 3:44 PM

  I used to blog and quit (pulled all of my content from the web). I still have a landing page, which serves as a general "This is who I am, I'm a real person" because I have a business and people Google my name.

  I couldn't find a good reason to continue publishing content for everyone to read. I also gave up on the open source community at the same time.

  The idea of "giving back" to the community is gone. The open source (and open knowledge) web is gone. People (and companies/ML models) take/pilfer/plagiarize/rehash/profit from your contributions and you get squat in return. I decided to no longer take part in it.

  I can write on my own, privately. I can share and link to content with private links. I don't need the vanity, opportunities or monetization (ie, peanuts).

• by boyter on 4/7/23, 11:07 AM

  While some of the things mentioned are why I also blog, the main reason I do so is so I can remember what I was thinking. I write my blog for me first. If someone else finds it useful that’s great. I guess you could stick that under clarify my thinking, although I tend to keep notes as I go and then reformed into a condensed post afterwards.

  I tend to go back a re-read some posts years after I published them. It’s especially helpful when working on open source projects, as I tend to include warts and all so I can remember what not to do and why.

• by simonw on 4/7/23, 12:40 PM

  I particularly resonated with "Be Able to Provide a Link"

  I wrote a thing about how ChatGPT can't access URLs but pretends that it can - https://simonwillison.net/2023/Mar/10/chatgpt-internet-acces... - and I've since sent people links to it dozens of times: https://twitter.com/search?q=https%3A%2F%2Fsimonwillison.net...

• by jordanmorgan10 on 4/7/23, 5:41 PM

  Re: Ads

  For me, I had some of the mentioned ad networks for a bit. But, they were all not to my liking in terms of UI and added unwanted cruft.

  I always wanted to run my own ads, but I thought “Hey, I don’t have enough traffic.”

  I think people underestimate (as I did) that if you write about a niche, even if it’s a broad topic (for me, iOS) that you can do your own ads for a nice bit of money.

  I make about $12,000 from running my own sponsorships annually, and moving them to monthly only slots has been a revelation. I started with weekly, twice monthly and monthly but man - it was quite a bit of work.

  I’ve hit a very nice sweet spot where I now make money from doing something I love, it’s manageable and it pays for my family vacations, kid’s sports and travel teams and Christmas. It’s great.

• by quaintdev on 4/7/23, 11:33 AM

  I request all bloggers to include RSS so that those of us who have ditched twitter and other social media could find you again.

• by ubermonkey on 4/7/23, 1:46 PM

  I've had a blog now for nearly 23 years, though my posting frequency is far below what it once was. My main reason has always been the same: to share things.

  In the late 90s I maintained a mailing list of sorts that I used to share interesting or funny things I'd found online to a group of friends. Eventually that became my blog. The impetus for any given post is still "hey, I want other people to see this," but the problem today is that most of my very nontechnical pals don't really look online anymore beyond their social feeds.

  At one point, my blog would post to FB and Twitter when I wrote something new, but over time Meta disabled that behavior. I think it still posts to my Twitter account, but I need to address that and shift it to my Mastodon account.

• by epiccoleman on 4/7/23, 1:20 PM

  I enjoyed this post a lot. I recently started blogging again after a long hiatus and have been having a lot of fun doing so.

  If I'm being totally honest, I think reason #1 that I started back up was vanity. I have a pretty cool domain name that is a play on my real name, and my email is hosted at that domain, so the domain name gets some (small) amount of natural exposure from that. For about 7 years, all that you would find if you went there was a little Jekyll blog with three posts that I hadn't updated for years.

  That was kind of a lame thing to present to people who took the time to check out my domain, so a while back I set up a new site and have been making occasional posts there.

  One thing that jumped out to me as I started writing posts was that I was already blogging to some extent in my notes. I write pretty extensively as I do my daily work or work on side projects, just to try to solidify my thinking. Those notes are loose and not suitable for publication, but they do provide a pretty good jumping off point for articles.

  Lastly, I feel this quote from Ted Chiang's story "The Truth Of Fact, The Truth Of Feeling" is apropos:

  > “As he practiced his writing, Jijingi came to understand what Moseby had meant: writing was not just a way to record what someone said; it could help you decide what you would say before you said it. And words were not just the pieces of speaking; they were the pieces of thinking. When you wrote them down, you could grasp your thoughts like bricks in your hands and push them into different arrangements. Writing let you look at your thoughts in a way you couldn’t if you were just talking, and having seen them, you could improve them, make them stronger and more elaborate.”

• by bachmeier on 4/7/23, 4:24 PM

  These would apply equally well to "Why I have a website". The purpose of a blog is to capture the time dimension of the writing. That makes sense if you're commenting on news items. Not as much if you're writing reference information, or sharing other information where grouping is the natural method of presentation.

  In the pre-blog days, you could go to someone's site and navigate all the different parts. I prefer that to looking at a feed of hundreds of unrelated posts from the last ten years.

• by raesene9 on 4/7/23, 1:05 PM

  I've been blogging for some years now (~18) and I definitely agree with the points made.

  For me the combination of solidifying/challenging my own ideas in writing them down and recording things so I can come back to them (I regularly get technical details I've forgotten from my own posts) is very useful.

  On top of that, there's the benefit of (hopefully) helping some other people looking for the same information and having permanent links to thoughts.

  I would generally recommend keeping blogging tech. as simple as possible. I just use a Github pages site and all the posts are markdown.

• by motohagiography on 4/7/23, 7:06 PM

  Great post. I also started writing mainly to clarify ideas, and there are a lot of ideas that when I complete them, I realize they aren't as good or useful as I suspected. Most of my writing on the internet has been an exercise in engaging directly with ideas, probably with only about an 80/20 distribution of weak to strong ones. I'm of the belief you only really understand as much as you can express clearly and communicate to others, and this means that to rationally disagree with someone, you need to be able to make their case with the depth and persuasiveness they have themselves.

  Emotional reactions are what happen when we run out of the ability to reason abstractly about an idea according to its principles. If you don't go down the road of physically writing them out and reasoning them through, all you have is a second hand opinion about them, imo.

• by blueridge on 4/7/23, 2:18 PM

  For another point of view:

  On Second Thought, I Actually Don't Like Blogging

  https://web.archive.org/web/20230319232333/https://kitab.ca/...

• by adityaathalye on 4/7/23, 11:25 AM

  +1 I relate strongly to the post. My blog literally says "Writing = Thinking" on the tin. And like Guo says in conclusion, many of my posts started life months or even years(!) before they got to see sunlight and fresh air. I tried to capture that sentiment in this post: https://www.evalapply.org/posts/hello-world/

  > Slyly (or so I thought), I fooled it by quietly typing into my Emacs. More days turned to weeks turned to months. Words accreted in my org-mode files. Wee notes. Snippets. Factoids squirreled away. Mostly harmless bits and bobs. Someone paying attention might have smelled trouble brewing and stopped right there. But, oh how little did I know.

• by vehemenz on 4/7/23, 1:22 PM

  I hear this line a lot. Writing is not the same as thinking. Rather, it's a type of thinking that forces you to lay out your argument in a particular, static way. There are pros and cons with this style of thinking, just as there are with internal dialectic and Socratic-method style argumentation. If you have stable arguments that you've repeated over and over again to yourself or to other interlocutors, writing them down is just a formality.

• by bluetomcat on 4/7/23, 11:22 AM

  > Writing lets me do that while also helping me avoid going around in circles. When thoughts are in my head, it's easy for them to get jumbled up. I miss things, and I keep coming back to the same thoughts, leading to the unproductive ruminating.

  Because text is ultimately a self-referential structure of claims, definitions and facts. When you are writing a new sentence, you have access to the complete accumulation of your previous thoughts in former sentences and paragraphs. The new sentence builds on and extends these connections, and doesn't stray in different directions like verbal speech.

• by ethicalsmacker on 4/7/23, 3:09 PM

  There are some good thoughts in there, but it fails to answer the actual question. Why publish a blog? Sure, writing has benefits. You don't need a blog to write. You don't need a blog to make your own content linkable.

  The only nuggets in there are "vanity", "monetization" and "possible opportunities" which are all pretty bad reasons to publish a blog.

• by adityeah on 4/7/23, 2:08 PM

  This is a great insight into pretty much any blogger's mind who has been blogging for a long time. I started blogging back in 2004 and I still blog but the reasons why I still do have changed.. When I started it was more journal based, then I started writing on social issues which eventually made me a better writer, good enough to get published in several literary publications and now l feel like going back to personal journal like writing again. The common thread, however, has always been that I have first written for myself and that it has given my thought process a certain clarity. Thanks for sharing this.

• by voakbasda on 4/8/23, 5:49 PM

  I quit blogging about my farm after my ex used it as evidence against me during our separation. I wrote about all the good and bad things that happened here, and all of the bad things were then selectively used to defame my character. Thus, my blogging turned out to be nothing but a huge liability; to late, I realized that it was stupid to post things that could be used against me. Since I think it's actively dishonest to blog only about the good things that happen, I felt it necessary to stop sharing anything about my life.

• by alxexperience on 4/7/23, 3:21 PM

  I don't blog as much as I would like to, but I feel like writing is more of a necessity for me than something I love. I have this desire and want to communicate my thoughts, and writing just so happens to be the best way for me to communicate that. I also take the opportunity when I blog to improve my writing, and maybe try different methods of expressing my thoughts and analysis (I mostly blog about videogames).

• by rodolphoarruda on 4/7/23, 6:41 PM

  > "Be Able to Provide a Link"

  This is one thing I do a lot. I have links for popular memes that illustrates aspects of our culture. The one I use the most relates to oversimplification of things. https://rodolphoarruda.pro.br/como-desenhar-uma-coruja/

• by Brajeshwar on 4/7/23, 1:27 PM

  Love this. I'm writing less (public) but I have written a lot in the past couple of years -- in simple plaintext.

  I'm looking for a pattern/framework/system to settle down as the starting base for "Markdown + Pandoc + Make + [no-idea-yet]" for simple Static Websites. Can you please link me to some to kickstart and look at the templates/starter-kit. Thanks.

• by janvdberg on 4/7/23, 12:01 PM

  This is a great post and I strongly agree with almost everything the author says.

  But I noticed his previous post is almost a year old (June 22)? So is there another place he blogs?

• by igtztorrero on 4/7/23, 3:51 PM

  Thanks for these words. I found lobsters. I thinking start a blog.