Alex Payne, a Twitter engineer, is shutting down his personal blog
al3x.net
al3x.net
Also a list of public blog-quitters so we can ridicule them when they change their minds: http://calacanis.com/2008/07/11/official-announcement-regard... http://www.inc.com/magazine/20100301/lets-take-this-offline.... http://al3x.net/2010/03/02/hiatus.html
Edit: to be fair, the title of this submission is misrepresenting.
Congrats and best of luck, Alex.
A similar thing happened to me when I wrote a rememberence-day post. Some people reasonably suggested it wasn't Hacker News. I explained why I thought it was tangentially relevant. There was a discussion about that, but nobody suggested that I shouldn't have written the post, we were merely discussing whether it belonged in HN.
I can understand the argument that meta-blogging doesn't belong in HN. But I don't believe it shouldn't be written in the first place.
Maybe flippant, but that's the nature of the blogging beast. Blogs come and go, new ones replace old ones and somehow equilibrium is maintained.
You go to twitter: "@al3x why haven't you been blogging recently?"
"@you I decided to stop blogging"
Wouldn't you wish he had written one final blog post letting you know instead of waiting for people to figure it out?
To an outsider who just sees his posts occasionally on HN, it may seem dumb, but it makes more sense for his loyal readers, I assume.
A lot of HN readers and empathize like so: what if pg "just stopped" writing/publishing essays. Wouldn't you wish he had at least written one last amazing essay describing his rationale for stopping and letting everyone know?
I didn't intend the post to be on HN. I didn't submit the post to HN. I didn't upvote the post on HN.
Is that the case? If so, you may find it more effective to explain why his blogging about stopping blogging is harmful to you. It may be that another solution presents itself. For example, if you aren't subscribed to his blog but are annoyed to have this post taking up space on HN, perhaps the solution is to appeal to HN readers not to upvote this kind of post rather than to appeal to the author not to write it.
Likewise, if there's something in it for the author, explaining that will be a lot more effective as it will appeal to his self-interest. He explains quite clearly that he writes the blog for himself, not for you or I. Therefore,he presumably has already decided that this post is a personal benefit for him. If you can think of a compelling reason for him to eschew such a post, it's best to tell him so rather than making him guess.
That way you will get what you want by helping him get what he wants. Win win!
JM2C on giving advice...
True and beautifully put.
With that said, some (unsolicited, I know) advice for if you want to get back into blogging. Try getting feedback from your peers before publishing something, then use their input to edit. That should improve the writing, of course, but it can also indicate to you if the ideas you want to get across are apparent to the readers you care about.
Not everyone who reads your essays will even be willing to meet you on your own terms. Getting feedback from peers - as opposed to random people who feel it's okay to dismiss soemthing out-of-hand - may help with the feeling that your writing doesn't provide the insight you want it to.
This is, I think, closer to how PG approaches his essays. Notice, too, that we don't consider those blogs, but essays that pop up periodically.
But isn't twitter the medium which caused him the most grief (the techcrunch manufactured-drama of last week) specifically when he tried to convey a big idea in too short a space?
"Twitter Rolling Out New Website To Kill TweetDeck and Other Third Party Clients"
http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-twitter-rolling...
It's forgivable if Alex overlooked that perspective but this is by no means techcrunch's fault. They reported what he tweeted.
Partner relationships are very sensitive. I have a product that is being sold by a reseller who has two sales people pushing it. One of the sales people heard a rumor from somewhere(a classmate) that we might be selling directly in the market so he would have to compete with our in-house sales staff for the same business. He contacted us in panic. We had to assure him that while we do plan to do in-house sales, that is for other markets. Point is, when you have good partnerships that are not just fluff, you also need solid communication.
If developers didn't care about the twitter api, they wouldn't give a shit about this tweet. Because they care about it, twitter should be very sensitive to how they communicate with developers.
No, they didn't. They took what he tweeted, gave it a sensationalist headline, and vomited out a few paragraphs of text designed to drive traffic to their site. That is most definitely not reporting.
>> twitter should be very sensitive to how they communicate with developers.
Alex tweeted his opinion about some cool things to come. This is not "communicating with developers", it's making an offhand comment. Twitter communicates through developers through a mailing list, and several official accounts (@twitterapi, for example), not through the personal tweets of its employees.
I don't think it's Alex's responsibility to analyze in advance how every thing he tweets might be interpreted. TechCrunch and Silicon Alley are to blame for the over-sensationalized writing.
Let's just say we have a serious disagreement there. He essentially tweeted about private future plans of twitter, something I'm pretty sure you cannot do. If you are an employee and you tweet about strategy, you have a responsibility to think from all angles. Otherwise you risk hurting the company you are working for out of negligence--never a good thing in any employee.
This was nothing until Techcrunch put their spin on it.
You really, really do.
While I don't think the various tech blogs that "reported" on my tweet did anyone a service by blowing it out of proportion, the onus for communicating poorly and freaking out our developers over nothing is ultimately on me.
This is why I've decided to just write to get something out of my head and there's no other outlet.
I do agree that blogging every other day is not going to help either. I would say blog like Dustin Curtis. Treat every post like a book.
As for my street cred: I quit blogging in 2001 after 3-4 years of blogging. Now, thinking of doing what I just proposed above. :-)
I really feel that that number will only continue to increase as more and more people get online and stop worrying about privacy too much.
Mishaps like this are tragic. Misinterpretation and misunderstanding are bad things...but for the most part, these things are rare.
I wonder if the twitter guys are concerned about the logical next step in this reversal of over-exposure.
I guess if you like the rain, though, that's the right place for you (surpassed only by Washington's Olympic Peninsula). As a native Oregonian, though, I think you're crazy to like the rain - you can't do much of anything outdoors without getting really miserably wet.
I can see getting out of the bay area, on the other hand - Portland is certainly more livable. Good luck!
Reinventions of the telegraph (twitter/facebook) and operating system (apple/android/chromeos) is all i'm seeing these days.
For the operating system snark I for one am glad the world isn't still using apple II's
If you want the problems solved start working on it yourself it isn't other peoples burden.
Operating system snark - beneath os x and android is unix, invented over 40 years ago.
I do work on it myself, but i'm only one man. If the industry set its goals higher that would make a real difference, and put more money in its pocket.
It'd just be nice if my dishwasher did my dishes better, and chemotherapy cured cancer better (and less painfully).
Kinda like how Twitter lets people communicate better. New products are almost always a refinement of some existing product. The ones that aren't tend to elicit a big "Huh?" reaction from the marketplace.
If you are using any operating system other than the unix invented 40 years ago then I think there is a reason for new operating systems and I stick with my opinion. An airplane is just based on some flying contraption people built 100 years ago but there is a reason we built new ones.
Now that he has time for some real work, that place is going to be a power house!
Criticism is what makes science function and is what made the west great.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=244937
It's interesting that this too was a complaint about yet another story of a type that there had recently been a lot of. That seems to be the most common thing that causes people to decide that this time, HN has really jumped the shark.
Sometimes sites get onto themes. Lately one theme has been prominent bloggers who are quitting blogging. Don't worry, though. There probably won't be that many more.
Also, a fair amount of people seem to care that this is happening, so why wouldn't it get on the front page? It seems to me that the submission guidelines are somewhat flexible to account for this sort of thing.