Comment by Locke1689 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Locke1689 | Hacker News Reader

I think there are two ways to blog: altruistically or narcissistically. If you're blogging altruistically you're blogging for others primarily and yourself secondarily. If you're blogging narcissistically you're mostly blogging for yourself.

Most of the great blogs that I visit are all done altruistically. They are well maintained, post useful information, and very rarely waste my time. They also require a huge amount of effort on the part of the blogger because they really have to do work to gather and present interesting and useful information for their readers.

What a lot of the press has referred to as blogging is "narcissistic." Instead of coming up with interesting information and vetting it for their readers they mostly just spew whatever thoughts they had that day onto the page. It doesn't take a huge amount of effort, but the signal to noise ratio is also very low.

With the rise of Facebook and Twitter, narcissistic blogging can happen more in the sphere you want it (your friend group). Narcissistic bloggers are usually doing it for attention and their friends' and acquaintances' attention is more important than strangers'.

Altruistic bloggers, on the other hand, have useful information to present so they want to present it to as large an audience as possible. While I think we'll see more narcissistic bloggers moving to Facebook and Twitter in the future, hopefully the altruistic bloggers will continue putting the time in for the public.

Blogging is seriously under-appreciated due to the media portrayal of all bloggers as narcissistic bloggers. In reality, altruistic blogging is very common and requires a lot of thought and hard work from the blogger, who is essentially a scarcely paid writer (a few exceptions aside).

I really like this distinction; it jibes with advice I've given would-be bloggers before. When you write a blog, you should have an audience. It's ok if you end up writing about yourself, but you should envision writing for the audience (mine was, initially, my mom---later expanded ;). It meant that, when I was regularly updating my blog at least, I had a readership in the several dozens. The difference between what you call "narcissistic" blogging and my idea of blogging "for mom" is the difference between "I'm writing about me because everyone should be interested in me" and "I'm writing things about me that an audience, however small (hi mom), would want to hear." It does make a difference.

In contrast, one can appear on the surface to be an altruistic blogger---writing about things rather than yourself---but still fall into the trap of narcissism, in this case, saying things about your topic because they pop into your head rather than because you think they'll aid your audience.

Are "altruistic" and "narcissistic" antonyms of each other? The opposite of altruistic is selfish. I can't think of a single word that exactly conveys my impression of the opposite of narcissism, but in this context I would use the phrase "Interested in the behaviour of other people."

Thus, you could have a blogger who blogs for selfish reasons but blogs about the behaviour and affairs of a wide range of people because they are interested in other people. This is how I view myself: I blog because writing out my thoughts helps my crystallize my thinking and ultimately manifest changes in my own life and career. But while I blog about my own work I also blog about things I observe that interest me, and many of these things are concerned with other people.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it!

I don't think this distinction is very useful. I read many blogs that are "narcissistic" in the sense that the blogger is doing it because he or she enjoys writing about a particular topic and likes having an audience. I read them because the authors write skillfully about topics I am interested in.

A blogger "spew[ing] whatever thoughts they had that day" just makes them a shitty writer. It doesn't matter why you're spewing them; if you write shoddily about arbitrary topics "for others", it doesn't make the blog any better. There's no need to do a bunch of categorization beyond that.

This is strange, why are you all posing the narcissistic blogger as a negative here? I usually write whatever comes to my mind on my blog and still get some readership. I seriously don't get the problem you have with people like me. Blogging mainly started as lifelogs of people which they published on the internet, I believe that is what a narcissistic blogger does and nothing is wrong with that.

That's a good point. I should imply a distinction between truly narcissistic bloggers who are doing it to gain attention for themselves and bloggers who are instead focused on themselves. They blog as a personal activity without viewership in mind. I Perhaps I should write a blog post on all this and bring it full circle.

I don't know of any people who blog just to get attention, but even if someone did whats wrong with that?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com