Analyzing HN readers' personal blogs

Or this

https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/details/y-combi...

And you never foresee the ripples. I wanted to buy books online and trade stocks when I was a student. MasterCard/Visa in Algiers, Algeria was a rarity, and banks didn't communicate.

I called every bank in the country that was listed by the central bank, I knocked on their doors until I found one that offered students a card.

I even had to write a document because they didn't have a form for that case. I finally got my card after a week of trips to the bank, city hall, administration, providing documents that were unlisted, etc.

I computed that this wasted time multiplied by the number of people who would eventually go through the process and the fact almost nobody in the country had the card warranted detailing the steps. It would save time, and contribute to reduce the "underbanking". I wrote a blog post explaining how to do it with steps, as in provide the following documents, take these amount in these currencies. I attached the document/form I wrote so people could fill it and take it directly to the bank and save a trip. That asymmetry in information bothered me.

That post 2013 post is read hundreds of times per day. It had more than a thousand comments, although it only lists 700+. People asking me questions, then getting their own cards, then themselves answering other people's questions, then updating me on what has changed.

People I would meet in real life would tell me I looked familiar, and then they'd put it together and tell me they followed the post to get their card. Sometimes people referred me to my own post in case I wanted to get a card.

I received emails from people freelanced online who wanted to bring money back here. One person even sent me credentials to their online account with thousands of dollars in and asked me if I can find a way to transfer it here (I told that person not to do that again and she said she felt she could trust me).

Many times I'd receive a phone call from a friend who'd say they wanted to get a card, looked online, found a great post, then saw my name and laughed out loud because they knew me.

And of course, I met interesting people.

Not a downvoter, but I did have a blog that I didn't promote, which I used mostly to get practice with my writing. I enjoyed it being public but with zero traffic, because writing that is 100% private can easily turn into a private rant. If there is the chance it will be seen, I hold myself to a higher standard, and hopefully that practice comes across when I engage in written communications with others, whether on HN, other sites, or at work.

Ultimately, though, all the sharing of our blog URLs and this related discussion made me realize that I didn't really want an audience, so I killed off my domain.

Direct personal experience is why I think someone would write a blog post and not have much interest in sharing. I’m not an enthusiastic self promoter. Turning up my lizard brain volume gets in the way of living in ways that I find more fulfilling.

I occasionally blog about interesting technical problems I encountered and how I solved them. Someone who have the same problem might happen upon my posts through a search engine, and find them helpful; but I don't see the point of "promoting my blog" to people who're not looking to solve those problems. So the answer to "what is your blog and why should I read it" is you probably should not until you find my blog when researching on a problem.

One reason is they don't actually want the "broader" community to see them. More than once I've seen people lament the fact that the "orange site" picked up one of their posts. There are Twitter accounts dedicated to making fun of things people say in the comments here. There are people who wrote scripts that do special things when the referrer to their site is HN.

If you participate under a handle here and use your real name on your blog, it may effectively amount to the same thing.

People can have a variety of personal concerns, from a nutcase stalker ex to "I work for BigCo and want to spout off online without getting fired" to "I happen to have some bizarrely unique name, so using my real name anywhere amounts to doxxing myself."

Lots of people on HN use a throwaway email just for HN and don't want general HN readership to know much about their lives.

People use a wide variety of approaches to having an online life while looking out for their own specific privacy concerns. Please note that most people with privacy concerns will not chime in to this discussion to explain to you why they make the specific choices they make as that would tend to be counterproductive and undermine their goals of protecting their privacy.

Linking to your website has this effect. For example, one of the few pieces of information on my website is my amateur radio callsign. You can take that to the FCC's helpful database and then get my home address. I have it there because I think crime is low enough that it's worth having a Google result for "who is that KD2DTW guy that I just heard?"

>doxxing

Where does this strange typo come from?

Self hosting is about as far from easy as you can get though.

If I'm not mistaken, Jekyll also adds it in the RSS feed metadata, if you use that plugin, but that's already a bit far fetched.