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Comment by antipaul | Hacker News Reader

Just to add perspective, one reason why it’s _not_ great is the deluge of poor quality information and therefore potential for bias and “the silent majority of experts”, where you can read a bunch of stuff and feel like you know a lot, when in fact you have large knowledge gaps.

Eg. There is tons of info and blogs on machine learning out there. But in my experience, reading a lot of that can lead to a false sense of knowledge, where you seem to know a lot, but actually lack even the fundamentals.

Still, this shouldn’t discourage folks to start blogging!

But it’s an unsolved problem how to balance these concerns.

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As the article and comments mention, writing forces you to understand your material really well. I'll offer another perspective: it's useful to approach topics from a less knowledgeable perspective.

The beginner's perspective exposes a lack of information on the topic, especially if the topic is usually covered only by experienced folks. It's also a great way to gather feedback from others who know more about the topic, aiding both you and anyone who reads the resulting discussion/follow ups.

The key is to be transparent with knowing about the topic and explicitly soliciting feedback in areas where you have low confidence. This is the part many armchair experts miss.

There is a huge amount of writing out there by people who clearly do not understand their material really well.

My general rule of thumb for controlling for the quality of the information I output is to:

(1) Talk mostly about things I actually did

(2) Do at least light cross-checking of the main opinions I assert

I'm currently writing some things in the security area, so I've been careful to reference specifications, conference presentations, public documents from security audits, etc. That won't keep me from being wrong, but I'm more likely to be right after going through those extra steps.

The disadvantages listed are exactly the other way round the advantages for authors that encourage some of them to write in the first place: To become clear about contents which one thinks to understand. This prejudice disintegrates exactly when one wants to write down this knowledge.

That's where "content is king" and search engine basics come to rescue. If search engine does its job well, high quality content will always turn up before low quality ones. If a programming article turned up on page-1, then it shouldn't matter whether it was written by someone with or without knowledge gap?

> If search engine does its job well

This is the problem of blogspam. There are plenty of "popular" blogs that are good at SEO and produce little to no good content.

Search engines have no idea whether an article is right, wrong, or irrelevant. In practice, they often do not and cannot do their job well.

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