Ask HN: What keeps you from writing a blog? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What keeps you from writing a blog?

12 pointspoushkar16 comments

I've blogged on and off since finishing college 11 years ago. Some posts about programming got millions of hits.

But this was mostly a decade ago. Today it is very difficult to find readers for blogs. This is due to:

1. Professional content-farms having thoroughly won the SEO game.

2. A shift in people's media consumption preferences from text to video and podcasts/audio-books

This year I replaced all my blogging with YouTubing and am finding it vastly easier to build an audience and connect with people.

I don't see myself going back to blogging and would strong recommend vlogging or podcasting instead. Be a person of your times.

Since I started a wiki, I haven't wrote a single post. I think the reason is that writing a 'blog post' feels like too much friction when I can just drop a note somewhere in my corpus of knowledge.

Makes it easy for querying too.

https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/knowledge

This is the exact reason that I started writing "posts" or "articles" even though I haven't put any on a site yet. I was putting stuff in a wiki and felt like they were unfinished ideas. I've found that the wiki is where the idea goes and the article is where I can really flesh out understanding. When you take the time to write something out with an outline and real consideration, you understand it better. It has helped me figure out my own thoughts on a subject when previously I only had surface opinions.

For the most part, branding. I don't use my real name online, or have much interest in doing so.

So I'm not entirely sure how I'd brand a blog that doesn't have a specific subject to cover.

Being unable to find a point at which I'm happy with the outcome. I have an uncontrollable fear that what I create is not good enough to share, be it articles or code, while my rational self acknowledges that the quality is more than ok and might help others.

I never wrote about basic "How to FP in X language", "Here's a script I wrote over the weekend, it's amazing", "How to git" articles. This limitation I have on myself pisses me off when I read most of the content on medium / dev.to. I see that people are going for cheatsheets / how-to-x-in-10-minutes-but-not-really-understand-what's-going-on content, and I feel that either my content will not be consumed, or it will be discarded as pretentious.

Add to this that English is my second language, and other personal insecurities and flaws (vanity - "I need to appear smart to my peers", vanity guilt - "I'm trying to pose as someone else", etc), and you've got a pretty bad recipe.

Over the years this has turned into over countless abandoned blogs and side projects.

Lately I'm trying to fix this and other issues (not connecting to people, etc) by streaming while I do stuff, but often I don't manage to convince myself to do it.

This is very much an emotional problem that I am aware of, and I notice the harmful patterns as the thoughts surface in my mind, but I'm not strong enough to block yet.

^ everything here applies to comments as well

What I'd like to blog about is a niche of a niche of a niche which I'd like to someday consult in and I'm afraid I'd give too much away

I get that feeling. But it's probably exactly the opposite. If you can share your niche, others in the niche may look to you as the expert.

You might shoot yourself in the foot with this attitude.

I can write but I'm afraid of exposing lack of technical excellence. It seems like I should be a true expert if I'm going to write a technical blog, and I'm not sure I'll ever feel like I'm that competent. Or another way of thinking about it, there are so many awesome technical blogs out there - what do I have to say that they're not saying but with more skill?

I can relate to this fear; it's closely related to imposter syndrome. But I think when we read established blogs we accept that they're probably accurate, and we readily forgive mistakes and slight inaccuracies. We don't afford ourselves that same forgiveness.

Writing a blog post, or any form of technical writing, is an exercise in laying out what we know, and watching the conversation that follows. A willingness to revise what we've written goes a long way toward addressing this fear. I view public technical writing as a way to fill in my knowledge gaps; when people point out my mistakes, it's like working on a larger team, where there are more people to offer feedback.

That said, you do have to do your own research. There's a big difference between writing a post that misses a couple nuanced points, and writing a post that's entirely misdirected. Few people will criticize you for the first, but if you make regular posts that are way off base you won't do anything good for your reputation.

Mostly just not having something to write about. I probably will if I ever get started on one of my numerous backlogged project ideas. Of course even then there's issues to tackle, like choosing a domain name and getting anyone to even see it.

How would I get people to read it? The search engines of today won't show my tiny blog when they can show a huge, popular site instead. It would take years of work to get any kind of a decent following.

(a) memories of Dave Winer promoting blogging.

(b) a preference for long-form discourse.

Could you elaborate a bit about Dave Winer? Has he somehow traumatized you?

Not traumatised, but at the time I did view going from shared discourse spaces to sharded discourse (albeit with comments & blogrolls) spaces as having been a backwards step. Looking back from today, I'll admit blogging was an improvement upon its successors :-)

Edit: props for turning off analytics on your blog. Молодець!

Botnets hacking Google rankings

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