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Comment by HexDecOctBin | Hacker News Reader

Almost every time I search for some technical information, all I find are blogs with incorrect information written by people who don't really know what they are talking about.

Almost every time I search for the answer to a question, all I find are SO/forum/reddit posts by people who clearly have no idea what is going on, but think they do.

The whole web sometimes feel like a giant pile of ignorance, created by people looking for prestige, jobs or just ad money.

So, if I am not an expert in a domain (i.e., amongst the very best), and cannot be certain that what I believe to be true is actually true, why should I blog at all? Why add to the ignorance manure?

I wish this cult of self-expression will die down already. I wish people start listening and thinking, instead of just waiting for their chance to talk.

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Every wrong thing posted to the internet increases the chance of the right thing being posted later. You can't invent a lightbulb without the 10,000 failed attempts that came before it. The noise is here to stay. Nobody promised that exploring the edges of human thought would be a clean process. It is very messy and people should be afforded the opportunity to be messy.

Totally agree and being messy is a feature and not a bug. And if you’re messy enough you might annoy someone enough that they’ll actually put you on the right path.

One of the explicit goals of Stack Overflow when it was founded was literally to fight this phenomenon: The preponderance of wrong/outdated information on the Internet. To a large extent, it has succeeded. Even if the chosen correct answer is no longer correct, there usually is a comment/answer further down pointing out what now works.

So while creating noise is necessary, there is value to curation.

I haven’t found this to be as extreme as you say in my experience. More often, the things I find on blogs and Stackoverflow are just not the exact issue I’m facing rather than flat out incorrect.

I think I see where you're coming from. I was recently thinking of starting up a technical blog as a form of self-promotion and to have something to show to potential employers. But I also wanted to do something that I felt was good and worthwhile to readers. So I thought about the sorts of programming blogs I'd read in the past that I could maybe emulate or use as a standard. And then it occurred to me that, for the most part, they're either a waste of time, not terribly interesting, or even harmful. I've had better luck with reading textbooks, though maybe I just prefer to try and learn a subject in some depth. But when what you're really selling is your knowledge and expertise, I can see why people do it.

If you want to do better, don't shy away from showing times you were wrong.

It's hard to present a universally right answer in tech (or in general), it's not hard to know when you chose wrong answer, and going over it can teach others how to identify the right one and show that you're capable of growth

I think if you have the right motivation it's fine. To be blunt I don't think self promotion and hirability is the right one heh I think that will lead to low quality content.

I'm not really a blogger, but I have written and posted stuff I found hard or interesting, like documentation for my self. I reffer to it occasionally too. Idk if any readers got anything out of it. People seemed to like it. I did find that worthwhile though.

> Almost every time I search for some technical information, all I find are blogs with incorrect information

Years ago I purchased a laptop with two SSD hard drives RAID'd together at the factory. Of course, it came with Windows; I wanted un-RAID'd SSD hard drives and to install a flavor of Linux on the Primary. Some flavoring to the problem was that [IIRC] at the time there was a BIOS vs UEFI "Linux situation" with this type of setup, which this laptop was in the middle of.

So I went searching around for a solution. I ended up quilting together a solution from three different forum//blog posts and tested it out. I ended up writing myself a working procedure for this quilted solution because for me and this laptop was apparently just a bit different to need all three together in a particular order to work at the time.

Laptop still works [after numerous Linux-flavor OS installations] except for a hardware-level dead right speaker [not sure if my fault or just wear-and-tear over the years].

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