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Comment by kareemm | Hacker News Reader

Edit: leaving up as an embarrassing reminder to myself fully rtfm before opening my mouth. I thought this did NOT have comments and sub by email but it does. Glad y’all provided me with some feedback to realize I was wrong.

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Original comment:

I don’t get it. If you want to write and don’t care how much you’re read, write privately (Google Docs, a journal, text file, etc.)

If you’re writing publicly presumably it’s for public consumption. The way you know if your writing is read is through feedback - comments, shares, email subs, etc.

Feedback on your writing both helps you understand where you need to think more deeply about what you wrote AND provides valuable positive reinforcement: somebody is reading what you put into the world.

Not providing hooks for these seems to defeat the purpose of writing in public.

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I see where you’re coming from, but I personally love blogging with zero concern for who reads it, how many likes it gets, or whether or not people want to give feedback.

It prevents me from falling into a trap of crafting posts that have a bias toward what I think people might want to read, it keeps it pure.

Just writing knowing that someone might read it inspires better writing. It's like when you think about a problem really hard, come up with nothing, then spend an hour formulating a perfect StackExchange question. More often than not, the process of writing for other people leads me to the answer, even without sending the question.

Same with blogging, except I can publish any old crap on my blog without moderation.

Private feedback via email is always possible and you can chose to publish specific feedback you deem important. It's the same for printed literature. There is no comment section in books. As for sharing: you can always share the URL

> I thought this did NOT have comments and sub by email but it does.

Can you please elaborate? Because I was (and still am) under the exact same impression. The only appearance of the word "comments" on the home page is this:

• Comments (alpha)

and there is no link.

Maybe consider that you're not their target audience.

I’m trying to understand who the target audience is.

Phrasing my comment a slightly different way: what’s the point of writing *in public* if you don’t get feedback?

Too much feedback (especially when it comes to sharing your own thoughts) poisons the purity.

It’s a cliche that every musicians best work is their early stuff. Once you become popular, famous, entangled in expectations and opinions, you lose the thing that made you great.

You are misrepresenting it: Not caring about numbers/analytics isn't "no feedback". People can still leave comments, email, ...

And the usefulness of writing isn't connected to if people can reach the author or not.

For me

- Writing publicly is minimum viable pressure to make me better formulate my ideas. It doesn’t require feedback; 80% of the value is in my words being public. When my ideas are better formulated, it leads to me new ideas I wouldn’t have had otherwise

- Over time (I’ve been blogging since 2000) I’ve found that the most valuable feedback is in email. You don’t get good signal to noise in comments or Web Mentions. RSS + a public email address is all I need

- I can afford for my network to grow slowly. I don’t need to build big community with flurries of debate in a comments section. Writing publicly is an excellent way to keep in touch with the broad network I already have

I have a public notes repo [0] in which I only write for myself, with no real expectation that anyone will ever read it. I have however gotten feedback in the form of cold emails that people have found the notes useful or interesting. Writing in public without hooks can also be valuable.

[0]: https://notes.param.codes

Not sure what kind of feedback you want?

They have comments and they have (local) analytics. What more do you expect from a blog?

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