Ask HN: Why Blog at All? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why Blog at All?

140 pointspragmatic1119 comments

Why bother at all with a blog and/or public presence at all? The last few days I have noticed quite a few HN posts about developer blogs.

I used to blog and maintain a decent open source presence online, but the last couple years I have completely withdrawn from the public. I deleted my Github profile, took my blog offline, removed all professional network accounts, etc.

It wasn't for the lack of success. I have no idea how many readers or followers I had, but some of my security related posts made it into more "serious" media and elsewhere.

I think it boiled down to a realization that no one really gave a damn about me, my writing/work/creations/etc. So then, what's the point? Is it entirely ego driven? Chasing dopamine hits when your post or your project is tweeted about?

The last few years I have been creating things entirely in the dark. It has been so freeing. Not creating to be talked about. Not creating something to hold it up and say look at what I did. I finally got the feeling back. The one you got when you first started programming. It's wonderful.

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My blog has been going since 2004, I add between 3 and 20 posts a year. I write the articles for me, in the future. I enjoy writing, and I'm pretty much the only person who will ever read the posts. I don't care if zero other people read it. I certainly don't do it for internet points. It's my blog for me.

I love going back and reading stuff from nearly 20 years ago... like a little tech diary. On a bunch of occasions I've used it as a reference when I remembered "I did something like this 10 years ago..." and dig up the posts.

Oddly, its also help me get my last two jobs too - in the interview, someone found something on my blog (that they looked at that morning before I came in) and we've had a conversation about it. The topics weren't directly related to the position, but showed my interests (Like, a post on a small webgl voxel thing I made helped get me a job at a mainframe company!).

I can choose where I want to work now, so I feel like my blog is a helpful filter: if a potential employee doesn't like my blog, it's probably not a good fit for either of us.

I’m kind of similar. I write up how I set something up or some strange problem I solved mainly for my own reference but if it also helps someone else, great. Once or twice I’ve Googled a problem and landed on the solution in my own blog or a stack overflow post I made years ago!

That's exactly how I feel as well. I blog for my own benefit. If anyone else finds it useful, too, that's great. But it's not the goal.

In a way, my blog serves as a platform to develop my own ideas into full arguments, even where they are only of interest to me.

And because writing is fun!

Personal Blogging is one of the few remaining bastions of the old 90s web. When people put stuff in the web for fun, to share and without any ulterior motive.

My blog doesn't have ads /monetization and never will. I also dont care if anyone reads it or not .

We should bring back a web-ring of non-monetized personal sites haha.

Web-rings have actually returned the last few years :) I haven’t joined one, but it’s still nice to see them back.

Example: https://fediring.net/

I’ve use my blog as my personal internet garden. People can come by, look around, whatever; and I document things I’ve worked on or howto’s etc. There have a more than a few times that I’ve actually referenced my own blog to look something up in my own domain expertise.

Internet garden is the perfect way to phrase it. I largely maintain my various "public" websites for myself, but if other people happen to come by and enjoy what they see, good for them.

why don't you create private Notion then

> I think it boiled down to a realization that no one really gave a damn about me

Exactly. It’s about bloggers giving a damn about other people by putting their knowledge out there for free, not the readers giving a damn about the blogger.

On the other hand, as a reader, I do care what specific people think about something, either on their blogs or on Twitter.

I use blogging to achieve a few goals of mine:

* Solidify my knowledge in a given topic (the best way to find out how well you really know something is to try to teach it)

* Improve at technical writing

* Create reference material that will be useful for myself (which may be useful to other people)

While it’s certainly nice to see that others visit my sites, it’s not the primary reason that I continue to produce content. However, knowing that it’s public, even if it’s possible that nobody will see it forces me to a higher standard.

I also just happen to enjoy writing about things I am passionate about, after thinking writing wasn’t for me after working on countless overly restrictive school essays.

edit: I also use it in an attempt to create the resources I wish I had when I was researching something for the first time. Many topics I find myself interested in can be hard to approach due to requiring some area of math I am not familiar with, but I feel I can explain in a simpler way compared to the encyclopedic descriptions, lecture notes, etc available online which assume some level of domain knowledge.

I think it's great that you're reflecting on what blogging meant for you before and discovering that freedom of doing things for yourself now.

But it's also important to not project your own previous potentially ego-driven activities towards everyone else in the world. Yes, I'm sure there are other people that had the same insecurities/ego, but it definitely doesn't mean everyone who ever blogs is like that.

When you're able to discern that, you'll slowly gain more clarity about yourself, your own motivations. What often happens, at least for me, is that after an initial pushback, I eventually come back to appreciate the thing more. In your case, now that you've grown from your previous self and taken back some of your personal ownership, you may one day discover a renewed reason and motivation for blogging again. And if/when that time comes, it'll be wonderful also.

> important to not project your own previous potentially ego-driven activities towards everyone else

Or onto OP. You are basically doing exactly what you accuse OP of doing.

OP described their experience and asked others for their view. Why project "ego-driven" or not seeing themselves clearly onto them?

Why not just answer why you are blogging (or not). Without the assumptions?

There's a reason I said explicitly "potentially ego-driven". It's up to OP to decide.

There's a difference between projecting vs trying to relate and empathize. And I didn't say I'm going to be 100% correct, it's an interpretation, and I hope it's one that the OP will appreciate, if not immediately then at least in retrospect.

The OP literally says this:

> I think it boiled down to a realization that no one really gave a damn about me, my writing/work/creations/etc. So then, what's the point? Is it entirely ego driven? Chasing dopamine hits when your post or your project is tweeted about?

The comment you’re replying to is kind, insightful, constructive, and non-judgemental.

> The comment you’re replying to is kind

My definition of kind is somewhat different, then.

The comment I replied to clearly stated that OP was missing "clarity about yourself, your own motivations" when OP had made that perfectly clear and even took action once they had realized it.

These projections are imho not "kind", nor "constructive, and non-judgemental".

But YMMV.

> The comment I replied to clearly stated…

No it didn’t. You’ve just quoted a few words out of context and prefixed it with “missing”, adding an accusative tone that was not present.

Let me quote the whole part:

> But it's also important to not project your own previous potentially ego-driven activities towards everyone else in the world. Yes, I'm sure there are other people that had the same insecurities/ego, but it definitely doesn't mean everyone who ever blogs is like that.

Please enlighten me how this is "kind". I would love to know how you rationalize/explain this. And I mean it. I get up every day to learn something. So maybe there is an opportunity for me here.

As I already said, your mileage may vary, but I yet fail to see the kindness in these words.

You quoted the original author. I need to split it in two to better explain my thoughts:

> I think it boiled down to a realization that no one really gave a damn about me, my writing/work/creations/etc.

That is a realization. Fair if one looks at the grand scheme of things.

So then, what's the point? Is it entirely ego driven? Chasing dopamine hits when your post or your project is tweeted about?

These are as much rhetoric questions as questions towards us as the audience imho. So I didn't read it as statement about OP themselves.

But if I see this as a rhetoric figure, how can I use this as argument to say OP had "potentially ego-driven activities"?

To me this was using rhetoric figures against OP to construct an "argument".

Especially the additional comment from the commenter as answer on the original comment I replied to:

> Oh and, dear OP, if you're comfortable with personal growth, it may be helpful to realize that, our frustrations often stem from our disappointments, that our feelings of anger are often a protection from more vulnerable feelings like sadness.

To me that sounded awfully condescending. How was that not projecting onto OP?

If I want to be seen talking down onto someone, I would talk/write that way.

Would, as said, love to know your thoughts.

Don't know if it helps, but read the qualifiers. They exist for a reason.

> To me that sounded awfully condescending.

I think we all have our triggers, we all define and recognize differently what things like kind/mean/etc mean to us. It sounds like you get triggered when people tell you how feelings work, or how to interpret something, like what I'm doing right now. I can see that the things I say could be condescending, but it's one possibility out of many. You could say I am projecting, but my intention is to share my understanding of things with people, and I was careful not to make it definitive by adding all the qualifiers. Does that make sense?

I'm not perfect in this regard either. I just recently lashed out on someone on HN because I got triggered by what I thought was patronizing comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30951970

Oh and, dear OP, if you're comfortable with personal growth, it may be helpful to realize that, our frustrations often stem from our disappointments, that our feelings of anger are often a protection from more vulnerable feelings like sadness. It doesn't have to be uber-sadness of course, but it's very normal to feel disappointed when our efforts (eg blogging) don't seem to be recognized.

When we can process our frustrations and understand our experiences a bit more, it'll be a lot easier to move forward with a refreshed mindset. :)

My website is not a blog, it's a knowledgebase of snippets, kind of like a personal stackoverflow with bits and pieces here and there where I was experimenting with different content types.

The main purpose is to serve me, first and foremost, and other people second. So I host slides for recurring presentations, maybe rants about things I need to explain multiple times to different people, so instead of a poinless conversation repeat, I share a link; food recipes that sometimes people ask me about, or just play around with whatever I find interesting.

But most importantly: I'm having fun doing it. When it stops being fun, I just stop, and that's it. There's no monetary gain from this and there never will be. Just my own enjoyment and pride.

Maybe if you also switch your mentality from "blogging" to "knowledgebase" it would help you.

I blog as a personal journal. The goal isn't for the blog to be popular, it's just to get my thoughts down.

Writing down something I learned also helps me consolidate that information in my head better. Explaining something in a quick tutorial often leads to my getting better understanding of that thing as well, because I want to make sure I'm not leading potential readers down the wrong path.

And if someone stumbles across it and finds it helpful one day, why not? I've actually stumbled across my own blog posts a few times when needing a reminder of how to implement something and Googling for it.

The best blogs are the ones that aren't 100% SEO optimised, filled with ads and have the authors face, credentials and contact info plastered everywhere.

They're the ones that are mostly just a personal notebook with "this is how I solved this problem I had, and I'm writing it down here so I can find it again". Most likely you can't even find the author's name in there anywhere, never mind their face.

Not everything has to be a side hustle or a shippable product.

This seems what marginalia search is designed for.

> Not everything has to be a side hustle or a shippable product.

Thanks for saying this. It’s really important. Reminds me of this article too: https://repeller.com/trap-of-turning-hobbies-into-hustles/

My blog is a personal knowledge management tool. I tried many things to keep my findings and interesting stuff organized, but none of them worked. Now, that I have a blog, I also have a place to put things. Even if I only draft an article with some notes, these notes don't disappear, but are well managed comparable markdown versioned in git.

However, the published notes are accessible anywhere and organized exactly like I need them to be.

More about the blog... https://pilabor.com/about/

Articles I visit more than once a week are:

My shell scripting cheatsheet: https://pilabor.com/blog/2021/04/shell-scripting-cheatsheet/

My markdown cheatsheet: https://pilabor.com/blog/2021/04/markdown-cheatsheet/

More and more I find I'm using gmail for my store of knowledge. It is just so easy to find stuff and it's something I have open all the time anyway. Big files or folder systems just aren't as searchable. I suppose your blog is searchable via google though. It's also become my diary via snoozed emails. For example, the instructions for renewing my let's encrypt cert pop up in my inbox every 2 months in an email reminding me to do it. If I order something online I snooze the confirmed order email to some date in the future to remind me I should have received it, etc.

> More and more I find I'm using gmail for my store of knowledge.

While I think Mail is a possible way to store knowledge, I try to prevent google wherever possible.

> I suppose your blog is searchable via google though.

No, it is a static json file with some lines of javascript. If you would like to know how to build a blog like this, here is an article about it: https://pilabor.com/blog/2021/05/building-a-blog-with-hugo/ :-)

> For example, the instructions for renewing my let's encrypt cert pop up in my inbox every 2 months in an email reminding me to do it.

I follow a pen and paper approach for my daily tasks. And I try to automate everything, letsencrypt can easily be automated.

> If I order something online I snooze the confirmed order email to some date in the future to remind me I should have received it, etc.

This is a nice idea... thank you.

Mutt + notmuch (search) gives you all that archival, excellent filtering, keyboard-driven navigation, and the advantage of cutting Google off your own personal journal datastream.

https://baptiste-wicht.com/posts/2014/08/a-mutt-journey-sear...

I wouldn’t bother. I ran a successful-ish non computing hobby related related blog for about 7 years and all it really did was add noise, obligation and expectation to my life. It added very little if any value. On some days it was depressing. It all ended in a 9 month long technical argument with a troll. It ruined the hobby for me. I deleted the blog, sold all my equipment and never looked at it again. I keep in contact with a couple of long term friends still but is it.

What I find far more interesting is talking to random people in the real world and finding overlapping interests. I’ve been an amateur photographer for 30 years and occasionally lug around an old film SLR. This has led to more meaningful and mutual communications, friendships and relationships than anything blog related.

You made a great point about creating things in the dark. I create a lot of things but I don’t do it to show people. I do it because I like doing it. I believe that’s a better and more ethical motivation than to sell attention.

Edit: worth pointing out that some personalities aren’t suited to the attention selling side of it. My ex wife manufactured an entire reality on early social media which came collapsing down upon her and finished our relationship. It makes me question what I read and the difference between the perception and the reality and the accuracy of bloggers. Thus it devalues credibility. I suspect that it has risks associated with it too including over sharing and privacy.

As a side note HN (and Reddit) comments on a blog post are far more valuable than the blog post itself.

I think I'll quote Nina Paley on the subject: in the first minute of her podcast "Heterodorx" she speculates:

"nobody cares, people don't really care about anything, people are just bored, and podcasting now is what blogging was 15 years ago, and we're just chattering monkeys chattering to each other, and I'm just going to chatter more because otherwise I'm just going to be sitting still while I grow old and die, so, might as well chatter while I do that"

I've written hundreds of posts.

1. It was fun

2. As a student it let me put my thoughts out there and hear other people's thoughts. Forum discussions kinda sucked by comparison.

3. It gave me a reason to really drill into something. The "if I'm wrong it'll be embarrassing" forced me to really learn what I was saying

#3 really resonates with me, writing about topics that I think I know well enough to share online often reveals gaps in my understanding and new insights.

I used to think that application was the best way to fully understand a topic, but I think writing is equally important and effective.

If you know what you're doing you can make a lucrative side hustle from it. In fact, I hold the exact opposite view from you. I feel there is clear lack of people who share enough technical information. And a lot of people who here on HN, who write dev blogs, don't know or care about search engine optimization, so finding their stuff is pretty much on first come first serve basis.

I've been working on a niche technical blog to share some of the stuff I learn. I think it could be useful to a handful of people with specific problems or interested in specific programming topics. I've looked into SEO but it seems like a giant shitshow. Lots of outdated and shady advice out there. Do you have any pointers how to get it done, preferably ethically and without turning this into a part time job?

I'd start with plugging your site into Google Search Console[0], this will give a lot of notifications on things you need to fix if there are actual errors. E.g. Site performance, since Google uses that as a metric. But also sitemaps and other stuff.

The most important thing is that your site is easy to navigate. So, extremely good internal link structure, breadcrumbs, and clear definitions of what your site is about.[1]

You're right that SEO is a shitshow because not very much has changed since 2010. People just like to say that it has. I think one thing Google has gotten better at is understanding the design of content. In other words, anyone can throw a bunch of letters on a landing page - but not everyone has the patience to optimize for which parts are important (blockquotes, lists, custom span elements, etc.).

Naturally, you need discoverability/exposure for your content, too. This is pretty much the hardest part. However, if you write up-to-date stuff on trending topics - getting links is actually very easy. There are a lot of newsletters out there, and also sites like Dev.to and Hacker Noon, both of which are currently seen as "darlings" of programming content; by Google that is.

Believe it or not, it doesn't take "a lot" to get a rolling effect going.

For myself, it's a bit different. I have scaled blogs to 350,000 monthly visitors (from Google) so I have a lot of experience in writing, and I am able to naturally write in a way that talks to people in first-person opposed to some horseshit marketing copy.

But on the technical side, I simply do what Google wants you to do (Schema, site structure, navigation) - there is no magic HTML attribute that is going to give Google a hint that your content is the bomb.

[0]: https://search.google.com/search-console/about

[1]: I think a mistake a lot of people make is they write their articles, and leave them as single-page documents that have no relation to anything outside of it. In this context, Google's algorithm can't actually figure out what your site is about.

Thanks for the help! I have a feeling I'll be coming back to this post for a while.

Yep, i agree. I have a blog in which i focused on a niche topic, for which there wasn't enough content, and i was contacted a few times for contracting on that topic ( without much effort from my side to state myself available for such a thing).

What you found is that the internet is kind of a poor way to form meaningful connections with people. It's a great way to form a high quantity of low-quality relationships with people. In this way it's kind of like fame. Now that everybody has a persona on the internet, it's like they're micro-famous. (Or actually the persona is famous, but I digress.) Which means they have a micro- version of the same fame-related problems that actually-famous celebs have, among which are... a high number of largely meaningless connections to people who mean nothing to you. What you've done might be some kind of Pareto optimization where the 80% that provide 20% of the value, are suddenly not in the picture taking up your time and effort.

Don't blog to compete with others[0]

Do blog to:

- connect with new people

- get feedback on ideas

- engage in discussion

- learn to write better

- finding new opportunities

- keeping up with your friends

- educating others

- and more

-------------

[0] https://antipaucity.com/2014/04/11/dont-blog/#.YlGIUrgpBAc

[1] https://antipaucity.com/2012/11/05/why-blog/#.YlGIUrgpBAc

I'll just quote relevant points from here:

It's a long article. I recommend reading it,

https://guzey.com/personal/why-have-a-blog/

2. “But nobody will read my blog”

It doesn’t matter! Your blog may have the median of 0 visitors per day (as my blog had for the first two years). Your blog may be ungoogleable. Your blog may have no subscribers. But if you’re not embarrassed to tell people “oh, btw I wrote about this / collected some things on the topic on my blog”, the purpose of the blog is fulfilled, since this is the best indicator of your writing actually being helpful.

People are different. You find working quietly freeing, I find working in dialog with others exhilarating.

A straw man of your post is: “Blogging is irrational for everybody”, for which there are many counter points in these comments.

But I actually agree with a moderated version: “Blogging isn’t worth the time for me and many others”. You don’t enjoy the process, you’re not looking for even local fame, and you have better things to do. Great introspection! A functional society needs all kinds.

As a counter-argument (yes, I’m the same person): I once spent 50 hours on a small website around some technical search terms with lackluster results. Two of the guides made it to Google’s front page, and I got about 100,000 hits across 4 years. Success, in a sense.

I’d hoped to make a few dollars with an ebook or something, but couldn’t get conversions. Fine, I mentally recategorized my time investment as charity work (I’ve certainly benefited from others’ technical posts).

But when a Wordpress upgrade broke the site, I just couldn’t justify the time to fix it, and the next 100,000 searchers won’t get an answer, which I feel bad about. It’s all small potatoes, but I wonder what we’re all missing when there is so little incentive (and some ongoing cost) to sharing knowledge.

I used to blog. I made a few things in public. Started a few conversations. Enjoyed it, really enjoyed the writing aspect, enjoyed riding the dopamine wave of social integration as others interacted with what I wrote.

Then three things happened: paying work ate all my time, we started a family which put everything else on the back burner, and I started woodworking for a hobby. I stopped blogging.

You say you feel free. I feel small, like I've lost my voice, my relevance and input on my market. I'm not happy about it.

I have two beautiful daughters who appear to be much smarter than I was, so I feel far from worthless, but I've definitely lost something from not blogging. I look forward to the day where I have enough conviction in myself to say something. For now, I do my best in comments.

With some reflection, it's probably not the lack-of-blogging's "fault" that I feel like I lost my voice, and more likely parenting.

Going from knowing how everything in my world worked, to Googling every strange noise, getting third opinions on what's best, how to raise these squishy meatbags. If you're already a worrier, it can really suck the confidence from you.

Still, I do consider a return to blogging an important target. I enjoyed it.

When it comes to technical blog, I've read interesting idea that you should blog about things you weren't able to find (e.g. "how to change print width in ngspice"). Once you solve the issue yourself, blog about it and your blog entry will be the only one Google can find thus you'll receive all the traffic which you can then utilize for ads or for propagation of your other projects.

This is why I do it. If I can figure it out quickly or via a Stack overflow search, great. If I get stuck for 2 days before solving it then I’ll blog about it. Maybe one person will read it and my 5 minutes of writing a blog post will save that person 2 days of headache.

I have seen visit logs where people visit my articles from Google years after I write them so it seems to be working. And more then once I’ve been stuck, googled the problem, and found my own article because I forgot I’ve solved this exact problem before.

Two reaons: 1. A future reference to myself (and to others) whenever I run into a technical problem and fund a solution 2. To give advice learned from a lifetime in the business

Sharing isn't just about ego massaging. When I travel alone and visit a beautiful place, I always wish I had a friend with me to share the experience. Personally I find it much less fulfilling to witness something cool by myself than together with someone.

It's the same thing for content. Chasing "likes" is soul-crushing; but sharing and hearing back from people is awesome. In 10ish years blogging, I received a handful of messages from people that read something I wrote and genuinely enjoyed it -- it's a great, great feeling! :)

I also do it for myself as a mental organizing process. Sometimes I refer back to stuff I wrote, etc.

I vastly prefer blogs and githubs that aren't mainstream. Like BIOS/UEFI security blogs or the very useful kefctl github with 40 stars (CLI control of my Kef LS50W).

I left Facebook over a decade ago because doing things "to be talked about" felt awful. Focusing on sharing information to help others, rather than to stroke my ego, is much more rewarding.

> Like BIOS/UEFI security blogs

You got my attention, could you share some links to them please?

https://ristovski.github.io/

https://firmwaresecurity.com/

https://blog.fpmurphy.com/

All I can find in my bookmarks right now. Good stuff though.

When I wrote a blog regularly it was largely a reaction to seeing things going badly in work and being powerless to enact any kind of change. So instead I used that as a catalyst to write about how we should approach things. It felt pretty empowering at the time and naturally stopped when I did the more sensible thing of finding a new job.

Bloggers have, in my opinion, influenced tremendously society and in ways that we can't fathom or grasp exactly due to all the chaos. Scott Alexander's blog, the LessWrong community, and so many others have influenced the way I view and think about the world, assisting me in my quest to become a better scientist, and who knows, if something good comes out of it, then they have also helped themselves while remaining oblivious to it.

Disseminating knowledge is paramount to improving our society, and I think that blogs certainly help with that.

Yes and no, I'm working on a music visualizer in my spare time and I don't like spending too much time promoting it.

Many years ago, I worked on a previous iteration of this and I wasted a ton of time putting up a ghost blog, and trying to document my process. No one really has the attention span to read all that. Promoting the blog is much harder than just sharing what you actually made.

Much of the fun with this thing has just been learning new tricks with Unity. The new Unity UI system is leaps and bounds easier to use, I've had to dig deep into some sparsely documented APIs to do what I want. I only know how to program because I wanted to make games. And these small projects are still where I do the vast majority of my learning.

The feeling of accomplishment when you struggle for 3 hours to get something working, only to find the solution somewhere deep on stack overflow.

At this point I just love the process, first I make a beat, then I make a visualization using it. It's been a great way to combine my two passions. But again, I try not to spend too much time on promotion.

Once I clean it up a bit ( figuring out a video recording solution in Unity would be great), I plan to release it.

Here's an example with a custom Ready Player Me avatar.

https://youtu.be/yvzQ0V3f7J4

I blog for myself. Writing is a good way to organise your thoughts and possibly help improve one’s communication skills but the biggest advantage I’ve seen is that ‘exporting’ all those thoughts made it easier to generate new thoughts.

It’s like real world defragging.

>> It wasn't for the lack of success.

>> some of my security related posts made it into more "serious" media and elsewhere.

>> I think it boiled down to a realization that no one really gave a damn about me, my writing/work/creations/etc.

I don’t understand how these things go together. Seems like an issue of expectations. You’ve received validation in the form of people picking up your posts yet it’s not enough validation for you.

Well, it can be extremely useful for some (or a lot) of people. If you ever used Google to find solutions to some obscure problems on some blog you never heard about, you know what I mean.

Doesn't need to be formatted or written well, you don't need to reply or have comments, just dump that information out in the open if/when you have time.

Maybe leave a contact email or get notified if you're willing to help with something. I've gotten random replies on Notebookreview forums (RIP), TechInferno, XDA and Level1Techs about hardware and it's pretty fun figuring stuff out with someone else.

Various (dying) forums, Wordpress.com, Reddit works, too. Twitter and anything else requiring an account? Eh, I guess. Just not Discord, Whatsapp or Facebook (non-indexable and login-blocked).

Someone somewhere someday will be happy.

You can also write to show off your knowledge if you need to.

If you want to make videos, maybe don't make a 10 minute video that could be 1 minute of reading lol

I respect your decision to withdraw from the public sphere and agree that it is entirely optional.

I believe the biggest benefit that a platform gives is the chance to begin the conversations you aren't seeing elsewhere. The value of such a thing is very subjective, hence the value of a blog is also subjective.

It sounds like you may becoming somewhat of a recluse. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

As you’ve said

> realization that no one really gave a damn about me

Many would follow this with “so why not post into the void” - or at least, that’s the other side of the coin flip. As well as why many people I know who continue keeping up a life repository do so.

It’s one thing if you don’t have the energy/spare bandwidth to do so. But otherwise… why not? If you don’t already, you may have kids one day. When you’re long dead, they may enjoy being able to find the archive.

I'd like to spin this around. Why write if you don't want to write?Write when you want to write. Otherwise, why write? Many great writers only write because they must write.

Similar to other people in the comments, I blog for a few different reasons despite having maybe 100-200 actual visitors a month.

If I learn something I found interesting, I try to think about its usefulness to others. If I think it could be even moderately useful, then I spend some time thinking about how I would write about that topic or idea. Having to even go through the process of translating it into something for others to read helps me clarify the idea. For example, if I wrote code to do something, why would anyone read about that? Maybe they've encountered the same problem and they dont know about this solution. Maybe their solution is more inefficient. Maybe its more cumbersome. Whatever the reason I need to think about this first.

The next step after thinking about , why would anyone want this, is how do I explain it well? Is my explanation clear? Am I making too many assumptions? Am I forgetting things? It also helps me cement my understanding and highlight gaps in knowledge.

Sometimes its also a rant about something I found particularly irksome. There are those as well.

Lastly, I am not a native English speaker, so it helps me improve my vocabulary and it helps me think in English, which then spills over into my day to day life where communication at work and in society happens in English.

All this means that I write, probably like most out there, for selfish reasons although probably not ego related. I care about an abstract reader from the point of view of understanding and grammar but not from any financial or self-promoting pov.

I blog from time to time, a few articles a year, and I don't care how many visitors I have.

When I am curious about something, I read as much materials as I can, and I use the blog as a tool to document my findings and put my thoughts in order. It's rather a last test for me to see if I can make sense, and an opportunity to practice my English.

3 of my articles so far went to this front-page and it was a nice feeling of appreciation. But that's not the point of blogging, internet points don't matter.

I can't help but notice some contradictions in your statements on this post, for once you maintain that you had a decent blog and coding projects but nonchalant about readership and traction metrics, isn't this more like a case of "grading your own homework"?

I am not trying to be negative but I am just trying to make sense of the situation.

In another instance, you lamented the lack of public recognition for your work and yourself in particular and in the same sentence insinuated that other developers are maintaining their blogs entirely for the ego boost when it looks to me that taking your whole portfolio offline in a protest of not receiving the right amount of public validation of your talents has as much to do with ego as their perceived driving force behind their online presence.

Again, I am not trying to be negative on purpose here, I'm just trying to establish the facts.

In general, I think that you may benefit a lot more from more introspection and viewing the whole enterprise in retrospect, and perhaps writing a post mortem detailing what went wrong and what can instead be done in the future to increase your chances of success, and to use the whole thing as a learning opportunity for personal growth on all levels.

Cheers

I just dump what would have been my "blog" into google docs. No need to spend time making it presentable to others and serves the purpose as my future reference. I occasionally think that I might clean them up and make it a proper blog or book someday. But that never happens and it doesn't bother me.

I also feel paranoid that written content I have spent effort researching on is just up-for-grabs for popular tubers and that demotivates me.

Sometimes blog articles are simply a good way to document things you don’t want to forget, with hope also that you might save other people a little bit of their time getting over some technical hurdle.

For almost 20 years I combined blogging with writing the occasional book for conventional publishers (McGraw-Hill, J.Riley, Soringer-Verlag, etc.). This worked out well for me.

I then switched to a different model, using leanpub.com to write shorter books that could be easily updated with new material, dumping stale material. This makes the whole process of documenting my thought and coding experiments and sharing them to be much simpler. I am transitioning from using a restrictive Creative Commons license to an unrestrictive CC license (so my material can be reused for other purposes). My projects: https://leanpub.com/u/markwatson

All that said, I still think that blogging is a great idea. Own your own web presence and just use social media to point to your own web properties. Advantages: potential for meeting interesting people and getting interesting work.

I particularly like blogs where people write detailed tutorials about how they achieved something. This creates a lot of value for others trying to learn and achieve similar things.

If there was only some way to aggregate such blogs and rate them with respect to quality and expertise level... that would be a platform I would use. Sites like dev.to go a step in that direction but there is also so much bad content on there.

All intellectual activity is based around the representation of ideas through imperfect media. My personally-preferred medium is writing and one's writing, as with all other skills, improves with repetition. Bouncing ideas around in one's head is all well and good, but it can get tiring. Taking the time to express those thoughts in a medium of choice allows one to exorcise them from the mind. Exposing them, as I do here, to a potential audience (and the attendant risk of criticism) ensures that any such idea will have been thoroughly analysed, and any potential illogicalities headed off in advance. By consolidating disparate thoughts through writing, I improve my understanding of them and my ability to discuss them in person. Other benefits, like being able to point people towards certain pieces for my thoughts on certain topics, are only bonuses—ultimately, writing is my deadlifting.

And, to perhaps make the point more pithily, that is a quote from a blog post I wrote four years ago and which better expresses my thoughts than anything I could have come up with just now.

It wasn't for the lack of success. I have no idea how many readers or followers I had, but some of my security related posts made it into more "serious" media and elsewhere.

I think it boiled down to a realization that no one really gave a damn about me, my writing/work/creations/etc. So then, what's the point?

Well, they obviously gave a damn enough to repost your blog to more "serious" media, so presumably some of them did give a damn?

All in all, I think having a blog/github account is part of what a certain subset of IT people 'require' for someone to be considered 'good' - because they also consider its the right thing, and its self-reinforcing taught behaviour. You don't have to listen to that subset, and have stopped listening.

I finally got the feeling back. The one you got when you first started programming. It's wonderful.

And are personally better for it.

Sharing stuff is great until you feel pressured to keep sharing stuff.

I mean, I never blogged myself. But if I did want to make some articles, it'd be to help share knowledge. The mindset I'd have for a blog post is "there's [thing] I know but there isn't good documentation/examples/methodology on understanding [thing]. I can write to help other people understand [thing]." Or at least, encourage people who know [thing] better to come out of the woodworks and tell me how wrong I am. Either way, knowledge spreads and I learn a bit.

I don't want ME as a personality to be known and talked about. And you're scenario of "but no one gives a damn about me" is perfect for my goals. But that's an inevitability of socialization when you create content that resonates with people. Others certainly have that intent and it can make blogs a niche form of advertisement for any future projects/products you produce. But I wouldn't call that a reliable approach unless you have truly novel knowledge to share, or have an actual gift for writing.

_If it makes you unhappy, stop doing it._ unfortunately we can’t do this with work, so sometimes it’s not that simple. That’s interesting.

You say you achieved some ‘success’, yet this success hollow—no one cared about you. It’s the exception that a successful person captures the hearts of others. This is interesting.

But what I find most interesting is this—blogging costs you very little (hosting, personal time investment), and you can reach a _world_ audience. This is amazing.

And, your works can be linked to by others, as you can like to others work. Sharing ideas and supporting other works without a requirement to only link to sources which have been gatekeeped. Yes, the quality could be lower or you could also reach unique ideas otherwise overlooked. Wow!

And finally, you can educate and develop personally from the works of others like yourself.

A virtuous circle. That’s very interesting.

I’m sorry it’s not working for you, but you’re welcome to return when you’re ready to share your knowledge again.

Success for a blog? How you measure it? IMVHO a blog, witch these days and in the past one also, despite the name, is a mean to share knowledge, ideas to the public. I've learnt many things from countless small posts around the web, I contribute to some, that's a kind of "knowledge FLOSS" that share docs instead of code.

If you run it for the ads revenue is the measure of the success, otherwise just ignore metrics: a good website about high energy physics surely get far many visitors than one about sport or beauty stuff, and that's does not means it's unsuccessful. A personal website/blog is something you do if you like, not a job, if you like sharing things with anyone than you do it, otherwise you do not.

About knowledge sharing and discussions: often you might form an idea, something you think it's nice and correct, than try to put it down to teach it to others makes questions, corners arise and help yourself correcting the original aim, similarly other people's opinions, comments, help improve. That's the same mechanism of publishing FLOSS software, something low cost for the publisher, good for us humans, that pay back well if others share similar needs and desire, witch is moderately easy to happen since while we are all unique individuals we are also all very similar and even if anyone have a different life most of them are very similar at least for many aspects.

Reasons are the same of reasons why we have invented the concept of society, we choose to live together or at least near other humans etc. The same reasons for aggregation, scale, network economy.

The web help fix and share things for a vast community, the network and aggregation effect transcends the geographical and social distances and in some cases also language distances. A personal website is a personal web corner, our public face toward a virtual community. If we like being social animals we do that, more or less, expressing what we like.

I blog to increase my personal brand which I use to make money.

I like writing. And publishing that writing publicly gets me to take it more seriously and improve my writing.

Also, people might find what I say interesting, reach out to me and this might lead to nice conversations or opportunities. It doesn't happen often, but it has happened before.

I totally get it.

I like the blog as a creative outlet, the audience was never the point. Some of my stuff had a good 10,000 visitors, most had, well, fewer than 10. I always made things for myself so I was fine with both since I was just doing this for fun.

But things have changed. The culture is nastier, the internet is nastier, professionally I probably shouldn't publish my "How to Escape the Kingdom of Google" draft even though it's hilarious.

I've been toying with the idea of tearing it all down and starting over in a sort of underground workshop format where I can just make stuff without wondering if who Googles my real name and all the different contexts the different things might come up.

Even if you are not consciously aware of why you are blogging, on some level you know... and you either feel happy because you are clearly getting that outcome, or it feels meaningless.

Writing just because "everyone does it" is stupid. The internet is already full of stuff. Writing for adsense, no thanks.

Also, who is your audience? The majority of internet is stupid people. Talking to stupid people is a waste of time; it's not like they will remember what you said anyway.

I only write when I have a specific audience in mind, who I believe would benefit from reading that article.

By writing things up I heard from others and learnt things. It also acted as a sort of diary and I can look back on things I did and when. It was good writing practice as well.

I slowed down blogging because I would sometimes write stuff that was kind of clickbait and it wasn’t really me. I was getting excited by the visitor count etc. I stopped doing that and removed analytics.

Now I blog occasionally about little projects. The interaction of “here’s a thing I did” and “someone asking or suggesting x” was healthy for me. But if I wrote something that was an opinion all the disagreement and nastiness was unhealthy.

15 or 20 years ago I was really excited about the idea of inventing something new, or contributing something to the community and being “that guy”. Over time I learned to let go of that and just do stuff I wanted to do.

Part of doing my projects is sharing what I’ve done helping people learn from my efforts. I find it very fulfilling to share a project. And it’s really exciting when someone else finds value in that.

I think the difference is whether or not you’re trying to be an influencer (focused on yourself) or trying to share what you do (focused on what you create). At least it is for me.

For my personal blog, I blog because some things just need to be said even if nobody listens. Though twitter has mostly filled that need in recent years. https://www.konstantinschubert.com/blog/

For my business blog, I decided to start blogging to drive traffic to the business. Not sure if that's going to work, we will see. https://www.invisible-computers.com/blog/

I write blog posts to pay back, even a little bit, all the developers out there that bothered to respond to stack overflow questions or posted a blog post with a fix to a tricky issue they thought someone else might run into.

There are countless times over the last 20 years where I was stumped on a problem and a quick google search took me to someone's answer to just the thing I was trying to fix.

If I can be the one providing that answer to just a few people in the future, it's worth it for me to put a few blog posts together and stick them on S3 behind a domain name.

I usually blog for myself, usually. Either it's some technical topic that I want to note down somewhere and happen to structure in a way that might make it usable to others, or it's something that I find myself having to write again and again so I figure I might as well sit down and clarify my thoughts on it, so I don't have to come up with new metaphors or reasoning on the fly. In the process I sometimes find that my strongly-held positions don't actually have as much evidence as I'd like to back them!

I write fairly compulsively. I really can't not write. If I'm gonna write a bunch I might as well publish it somewhere. I don't really get anything out of it more than what I got out of the writing, but I think that's a fine state of affairs.

I don't know who reads what I write. I have no trackers or comment fields, it's just like sending a message in a bottle. I know some read it, because sometimes they email me with questions or comments. But that really isn't the point of the writing.

If you want to blog for ego reasons, just do it. If you want to keep a public diary... same. You can even write blog posts and not hit the 'publish' button - heresy, I know! :)

Blogging is a side-media. It's useless by itself, but a great resource for people to learn more about your process in the context of something else you're doing.

I've got a blog set up. There's a few things I want to write about but I have to admit - I'm kind of afraid of being "wrong on the internet".

A publisher found my blog posts and reached out to me. Fast forward and I've now published five books. All of this helps me get noticed and interviewed.

I am entirely the opposite - always wanting to but never following through on building a blog/online identity presence.

Seeing the recent posts I started thinking about finally taking the plunge soon.

I guess your perception of this depends on your prior experiences. I’ve never been recognized or “seen” by anyone online. The idea of achieving that sounds super appealing right now. From the sound of it, for you that is a “been there done that” kind of thing.

Because you can slowly build an audience over the years and then monetise it when you launch your own business.

That said, I killed my blog 15 years ago and never marketed my OSS projects.

I do enjoy writing, but I enjoy writing stuff I don't want to publish or that I will publish anonymously at some point.

I hate blogging for blog's sake and I'd happily give 50% of whatever we're building with someone else who enjoys writing blog posts to gather an audience.

I've got my own blog in my .com homepage I do it for myself, writing stuff that I dont want to forget, or things that I do which I find amusing (like an arduino door controller for my cat).

I would never think about sharing it proactively, specifically here on HN , as I'm very shy and HN crowd would destroy it with criticism . But I found it liberating to write that sort of stuff, as small as it is, somewhere.

> But I found it liberating to write that sort of stuff, as small as it is, somewhere.

Great for you! Do you feel like this is due to the writing part or the "in public" part ?

I only recently restarted a blog after a decade hiatus. For me there's two reasons:

1. Catharsis. Work and life is often excruciating and it's calming to organize your thoughts about a subject.

2. To see if people relate. Sometimes your journey is lonely and painful and seems unique to oneself. By posting blogs on this site, I've discovered that I'm not even close to being alone. The Internet is a wonderful place.

For me blogs are/were the best part of the internet. Unfortunately good content is so hard to find nowadays purely because of the insane amount of marketing/ad fueled blog spam that poisons every search result page.

Not a fan of opinion pieces and silver-bullet type posts, but I'm always down for a technical deep dive, a postmortem, an experimental programming paradigm idea, or just plain-old hacking fun.

My friends called this disease tutorialitis. It's when people explain "for loops" and hope to sell some adds or course on something that is virtually free nowadays. The influencer culture leaks into our programming world.

Funny but unfortunately true. The big market for bloggers will rarely be professionals delving into advanced topics (that's what research papers and conference talks are for), it's for the fledgling who is kinda interested and will dabble for a few weeks before inevitably quitting for some other venture.

That's pretty much why many specialized parts of tech have this massive dirth of intermediate content out there that bridges the gap between "how to color a button" and "2D Shape Rendering by Distance Fields".

Blogs were a great platform 20 years ago. Today people just participate in some forums and social networks (walled gardens).

I still maintain my blog after 20 years.

I write for my future self first, but comments like these are a good motivator…

“Thanks. Great app. Perfect for what most of us needed. I lost 212 pounds using it. Just needed to track calories, not all the government nutrition stuff.”

- Feedback on Quick Calories app

“Thank you so much for the links! I have finally been able to get my Pffaf embroidery machine working after months of despair. Bless you!”

- Feedback on Husqvarna 3D software install blog post

I’ve using the zettelkasten / bidirectional note taking method to learn things. It’s not too much of a stretch to start publishing online. The ideal note is written in a way that’s understandable to someone else https://briansunter.com/notes/

My experience as well. Working on projects in the dark frees you to do whatever you want, experiment as much as you want, pause/restart/abandon projects without getting heat from current users etc. Work for me is being constrained by external expectations. Play for me is doing whatever I want unconstrained by external expectations.

I like writing about a particular thought which I find interesting and then share with people to explore the "thought space" with me, so I can discover more. I also write to solidify information further and record it for future reading.

I find it's a useful to share knowledge with people you already know. You can use it as a wiki/knowledge base instead of writing an email to those people. Except it's more findable, because Google is indexing it.

I write blog entries when I have to explain the same thing more than once. I just write the "email" as a blog entry and then just send a link to the blog post.

So I write blog posts as a way to reduce my effort.

There is an unwritten understanding that if you write an interesting blog post, then in exchange you are allowed to drop a link to promote your project. For example the OkCupid, Bingo Card Creator blogs.

People still give a damn about other people but blogs are out of favour and instead have been replaced with Hacker News and Reddit and other such social communities.

Blogs are centred on just one person while communities are centred around an interests which partly explains the rise of Reddit, etc.. and the fall of Blogger. Also, in terms of web browsing experience, it's much better to read different Hacker News or Reddit posts then to visit a different blog sites and then have to orient oneself to the navigation and UI elements each time; the voting mechanism also makes finding good stuff easier than just by reading a blog.

What is the definition of a Blog? Is it just a place to host articles? If so, then even Github can be used. Is a Blog just centred on a person's ideas? Then Twitter is a blog or has replaced blogs.

TLDR: Blogging is still alive, but just has taken different forms.

Now as for the Why, why not? People like to express, discover and exchange ideas.

For me, i love blogging, but it's not easy to write decent blog articles with good enough structure without reviewing, refactoring or migrating.

Blogging is just as hard and fun as coding.

So, why coding at all ?

I write to keep record of things that I'm working on, issues that I've tackled. If I've came across something, maybe my writing will help someone else.

My friend is an Civil Engineer, but in her spare time she paints. She keeps her paintings for herself. Why bother painting if no one gives a damn about her paints?

I find writing to be a useful means of self reflection or reflection on a particular topic.

Sometimes I like what I’ve written enough to want to share it with the world.

I do it so I am forcing myself to put to paper my reasoning so that later on I can review and see where I went wrong.

It also helps keep me motivated and engaged.

If nobody cares, then you shouldn't blog. I get dozens of cold emails about my blog thanking me for sharing the information I do.

It feels good to take a convoluted mess of thoughts and organize it to put it into words. It’s like a public therapy session for me.

https://indieweb.org/POSSE#Why

Why only open an HN account now? You could've had an audience here years ago and even linked to your blog.

I blog because at the end of the day i feel like writing on the internet can have a long term impact

I like writing.

Write for yourself. Anything else (some readers, professional contacts etc) is a nice possible extra.

Hum... I write because I want to write. If someone reads it, great. If they comment on it, awesome. But, it is not for other people that I write, it is for me.

> no one really gave a damn about me

One should never care about a person in context of their achievements. Because what and the who just muddy the other and you end up not understanding and appreciating either one properly. E.g. Elon Musk or Michael Jackson. As a person, you can highly like or dislike them. But their achievements should not be judged in any way based on their personality or you end up with people who dismiss revolutions in their fields, because of a tweet or a mannerism!

> So then, what's the point?

The point, at least for me, is to make people aware of something useful I've done. The amazing chef whose recipe dies with her has, to me, contributed little to society. Seems like your posts have been useful enough to make it to a large audience. THAT is the point.

To that end, it only makes sense to promote something you've done so as many people as possible, get exposure to it and hopefully benefit from it.

By the way, if all this sounds like a justification for dopamine hit, then "that's just like your opinion man". :)

Getting users is tough. I get it.

i use it as a backup of my thoughts.

I mean yeah, exactly.

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