Writing is a single-player game | Hacker News Reader

Writing is a single-player game

otherlife.co

137 pointsbspear41 comments

I don't disagree with the general sentiment, but as someone who has faced literal attempts on his life for revealing unpleasant truths about powerful people and has PTSD, I find myself cautious in fully accepting the optimism. And I'm someone who had a pretty big platform in the 2010s.

The problem with "speaking truth to power" is that the shitbags in power already know the truth (that they're shitbags, and that in a just world they would be torn down and humiliated, if not destroyed). What you do by "speaking truth" is reveal to them that you also know this. By doing so, you make yourself dangerous to them. Sometimes, this is what you want. Sometimes, it is not. It is not an easy, one-size-fits-all decision. Your enemies, but also your friends, start to see you as an instrument of war.

Also, with regard to "algorithmic demons"... it's not "algorithms" that are the problem. It's (a) the complete lack of transparency, (b) that the algorithms are often tailored toward objectives other than content quality (which leads to gaming, hence the perceived need for opacity), and (c) that the data now available about us is invariably used against us by bad actors (and that a lack of influence / platform will also be used against us, so I don't know if there's a way to win).

The algorithms themselves aren't so bad; what's worse is that these companies often slip shit into the algorithms that punishes people or ideas they dislike, and of course (a) this is completely unregulated, (b) it's impossible to prove, and (c) you'll often damage your reputation if you point it out (since you sound identical to a crazy person who failed organically and is lashing out at "the algorithm" with unprovable assertions).

Speaking truth to the power sometimes is nothing to do about power itself. It is about speaking.

In fact writing is never one person’s game. Otherwise why bother to write. It is also not just about who the author write to. It is the side audience, the chorus in the Greek drama, the reader of the x outside the channel etc.

of course someone has to struggle through it on their own. There is a target audience.

But real life it is never about them.

P.S. chapter 4 of Zhoungzi is about this speaking the power and even strangely it is arguing even if one adopt a zhoungzi position, very post-modern. The speaking truth to power could be just a guy state his position and not changed anything. Just hurt himself. But if the story leaked out it is a different matter. But if one concerns oneself … hence never about one. Not ever one person’s game.

> In fact writing is never one person’s game. Otherwise why bother to write.

Ever hear of personal diaries or lecture notes? People write to formulate their thoughts, reflect on their lives, record something so they can remember it later, establish a base of ideas on which to build on top of, etc.

It could possibly be argued that at some point what they will interact with others, and they might use the results of those thoughts in the interaction, and therefore indirectly the writing is not single-player, but unless you're a hermit living in the mountains that's just something that has to happen and "single-player" becomes a bit useless as a definition. I might as well start saying single-player board and video games are multi-player then, too, as I might take skills I picked up playing them into the real world.

Like I've got about 300,000 words in a personal diary. Some of them I intend to maybe eventually turn into blog posts, but the vast majority of those words I will most likely keep private until my death (after that point, whatever). But every once in a while I reread some entries, and help remember some details about my life that I have since forgotten. Also there's a bunch of game designs I recorded that I might need to get a reminder of what I was thinking when I double back to them.

But those journals aren't going to build me an audience sitting on my hard drive or physically written on a notebook.

> In fact writing is never one person’s game. Otherwise why bother to write.

Writing is useful as a way to better articulate your thoughts. When the thoughts are in your head, it's "obvious" that they just "make sense". But when you have to give them structure on a page, putting them into the real world, you may start to see that your ideas weren't so coherent after all.

One could then argue, "But why are you trying to better articulate your thoughts if not to communicate them to others, i.e. an audience?" Which is a valid point, but I think there's value in developing clearer thinking, in terms of living a better, more fulfilling life.

I read the title as "Writing a single player game" and was utterly confused by this comment. Damn you brain!

In order to participate in the comment section you must have read the entire linked post/article. It's the law!

As someone who is written over 300 articles on my blog I can relate to the feeling of wondering if my words even matter or make difference. Feeling like they don't matter is the easiest way to quit.

Some articles have made a splash, but only for the momentary period it was first published. I always wonder if the next generation of people will ever see it, or will it just get lost in the void.

I've come to terms that it doesn't matter if it helps people or not. What keeps me writing is all the interesting thoughts and ideas I want to share. It's a way to express what's inside of me to the few people that want to listen.

If you can make writing so engaging to you to where you want to play it like a video game, you've cracked the code to being a writer.

I just checked my blog. 367 posts. But it’s private with a protected login. It’s written for an audience of one: my son when he’s an adult. Maybe it’s also written for me.

I contend that the best writing and the easiest commitment to regular writing is to write for yourself. Always.

Do not forget to print it and put it in a binder, otherwise he might never know about it.

Publicly available but protected? Sorry, but that's just mean. Your son will likely never read all, or any, of it. But someone else's son might. If it wasn't login protected, that is.

Why should they make something public if it was not written to be public? How is that mean?

Exactly. It's even worse than the belief that privacy is unnecessary unless you have something to hide, since it enslaves you to a positive obligation to informing others, and despite the risks. If you have something interesting to say regarding humans, then you have to judge that there doesn't exist someone sufficiently threatened by it to do you or your interests any harm, and thinking through that is both stressful and uncertain. The safest default assumption is privacy.

Just getting some of your thoughts down in writing is a first step, like a diary or journal. Maybe a few of those thoughts should be public soon, or maybe not. But getting them down helps your thinking and is useful.

Writing is not a public good by default, but merely a physical manifestation of thought, and thus private.

> you have to judge that there doesn't exist someone sufficiently threatened by it to do you or your interests any harm

There absolutely is someone who exists that would weaponize some of my posts against me. That's why it's private and will remain so, except for my son's eyes when he is older.

Good choice.

Herman Melville was nearly lost to the void; it's pretty much random happenstance that Moby Dick was discovered thirty years or so after publication. Like the tiktok craze over No Children, I suppose...

https://www.tiktok.com/music/original-sound-7018310124947147...

'I hope you die. I hope we both die' fits pretty well with Moby Dick too

'Don’t strive to be superior to others; strive to be better than you were yesterday." I find this quote to be the main difference between single player/multi player game. The joy is always in progress, the difference is your frame of reference.

I find that writing helps clarify my thoughts and own them, rather than just being an amalgamation of the content I consume. It also helps keep my opinions and predictions in check—-I have something that I can look back on in future years and see how my opinions have changed, which can be a humbling experience because in the present it is easy to think that you are always correct.

I bet my life it does help people. Even if it's just one sentence that someone read as part of 20 tabs they opened for whatever research/project/thing they were doing.

You can write for yourself, but if you publish it on a publicly available site, you clearly want it to be read by others.

This. This is why you don't want analytics on your blog/website/platform. Analytics leads you into crowd-pleasing, veering away from your own insights and truth. I've probably written on the order of that many articles, too, over the past uhh... ? years... and if any of them made a "splash" I probably wouldn't even know! Don't care.

Expanded version of this thinking: https://one.mikro2nd.net/posts/why-no-web-analytics-are-to-b...

Everyone wants and needs to be heard. Writing is another way of achieving that - putting the message in an internet bottle and letting it float. Your audience may live in another age, past you, but your message is still alive and maybe immortal. By writing you are getting better at writing. You are also getting better at noticing things worth writing about. You are putting a (hopefully) rare perspective into the world. If you can survive the cringes of reading your own past work, and not be demotivated by the lack of feedback, you feel fortunate. Fortunate not if you make a living off of it, or if it becomes important, but if the person you actually intended the writing for ends up reading at, enjoying it, and replying back.

If one day some AI supersedes humans and produces the most perfect writing on the planet, humans will not stop writing. Because writing is not about achieving perfection, but about feeling heard, eventually.

And if any AI ever produces great writing, it will only be because it has become capable of genuine originality, as many human beings already are and will continue to be no matter what AI does. Rare perspectives aren't going to get exhausted, either by AI or by an increasing human population with more literacy and leisure time. For every piece of low-hanging fruit that gets plucked, several seeds get scattered and new trees spring up.

I don't think AIs will ever be capable of truly great writing, but within 30 years (if not sooner) they will be capable of (a) writing clickbait articles capable of going viral, (b) waging complex PR campaigns including the creation of author personalities that do not actually exist, and (c) fooling literary agents and publishing houses and selling thousands or millions of copies.

This problem already exists in the bottom reaches of the self-publishing ecosystem--the AI-generated scammy "books" don't sell very well, but they take no effort to create--which could lead to a resurgence of traditional publishing's flagging prestige, but that would be short-lived, because New York publishing is probably no more than 10 years from getting Sokal'd in a high-profile way.

Anyone who has seriously works, exercises, or creates, fights quitting. I'm curious how others deal with it.

I don't find thoughts like the ones in the post very helpful. Once I start thinking about instead of just doing, I've already lost. The only thing that helps me is remembering not giving up in the past, which feels like yoko ono's ladder to yes.

I'm fifty years old. I've been good enough at drawing to have people pay me to do it since about 2000.

There's a point where it's just... what you do. Where it's become a major part of your life and you get to regularly remind yourself that even when it gets kind of tedious, you're still paying your bills by doing this thing you essentially love doing. And then you get to figure out how to make it more exciting: bigger challenges? new approaches? working with other people to make something bigger than you can make yourself? or just shrugging and accepting that this has become Work instead of Play, and enjoying being able to do solid work in a tenth of the time it once took, and enjoy more leisure time to do other things you enjoy?

I mean, what the fuck else am I gonna do? Get a day job at the bottom of some other career ladder?

This feels like a submarine article, so I'm going to go off on a tangent, and ask, "For how long will this be true?"

With evolving documents like wikipedia and Conflict-free Replicated Data Type (CRDTs) coming into favor, it feels like writing could be a cooperative and multi-player game. Most of the meetings I go to have an EtherPad open for all the participants to collaboratively take notes during the discussion. I'd assume that collaborative editing of documents will become more of the norm.

Like exercising, perhaps one could show up and write in a shared document so as not to let your fellow writer's down.

No everyone likes to work in group (I don't). Tools to work in group are quite often very different than tool to work in isolation (by needs).

That's social media and it sucks.

Social media could learn a thing or two from Wikipedia--scalable collaboration that is actually constructive.

There's nothing submarine about it, Justin is shilling his community quite openly at the end, if you asked him "hey what's that last paragraph about" I expect he'd reply "I'm shilling indiethinkers what does it look like".

Submarine is when you launder your ad through some putatively neutral platform, Justin runs otherlife, there's no mystery here.

> Justin is shilling his community quite openly at the end

Yeah, I got curious about that, and googled for the word. "Enroll, One-Time, $550", it said. Right :-)

I'm not super happy about using 'writing' to mean 'publishing articles online with the goal of maximizing your subscriber count'.

Writing might be a single player game. But as soon as you hit "publish" onto a website you are a twitch streamer playing a single player game....

I know this isn't quite what the author means, but: writing can also be multi-player:

https://storium.com

(Disclosure: this is my thing)

I've kicked around the idea of starting a blog. It would be for me and me alone. Just a way to help myself work through some thoughts. There is always some sort of anxiety that stops me from doing it though. The idea of putting thoughts out into the world is scary. The author says my ideas can help people and I'm selfish to not share them but what if I don't want to my ideas to have a wide reach? What if I accidentally make the front page of Hacker News? God knows people here aren't any sort of kind or gracious. There is a comment in thread that sums it up, it's a single player game until you publish and are on display for everyone.

if you aren't looking for interaction or a following - then why publish? Write your thoughts out for yourself and see where it takes you.

This is something that every individual needs to realize themselves, but you shouldn't give a flying fuck what strangers think of you. Or anyone, really. Their thoughts and opinions are their problem, not yours.

"Oh, but what if it actually affects me?". If it starts affecting you, then you fix it.

You don't care what a random person on the street/road thinks of you, right? Even though they can realistically punch/stab/yell/crash their car into you at any time.

Maybe try writing a private diary for, say, a year and see what you get. Depending on events you will probably either (a) drift out of the habit after a month or two (b) gain insights into yourself and carry on (c) start to publish selected extracts as a blog/book.

If you become famous then someone will do (c) for you at some point (maybe after you are gone).

Writing is a single-player game... until you get an editor involved.

You only need an editor if you're trying to sell your work.

Why not to assume infinite readership?

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