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Comment by antux | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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...

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.

'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.

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