Guide to Writing Online | Hacker News Reader

Guide to Writing Online

perell.com

84 pointsimartin2k26 comments

It feels like there is a new industry springing up selling courses and advice on building 'writing online' skills which gives me mixed feelings.

On the one hand, lots of the advice seems relatively sound and helpful to those who want to express their ideas clearly and engage with a wider audience.

On the other, some drifts into influencer type audience building for the sake of later monetisation with the prospect of this monetisation luring people into buying relatively expensive courses and other material. It all feels a bit like a pyramid scheme: "I changed my life by writing online. You can too."

Selling shovels to gold diggers is easier than finding gold and digging it up. Someone will always find novel ways of doing that.

Except there is no gold and the only opportunities is the next persons 2000 dollar seminar on why you aren't succeeding which they then use to network with other individuals who sell them on their 100,000 opportunity.

You'd be better of hiring people with little to no experience than someone who was taught by these gurus.

I've always heard the metaphor as encouraging people to "sell shovels during the gold rush", to get into the market of supporting tools and equipment.

But if everyone's selling shovels because it's easier than digging for gold.. It's an oversaturated market - perhaps we should be encouraging people to "dig for gold", to search for something that produces original value, rather than be in the market of derived value.

This is exactly my thought. There are many influences of this kind that somehow managed to land in my twitter bubble. Many of them telling stories about how writing online changed their lives. But as far as I can tell, none of those influencers wrote about something else than writing online at any point.

It’s the same with YouTube coaches teaching people how to become entrepreneurs, but the only business they have ever build is their coaching business. It just does not add up

Those who can, do. Those who can't, sell online courses on how to do it.

This is just how many "writers" make their revenue. Selling adspace and giving tips to lure people to become just like them. It's just a scam the advice here like in many other places is generic and copy and paste and if you aren't a writer who's part of the more private programs you won't notice the difference besides maybe some fundamental basics you can learn at the college level for 20-40k a year. Invitation to these programs are rare and with D&I programs which I was part of the likelihood of the average American joining this program unless their family was already associated with it in varying degrees is zero. Many of the people I learned from have stopped doing it simply because of this. And only talk about it on chance and opportunity, but not really you shouldn't expect a blind monk to guide you. It's a huge time sink that nobody will want to do for free. Which these programs were and are almost never offered.

Realistically the only way to get better at writing is just pure luck in getting into the right groups of people and even then those groups don't really understand it either. Often they come up with meaningless phrases such as writer's block which don't really exist and are rather signs of burnout. But yeah, don't listen to people like this, they tend to use their backgrounds to make false claims using survivorship bias to back it up. Realistically all the best writers I met in my life have only actually sat down to write for maybe 2-3 hours at most at a time of which they aren't even writing for. Like anything writing is a skill which requires mastery that most people do not have the privilege or opportunity to learn. And even those with money and time can still never learn how it works.

Regarding the article, I write everyday and I recommend everybody journal their thoughts, feelings and ideas. At one point I used to regularly read blogs and check up on each person's websites. But I don't use a RSS reader anymore. I need to check Jeff Atwood's blog and Joel on Software and The Daily Wtf.

I started a journal in early 2010s and it's all public on GitHub. I used Wikidpad and got to over a thousand notes after reading people's comments on Slashdot. Wikidpad is a Windows based wiki software which is good but then I moved to markdown, using the GitHub interface.

When I generate an idea I like, I write it down. I got to over 450 entries. They're mostly computer software or startup ideas, they are related to a futuristic vision of computing, society, concurrency, algorithms, parallelism. They're a dream of how computers should work. How they could benefit society. There are links to it on my profile.

I enjoy reading other people's problems to generate ideas from them.

I find there is a shortage of good things to read on the internet, you kind of need to read books or academic papers for good quality things.

What happened to tech journalism of the 2000s? I enjoyed the era of Wired, Digg, LinuxFormat, Slashdot and sites such as LifeHacker and computer magazines. The web feels more fragmented, lower in quality and less synchronized today than it did.

I think the absolute number of good things to read on the internet has continued to grow - it is just that there is so much more “bad” then there was before the barrier to entry for publication was lowered. So finding the good is harder because it is relatively less common. Also some people blame Google’s search algorithm.

Seems like a guide for 'being a writer online' aka reach many readers and whatnot.

"My life is devoted to helping people write online. In Write of Passage, I teach a proven system that’s built for the 21st century. Our alumni base includes some of the fastest-growing online writers in the world right now (such as Packy McCormick and Ana Lorena Fabrega). "

That's cool and all, but if you wanna share your thoughts by writing stuff online, just choose a blogging platform and start writing. This guide is way overkill.

I have read the article before, and while yes, you are right that the article is overkill for people who simply just want to put their thoughts and writings online, but to people who want to write to become famous and have an influence in their field and shit, then this is one great article.

Nope this is actually useless in it's entirety.

It reads like a starter book for a pyramid scheme like rich dad, poor dad. I wonder when this self proclaimed successful writer will start his masterclass series on how to write. Or his private seminars to guarantee that first publication in ENTER BIG ONLINE BLOG SITE HERE.

    >Writing from Abundance is the art of collecting ideas so you can think better and avoid writer’s block.
    >Writing from Conversation is the art of using dialogue to identify your best ideas and double down on them. 
    >Writing in Public is the art of broadcasting your ideas to the Internet so you become a beacon for people, opportunities, and serendipity.

Pretty interesting 3 styles of writing, probs the biggest highlight if monetisation isn't your objective.

When I started reading there were few comments telling about how lame the article is. But next line is a diamond of observing:

One thing stuck out: everybody in front of me only consumed content created within the last 24 hours.

I have no smartphone and basically do not know how people are using them. Now I know why I don't feel a needness to get one - I really prefer to consume something timeless from my laptop with thousands of good books.

A better title: A self-congratulatory guide to writing online without contributing anything.

Ahh! do not forget to smash the button to join my writing course.

There's some tidbits good psychology in this guide.

I don't know of this writer or their subject, but the piece touches on a hard part of sustainable, professional writing, which is "where do authentic ideas come from?".

Integrating self with thought and action, in harmony with your everyday real-life is an art. Same skill I see in good stand-up comedians and musicians. Many writers don't find that source in their hearts. They write only what they think people want to read. Or professional writers can churn out copy on what their boss tells them. Technically, it can be great writing, but it doesn't flow from anywhere.

This impediment to sustainability is expressed when s/he says:

> "For years, I thought that being successful and being myself were diametrically opposed"

Outside of comment responding, I struggle to write anything of length that's meaningful and informative.

So far I've skimmed this guide, but I've bookmarked it for reference. I really want to improve my online writing, so I'll take whatever advice I can get.

Surprisingly solid article. I'm not a great online writer by any stretch, but most of the advice in the article seem to agree very well with what I've personally found helpful with finding the inspiration to write.

Did anyone else just skim through the article just glancing at the headings and get the entirety of what this person was saying?

For someone who wants to expound on writing, they have a lot to learn.

Is that a bad thing? Not everything has to be Hegel.

The reality of advice, and this goes for almost any category, is that most of the advice that matters is fairly simple and obvious "eat your vegetables"-type stuff.

You can skip the first 10 or so paragraphs, for sure, and miss nothing.

> Did anyone else just skim through the article just glancing at the headings and get the entirety of what this person was saying?

Isn't this how we consume most of long texts online anyway? :-)

> I was a terrible writer growing up.

And why should I care? Maybe answer that question earlier. At least give me a hint, to keep me engaged. The whole first five+ paragraphs are way too self-centered for a piece that wants to sell something to me.

The way it is written now, you lost me right at the beginning. And I guess I'm not alone in that. If you want more people to give you their email, you have to do better than that.

On the contrary, I found starting with a short personal story to be a good way to catch my attention since I could somewhat relate to the author while also getting some context about the actual piece.

And, uh, I don't see the author asking for my email.

> for a piece that wants to sell something to me.

Does it? My impression from that article was that the author was giving advice, left and right and for free. There is a link to a course, in the header, which the author is selling; but the article is not centered on it.

> And why should I care?

Well, the obvious presupposition is that you are reading an article titled "guide to writing online" because, presumably, you want to learn some tips about writing online. Because, presumably, you think that your writing is somehow lacking. To which the author is saying here, effectively: "don't worry; I too sucked at writing; and now look at me, I am teaching people how to write; if I could do it, so can you." Or something like that.

It's not actually about "writing online", in the sense of the writing happening in a browser-embedded editor or anything like that (compare to writing /in/ a book). It's about writing content to be published online.

Is my pedantipoint-counter displayed anywhere?

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