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Comment by klelatti | Hacker News Reader

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."

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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.

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 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.

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