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Comment by FlyingSnake | Hacker News Reader

"Always bet on text"

Text is eternal and has a nice Lindy effect going for it. However this article doesn't address the core problem indie bloggers are facing, discoverability. It reads like a self fulfilling prophesy and dismissed the inroads made by video. Many programmers these days simply jump to YouTube to solve a problem and videos solve these problems satisfactorily.

To make blogging great again, we need to solve this issue of discoverability. Otherwise we're all screaming in the wind.

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Maybe many beginners might be jumping to videos. I'd like to think that most of the experienced developers like text more as they can quickly scroll past the bits that are irrelevant to them and look for the parts that are interesting. It is harder to do so for a video as you typically have no idea at which point the person will tell you about the concept you were looking for (unless you get some timestamp list but even then you may need to wade through some fluff/water before you get to the juicy bits).

Ye videos are really bad as a manual for programming.

Usually you just want the code pointing you in the right direction and if the writer was nice the header file is included in the snippet.

For e.g. repairing cars it is really great.

I find with programming video's the information density is really low. The best channels is where there's no introduction or it's in chapters and easily skipeped.

When looking for information, I despise videos and will avoid watching them if at all possible. For exactly the reasons you mention: random access, too much fluff and low information content.

The only exception is things like home repair advice, fixing washing machines, etc. I assume that the people with most knowledge of these skills are more likely to produce videos than write down something.

I agree that the sort of people who do home repair, car repair, etc. are much, much more likely to put a video together (low friction) than to put up a well-written and illustrated instruction manual.

But I still hate it. The video is always too long, has too much non-relevant stuff in it, and a phone camera jammed under a water pump to see the frobnitz valve or whatever is never as good as an exploded view illustration.

Forget AI-powered lawyers and AI-powered fantasy art generators, let's get an AI-powered technical writer and AI-powered technical illustrator going. Train them on Haynes manuals until you can ask them to generate an accurate repair guide for a Kenmore washing machine.

That’s pretty much why I’m working on summarising content, no matter the media.

Just getting started, but it has already yielded some fun results.

That's why I've decided to just blog for myself. It's kind of like notes where if i come across it again, i can remind myself or i can grasp something i once understood more easily but with the added component of holding myself to somewhat of a high standard because it's still going to be public. Can also be something that helps when looking for a job as the recruiter can look at the blog and see the experience you have.

Yeah, this is exactly the same thing I do. It's just a place I dump stuff I learned and want to remember. And can confirm, it was the deciding factor in at least one job interview. People do care about that kind of stuff.

Does everyone need to be discoverable? What would a blog engine look like with zero discoverability? You can't say they wouldn't have any readers, to an extent Gumroad and other similar services have no discoverability.

example: I don't go to Gumroad.com to find random people to give money to, a creator who has captured my through other means directs me there.

Services like Gumroad can have zero discoverability because other services have decent discoverability. So somewhere, discoverability is a crucial service and it's probably best to have control over that rather than assuming a third party service will continue as-is.

Take Twitter for instance, prohibiting the promotion of other platforms. This impacted discoverability for a lot of people because they relied on Twitter as the funnel to get people to patreon/gumroad/their site/etc. Apparently that policy at Twitter is now gone but you get the point.

I don't fully agree with the above idea that discoverability is the main problem however when it comes to blogging. Tumblr solved that for a long time (although now discoverability is a bit rubbish), most still don't use Tumblr so there are greater factors at play here.

creators will always find a way to promote. discoverability has never affected that. this isn't the internet of stmbleupon anymore, we use aggregators and influencers.

Discoverability is a huge challenge... I've considered moving to Substack because of their discovery mechanisms, but I don't like incurring the platform risk having seen the way that applications like Medium have changed over time. Curious if anyone in the HN community has any ideas on that conundrum.

If you can script this for yourself, write your post, push to your platform and auto publish to substack, or vice versa.

Yeah we're definitely able to do those things, it just seems weird to have the content living in two places and I'm not sure if that will present some sort of other issue for us down the line.

I copy my blog text to Substack and use the platform as a push mechanism. I hear your concern and am open to suggestions.

Yeah, I'm always worried about the fact that Substack won't let you set up canonical URLs back to your blog, but we aren't really SEO optimized anyway so maybe it doesn't matter that much...

Just checked out your blog, pretty cool stuff. Thanks for sharing.

Your blog is really nice! Information like yours is great to see more of. In regards to discoverability[1] I shared a rule you may find useful, why is it a huge challenge? Are you aiming to monetize?

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34553528

I think discoverability, reach, and exponential growth is overrated. In the end you either get overwhelmed by your massive userbase, or lose your original intent somewhere along the way, subconsciously catering towards more growth versus blogging for bloggings sake.

Instead, screw all of that. Write your ideas and let it out. It's cathartic, it helps you think more clearly on whatever you are writing up, and serves as a lasting reference should you need to revisit that information again yourself. A blog with no readers is still a great tool for your own productivity.

Well said! One thing I think a lot of people get confused with is prioritizing discoverability. People forget that the internet is large and continues to get larger today. Platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram which largely "solved" discoverability are now available. What should be practiced more is the "POSSE" rule or "Post On your own Site and Syndicate Elsewhere". This is already what a lot of people do but fail to capitalise due to convenience

I've personally benefited a lot from Thinking About Things, a newsletter that emails me a couple of blog posts every week. https://thinking-about-things.com

Is a newsletter a blog? For me, a weblog (or blog) has always been a webpage that I can either read in my browser or my newsreader.

If a newsletter that arrives via email is a blog, is a newsletter that the post office delivers a blog?

That newsletter links to actual blog posts, I believe. It’s basically a blog post recommendation newsletter.

I miss the days of webrings.

A lot of people are still using them, especially in the IndieWeb scene. I came across this really cool blog last night (click the different theme switchers in the top right) and the author is using one:

https://localghost.dev/

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