Why I Blog
dannyguo.com
dannyguo.com
I couldn't find a good reason to continue publishing content for everyone to read. I also gave up on the open source community at the same time.
The idea of "giving back" to the community is gone. The open source (and open knowledge) web is gone. People (and companies/ML models) take/pilfer/plagiarize/rehash/profit from your contributions and you get squat in return. I decided to no longer take part in it.
I can write on my own, privately. I can share and link to content with private links. I don't need the vanity, opportunities or monetization (ie, peanuts).
I think a lot of people think of blogs as "production-quality writing", which is natural because for part of the 2000s, blogging = money/recognition. That era is over, no matter how many people start (and later abandon) Substacks.
Spending double digit hours to polish up an insightful or useful article then posting it publicly to the internet feels like playing the lottery. There is a chance that you'll get "monetization", "opportunities", or "notoriety"; but you can be sure that the house is getting their cut. With the current web scraping models out there, it feels like the house's cut is only getting bigger and your upside is getting slimmer.
Sure posting a tutorial that you wrote anyways to help yourself digest something has low personal downside, but you're basically just crowd sourcing away a technical writer's job at whatever entity is responsible for (or benefiting from) the tech you're researching.
Maybe this is "pulling the ladder up behind you", but it feels more like "not being climbed on in a human pyramid". I would have no problems with "content" I spent time producing only benefited individuals with no compensation in return (probably still citations if warranted), but like OP said the reality is that your "content" will either be:
- not generically valuable in the first place
- iterated on without credit
- digested into the beast (blog spam & ML models) with no compensation
That's never what open source was about. It's the tragedy of the commons.
People can get the same thing out of blogging, but I came to really dislike the nature of online content today, and all the considerations one has to take in order to make one's blog "readable" undermines the personal benefit one can get from the act of writing.
It was one thing back in the early days of the web when a blog could be scrappy and written in a very personal way. Those days are long gone. If you want to write a public journal in a personal and informal way, and interact with an audience, then be prepared to have some malcontents tell you to "cite your sources" about the most trivial shit, despite you never having made the promise of writing academically. If you're not making money, why bother listening to the peanut gallery? And let's say you want to make money off your blog; first off, blogs are not easy to monetize, and with money in the picture you now have to think about the voice you use, the structure of your writing, whether you're being too offensive, etc. In other words, you now have a shitty job on top of your day job!
Yeah, count me out. I know some people get enjoyment and profit out of blogging, but the wild west of the blogging is in the past, and the current state of the internet is largely not for me as someone who might otherwise want to produce content. The only content I generate is here in HN comment sections.
In case anyone reading this is interested in getting started journaling, what I do is use Apple Notes and encrypt all my notes. The nice thing about the encryption is that the notes aren't easily searchable, and the Notes app will lock the notes after a few minutes if you aren't interacting with them. The safety of the encryption allows me to write virtually anything to myself, which I've found to be a really good thing for my mental health. My more formal entries are just a title, a date, bullet points for what I've achieved that day, bullet points for things I still need to do, and a "debriefing" section where I can just write about whatever I'm thinking about the current or previous day.
0: https://generativereview.substack.com/p/tasks-open-source-em...
I was reading fairly old gamedev, emulation and other blogs. The content and spirit of them made me realize how things have come along since and depressed me. Said fuck it.
I tend to go back a re-read some posts years after I published them. It’s especially helpful when working on open source projects, as I tend to include warts and all so I can remember what not to do and why.
"I don't claim to actually know all that much, but everyone has something worth sharing."
If you aren't currently using any "knowledge management" software, you may want to check out Obsidian or Roam Research. I bet you'd get a lot out of it.
And thanks for the tip. I've been using Notion, but I've kept my eye on Obsidian and Roam too.
I wrote a thing about how ChatGPT can't access URLs but pretends that it can - https://simonwillison.net/2023/Mar/10/chatgpt-internet-acces... - and I've since sent people links to it dozens of times: https://twitter.com/search?q=https%3A%2F%2Fsimonwillison.net...
That post was me sending a link to him, after that conversation, so neither of us forget. And guess what, where there is one, there are others. I've sent it to several people since!
(edit: add more context)
Losing my ego over the past several decades has been the best thing to happen to me. I think being wrong publicly has been the main cause of that.
Although I should point out that being wrong publicly for me began before internet comments — just making an uninformed comment in front of people smarter than me started that ball rolling. Perhaps it's one of those things where in the smaller circles when you are young you might be the most knowledgeable about a number of topics and so your ego believes you are an expert. But as you begin to move in circles of those with the same expertise you begin to see that there are many people much more knowledgeable and capable than you.
Learning to be more humble has been transformative for me. I listen a lot more than I used to. I make less acerbic comments online.
Nonetheless, like the blog post implies, if you offer no thoughts or opinions at all you will never get the chance to be proven wrong. If your ego is in check that can be an excellent learnable moment for you.
For me, I had some of the mentioned ad networks for a bit. But, they were all not to my liking in terms of UI and added unwanted cruft.
I always wanted to run my own ads, but I thought “Hey, I don’t have enough traffic.”
I think people underestimate (as I did) that if you write about a niche, even if it’s a broad topic (for me, iOS) that you can do your own ads for a nice bit of money.
I make about $12,000 from running my own sponsorships annually, and moving them to monthly only slots has been a revelation. I started with weekly, twice monthly and monthly but man - it was quite a bit of work.
I’ve hit a very nice sweet spot where I now make money from doing something I love, it’s manageable and it pays for my family vacations, kid’s sports and travel teams and Christmas. It’s great.
After that, income was too low to do things like pay rent, go on vacation, etc It paid for the domain renewal and hosting, but that was it.
ADs were not why I blogged though. The income from ADs was a bonus but not the main focus. Of course you get people like black-hat SEO types doing content farms and gaming Google whose sole purpose is to drive impressions and get clicks on ADs.
Then there is your core visitors blocking ADs and browsing with JS disabled which further hampers income from ADs. Maybe they enjoy their privacy, and that's fine. I'm not certain the percentage of users who do that. I would guesstimate 20% are blocking, and that could increase over the years.
I'd like to start a blog but I don't want any analytics on my page. I'm wondering if just parsing the access logs is enough. Curious to know what advertisers look for in your case.
I like this idea of running your own ads, this means you circumvent ad blockers because you're loading the ad from the same domain and also you have full control over the ad deliverable and not allow JS, just image and links. Images can have malicious things in them too but maybe some pre-processing could help with that
I use Plausible, and I don’t do show them anything more analytics wise than what the Plausible dashboard shows (visits, territory, etc)
I’ve heard of people doing sponsorships without analytics, definitely possible. My blog has been around a long-ish time, so that’s helped. I’ve only started running sponsorships since 2022.
I’m genuinely asking because to me, who cares if someone steals my content. They can steal it anyway, people will scrap your site if they need.
But I want the user experience for the users to be the best possible.
In fact my feed has full content and based on the differences in HTML in my feed and the direct page it seems like most often they scrape the page anyways.
Monetizable traffic. People mirror sites wholesale, throw monetization on it and apply blackhat techniques to ensure they outrank origin site.
What is the compelling advantage of this?
I have a blog (such as it is), hand-rolled HTML and RSS. What benefit would I potentially get from the extra work of duplicating the content, rather than the date and headline?
But that’s an exception. Many, many sites out there run on a cms and require no extra effort to serve full content in the RSS feed.
Fixed!
In the late 90s I maintained a mailing list of sorts that I used to share interesting or funny things I'd found online to a group of friends. Eventually that became my blog. The impetus for any given post is still "hey, I want other people to see this," but the problem today is that most of my very nontechnical pals don't really look online anymore beyond their social feeds.
At one point, my blog would post to FB and Twitter when I wrote something new, but over time Meta disabled that behavior. I think it still posts to my Twitter account, but I need to address that and shift it to my Mastodon account.
If I'm being totally honest, I think reason #1 that I started back up was vanity. I have a pretty cool domain name that is a play on my real name, and my email is hosted at that domain, so the domain name gets some (small) amount of natural exposure from that. For about 7 years, all that you would find if you went there was a little Jekyll blog with three posts that I hadn't updated for years.
That was kind of a lame thing to present to people who took the time to check out my domain, so a while back I set up a new site and have been making occasional posts there.
One thing that jumped out to me as I started writing posts was that I was already blogging to some extent in my notes. I write pretty extensively as I do my daily work or work on side projects, just to try to solidify my thinking. Those notes are loose and not suitable for publication, but they do provide a pretty good jumping off point for articles.
Lastly, I feel this quote from Ted Chiang's story "The Truth Of Fact, The Truth Of Feeling" is apropos:
> “As he practiced his writing, Jijingi came to understand what Moseby had meant: writing was not just a way to record what someone said; it could help you decide what you would say before you said it. And words were not just the pieces of speaking; they were the pieces of thinking. When you wrote them down, you could grasp your thoughts like bricks in your hands and push them into different arrangements. Writing let you look at your thoughts in a way you couldn’t if you were just talking, and having seen them, you could improve them, make them stronger and more elaborate.”
In the pre-blog days, you could go to someone's site and navigate all the different parts. I prefer that to looking at a feed of hundreds of unrelated posts from the last ten years.
I think the "digital garden" people are rediscovering the joys of having a regular website.
For me the combination of solidifying/challenging my own ideas in writing them down and recording things so I can come back to them (I regularly get technical details I've forgotten from my own posts) is very useful.
On top of that, there's the benefit of (hopefully) helping some other people looking for the same information and having permanent links to thoughts.
I would generally recommend keeping blogging tech. as simple as possible. I just use a Github pages site and all the posts are markdown.
Emotional reactions are what happen when we run out of the ability to reason abstractly about an idea according to its principles. If you don't go down the road of physically writing them out and reasoning them through, all you have is a second hand opinion about them, imo.
On Second Thought, I Actually Don't Like Blogging
https://web.archive.org/web/20230319232333/https://kitab.ca/...
Seriously interesting article.
This point here struck me:
> Regarding being offline, I don’t see a point in writing a blog that is public, but that no one reads, and it being writing I have to edit and filter for online publication. Like, why not go back to writing in private files on my computer/phone or by hand on paper?
And I think the answer to that, the point for many people, is the sense that you are "done", finished, and you can move onto the next thing.
> Being online feels like being a brand sometimes.
This does bug me too. In preparation for re-starting my own blog (such as it is) I did an expansive review of a lot of blogs, and there were a lot of headshot-photo then a "waving emoji" followed by "Hi I'm John Smith, I help companies with X do Y, and I'm a passionate Z."
These are "personal branding statements" and maybe they have some value in certain fields (including, perhaps, landing a job or next contract) but they really started to (a) make everything look the same and (b) felt pretentious and superficial, especially in a sense of instead of demonstrating that you do 'X' you're simply telling me that you do (in such a way that feels aspirational, that it's what you want to be doing instead of what you've actually done).
It's funny, I kind of want to read more from that blogger. Reading the experiences of a woman of colour, especially in a tech field, that would be really interesting (and probably sad -- the note about microaggressions and some of the titles suggests she's struggling with things).
And I'm stealing a tiny, tiny little detail from her blog for my own one, that solves a problem I've been wrestling with.
Thank you.
> Slyly (or so I thought), I fooled it by quietly typing into my Emacs. More days turned to weeks turned to months. Words accreted in my org-mode files. Wee notes. Snippets. Factoids squirreled away. Mostly harmless bits and bobs. Someone paying attention might have smelled trouble brewing and stopped right there. But, oh how little did I know.
"Saving string" is what journalists call this practice (I read recently).
https://www.poynter.org/newsletters/2015/save-string-and-9-o...
Because text is ultimately a self-referential structure of claims, definitions and facts. When you are writing a new sentence, you have access to the complete accumulation of your previous thoughts in former sentences and paragraphs. The new sentence builds on and extends these connections, and doesn't stray in different directions like verbal speech.
The only nuggets in there are "vanity", "monetization" and "possible opportunities" which are all pretty bad reasons to publish a blog.
This is one thing I do a lot. I have links for popular memes that illustrates aspects of our culture. The one I use the most relates to oversimplification of things. https://rodolphoarruda.pro.br/como-desenhar-uma-coruja/
Have a good weekend. Cheers from an Argentine :)
I'm looking for a pattern/framework/system to settle down as the starting base for "Markdown + Pandoc + Make + [no-idea-yet]" for simple Static Websites. Can you please link me to some to kickstart and look at the templates/starter-kit. Thanks.
Building a Website using Pandoc, Markdown, and Static HTML
But I noticed his previous post is almost a year old (June 22)? So is there another place he blogs?