Nobody cares about your blog
alexmolas.com
alexmolas.com
> There are hundreds of blogs out there, what makes you think yours is different?
Because it's mine. My friends care. Recruiters and hiring managers have cared (in a good way).
> You’re just probably repeating things you’ve read in another place.
Maybe. But some are hidden in a locked library basement behind a door labelled "beware of the leopard". The information is not useful there.
Also I sometimes write the documentation I wish existed before I learned. Maybe it was written, but not in the way I found useful. If ever someone who thinks like me reads it, it'll save them more time than I took to write it. And people have thanked me, so I guess they exist.
> You’re not an expert in your field, otherwise you wouldn’t be publishing in a blog, but writing papers and giving interviews.
So there is no need for teachers and textbook authors, because they don't advance state of the art?
And actually, when I've asked questions, I've had people refer me back to my own blog, as if it's a reference. (I'd not forgotten, I was asking about the next step)
> You are only showing the world how stupid you are.
I do that every day. The only way to become (and therefore look) smart is to look stupid. :-)
> If someone, at some point, cares about your blog will be only to criticize it.
No. The only real criticism I get for my blog is from Bitcoin idiots telling me I'm stupid, but they never "have the time" to explain what exactly I'm not getting. Sure, buddy.
> Your work is trash, and exposing it will make people notice you’re trash as well
I'd rather leave a mark of who I actually am, than some fake Instagram persona lie of who I am.
I’ve stumbled onto so many random blogs and read a post on a topic I’m already familiar with because I hope to find a different perspective on it.
In other words... nobody cares about your blog. ;-)
They just care about it for the wrong reasons.
Reasons that can be eliminated by adapting the structure of the content to a modern audience.
They may care about the subject matter of the blog post, but they don't care about the blog post, which is just an excuse for them to rant about the subject matter.
> Reasons that can be eliminated by adapting the structure of the content to a modern audience.
c/modern/lazy
This kind of framing/sweeping generalization doesn’t make sense to me. There will always be people who will rant for the sake of ranting, but this isn’t universal, nor should it be the base assumption about a reader/commentor.
> c/modern/lazy
This carries the problematic generalization further. The modern media environment has drastically impacted people’s attention span.
There are plenty of critical things to be said about the effects of this trend, but painting this as just a matter of laziness misses the bigger picture.
Especially important if you want to create content that encourages people to cultivate attention and stop consuming attention-destroying content.
Writing for a “modern” audience isn’t about catering to lazy people, but recognizing what people are up against in an information landscape that increasingly churns out bad information, making it necessary as a reader to assess the content quickly enough to know if it’s time to move on, because there isn’t enough time or attention in a day to give every post a full read.
I’m not saying lazy readers don’t exist, but that’s not why I think it’s useful to think about content structure.
Nonetheless, many good jokes have a grain of truth. Such commenters who rant for the sake of ranting obviously do exist, as you admit, and they are pervasive.
> making it necessary as a reader to assess the content quickly enough to know if it’s time to move on, because there isn’t enough time or attention in a day to give every post a full read.
It's interesting that you said "move on" rather than "comment", which is precisely the distinction I discussed in another comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36746673 Moving on is fine. The problem is staying and commenting without reading carefully.
But I still don’t understand how come people feel like it is worth to spend time writing comment on something they don’t have time to read through.
Personally, I read the whole thing, kinda scratched my head about the framing of it all, and came here to find what apparently seemed like agreement with my reaction.
It became more clear what the author was going for when he clarified, and in that light, the post makes more sense.
But I think someone lacking that context or familiarity with the author’s style and taking the content a bit too literally at first (like me) is another source of the critical commentary.
Things got a bit off track when this became a thread about people refusing to read, or lacking comprehension. From my perspective there are two ways to read it, and I think this pretty much guarantees some confusion.
A long long time ago, before the Internet and the wide availability of electronic content, I used to read books and would even send physical letters.
Once I entered the corporate world and email, I had people telling me that I have to change my writing style. Pre-modern world and me included would use what I would call the "epistolary" style (long, detailed text). I was taught it by the literature I read or enforced in school by the style of writing I was expected to write. Essentially a bottom-up approach where you start with the premises and gradually build up your conclusion, presented at the end of the "novel".
Well problem's in the modern world nobody has the time to read your novel. I think reformulating "Nobody cares about your blog" to "Nobody has time to read your novel" would be closer to the truth.
It's not that people don't read novels anymore, it's that the quantity of content has increased 100x. Literally there's no time to go in depth over each and every wall of text you are confronted with.
So better adjust your writing style to modernity and use a top-down approach. Start with the conclusion and gradually build up the premises that led you there. Some people might read the whole content if it captures their interest but 99% will just read your summary and skim through the high level part of your content (assuming you stick to the top-down, so it gradually breaks into more and more complex parts).
I'd say there's nothing wrong with the approach and gotta keep up with the times we're living.
If people don't want to read everything you wrote, that's not inherently a problem.
The problem is that people want to comment on things they haven't read, and that's a problem the writer can't solve. Lazy, superficial commenters are a pox on all writing, and the internet has enabled them. It's a feature of modern times because the internet has given superficial, super lazy commenters a platform they never had before. Anyone in the world can sign up for a social media platform and start spewing text with practically no effort or ability.
Long form speakers often do so to obfuscate the content. It's a hiding place.
The only long form I read is fiction.
No, it's a criticism of people who make cheap shots in comments.
Again, if one doesn't have the patience for reading something, that's fine. But just walk away from the article, don't proceed to comment on something one doesn't have the patience to read. That's a disservice both to the author and to the people who did read the text.
"There's too much stuff to read on the internet" is a reason to walk away. It's not a good reason to stick around and comment.
Sure - times have changed - but not necessarily for the better.
And the "pro": you don't care what modern times are like. This is a blog. You get to pick who you write for. If time-short people who only want maximally-concise hand_holding business text are not your target, that's fine. You get to pick how you want to write. You can pick to ensure only better classes of readers.
Shameful.
I think some of the feedback here is because that’s not how you explain the cons in the post:
> Here’s a list of why nobody cares about your blog
While you do go on to tell people they shouldn’t care about these cons, I’d go a step further and say these aren’t even real things most people who encounter your blog will think.
Your framing sets this up as a current of negative sentiment out there against which you must steel yourself to write.
A different framing is that this negative sentiment primarily exists in your own mind (mine too), thus not a problem.
I think there’s a meaningful difference between the two, especially if you’re not writing due to anxiety about reception.
The overarching message is great. I just worry that your list kind of reifies the notion that those are real reasons.
This is a perfectly acceptable style.
This is a problem in comprehension. People aren’t thinking.
“these aren’t even real things most people who encounter your blog will think”
But these are real things real people think about a lot when they think about writing or creating and sharing it.
Honestly, the lack of comprehension is a gentle reminder to me that HN isn’t any smarter than any other place. It just tends to lean toward topics I’m interested in, but the people making up the discussion aren’t necessarily smarter.
I'd argue that it's a failing of the engagement-driven information economy.
The Internet is full of posts with lists of hot takes that are completely literal. It is in this landscape that a reader finding a post like this must decide how to interpret what the reader is trying to say.
> It’s clear he doesn’t believe this list of cons
For the reasons outlined, this was not clear at all. It was clear that the author felt someone shouldn't care about these cons, but that is quite different than concluding that the cons aren't even worth believing.
There are times that cons are true, and those cons are outweighed by the pros. There are times when the cons win.
This is a time when the cons are false. Mentioning that would be helpful. This is my primary point.
> But these are real things real people think about a lot when they think about writing or creating and sharing it.
Yes, and my point was that the issue can be very easily solved by just framing it as such with almost zero change to the overall content.
"None of these are true" vs. "You shouldn't care about these cons". It's a small change that completely shifts the meaning of the list and brings more readers onboard.
> Honestly, the lack of comprehension...
And let's say for sake of argument that the primary problem is one of comprehension. That implies a broader trend that requires corrective behaviors, and concluding that "that's just their problem" doesn't seem to be very useful for anyone involved either. If this is the new state of readership, authors have some choices to make.
I deeply support the underlying message the author is trying to convey: write stuff, and don't listen to bad reasons for not writing! I don't want my comments here to be misconstrued otherwise.
Most blog posts are unpaid labor. It's not blogger's job to explain everything to everyone, because blogging is not their job. As a frequent blogger myself, if I had to dumb down my blog posts for the dumbest, most inattentive readers, then that in itself would be a good reason not to blog at all. I'm just not interested in that crap. I write for an "intelligent" audience, and I don't care if that sounds elitist.
If you paid for a product, then you have the right to complain. But with blog posts, you're consuming text for free. You can choose not to consume it fully, and that's fine, but pedantically telling bloggers to change their writing style is stepping over the line. Bloggers have no obligation whatsoever to cater to the inattentive, or whomever you believe they need to cater to.
If everyone was missing the point of a blog post, that would indicate a problem with the writing. But that's not the case here.
I shared a piece of feedback earlier in the thread based on what I saw to be the source of confusion.
I'm not arguing that bloggers have to explain everything to everyone.
I'm not arguing that bloggers have an obligation to cater to the lowest common denominator.
And I'm not arguing that everyone is missing the point.
To bring this back to where I started, in a meta-discussion about people getting confused about the meaning of the words written, the only point I was trying to make was that this is happening for an understandable reason, and this reason goes away entirely with a slight reframing without fundamentally changing anything.
I'm not even arguing that my specific reframing is the best way to do it or that the author must go change anything.
I think my perspective may make more sense if you imagine that I'm trying to understand why people are misunderstanding, and that I find it interesting to explore those reasons. I find this interesting for admittedly selfish reasons: like most bloggers, I want people who care enough to read my stuff to understand the words I write. Discussions like this help clarify where the pitfalls exist.
In a post about writing blog posts, such an exploration seems appropriate.
I agree.
> and this reason goes away entirely with a slight reframing without fundamentally changing anything.
I disagree, because I disagree with your diagnosis of why it's happening.
* Information that's derivative of cutting edge knowledge, but not worth the bother for the academic researchers to work on, especially in the area of turning it into practical things.
* Stuff that can't be documented by the experts because they can't write, unless it's for an audience of fellow experts, or they feel no reason to. Virtually all technical documentation is impenetrable without supporting commentary or explanation, often written by non-experts.
* Practical projects, that might have only one interested user (myself), but whose pieces might be of interest to others. This is most of my blogging.
* Keeping old arts and obscure techniques alive.
* Invitation for critique. Am I wrong? Show me. Make my day.
So far as writing papers or giving interviews, some folks might feel that the "overhead" of doing those things does not justify the benefits. For instance I have no academic career to advance.
>So there is no need for teachers and textbook authors, because they don't advance state of the art?
This. I have a web site that in places you might call a blog. It's got a section for work stuff, some photos, hobbies, and random pages like explaining how to drive off-road. Those off-road pages (specifically this single page - https://www.wittenburg.co.uk/offroading/Concepts/Gearing.htm...) gets more hits than all the other pages combined. I wrote it in 1998.
However, a fourth option appears today: one writes for the language models. The language models will always care about your blog.
[1] Julien Green is probably the most famous for his Diary, 1919–1998 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julien_Green
I understand the point and why that could pop up in a blogger’s mind as a way to stop writing, but this is a wrong framing problem.
Academia for example is a gigantic citation game. The reason why you’re writing a paper is not necessarily because you’re an expert, but because you need to establish yourself as one in a very narrow field based on a self-reinforcing score scheme.
“Giving Interviews” also implies an objectivity that does not exist. Establishing yourself as an expert has a lot more to do with personal branding than actually being the best experts. Plus, especially fo TV, you don’t call the utmost experts of a field, you call someone who’s expert enough or prepared enough AND knows how to talk in front of a camera and for the tv interview format, which is a superficial medium.
Getting interviews or being perceived as an expert is a “business” that has its own marketing strategies. A blog could even be part of that strategy and it’s been in many cases, but it has to be structured as such. On the other hand, it’s ok to put your words out there without this specific agenda. In that case a blog and blogging shouldn’t be judged by the metrics of popularity, because it sits in a very different domain.
Precisely this one. There are billions of people out there breathing, your own personal breathing is so unremarkable and trivial that since only being original at all costs matters in this world you should cease to breathe effective immediately!
Mastodon has a well-documented setup process. I'm still going to do a blog post about setting mine up because I used an unusual hardware configuration and an unusual server config that aren't covered in the mainline-supported tutorial. I was only able to succeed because other people had done the same at some point.
And one more…I write because it helps me organize my thoughts. When something is on my mind for a couple of months, I often can’t stop thinking about it until I write it down. That’s the entire reason I blog.
This is a thought I had before I read many papers. After getting over my fear of reading papers (mostly) and actually starting to read them I've realized their quality varies greatly.
Taking a step back from the glamour of academia. The random blog without ads is written out of love. The published paper is written as part of a job, and probably to meet externally imposed deadlines (and there might be some love in the paper too). Judge for yourself which you want to read.
Sometimes, as a beginner I want a beginners perspective. We imagine that we only gain through study, but we lose our fresh perspective, and no amount of study can restore that fresh perspective, which does have some merit.
Papers are honestly just a lot of work, and unless you want to be cited by other academic papers, putting your work in a blog just lowers the friction of publication.
This one is especially far out there. Lots of experts in their fields write blogs or newsletters or articles for other publications, etc. Not every field is an academic discipline. And quite frankly, academics would themselves be far more impactful if they didn't only churn out academic papers, but also wrote in a blog-like format. And many of them do, and they increase the impact of their work by doing so.
Woah strongly disagree with this as well as it showcase a fundamental lack of knowledge on different communication formats. Blog posts can give an laymans introduction to a paper, it can expand on a part of a paper etc - talks and presentations can be summarized in blogposts. Even though I am mostly working on papers I have so many ideas on blogposts about stuff that is not really relevant for my field (like detailed information on how I work with subset of data) - nothing that is groundbreaking or a wide enough topic to warrant a paper. I mean, you could even write blogposts about great papers you read. That can be so helpfull for others. (Yes you could also write a big literary review but thats a lot more work).
Mines don't, because they don't understand it.
> You’re not an expert in your field, otherwise you wouldn’t be publishing in a blog, but writing papers and giving interviews.
Blogs and self-pub are often the only ways some information is shared by nature of the fact that academic publications don't publish things that don't obviously advance the state-of-the-art.
For example, one area I'm close with is computer security. While academia does some quite interesting work here, most major journals balk at the papers which discuss security mitigation defeats unless they're particularly zany (say, breaking ASLR using transient side channel attacks). Blog posts which detail how these mitigations work (ex. Siguza's post on Apple's proprietary APRR [1]) and how they can be defeated (ex. Project Zero's post which builds on Siguza's work to explore how APRR can be defeated in Safari's JIT [2]) provide considerable value to both security researchers, people who develop mitigations, and software people in general who are interested in learning how attackers think.
These sorts of works don't really belong in journals but that doesn't make them any less valuable.
[1] https://blog.siguza.net/APRR/
[2] https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2020/09/jitsploitatio...
Maybe I'll even post about it on my blog, sometime...
Instead it seems to assume they are truths but argue that you shouldn't care that your thoughts are unoriginal and others laugh at your stupidity.
And even if you know they're flawed, it can still get in your head and discourage you, so the author provides a different list of reasons to still blog in spite of that. It's not meant as proving/disproving any of the points, but simply as motivation to keep going.
For me personally it did help a bit, as I was thinking about writing my first blog post for a long time, and I also have been fighting with quite a lot of items on the first list. (Especially about the being considered dumb part). While I find the title a bit click-bait-y and that’s likely the reason why many didn’t read the whole thing/misunderstood, by critiquing I would just confirm one of the negative items, so let’s leave it that :D
I have to admit the title is a little click-bait-y, but it's my blog and I do what I want ;)
Every time I've shared my posts with other people I've received critiques and comments of people telling that what I wrote is dumb. But I've also received a lot of comments of people with constructive comments and I've learnt a lot from them. And in my experience the good is much better than the bad. So I encourage you to go there and write your first post!! And please, share it with us once you finish it please :)
Consider the opposite: The author didn't properly communicate their intent to the audience. A blog is mostly if not entirely one way communication, and as such the understandability of it is the responsibility of the speaker, not the audience.
This can be learned from and fixed easily enough, but only if one correctly identifies the problem.
Nonetheless, we should try to look behind the exact content and discuss the topic at hand. I don't see much value in arguing against a straw man.
If a reader couldn't be bothered to read that far, I don't think I can place all blame on the author for not "properly" communicating their intent to the audience.
The audience for complex math proofs is very small. At first. Same applies to a lot of creative works ... paintings, photos, poetry. van Gogh sold almost nothing.
A composer once asked me 'what do you care more about - how many are listening, or who is listening?"
Amazing how many blogs have shut off their feedback.
Even for something as simple as a blog having a large following is exposure. You have a better chance of finding quality discussion given more eyeballs.
Assuming we don't kill ourselves out of the planet, good luck to whoever will be digging hard drives 3000 years from now, and trying to understand what is stored in them, assuming the magnetic field is still readable.
I think it was a snarky Spartan.
Physical publications have a chance at existence though
- I wrote a blog post about a CloudFlare when they were just starting, which landed me a gig to provide a technical review for a printed book.
- Some reverse engineered router/phone IMEI unlock codes lead to a complete website to generate them.
- An Instagram photo/video download tool that got so popular Meta sent me a UDPR and a C&D demand to shut down.
- Various talks in conferences, some that even paid me.
- Small web sites that spun off to their own web sites.
I would argue that an average person is exactly who should have a blog. Because, majority of us are average, and having a blog or a blog post related to a particular topic (even a mediocre one) gives the boost to stand you out. Some of these opportunities may not generate a lot of money, if at all. But I like the excitement I get from them.
I do. I write not just for others but also myself.
My little blog of few posts exists to satisfy my expectations and fulfill my rare urge of writing and the need of getting some thoughts out of my head. As long as nobody cares enough about my blog to monetize it, I'm perfectly fine with the status quo.
> If someone, at some point, cares about your blog will be only to criticize it.
And that's great! I may be able to learn something or at least I may get to know different view points.
There was a time when sites promoted blogs via web rings and blog rolls - recent discussion -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36728870
Google penalizing sites for linking to other sites and people getting paranoid about bleeding pagerank and getting penalized for unknowingly linking to 'bad neighborhoods' - quickly changed how many people would peruse your blog..
Removing blog rolls, web rings, pingomatic, technorati... some blogs adapted, most did not.. google is the reason blogs aren't read these days.
On top of things mentioned in the post.
There’s lots of reasons not covered in the blog about not blogging trying to convince why to blog.
There is plenty of space for quality and thought out content on YouTube. Especially if you don't need to make a living. The kicker to me, seems the extra time required to get production value to a tolerable point.
https://www.youtube.com/live/UAUg6y2UX88?feature=share
I stopped most of the way down the page. Here are the exaggerated facial expressions:
https://www.youtube.com/live/CN5bnEn9YZA?feature=share (sort of an exaggerated :|)
https://youtu.be/iQ190Bf-6J0 (the only actual “soyface” I could find)
https://youtu.be/fpnd1OboPPs (borderline soyface maybe?)
So that’s 16 normal facial expressions, four slightly exaggerated ones, and 1, maybe 2 soyfaces. And a much larger majority of videos that didn’t show the presenter’s face on the thumbnail at all.
Edit: It occurs to me now that it’s not that easy to see a YouTube thumbnail after you click through to the actual video.
Writing, on the other hand, seems to “just flow,” and I spend a bit of time, after publishing, correcting and tweaking the prose. Nothing, compared to video postproduction.
As it is, I have barely written anything in the last couple of years, because I have had a fairly consuming project.
Plenty of reasons why someone would care.
I think there are plenty of great reasons to blog, and there will be more in the future.
Google really kneecapped the written word with a few sites as exceptions. Wordpress has struggled to make blogging better, along with the other publishing options..
However the written words are often a better way to communication certain things as you can have easy to follow links and more formatting that makes things sink in well.
Although 2023 is a perfect time to sing the 'video killed the radio (and written word) star' ... some things are aligning where that could shift.
Now that mobile theme styling is getting better, all it's going to take is a few changes like 'nofollow' links by default, easy to moderate web ring additions, animated talking heads and AI pics to include and we will see a re-emergence of great story sharing again, and google won't be needed for them to have impact far and wide.
I see activity pub helping with this in the future, and a few other things that are starting to get traction.
I've been considering starting a more freeform, anonymous site where I could cut loose a bit more. This post is somewhat encouraging in that direction.
I might set up another domain for those topic that I start to write and abandon because it's not something I want attached to my professional image.
Maybe personal websites should be the "public square", not third party "social media" websites. Most folks probably won't bother with maintaining personal websites because they do not have anything meaningful to say. Instead, "social media" websites encourage all people, many of whom are only using these sites to communicate with friends and family, who otherwise have nothing worthwhile to say to the general public, to "share" their every thought. All in the name of exploiting these serfs/sharecroppers as ad targets for obscene profit. We have seen the results. It isn't pretty.
Just because "[y]ou can say whatever the fuck you want" to the entire web does not necessarily mean everyone will. At least, this is how I remember the web before so-called "tech" companies and "social media" hijacked it. The social media websites are desperate for others to create content for them, for free.
If facing potential personal liability, there is a disincentive to trash talk on a personal website. Whereas with social media there is an incentive to trash talk as it apparently leads to "engagement".
Social media very much has its roots in bloggers who couldn't see the internet as much more than an extension of their living rooms.
But last week, someone contacted me via e-mail to tell me that a workaround I published to run interferometry software under MacOS was now not needed anymore because he made the porting work to run this software natively.
I then realized I ranked high for "<software> mac" and updated my post so people easily find his work.
That's a win to me !
Blogs are superior to conferences imho. A decent blog post will get about 10,000 views via HN/Reddit/Twitter/etc. A conference will only have dozens to hundreds of attendees.
I only make a few posts per year. I mostly avoid hot takes. Most of my posts I could have turned into conference talks. But conferences are kinda gross and blog posts are better so meh.
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But that's ok, he doesn't care about what we think ;)
My supervisor at my last job said I should start a blog. I suppose because I always ate at restaurants and I liked describing the food and stuff. But I'm not really a foodie, or eloquent like a food critic. Perhaps she just said that because I talk so much.
I feel sorry for people that feel this way about lunch. Lunch is sacred. It’s the part of the day to get away from work. Nothing at work is so important that you can’t get away from it. If you disagree, wait a few years, you’ll come around. I don’t care if it’s just a spam sandwich.
I mean... Maybe you should care sometimes? Maybe it is good to try and not repeat others and try to express original and useful thoughts?
I have written some stuff in the past that was purely for me, but have also written explainers and other stuff that was actually meant to be of benefit to people who found or read it* (even if very few people did read it). This all-or-nothing stance is kind of silly. The title is also rather misleading, but I guess that's good for upvotes...
* I won't link to it as I don't mean for this to be a plug, but just as an example - I wrote "Things Everyone Should Know About Depression", because I found most articles of that sort lacking. And I put in a lot of work into making that a good post because I did care about its impact on potential readers, and I do think it probably helped some people.
Not everything has to be just written with only yourself in mind, even if fundamentally the reason to write should be that you want to write moreso than for the potential of getting lots of readers.
reminded of dfw: "true heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care — with no one there to see or cheer. this is the world."
I liking having my own space where I can say what I want. There is also real value in me going back and reading what I said a year, five years or even ten years back. My blog posts have proven to be a useful way of reminding future Jay of what past Jay was going through as I have a tendency to look at the past through rose tinted glasses.
This morning's blog post is no different, though more self-deprecating than most of the things I have written.
https://jaylittle.com/post/view/2023/7/i-am-on-the-mcnulty-s...
I dare to dream of a world where I can reread that years later and say, "It's okay past Jay - it's all going to work out for the best, just stay the course"
This is unfortunately not true in many parts of the world. Even here in Germany, any blog, including private ones, need to come with an imprint section including your full name, residential address, mobile phone number et cetera.
Even though realistically, nobody would care if I omitted this imprint section, it makes you think again whether you should actually go trough with self-hosting a blog.
In other countries it's of course way worse (think censorship and social scoring), so blogging just because you can seems to me as good a reason as any.
This is likely a moment of cultural incongruence, but this is outright shocking to me. Generally, when I am shocked by such things, it’s because I’m unaware of the reasoning behind them. What is the reasoning behind this law, exactly?
https://law.stackexchange.com/a/23395
https://www.ionos.co.uk/digitalguide/websites/digital-law/a-...
That being said, this legislation has been in place for some years now. I am not aware of any private person actually having had to face legal ramifications because of this and personally I would just omit it and say bring it.
Still, you see lots of private German blogs which do have an inprint, if you look out for it.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36745481
[1] https://www-checkdomain-de.translate.goog/blog/bloggen/fortg...
How can this be consistent with GDPR? AFAIK, WHOIS data had to be concealed because of GDPR.
If you had an account on LiveJournal, would you have to put an imprint in the profile? What if you're microblogging on Twitter? Vlogging on YouTube?
Non-legal advice often is "if it's non-commercial, you don't need an imprint", see e.g. documentation by Hetzner [0].
On the other hand, if you visit pages that do offer legal advice, the situation is suddenly way more nuanced. This page ([1], German, but you will surely be able to translate it) makes the following points and describes the situation as I remember it:
* Commercial page targeting a German market or residing in Germany: you need an imprint
* Some blog that generates 1 cent of ad revenue: you need an imprint
* Private blog which reaches a large audience and publishes on a regular basis: You need an imprint
So in summary, many lawyers advice you to add an imprint section even for a private blog, just to be on the safe side.
[0] https://docs.hetzner.com/general/others/impressum-faq/ [1] https://www.abmahnung.org/blog-impressum/
I’m not saying you shouldn’t write a blog. But keep in mind your future self’s wellbeing. Your very future, responsible for hundreds of employees, 2 kids, a spouse, and significant economic or national responsibilities.
My blog is 15 years old and entirely private. It's a great way to process thoughts. Looking back, I am amazed at how often I revisit the same questions and musings.
This realisation of recursion has led me to create mini manifestos. For example, a lot of my financial thinking/planning is summed up in half a dozen points in one of my blog posts.
I would recommend blogging for circular thinkers as myself as a way of maturing your thought process.
It's partly a way to get approval to talk about some work details outside of the office, but also a bit of a behind the scenes thing from games I work on because I love reading that from others.
While I enjoyed this post, I can't say I agree with the motivating bullet points.
> Your blog is not original. [...] You’re just probably repeating things you’ve read in another place.
I'm usually not writing fluffy think pieces, but rather detailing specific technical solutions from a game I worked on. My solutions may not be original, but the context definitely is and this serves as a vehicle to share details about my work and start discussions of it with my friends.
> You’re not an expert in your field
I am certainly not a leading expert, but I do have expert knowledge which I know some find interesting and have learned from. Several blog posts are based on lectures I've held at work which fellow programmers seemed to really enjoy, so I'm happy I get to post about them publicly.
> You are only showing the world how stupid you are.
> If someone, at some point, cares about your blog will be only to criticize it.
These two points were my biggest worries before I started my blog. Luckily, it's proven unfounded. People generally have positive things to say about it and the one time someone questioned something led to an interesting discussion from which I learned a valuable trick I've since used in my work.
I even published a tool I made at work and got some encouraging comments and a few stars on GitHub, which is fun given how ridiculously niche it was.
We tend to overburden ourselves with these negative thoughts all the time. What other people might think, and other forms of self sabotage.
In a sense it’s a good sign. It’s good to care and put ourselves into the shoes of others. It’s also good to be self-critical, it’s a powerful tool that prevents us from stupidity and harm. Being critical also helps us to develop taste and make things of higher quality.
But it can easily be too pessimistic, too hindering and too lazy. It’s so easy to say „It‘s going to suck anyway, let’s not do anything.“ But that’s not being self critical, it’s being lazy and self harming.
To build confidence, one has to actually do something and keep at it. Let self-criticism be a tool used iteratively and not a burden that prevents us from going forward.
It’s the priorities and goals, our inner value system that helps us choose whether we do something or not.
My site is part blog, part lab notebook. It's all the stuff I had to figure out to get something to work. It's a chronicle of the mistakes I make and the successes informed by those mistakes. It helps me organize my thoughts and check my knowledge. If that's helpful to someone, awesome! I would love that. But if not, that's ok. I still get something out of it.
It's one of those ideas that spreads because you see other people doing it: You get the OG blogs still up with 90s styling, student blogs with like 2 posts, and longform explorations of trying to squeeze out every ms of performance from D3 by rewriting parts of it in WASM [1], which link to the posts that it was inspired by, an even crazier attempt which tries to turn off all its safeties.
It forms an entire ecosystem, to which Hackernews, Google, et etc, form a kind of gateway into the canopy of a blogosphere.
One more thing: can we do more linking? Like, have a section of our blogs that's basically, "here are the blogs of a bunch of people I find interesting"? Is there a reason why we don't do that (spam or harassment)?
1. https://cprimozic.net/blog/speeding-up-webcola-with-webassem...
- personal website = portfolio and trying to look special
- personal blog = you're some sort of aspiring failed writer
Social media and blogging platforms have made the idea of personal websites so alien now to people.
I do run a blog, but having to ensure that it gets patched in a reasonable amount of time is to me the one significant drawback of the process.
I'm really not looking forward to the next time I'm forced into a major-release upgrade (deadline is early 2025 given that I'm running Drupal 7).
At least in the field I'm in (computer graphics), the penalty of publishing is months; blogposts (and patents) cost days. Papers have perverse incentives in style and fact presentation. Where do you prefer the knowledge ending up?
P.S. I also like the design of your blog, I might steal a few ideas :).
Aside from ramblings, most of my blog is various projects I’ve done and solutions I’ve found, and I continue to refer back to my own writing frequently to see how I accomplished something.
The team I joined worked on a Ruby codebase, and there were people with background in other languages, where method visibility worked differently. A short post I wrote [1] was being shared around in the team, and the manager decided to interview me.
Funnily enough, that same post was quoted to me by a colleague during a code review a few months later! So it turned out that it's still working as intended - as a reference for myself. :)
- Even in the (very unlikely) case that nobody actually reads your post, language models will. They have to, because there's never enough training data. Your ideas will be merged into the text that LLMs synthesize and perhaps that will save someone's day.
That’s because cell carriers, uninterested in data, had no instructions to tech support on how to make this work, and indeed tried to suppress it. I can’t tell how much appreciative feedback I got for it:
So this year I decided to just put those notes into my website. I don't think that they'll be useful to anybody but me (although I'll be happy if someone would save some time learning from those notes).
It's pretty empty right now, although I hope to slowly build it this way. So basically it's my storage of information which I spent some time researching for.
And some place to express my approach to design is always nice to have. At my work we always hire designer who will produce shitty (IMO) flashy designs that I have to implement. Well, I like empty and content-rich designs, without custom fonts or heavy CSS, almost pure minimum with very few touches.
What actually hides being it is: unless everyone cares about it, then no one cares.
What if only one in a thousand people care? That's a huge number. You could have 10k or 100k readers.
It's a minuscule number compared to everyone, but it's a huge number for a blog.
If I would write it for my close friends, I would rather make conversation with them about this topic, but then I'm not sure how beneficial those conversations would be since it's not topic that they are educated enough. So making blog for my friends about topics that they are not interested enough doesn't make sense to me either.
Only reason why write blog for me is to manage my notes and write down my thoughts. But I can do it privately as well. So it brings me back to first.
I would say you need some kind of narcissism to write blog.
This. Getting ideas out of my head is the reason not only for blogging but also for all my opensource work. BTW, never sign an NDA. Locking ideas in your head will drive you nuts.
That's exactly why I prefer blogs over the fake social media. Being exposed to people's perspective makes one prone to show what people want, not what he truly want and believe. Keep blogging and writing.
I've applied for it to be delisted, but since this is Google, I don't think that will ever happen.
What I'm saying is that if you ever use Wordpress for anything - especially blogging - you might want to start with setting a strong password, so that you don't land with spam posts from bots who cracked it.
Was a nice demonstration of password safety to the client though.
And hand written blogs by somebody for several years is very high in my filter list to check out something.
So I care very much about your blog.
Besides, the best way to make sure there is more quality content in the world is to produce it. And that's why I write https://bitecode.dev. Because I want others to have what I wish I had when I needed it.
I don't care if it fits any standards, it's not about "People don't care" (i'm sure people do care if they want to read more about your writings), it's that you don't care what people think about your blogs that matter more.
/shrug
I think this is one of those things that people say without thinking it through. I certainly agree that you should not care enough about what people think to allow it to cause you to not share your thoughts and opinions. But as a general and absolute rule, it’s a great recipe for never learning anything from anyone and having no friends.
The second blog[2] is a “professional” blog I started in 2009 a couple years into my career. “You are only showing the world how stupid you are.” strikes waaay too close to home on this one. Early on I wrote about things I had a somewhat tenuous grasp on.
To wit, the VERY first post is an angry rant about JSONP being hard to parse on the backend, “not being valid JSON”, and being unsafe because when used as intended requires remote code execution. This was all because I was peaved about the Flickr API returning JSONP. I much later found out that while it did return JSONP by default when requesting JSON, there was a flag to disable it - thus eliminating the triggering event of my rant. Arguably a stupid default but I should have been better at reading the docs. It’s a really cringe inducing rant to look back on.
That’s just one example, there are a fair number of those. I have unlisted (still available by direct link) a handful over the years that I felt had very limited merit.
My blogs are both entirely custom applications, the prior ported over the years from PHP 3 all the way to PHP 7.4 and soon 8.x. In recent years friends have largely converted their own blogs to Jekyll and Hugo and the thought felt very foreign to me. It took me a long while to identify in myself why I hated the idea so much. It hit me that getting posts published isn’t my goal. It’s the sheer joy and creative outlet of building and maintaining these little entirely custom applications. They’re my own little world I can constantly tweak, with no code review or other people’s opinions. I get to just try out ideas and potentially fail in a consequence free way.
That in my book is the main reason to have a blog, getting to build and maintain something personal.
That’s definitely early, but the term blog predates it by a couple of years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog#History
> The term "weblog" was coined by Jorn Barger on December 17, 1997. The short form "blog" was coined by Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the word weblog into the phrase we blog in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com in May 1999. Shortly thereafter, Evan Williams at Pyra Labs used "blog" as both a noun and verb ("to blog", meaning "to edit one's weblog or to post to one's weblog") and devised the term "blogger" in connection with Pyra Labs' Blogger product, leading to the popularization of the terms.
It's true.
But people blog and will do it because...
Isn't it a sign of our times when you maintain a blog only in the hope of others will care for it, more than as an outlet for yourself?
Everything is a like symbol nowadays. It's not a popularity contest.
This one is a very poor argument to me. Should textbooks not exist because they're just "repeating things you've read in another place"?
Still going after 4 years.
Type inference has usability problems. https://austinhenley.com/blog/typeinference.html
I just skimmed over the blog and it looks super interesting, I'll add it to my list of blogs to follow ;)
- maybe a few people will actually enjoy your blog.
- maybe it turns out your blog is going to be one of the very few which are actually successful on a broader scale.
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for me it seems blogs are no longer fitting into my life or how i use the internet. but i still fondly remember the mornings during my days as a student more than 15 years ago where i have been regularly reading blogs.
mainly (all german):
- basic thinking
- nerdcore
- law blog
Wrong. Literally everyone can have an original idea. Is this article parody?
I don't quite know about this. I certainly recall the tone of some of my own older blog articles being such that it makes me embarrassed now.
Like when our national auth system went down at around 50 RPS and prevented COVID vaccination signups, with around 8k EUR a month expenses for maintaining it, I chose some strong language to describe that situation: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/manavakcina-lv-and-apturico...
I'm still leaving the article up because of that being how I felt at the time, but nowadays I try to be a bit more charitable with my assumptions and a tad more milquetoast/neutral in my tone.
Other than that, I mostly agree with the article about having your blog, it's nice to have a place to jot down some notes and thoughts sort of in public, without a lot of pressure on you.