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Comment by mtlynch | Hacker News Reader

>I’m not on Twitter anymore - my goal is to instead channel that micro-blogging energy into regular blogging energy on my personal website as well as posting Zig project news here on ziglang.org.

Cool, I like this!

I realized last year that I was investing too much time into sharing things on Twitter that I'd subsequently forget about or be unable to find.

Instead, I created a separate section on my personal blog for "notes" where the idea is to house content that I'd otherwise post to Twitter. It's been working well, and I like owning my own content rather than contributing it to another platform.

I'm especially glad for this change after seeing what's happened in the past few months with Twitter and Reddit. It's been unfortunate to see those platforms become so much more possessive of the content that their users generated. If you publish to your own platform, you're safe from that. At least until LLMs bury your platform in noise.

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I'm also trying to do my part in fixing my own and many other's overreliance on reddit comments for everyday problem solving and advice. I decided that every time I would write an decently sized explanation of something on Discord/Telegram, I would instead write a post and link it.

To make it as convenient as possible (every amount of friction would eat at my motivation) I made it using Obsidian Digital Garden [1]. It's a bit of a hassle to set up and the UI is annoyingly bad but it's pretty convenient (boils down to click to publish) afterwards.

1. https://dg-docs.ole.dev/

> At least until LLMs bury your platform in noise.

Curious, but how exactly would they do that? Are you talking about scraping your website and adding garbage filler content from LLMs and republishing to divert traffic?

Oh, I just mean like filling the web with so much garbage that nobody can find your website.

It’s gotten really bad over the past few months, but even before GPT was a thing scummy operators just used Mechanical Turk or Fiverr.

I don’t understand why Google is doing so poorly at filtering it out: for a concrete example, searching for terms relating to common semi-trivial problems when programming mainstream platforms like the web, Java, or C# will now result in low-quality, non-authoritative sites like GeeksForGeeks - or even W3Schools always coming up first, with authoritative sources like MDN, the W3/WHATWG, even StackOverflow sometimes being below-the-fold.

The site: filter is your friend! Google should be smart enough that you don't need to use it but it is what it is.

You can even create your own custom Google search that only returns results for domains that you list. So you could put stack overflow, reddit, and a bunch of reference sites (like mdn) and have super high quality search results.

I already do that when I can - but I'm more concerned about the legions of beginner-to-intermediate-level "coders" out there who will be learning outdated (if not woefully insecure) programming habits from those low-quality sources, which comes back to bite us all because, like it or not, companies hire people on the basis of how cheap they are, not about how competent and socially-responsible they are.

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