What has your personal website or blog deprived you from? | Hacker News Reader

What has your personal website or blog deprived you from?

32 pointscascada23 comments

I see it’s common for people on HN to have a personal website/blog prasing it.

What has your personal blog deprived you from?

Adding social media features (profiles, comments, and temporarily even a reddit-like sub-page) to one of my sites sent me straight to moderation hell. People intentionally violating the rules, disagreeing with my decisions, insulting me, spreading lies. Community drama, spammers, DDOSers... Once a site becomes popular enough, even if a tiny fraction of its users behaves maliciously (or just badly), it can become overwhelming for one person. Eventually someone uploaded illegal images, which led to the most stressful day of this year and me having to disable some functionality and making some things more difficult.

On one hand, I feel people YEARN for places to express themselves more than they are currently able to, and they really want alternatives to the established platforms. Nicer places. But damn, if you intend to provide such a place, be prepared to police it, and expect every functionality to be used for other things than its intended purpose, and to be misused and/or abused.

IME, ban fast and hard. I used to do this back in the day with webrings and free forums.

Quality drops to the level of its lowest member. If it's a personal site, you don't have to tolerate idiots. People tend to not say nice things on a place full of graffitti.

Also my experience, but it's not too bad, the ratio seems to be about 1 in 10000. But if you have a million people, I can see it going bad fast.

I'll interpret this as "what design choices that you made for your blog deprived you of something you could have had?"

Maybe others can find answering it in this light interesting too.

I have no analytics tracking and host my site on GitHub Pages, so I have no idea how many people have seen my work or read my stuff hosted there (I've tried out substack too which does give page views and referrers).

So my personal blog (tech choices) have deprived me of understanding what people tend to like, finish, read, re-visit, how they found it etc or (if I had more intense tracking) what type of people tend to visit, where they live and where they work etc.

I also have no comments sections, so I've deprived myself of the potential for engagement or constructive feedback etc

I very likely could find ways to improve content and increase personal motivation using those types of tools, but it's a personal blog and I just rather let everyone be anonymous.

I first used basic google analytics but found it too invasive/heavy so I switched over to https://www.goatcounter.com/.

For comments, most solutions were also too heavy, paid or had ads, but I finally found https://giscus.app/.

So while I did add these 2 features, I'm happy with those variants that I managed to find.

I host on neocities so somewhat similar story here. I do know how many people are showing up but I have no clue what pages people are reading or if they are at all and I have no clue what anyone even thinks. So despite Neocities telling me how many people are visiting I effectively know nothing.

> I also have no comments sections

A crude and dirt cheap way of ""implementing"" comments is to leave your email address, sufficiently captcha'd, and append the comments manually to the pages. As a bonus, you're sure all comments are moderated, relevant, there's no need to share data with anyone (well, but your email provider probably), no need for JS, no need for a local service, etc.

In my experience you don’t even have to have it sufficiently captcha’d. My email has been on my blog for 7 years and spam is definitely not an issue. But maybe I’m just lucky

There's an opportunity cost to everything, so time spent writing for my blog could be spent elsewhere. Seeing friends, meeting new people, writing code, putting time into my job, researching whatever interests me... but it's my time, and I get to choose what I do with that time. You may not want to have a blog - it seems like you're asking for reasons not to have one. You don't have to have one if you just don't want to. You don't have to justify that decision to anyone but yourself.

Having a (relatively) successful blog deprived me of the opportunity to understand earlier that I was just faking it and that tech wasn’t a career I should go after.

Lesson learned: sometimes feeling hurt or lost or out of place is much better than faking everything is ok.

https://confessionsoftheprofessions.com

Little did I know when I thought about starting a blog focused on people ranting about their shitty days at work, horrible bosses, and backstabbing co-workers, that it would evolve into so much more. I'd solicit people for their stories and so many wanted to tell so much about it. From the webcam model, to a woman whose boss took advantage of her and gave her an "advance paycheck" in exchange for sex, to an undercover FBI agent, etc. The stories are endless because everyone has a story to tell about something that happened at work. The evolution is the focus on jobs, careers, and the workplace.

While the blog has been very successful over its 10+ year history and will probably demand I keep it going for the rest of my life, I'd say my blog has "deprived" me the ability to have the choice to walk away and do nothing with it anymore. In other words, when I first started it, it was me writing blog posts and soliciting stories from anyone and everyone willing to send them my way or let me write it for them. Nowadays, the blog has attracted seo marketing agencies, freelancers, small companies, and an audience that reaches anywhere from 2 to 3 million a month.

So each time, when I was ready to give up, stop blogging, and let it go by the way side, I kept getting emails from people wanting me to publish on the blog for them. So ultimately, it became the people's blog... and I keep it going. I have my daily contributors, but every month, it's many new people sending in more articles to me. The fortunate thing about it is learning to value my time. I used to spend 2 or 3 hours a day on it, but this has amounted to about 5 or 6 hours split across 2-3 days on the weekends answering emails and scheduling articles.

I have only seen one other similar website pop up, got featured on the news, and then fell into the abyss, where I saw they hadn't posted in weeks, months, and then years. I've never stopped publishing since I started almost 10 years ago. Unfortunately, I've also never gotten the publicity of news, but it somehow keeps being discovered. And so... I'm married to my website for the rest of my life. And why not keep it going? Especially if there are curious eyes from all over the world.

"Not the marriage you wanted, but the marriage you deserved"

E: The webpage linked is completely useless and even contains articles dated 2027, amongst bunch a of spammy "articles" that look like generic looks-like-real-but-is-not content.

Nice saying on marriage.

Me: 10 years of writing many of my own articles on the site

You: It's spammy and useless.

Well, its useless to you, but some other people might be able to use the information or maybe relate to the content.

You and I must be looking at two completely different websites. I see some short articles. I see some long ones. I see some very summarized articles which are called "lead-ins" meaning to bring people back to their own website. I see some in-depth interesting content and I see some bland content that isn't very interesting, as some of the fields some of us work in are not. Considering the 1,800+ authors that have contributed to the website, not everyone is the same.

I appreciate that you took a look, but just because you skimmed a few articles on the front page doesn't mean that the content isn't real. I do filter out the spam from the genuine articles and have tried to keep a very consistent over the years. But you saw what you saw.

As for the topic of this page, "what has your personal website or blog deprived you from?" I think I was able to answer it in the fact that at least 5 hours of my time every weekend are dedicated to answering emails and uploading/processing/scheduling articles to my website. I guess you're going to tell me those people are fake too though they seem pretty legit, even having their company names in their signatures.

I’m not sure what’s going on here — all I see is unrelated SEO blog spam on the linked site.

I run a blog that's generated with a static website builder. Whilst is very light on resources and has practically no security holes, I actually miss the comment section.

Previous blogs I operated were WordPress and the comments acted like a guestbook, letting me know I wasn't just shouting into the void. Now it feels very 'one dimensional' and not much of a conversation.

Disqus and its ilk might be a solution, but for me they are out of the question - I don't condone data harvesting.

Time probably, but one can always choose not to post, or to be draftier.

That's pretty much it. I suppose it depends on the type of content you're publishing: openly controversial articles may yield all kinds of trouble, but technical, "cold" stuff, I'm not sure what kind of major issues it could cause.

And also on your intents: if you're publishing to help you think things through, you're essentially never losing anything, not even time. It's just "work."

Not exactly sure what the question is asking but I am 100% positive I once missed out on a great job at a forensic technology company (pen testing) because of my book review blog. I had A LOT of negative reviews about Trump books and was in general very political and kind of a shitty person online.

Trying to do better in life :)

I suspect if you weren’t blogging you would be twittering and facebooking a lot more which (a) would also be equally available to those employers, (b) would have less context so your tweets/Facebook posts would have appeared more shitty/indefensible, (c) because you would have had the algorithms giving you little dopamine boosts with likes, etc. it’s possible it would have been much harder for you to come to the realization that you needed to tone it down…in fact, the shittier you are, the more you’re rewarded in these networks.

So it may not really be a blog issue, and quite likely the blog prevented it from being worse than the alternatives.

At least you realized this and became a better person. Many of us went through that phase (fortunately mine was mostly at 13).

Time. I mean it takes time to write a blog post and more time to write a really good one. I've burned more than one Sat morning writing. That's time away from hobbies, friends, family.

Opportunity cost. I could have made more money if I'd spent time writing courses or coding instead of blogging.

my site is a set of markdown pages making a blog and a singlepage otherwise. My previous site had login, WYSIWYG editor, an admin account just for me. So i ditched login/profiles because it was more trouble than my site required to accomplish its goal

When I started writing (and the other stuff that comes with it - planning, editing, posting, follow-up, archiving) I stopped making music, because blogging takes up a lot of time.

Time, a few bucks a month, and peace of mind?

I often wish I had not done the whole self hosting on a VPS thing. It's kind of a hassle...

GitHub pages would probably make more sense.

This would make a pretty decent New Yorker cartoon premise/punchline circa 2007

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