Comment by at_a_remove | Hacker News Reader

Comment by at_a_remove | Hacker News Reader

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I to some extent agree. A blog can be an attack surface for someone wishing to doxx you, a point of failure for potential employers, or perhaps an opportunity to open yourself up to criticism for the local equivalent of your knitting community when they're having a purity spiral.

You could, of course, keep to the driest topics, the most tamed opinions, nothing spicier than an animal cracker, but for some this self-censorship of "your most honest, primitive, real thoughts" (to quote Naked Lunch) is tantamount to a sin, just one step up from lying to your diary.

If you are trying to keep it safe, are you truly communicating what is on your mind, or are you pasteurizing your output, homogenizing it, adding a touch of gamma radiation and a run through the freeze-drier, until the final result is palatable pablum, certainly inoffensive and low-residue, but ultimately unworth either consumption or production?

Blogging seems to have shifted on the risk/reward scale and people have responded as such. A pity.

> You could, of course, keep to the driest topics, the most tamed opinions, nothing spicier than an animal cracker, but for some this self-censorship of "your most honest, primitive, real thoughts" (to quote Naked Lunch) is tantamount to a sin, just one step up from lying to your diary.

Um, I guess. It seems to me like most of the "controversial" stuff that people get attacked for is just lame vomit about current-events political junk. No one needs yet another clueless nobody ejecting that crap on the Internet. Go write about something interesting, like old computers, or music, or I don't know, your favorite species of grass. You'll be contributing something of value, instead of more mindless current-events garbage, and you won't get attacked for it. Win-win.

One would think, but again, the bar is now very, very low. Like I said, a purity spiral on a knitting forum.

I used to be on a once-popular forum which has slowly skewed to the left, and then farther, and farther. Now everything there is politicized because the Red Guard types remaining are on the continual hunt for anything at which they might take offense. These are people who go wild for the opportunity to talk about the racist origins of steampunk.

Sure, but that's about a community drifting to topics you're not interested in, not about your being attacked for maintaining a personal blog about a hobby. I'm not saying it can't or never has happened, but I'm skeptical that this problem is widespread enough that it should deter anyone from writing about their interests (again, provided their interests are something other than current-events trash).

Surely a blog should precisely be about what he finds interesting, that includes current-events political junk.

Yeah. I'm saying if you're digging a hole for no reason and going "man it's a lot of work digging this hole and there's no reward at the end," then you should stop digging the hole and go do something else. Writing about current-events political junk is a waste of your time. If you're not finding it fun then do something else with your life. There's a whole universe of interesting stuff!

I think this is it. Of course you could blog anonymously? Though it kind of defeats half the purpose and feels like shouting into the void. At that point, it's easier to just be another random user on hn and reddit.

And if I'm anonymous, I can't say _much_ about my life. Every single comment gives away entropy. https://gwern.net/death-note-anonymity

I think this has contributed to my life-long mental health problems, as I've purposely separated myself into 2 personas. To paraphrase Agent Smith...

Jelly 1 has a job and a mortgage and a Facebook, is made of matter and occupies space, and is openly lesbian, and isn't shy to talk a little about politics or her old schizophrenia diagnosis.

Jelly 2 exists only on the dark web, never grew out of enjoying hentai, delights in posting political hot takes like "gasoline should cost more, actually", lies about absolutely everything to shake off doxxers, and doesn't even use the same username on any 2 forums.

Both Jellies are miserable most of the time, since they take turns hiding the other one from one social circle or another. Jelly 2 can never hold a job. Jelly 1 isn't convinced that there's enough stuff in the real world to kill off Jelly 2 and live alone.

"One of these lives has a future..."

Jelly sounds kinda like someone I used to know

The idea that one must live and the other die is a trap, both jellies must be integrated into a superjelly.

…only 2 personas?

It's still good to lie about everything to keep stalkers off your trail. Furthermore, it contributes to the erosion of trust that everything online is literally true. People have gotten complacent in that regard.

I have set up anonymous websites before, long ago, over a trivial bit of local politics that might almost be described as minutae. I have no idea how difficult it would be now.

The reasons for blogging are varied. Part of me would like to post the odd bit of how-to on an obscure technical topic, that kind of thing. And then there's writing reviews. No expectation is had of reward, but that does not preclude the kind of risk I run if some gibbering nutjob decides I am a fascist or someone else dehumanizable because the Devil's Advocate in me might want to point out that this person was not given a fair shake in this instance, or that something else is a bigger deal than we are making it, and so on.

Of course, I would like to know that there is someone who is catching my signal besides Grim Entropy and the Inverse Square Falloffs, but then you're back to moderating comments which are largely linkback blogspam.

Another poster once mentions that there's an eerie comfort in the thought that even if no one ever reads their blog, it's probably still crawled and ingested by various LLMs. Even when you're dead, your ideas may still live on in AIs of the future.

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