A blog post is a long and complex search query to find people (2022)
henrikkarlsson.xyz
henrikkarlsson.xyz
Relatable and counter-intuitive. I have this reflex when I write that I’m trying to reach an imaginary broad audience. But whenever it’s extremely specific, to the point when I don’t expect anyone to even know what I’m talking about, it tends to drive more “engagement”, in a good way! In a way it makes sense, when I’m reading some generic truism, I don’t get any itch to engage, even if it was well written.
If you, like me, have been stuck writing and it’s slow and ends up bland, I can recommend just changing the mental “audience”. Just assume you’re talking to someone who really gets you – perhaps your younger self or a nerdy friend. Don’t be defensive, trying to convince a hypothetical, hyper-intelligent skeptic.
To me it can make the difference from dreadful and tedious to pure delight.
> If you, like me, have been stuck writing and it’s slow and ends up bland,
To me this is a sign that I'm either tired or don't care about the subject, but haven't realised that yet. Write about the things that matter to you (harder than it seems).
Yes. My wife worries a lot about this; she was worried that her 16,000-word, three-part essay guide on how to find clinical trials, and what the process was like for us (https://bessstillman.substack.com/p/please-be-dying-but-not-...) would be too long and peculiar. Instead, it's found a wide audience, and perhaps most vitally, she's gotten a lot of great emails and comments from readers. Astral Codex Ten in particular has great readership. I'm not sure whether she's forged meaningful relationships that way yet, but the potential is there.
And if some people are put off by the peculiarities and quirkiness, so be it. To be for everyone is close to being for no one, as you mention.
Cancer has affected too many people in my life
I'm obviously interested in prolonging my own life in order to spend more time with Bess, but the prospect of helping advance science, in however tiny a way, is also attractive.
In 2020 I signed up for an organization that sought to do human challenge trials. I would've happily taken a vaccine and then been exposed to covid for the sake of ending the pandemic sooner.
Granted it could support it all along but, for a time, people wanted to see what the fuss was all about at the Big Platforms. I'm glad that bloggers kept blogging and that talented writers, old and new, are still going at what I consider my favorite part of the internet since it's modern inception in the 90s.
Reading will always be my performed form of content despite more and more people moving to YouTube for better exposure and money but for all you who feel the need to write: KEEP IT UP!
Is throwing a bottle with a message in it into the ocean a "complex search query to find people?" I wouldn't phrase it that way.
The article does say:
It will seem like I am mainly talking about how to use writing
to forge meaningful relationships ... But lurking behind it is
a larger idea. Namely, that you can shape yourself by reshaping
your relationships. By changing who you are addressing, and the
responses you garner, you steer your development.
I've got countless drawings and writings that nobody else will ever see, and likely will die with me. But they were very important for my self-shaping.
Maybe this is just a personality difference between me and the author — some people define themselves more in terms of their relationships with others than otherwise.
But regardless, I liked the article (:
There is some fine line between just being yourself and "singing into the void" as it were, versus trying to use your voice to make changes in the world. I must admit I lean towards the former, but the idea of "the summoning of a new culture" at the end of the article is interesting.
Besides his expose jumps from his main thesis to arguing how easy it is to become viral on some social network, particularly if you know whom to tag. Well my posts can become very popular on hacker news by replying to the right peple - that's fine. Or by annoying everyone in the comments section by being obnoxious (or not too careful with wording). But this does not imply at all that I was actively pursuing a goal, or aiming for it. It may be a result of personality trait. Some people talk, others write, and the rest - does not.
The fact that the essay at http://worrydream.com/refs/Licklider-IntergalacticNetwork.pd... is beautifully written and Licklider was apparently impactful on the initiation of Internet does not imply neither whether the essay predates actions Licklider undertook, nor that he was aiming for such an impact. In fact many may argue that what we have as the Internet today, 10, 20, 30 years ago is not a result of single vision. I don't think there's universal agreement on Jacquard being THE father of programming, because he's the first person in modern history who employed some sort of programs.
We can with ease argue that the idea of intergalactic-anything goes back to Jules Verne for example. We can easily say that Dune kicked the LSD culture with this spice thing, and that the idea of inter-worlds communication is taken from Azimov's Foundation. Why not say that William Gibson queried for someone to write him a cyberpunk 3D, and some filthy rich guy read it and decided to act upon it...
This is such an oversimplification of the role of written text, and even though I kind of agree with the author that like-minded people may write in similar fashion, I have seen more proof that like-minded people, who talk alike, actually do not get so well together.
It is very possible to write about niche topics with gusto and at length, but without finding an audience or a circle of peers. Twenty years ago it was common to call this the "long tail," a term popularized by a bestselling middlebrow book.
I put my trust in the "long tail" of the Internet audience and wrote in public for a few years. The experience did not shape me intellectually, as reading a good book or learning a skill might have done. And it did not bring me into contact with a circle of peers who learned from each other.
The author even offers the example of his wife, who published a long piece of writing in a niche different to his and did not benefit in the "search query to find people" way.
I think there is a likelier and more specific explanation for the author's observations. Namely, over the past decade, guru figures like Scott Alexander have popularized a style of academic-sounding essay-writing that is diffuse, meandering, and often very long. Fans of this kind of writing also reward authors who aspire to global or timeless significance by writing about a set of "cornerstone" topics that includes Plato, Roman stoics and the Roman Empire in general, Tolstoy, Enlightenment-era American political philosophy, and popular takes on behavioral economics and evolutionary psychology.
Some of this guy's posts struck gold with this audience and got widely disseminated through their social networks. I strongly suspect that writing about historically and thematically adjacent topics (e.g., Russian Realists other than Tolstoy) would produce a lot fewer "search results" for the author.
But my purpose of writing is the same as the authors, to find like minded people and have a discussion with them. It’s kind of cure for intellectual loneliness.
I paid for stats for a while, but it was depressingly low. But I'm chugging along for myself, like a public notebook.
I have my email on my personal site and when an article reaches the frontpage on HN I usually get some emails related to the post.
I don’t want my website to be a distribution channel. The last thing I want is to be managing visitors to my home.
I’ll let the distributors do their thing to pass my content around and I’ll own/manage my own content on my homepage.
https://untested.sonnet.io/Instead+or+writing+a+comment%2C+w...
Substack is neat, but I'd prefer a nice, self-hosted alternative.
(or POSSE - "Publish (on your) Own Site, SyndicateElsewhere").
Substack does look better, but not sure if it's sustainable
I (somewhat) recently saw a post[1] from an author I like that sent me down the rabbit hole and it seems like Disqus also tends to inject ad scripts into the websites that host it (which, honestly, makes some business sense because they are a for-profit and not a lot of people are using their non-free plans).
In that same article, it was also mentioned in an edit that Giscus[2] seems like a viable solution. In my eyes, it really looks like it's the best client-side comment library out there and when I start my blog I'll try to use it for comments.
[1]: https://www.supergoodcode.com/adventures-in-linking/#first
[2]: https://giscus.app/
I've had a surprising amount of feedback from strangers who say hi or ask for a followup to something I'd written about. It's a little gift each time that happens. I can't imagine that anyone would care about something I had to say, and yet here's this real person who wants to have a conversation about it.
Edit: In fact it kind of mirrors how social media went from a tool to foster human connection to a tool to see interesting content...
By contrast, let's take one of the key questions I am tackling in about a week in my blog at https://rationaldino.substack.com/. "How can we avoid cognitive biases when thinking about things we care about?" I believe this is much harder.
The problem is that it is adjacent to more obvious topics that are more discussed.
For example there are long lists of cognitive biases and intellectual fallacies that you can find. On the one hand, they form a taxonomy where the boundaries are not clear. On the other hand, I see very basic things missing from the taxonomy, like our tendency to take sides. And such taxonomies don't generally address how we can proactively avoid the emotional roots of our biases.
On the other hand, there are plenty of discussions about ways in which avoiding caring too much can improve our thinking. A lot of it is good advice. For example both http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html and https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-ten-commandments-of-egoles... have been helpful to me.
But I have a limited ability to not care about having made mistakes as a husband and father. While I agree that avoiding emotional overwhelm helps thinking, that advice is not very actionable for what I actually care about most.
That seems like a weird way of explaining the internet to your 5 year old daughter?
Uh, what a way to make things sound needlessly complicated. He could have just said "the Internet is a way for people all over world and in far flung places to talk to each other".
Finally we know exactly how it works and its based on an RFC system. We may not comprehend the the societies built on top of the internet.
I do believe a blog is a form of search query.
What's harder to explain is the emergent behavior that comes from that. I like to think of this as "meta gaming".
Generally when people start playing a new game, they don't care much for picking the optimal team/items/tools, they just play to have fun. As they play more, they recognize that some combinations are stronger than others. Some people will theory craft those combinations.
Over time, the general population will inherit those combinations, or perhaps build against it. That's kind of like the Internet before and the Internet now, but on a much larger and more complex scale.
I suspect a lot of people are clicking up arrow because they reminisce about blogs or something, because it seems unlikely the actual content is yielding this support.
There is a pummelled, low rated post that says this is "pretentious and stupid", and I'll take those same lumps and agree with them. This reads like the sort of fevered word dump of quasi-enlightened noise someone writes when they're a bit high and think their takes are brilliant.
And what you're calling “weird” and “bizarre” is exactly the author's point about writing to be niche and specific, in contrast to “Writing for a general public, you need to be broad and a bit bland”.
It’s just much too long. If he’d pared it down a little, it could have been quite good. His big mistake was this:
I will spend the rest of this essay unpacking those two statements.
That’s when I gave up. Two blocks of text, each with a few good ideas smothered beneath way too many words, and he says “I will elaborate.”
Notably this was pre- social media and smartphones which were the societal phase change most people think of as the line of demarcation.
In terms of the value of the post: I liked the metaphor of a blog post being a search query for human contact, so I got something out of the post. On the other hand, I've been running the same blog anonymously, with no contact information or social media sharing, and all bot indexing and commenting disabled, since this author was 11. So, I can't agree that what he's saying is always true. Bah, humbug!
I think most of the general public don't remember a web pre-YouTube (2006) or pre-Facebook (2008-2009).
So I think for most, "pre-internet" is not "right when Google came out as Yahoo's search partner" but closer to "right when I created my first public online profile".
Maybe if he's from the US? In Romania, in my home town, we had our first internet caffee when I was 12 years old, around the year 2000. Two years later, I had shitty internet at home, and 4 more years later we had the best internet in Europe (for a while).
I'd believe any 80's kid, living in post communist countries, that they've grown in the pre-internet era.
In 2010, a significant majority of people didn’t have smartphones. It wasn’t until January 2013 that most US adults had smartphones. The social media that we had then is a crude prototype of what we have now. 13 years ago, technology for the average person was a moderately improved version of traditional TV, mail, books, and office technology. More than a quarter of US adults in 2010 did not use the internet at all! That was a normal and fine way to go about things and you could live a typical life like that. Nowadays meeting someone who doesn’t use the Internet is like meeting someone who doesn’t use electricity! In 2010 it had not yet transformed business, shopping, relationships, life or anything really for the average Joe. Now it affects every facet of our society and absorbs every moment of attention we have. For your average person, their phone is where they meet their partner, the single physical object they touch the most, the first thing they see in the morning and the last thing they see before they sleep at night. Technology has completely transformed the entire human experience. No, I would argue that the real shift occurred around the early 2010s and what happened before was only important in relation to what happened next, which is the largest societal shift in recorded history.
One of my children, born well into the 2000s, claimed exactly the same thing: They remember when you couldn't do classes online and the pre-TikTok era, etc. They remember back when people would rail about vertical videos. It goes on and on. "Kids these days". Etc.
This is a wonderful idea, the more so because it is so simple to apply. I love the way the author thinks in time and sees communication as flows. Judging from other comments his point of view is not for everyone. I find it a treasury of interesting notions. It reminds me of the delightful phrase from a translation of Beowulf many years ago:
> the leader of the troop unlocked his word hoard [0]
Many thanks to OP for posting this article. You made my world a little larger.
[0] https://thesestrangewoods.wordpress.com/2015/01/06/favorite-...
The internet or the WWW? I was in my late teens in 1989 and we had been using the Internet in our home for years by that point.
That said, I’m from ye olde 1987 and we only got internet in the house in 2001. The library started having it around 1997. Or that’s when I found out about it. I think my mom’s work had something like a WAN in the early 90’s.
I was playing StarCraft online in 1998 and even then most of my friends (middle and upper class in Chicago) didn't do much online, or only used the internet for schoolwork which was a pretty new thing for us at that point. Even at that time I was still using our Britannica Encyclopedia CDs for school projects.
So, paraphrasing and specifying a bit more, I do agree with the author. I too feel like I was part of the last generation who remembers a time before the internet, and the World Wide Web, completely proliferated society.
Again, I was a child while all this was happening in the 90s, so perhaps my perspective is skewed, so I'm interested to hear if anyone older thinks that's completely off-base.
When I got the Internet in 1994 or 1995, I used Gopher as well as the web.
College was a big upgrade with broadband, and I used it all through-- 1997-2002. Everybody used e-mail at college, but there were few "regular people" on the web, except maybe professors/scientists and programmers. It was mostly "web pages".
I started my first job in 2002, programming in the Bay Area, and the funny thing is that I didn't have Internet access at home for 3 months. I guess it wasn't really necessary or worth the cost for a temporary place.
I just used the Internet at work. These days I think people would look at you funny if you only used Internet at work.
So it's hard to say, but yeah in 1997 the web was all over the news, because companies like Yahoo started to make money. EBay was kinda popular. There was all the IPO talk, so the Internet was in the public consciousness.
But most people still weren't on the Internet. It was more like the news was reporting on this trend, and I wouldn't say it's essential to daily life.
I also think the daily "news" conversation was still on TV at that point, not on the Internet.
---
It's hard for me to remember now, but now I kinda want to read what the Internet was like in 2002. Definitely Google was a huge thing back then. It made the Internet more popular, because it was easier to find things.
I started using it in summer 2000, when I lived at Stanford, after a research co-worker told me about it!
There was no Facebook/Reddit/Twitter/Stack Overflow, etc. The whole thing was just less important, and you did less on it. The web continuously grew over 20+ years, so yeah everyone feels they were "early" because it kept growing a lot after they started using it! It kept taking over more and more of life.
But I think I saw more or less the whole thing since I used gopher before the web. I didn't see all of the Internet though. I remember talking to people on Usenet that had been on the Internet since the 80's, 10 years before me.
Usenet was really big for me -- I learned a ton of stuff about playing guitar and drums -- but I think the 1989 generation probably never touched Usenet. For that generation maybe ICQ was more formative, etc.
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For someone my age, Klosterman's recent book the 90's is kinda fun for remembering what things were like before the Internet
https://www.amazon.com/Nineties-Book-Chuck-Klosterman/dp/073...
He's kind of an information hoarder, an extreme trivia master (of musics and sports and pop culture), and he makes some interesting points about the nature of memory and how the Internet changed us and our memories.
Kinda summed up by this comic - https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/tuy27/thats_a_damn_s...
Content would be automatically sourced from the Internet Archive or similar sources, so that you could actually get the experience from back then.
But in the mid 90's you would need a Windows 3.1 virtual machine to capture the online experience.
All the PEOPLE I interacted with were actually on BBSes, which had ANSI graphics, which I used through MS-DOS.
The web was a separate thing -- I switched into the Windows 3.1 GUI, which had fewer programs. And I probably downloaded Netscape Navigator over a really slow modem connection. Browsers didn't come with OSes!
And then I would visit a web page -- there was a good site about guitars hosted at MIT. Maybe Yahoo or Alta Vista, and later eBay.
For regular people, AOL or Prodigy was more popular than the web. The reason is that they were CURATED. I think they had professional writers and they had games portals and all that. Probably some stock quotes and news.
You couldn't really play games on the web then, not until Java applets became popular. I'm pretty sure Java games and Flash games came much before JavaScript games.
And AOL and Prodigy and Compuserve had e-mail. I think most regular people had AOL addresses. So it was kind of this walled garden, that they mostly kept you on, and the web was a separate thing.
It was only around 2004 that Gmail and Maps and Facebook came out, and then the "open web" properties became dominant. Of course they repeated the playbook of AOL and tried to keep you on their site! The young companies always advertise themselves as open, and when they get users, they close down.
So yeah I'd say the 90's was online, but for most people, the experience was mediated by some kind of "online service" like AOL/Prodigy/Compuserve. I had both -- my parents used AOL and I used the pretty much all the network-connected services I knew about.
Almost parallel was remembering what things were like before everyone had cell phones. I remember going around to my friends’ houses and their parents telling me that my parents called and I have to go home now. I used to have so many phone numbers memorized. But I also remember getting a cell phone in high school and calling my friends all the time, and eventually texting - if my parents weren’t complaining about the phone bill from all my texts.
> Usenet was really big for me -- I learned a ton of stuff about playing guitar and drums -- but I think the 1989 generation probably never touched Usenet. For that generation maybe ICQ was more formative, etc.
ICQ maybe, AIM and MSN Messenger and others were more likely in my experience at the end of the 90s and early 00s.
Usenet was what my uncle who’s basement reeked of cigarette smoke that stuck to the server fans used. He was also the one who wired our house’s phone lines and ran Cat-5 to every room when my parents remodeled a new house in 1999.
LOL smoking cigarettes was indeed more popular in 1999, and in 1989 ...
Yeah I didn't have a cell phone until 2002, after graduating college. None of my friends used cell phones -- there was not really a reason to.
I still have memories of my "answering machine" and people leaving messages on Friday at 5pm to go out later, and so forth. It seems so quaint now. To have to be home to get a call to meet up with somebody !!!
we’ll probably see it happen on the centuries scale too. (we as a culture.)
Welcome to the internet - it has always been a two-way street.
I started writing 'amiga xcopy', or 'amiga workbench', 'amiga demoscene' this gave me better results.
Then some results had links. Some to morphos, some to old internet forums.
Same goes for diablo 2. To find anything I had to write niche things I new forme the old internet. I started writing download hero editor or stuff I new was present in the good old pages.
Lost me on the first sentence. Author doesn't even know that we had internet prior to '89. Kid is 34 and trying to sound old and grizzled.