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Comment by blackbrokkoli | Hacker News Reader

Genuine question:

If you write only for yourself, what motivates you to actually finish, and more importantly, polish a post?

I write for myself all the time, in private: I have a journal, a paper notebook, thousands of notes in Obsidian. Yet doing a blog post feels like a massive undertaking every single time, especially the later writing and editing: explaining stuff that is obvious to me and no one else, replacing idiosyncratic abbreviations, fixing formatting issues, fixing blogging engine or hosting stuff. I think I struggle with these parts because doing those tasks doesn't benefit me very much.

So how do you do these things within the framework of writing for oneself? Any takes on this?

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I can answer for me (I've been blogging just over 20 years at this point). There's a couple of main reasons for me to write a blog instead of just an obsidian note.

Firstly, the process of writing a blog post makes me think through my assumptions as I'm explaining the concepts it covers to other people. On more than one occasion I've realised while writing, that my understanding of the topic wasn't entirely correct, so it's useful here.

Also I blog so the information is available to others. If I spent a decent amount of time working things out, it's possible that a blog could save other people in similar situations effort, so that's handy.

Lastly I blog so I can point people to a post instead of explaining a topic in detail, it's a handy time saver for things that come up a lot.

As to benefits, well it wasn't deliberate but blogging contributed to me getting my last two jobs, so in that sense I guess it's paid off pretty well!

I have 500+ posts over ~9 years and the polish is what lets me absorb what I've written into memory.

If I look at the titles of all of my posts I can pretty much recall the details of the post to a reasonable degree, certainly enough to get a complete gist of it and understand the head space I was in at the time.

If I stick to internal chicken scratch notes then I have a harder time remembering things later. I guess you could say it's the process of writing a somewhat coherent post that has a beginning, middle and end that's really helpful for retention.

For me personally, the effort of 'polishing' a post makes it drastically more valuable to myself in the end: I think harder about the material; I notice problems with my thinking that I would have glossed over otherwise; I explain things in ways that will be more useful/legible to me-five-years-from-now.

Committing myself to publish posts is, in part, sort of a motivational hack to get me to do the polishing. The possibility that someone else _might_ read it and judge me for it pushes me to put much more effort in than I would if I kept it private. (I wrote a short blog post on this: https://brokensandals.net/personal/reviews-as-notes/)

I probably wouldn't see this as a sufficient reason for blogging if I believed that _literally_ nobody would _ever_ read the stuff I post. But it is a significant benefit that's available even if I only have a very tiny and sporadic audience.

> If you write only for yourself, what motivates you to actually finish, and more importantly, polish a post?

Because I will eventually have the same problem again and if it's not documented to hell and back it will take me days to figure out what I did the last time to solve it.

The third time you find a 10 year old post by yourself asking how to solve the same problem you're having now and posting "nvm - I got it" is the time you appreciate documentation and run books.

Not op, but..

Writing for my future self (I know from coding) is like writing for another person. So making it readable, sources cited, etc. is being kind to future me.

Also, it’s like that old saw about teaching - if you can’t explain something to another, you probably don’t really know the topic. The exercise of writing about something with another person in mind helps me organize the information and understand it at a deeper level.

"Writing is thinking. The clearer your thoughts, the better the output. It's kind of the main reason why writing is an essential part of the learning process (especially in schools)."

I don’t write too much anymore, one of my blogs got a lot more exposure and attention than I was comfortable with and people online in general are weirdo freaks and annoying to deal with. I guess I didn’t fuss too much with that stuff, the quality was likely poorer than it could have been. Same with my video stuff, I just don’t care that much if it’s polished. Audience feedback sometimes helps but isn’t that motivating to me.

>> and people online in general are weirdo freaks and annoying to deal with.

This is definitely the current internet and not the typical experience back when blogging was very popular. It's too easy to access and produce low-quality contributions today, which (ironically?) is something that blogs countered and also probably led to their decline.

> This is definitely the current internet and not the typical experience back when blogging was very popular.

This has been my experience for much of the last ~15 years as an extremely niche internet personality but it is definitely worse lately, particularly the amount of outrage people can generate out of nowhere over the most benign things - my response is always an exasperated "you're perfectly free to simply not consume this." But people then take it waaaaay too far.

If I publish what I write then it forces me to actually put some effort into making it readable but I don't necessarily think of the audience when I'm writing. Just more of from a perspective of spelling and grammar. Personally it's the knowledge of the fact it will be public is the accountability I need to put in that extra effort and future me is grateful I can comprehend what current me is saying.

Not the person above, but...

> I write for myself all the time, in private

The approach can be similar. I mean, I write for myself; nobody reads my blog. They can, sure, but nobody does because I almost never give out the URL to anyone.

So the result is I don't feel the need to care too much about explaining, etc. except when I want.

> especially the later writing and editing: explaining stuff that is obvious to me and no one else

I don’t do this. I write expecting the audience to pretty much have read the entirety of my blog to understand any single entry. I like to think there’s a mystique to it — I’ve long enjoyed unpacking the ideas of obscure thinkers, myself.

Then: I’ve known of maybe 10 people over a combined five years that have made the effort to read a lot of my stuff.

I can't speak for the original author, but crafting a great blog post is fun. And, there are thousands of people a day who read my blog, but even if it were zero it would be the same.

The "polish" and working on it is part of craft, it's no different than carving something out of wood and not showing it to anyone. You still had fun creating the product and shaping it how you wanted.

for me, i've saved myself time and energy at least 10 times by writing stuff down and publishing it on my blog/forums. i know i help people, but i mainly do it for Future Sergio.

Are you somehow closely related to one Tito Tapia?

Perfectionism would cause someone to polish something like this.

If that doesn't hit home don't polish just post.

just dont do any of that. write at the level you want to write at and publish what you have. its a kind of self esteem work to say “what i write for myself is fine to make public”

and then being public also inspires slightly higher quality

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