Hacker News Reader

Comment by riazrizvi | Hacker News Reader

Writing a blog is like talking in the town square. Except because it’s digital, we seem to forget how communication works. If you just start talking in the town square, you’re standing alone talking. Sure a person who passes by might pause, but the odds you’re saying something really relevant to them are low, so they’ll move on.

The whole question of how you get in front of the right people and tweak your message based on their reactions, and then setup a routine so you have a dependable performance-audience, all seem to be lost on many folks.

View on HN

Related, I think people have stopped.... reacting on the internet? I've been part of the X/Twitter to Bluesky migration and people often mention how 'quiet' Bluesky is.

I think that's not due to algorithmic intervention of product design etc., I think people are just tired. The novelty of shouting at strangers on the internet has worn off - how many internet fights have we gotten into that did nothing in the end except waste time? It's only worse with a coin flip's chance of the other person being an LLM. We're all tired.

Spot on. Ten or fifteen years ago, participating in the internet was something I got excited about, now I just get excited about getting away from it.

This is relatable. I often find myself starting a reply on here, really thinking it through as I type it out, and then hitting delete on what I just wrote. Sometimes I even hit submit, and then delete a few moments later.

It's just hard to justify engaging. Worst case, I get a fight on my hands with someone who's as dogmatic as they are wrong, which is both frequent and also a complete waste of my time. (A tech readership is always going to veer hard into the well, akshually...) Most likely case, I get fictitious internet points. Which - I won't lie - tickle my lizard brain, just as they do everyone else's. But they don't actually achieve anything meaningful.

Best case is that I learn something. Realistically, this happens vanishingly infrequently, and the signal-noise ratio is much, much worse than if I just pulled a book off my shelf.

I suppose this is all an artifact of time and experience. Maybe I've just picked all the low-hanging fruit, and so I no longer have the patience to watch people endlessly repost the same xkcd strips from fifteen years ago, navel-gaze about tabs or spaces, share thrilling new facts that I have in fact known for many decades, etc. And while I'm very excited for them to discover all these things anew (and anew... and anew...), it's just not a good use of my time and patience to participate.

    It's just hard to justify engaging.

Well, if your try and force yourself to engage with multiple people, the site won't let you post that many comments in such a short time period. Which, overall, is a good thing I believe.

> It's just hard to justify engaging. Worst case, I get a fight on my hands with someone who's as dogmatic as they are wrong, which is both frequent and also a complete waste of my time.

The three mindset changes I found that really help with this are understanding that:

* You don't have to try and get the last word in.

* Other people are not entitled to your time, especially if they're engaging in bad faith.

* Outside of small and curated communities, there's pretty good odds that you're not interacting with a real and honest person.

So whenever I click into the comment box, I always ask myself "Can I really be bothered with this? Is this really what I want to be spending my free time doing?"

And then I often close the comment box and get on with my life.

I wish we got karma points (or maybe "zen points") for every time we refrained from commenting on someone who is wrong on the internet.

I wonder if it's just creeping apathy, post-covid, current-AI boom. That we're just tired in life. There's a psych study, Dimensional Apathy Scale (DAS)[0] and one of the questions is basically "How much do I contact my friends?" I think it argues that the more apathy we feel, the less likely we are to reach out to others, and I imagine, the less likely we are to react or reply to comments (or even post).

I'm curious if the decline in reacting is matched by a decline in replying and posting in general.

Anyways, I worry that apathy is on the rise as we get overwhelmed with the rate of change and uncertainty in the 2020s and I'm working pretty hard to fight that apathy and bring more empathy, so if you're interested, please reach out to me the contact info in my bio.

[0]: https://das.psy.ed.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/SelfDAS....

I feel this, but also, I am... anxious about reactions? I rarely / never go back on comments I've written on HN. I know it's actually a really bad thing to do because it means I won't allow my views to be challenged, don't engage in debate, just want to get my side out without actively defending it.

Years ago I had a blog and one time I wrote a post in response to another blog post about education vs experience, arguing in favor of formal education. And that one got a link back from the original article, leading people back to my blog. I got engagement, comments, feedback, etc... and it was very uh. Overwhelming? Like suddenly I had to defend my arguments. It made me very uncomfortable, even though it was probably a good thing, all in all.

I don't know how to break that trend. I think I'd rather have realtime communications / chat, but that's another thing that seems to have died, at least in the space I've been at for a long time now.

The simple solution is that whenever you start to write a comment, ask yourself: do I want to have a discussion about this?

If the answer is "yes", then make your comment, check back and interact with the responses (assuming they seem to be in good faith). If it's "no" then just close the comment box and get on with your life.

But then I realise that it's fairly pointless writing this in the first place...

Participating? Or reacting? The internet I look seems plenty full of reactions despite the migrations you mention.

Maybe to YT or Threads instead.

I like Bsky but I don't think the userbase supports much large-scale communication (not a bad thing, frankly)

Probably more related to progressive culture, people worried about saying the wrong thing. From the outside, it looks exhausting to try and keep up with the latest dogma of the left.

I think the aggressive bots/AI, and bad moderation policy, have poisoned online discourse in popular channels.

You can still find real people in niche communities (like here), where good moderators can maintain a grip on quality. Though perhaps HN has some secret moderator sauce, I’m not aware of.

Humans are just migrating off the old, big platforms that no longer feel real.

What if having an audience isn’t the goal?

I saw this Carl Jung quote shared on Substack recently.

"Loneliness does not come from having no people around you, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you"."

I'm using writing as an outlet for an active mind these days. Thoughts that seem important to me and need to come out even if there is nobody there to read them.

Precisely why I maintain a diary. It listens to all of my thoughts, sans judgement. One of the best decisions I've ever made. Wish I did this years ago

I don’t get this town square analogy. My blog is a “permanent” record of the electronics related projects that I’ve done. Things I’ve learned along the way, techniques that I’ve used, stuff that I’ve made.

I’ve given myself a target of 6 blog posts per year. It forces me to complete something every once in a while, and it also makes me study a subject more thoroughly than I otherwise would: I don’t want to make a fool of myself.

It’s nice if a blog post resonates with a few people every once in a while, but that’s just a bonus.

> Writing a blog is like talking in the town square. Except because it’s digital, we seem to forget how communication works. If you just start talking in the town square, you’re standing alone talking. Sure a person who passes by might pause, but the odds you’re saying something really relevant to them are low, so they’ll move on.

An optimist take on your statement is this: we need MORE folks writing/talking in town square. More chances to encounter something valuable (to you).

Otherwise, I first read your statement the other way: too many people communicating into the ether with no audience and no feedback. But I suppose I prefer people practice that communication somehow rather than not...

Is your point that people do not understand how to present themselves and a point of view (on anything) in front of anyone? Work presentation to executive. Writing a coherent email. Running a meeting. Etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com