Why blog, when you can write in notepad? | Hacker News Reader

Why blog, when you can write in notepad?

4 pointsonesandofgrain5 comments

If the whole purpose of blogging is to reflect and write down thoughts and learn/(have personal discussions), why not just use notepad?

If you want your content to be read, that's obviously a different matter, but blogging framed as "notepadding" seems somewhat disingenious?

I dunno, but my impression is that blogging is done with some degree of underlying desire to reach out to people and have your writings read (which is fine).

Blogging (with a domain) is more expensive, more cumbersome, less write-friendly due to HTML and .md syntaxing and formatting and it's also laced with the entertainment-complex (it might be read by someone so it should be good writing). But in my opinion this entertainer-complex makes your writing more edgy and attention-seeking (which again is fine).

That's my ramblings :) -... -.-- .

If one wants to write down thoughts, no computer is necessary. Keeping a journal with pen and paper has been a thing for centuries.

Blogging being less write-friendly? It can be as simple as writing a tweet, or editing a comment for HN. It doesn't need to involve git or hugo. You could use one of the big blogging platforms, and have no more than a login and some HTML text fields.

Blogging as pressure to improve your writing is real, and that's one of the reasons I blog.

So you need the scrutiny of others to feel pressured to write better?

I wouldn't call it scrutiny. It's mostly caused me to communicate and articulate my thoughts better, to the point where I'm misunderstood less often. Along the way, I realized that I left out important points, so I've gotten better at including them the first time.

Others? Only a handful of people read my blog, and most of them are my friends.

That's fair, I'm not trying to belittle people that like to blog just for everyone's information.

ELI5: Blogging seems to be more of an traffic-seeking endeavour than a personal writing journey. The mere fact someone might read it is an immediate stopper to the creative juices as it literally from the first word is blasted with the "what if someone reads this" and "This needs to be so original".

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