Blogging can just be stating the obvious

> So it must be that a key ingredient to blogging is simple: have a willingness to state something that seems obvious to you but nobody else is saying it. Or if someone else is saying it, just link to them and say, “Yes!!! This!!!”

As a young mathematician in grade school, I had boundless enthusiasm to prove and present basic theorems in number theory and geometry. Now, as a PhD mathematician who has since pivoted into other fields, when I'm considering new mathematical content, I feel only the stymying influence of a million invisible eyes all around me asking, "Don't you think this been done before, better, by others? Do you really want to waste your and your readers' time with your DIY reinvention? Are you not just noise competing with other noise, drowning out the valuable signals in your domain for your own personal gain?"

All this to say, on a statistical level, it is fair to say no one ever has any original thoughts, and the ones most capable of elucidating existing ideas can be the ones least motivated to do so.

If every blog, op-ed, and social media post in the world were stripped of all informatic redundancy, what would the compression ratio be? Among these resources in particular, I just see the same old arguments and observations trotted out in varying tonal registers.

Everyone learns different things at different phases of life. And when they do, they're excited to share. And if they have a website, they will write about it there.

Think of this way. It doesn't matter if the message/info you are sharing is already written about. A ton of people didn't know about it. So when the message is written about again by YOU, more new people will know about it. And read it. Sucks for people who know about what you are sharing. But you're not writing for them, are you?

Not to mention, even if a person already know about the topic someone wrote about, there is still new perspective and angle to it that this piece might have. So, read it for different perspectives or angles!

A couple other versions of this that have always stood out to me:

1) There's always a new cohort of people that don't know the things you know. You assume since you know it, everyone does. But kids coming up, or whoever, aren't you. They don't know this stuff yet. You can easily be the first time they've heard "make something people want" and where that comes from. The Curse of Knowledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge

2) There's always another tone/anecdote/verse that makes whatever idea more palatable to someone out there. They might not like the PG version, or the Wired version or the Daring Fireball version, whatever. There's probably some version of you in this lesson that someone out there vibes better with.

Thank you for sharing this observation.

I had a post on here this week that was briefly popular. There were numerous folks who posted that the material “wasn’t new.”

I felt like it should be implicit that people who already know what I was writing about are not the target audience. But here they were, commenting.

At the same time, the page got upvoted quite a lot and the comments were filled with folks who had lots of interesting reactions and additions. Despite the fact that this was “old news”, it seemed implicit that for many it was new news.

Sometimes we should trigger conversation. I believe we shouldn’t index on novelty- we should index on impact. Your post is a nice defense of those who discover and share what they discover.

Writing, anywhere, serves multiple ends.

There's spreading new wisdom. There's sharing your own recent discoveries. There's bearing witness to a phenomenon, or adding one's own voice to support or opposition to it (both of which apply to the Gruber example noted here). There is documenting your own path, hopefully forward. There's simply sharing commonplaces and the quotidian, which whilst not grand or spectacular often serves to record or fill in the details which make up a place or time. (One of my own favourite finds at museums are the incidental details, whether within a larger work or of themselves: everyday elements within a painting, small studies or sketches, archeological artefacts such as the gaming pieces, make-up tools and materials, and sand toilets dating from pharonic Egypt of 5,000 years ago.

I do seek novel discoveries myself, I may have made a small handful. More usually, if I think of something I look to see who might have come across the idea first. If I'm quite lucky, I'm only a few decades behind the vanguard. Generally I see that not as a failure but a sign that I'm treading interesting ground, and not too far from the frontier itself.

I read a lot of beginner/tute FP stuff. A mistake they make is doing 2 sentences of "here's how to conceptualise this new notation and what Int -> Int -> Boolean means"

And then they get bored and just go full bore ¿ conjunctivitis applique to unbound ¤ variable 》》-> is a Mongolian {....} ... forgetting they were in tutorial mode. Or, showing examples which embed syntax which is apparently the same as before but "oh shit, I forgot a : means something else in this context" so having explained syntactically what a : means.. confusing you again.

Or showing REPL prompts without explaining if the # is a prompt or part of the command. The list is frankly endless.

Decades ago, this was C programmers trying to explain basic imperative syntax and then using a "compute prime" with a recursive function call or a ternary operator or bitshift.

So my next blog maybe will be "seven cardinal sins of blogs about basics" which will have only one sin: forgetting the job, the only one job you had (or apparently set yourself)

There's also a social component to blogging, right? When you post something it tells me about who you are. It helps establish my (probably parasocial) relationship with you.

And when you post something, I might be interested in it, even if I wasn't interested when someone else posted about it, because I'm interested in you and interested in what you have to say.

I think that human communication is about pure relationship socialization as much or more than it is about actually communicating information or ideas.

Yeah, whatever's obvious to you might not be obvious to someone else, and your take on a common take may appeal to certain people more than existing ones.

Plus let's be honest, there are a surprising number of topics where the obvious hasn't actually been documented in any real way, or where finding an answer to certain questions is near impossible. In those cases, just having an answer publicly available rather than say, on Discord or Google Docs can be a huge help.

I never imagined my blogs to be useful to anyone. For me, they're mostly just things I felt like sharing but with no particular audience in mind. Over the years though, I find myself receiving email from people who I helped. I even googled quite a few things in the past years only to find the first answer to be a blog of mine. So I unblocked myself a few times.

Blogging is fun. What's obvious for you isn't for everyone.

Stating the obvious (or maybe not). A bit of internet history, the word blog comes from web log, and shorten to take just the last 4 letters.

I like actually taking the full form weblog and nudging the space we get also 'we blog'.

An engineer friend of mine, after a decade in industry where he rose to management, decided to go get an MBA at a top ten management school. Compared to engineering, he said it was easy, since everything they teach you is obvious common sense.

I thought that meant the degree was worthless. But he said just the opposite. Even though it's all obvious common sense, it really helps to have someone lay it all out together and remind you to think about those obvious common sense things as you go about managing a business.

Wrote something like this earlier today [1]. There was something really nice about not thinking too much about the details and letting it be rough.

[1] https://graybeard.ing/llms-are-grep-on-steroids/

Commenting on Hacker News is often just stating the obvious, but people still upvote! ;)

While the "thankfully not all books are worth reading" adage is presumably very true of blogging as well, I do still feel some admiration for bloggers, even when their blogs could be perceived as "useless". Even to put something "useless" out there can be an act of bravery itself sometimes (in a "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act" George Orwell sense).

I've felt the "chilling effect" way too often when considering if I really want to put an idea out there that might later turn back to haunt me (even for things I would not consider controversial). I am very aware of the irony that oddly enough, psychologically I don't perceive the same level of danger from random HN comment threads though.

In a meta way, this blog post itself is example of that: sounds obvious that blogging can just be stating the obvious, but I still enjoyed reading it, and it served as a good reminder. I guess part of what makes it feel good is confirmation bias, but it can also be nice to read something that confirms your beliefs especially if the other side(s) are very loud online. I would also add that it is just expressing oneself, and therefore it is ok for it to be non-original thought: you are not publishing a scientific article, you are expressing your opinion, adding to the general discourse online, making your voice be heard, and also just capturing your thoughts into something concrete.

Problem with getting old is that you’ve seen it all. A bright eyed 25 year old blogging about this thing called a “Unix pipe operator” gets boring the 200th time it shows up on the front page of HN.

A lot of the blogs I follow and enjoy the most have writers that often times just put a borderline one-liner and thats that. I think over the years what I value the most is the admiration I feel for the constancy some people have, posting every week for years on end. Of course I appreciate the content, and substance, but I value them more for actually staying true and showing that sometimes there just isnt much one can say, regardless, they still check in...

I don't think i ever went past the 5-blog count on any of my attempts.

People already know a lot of things.

But which "know"?

There's seeing something and recognising it as something you've seen before.

There's being able to recite it without seeing it.

There's being able to explain it.

There's _knowing_ it. Where your life is an active demonstration of having made it _part_ of you.

To the extent we obtain wisdom with life, it's usually a progression of things progressing deeper down the layers, years, perhaps decades after they attained level 1.

I was never a prolific blogger. I do write a LOT internally at work and I write very long messages in group chats.

With the advent of LLMs, I've felt even less need to publish publicly. It's as if an LLM can either produce something higher-quality and more tailored to the reader's context in a shorter period of time. Or the topic I write would be so niche that it should just be in a group chat.

Publishing the obvious has tremendous value for historians, it allows them to figure out how things are done. I try to write content that seems so "normal" it doesn't need to be described ever! It can give fun reflective insights also.

I want to dig more into archival of the sources I use. I think it is important when linking to an other resources to at least describe what was found there or just mirror the source. I have read enough forum posts with link-rotted images to know how a useful comment can become a puzzle when a few links, images or referenced source dissapears.

Now I wonder how well the web will be archived in the long run, but that's another matter. Seems it is an ever sliding window where knowledge of the past is build upon but not kept.

The fact that someone makes a simple observation is probably suggestive that despite its simplicity, it doesn't stick fully, maybe it's even anti-memetic.

Perhaps repeating such simple truths is like a spaced repetition system for society

This is often, but not always, also what stand up comedy is.

Jerry Seinfeld made a billion dollars doing this in his act.

https://sive.rs/obvious "Obvious to you. Amazing to others."

I have a simple blog if anyone is interested: https://landenlove.com/

Something obvious to others may not be obvious to you - and to be fair it was a key ingredient in blogging.

I find it extremely sad that blogging shifted from personal writing to a performative act - we can feel ashamed stating something obvious because the expectation is to get approvals and shares, rather than us writing something we find intriguing, interesting or worth writing down.

There's also just so much overwhelmingly bad advice out there that sometimes, stating the obvious real thing is worth doing.

If I wanted to write something completely new, I'd write a paper, not a blog post. After all, blogging is ultimately about organizing my thoughts on topics that are already known.

In that sense, my personal problem is that no one visits my homepage (www.makonea.com). Ultimately, I think conveying thoughts on such topics also depends to some extent on reputation.

  > If you visit a website you should ... see the website. See its content. Be able to read the article whose page you are attempting to visit. Showing a “subscribe to our newsletter” or “accept our fucking cookies” dickover to someone trying to read an article on the web makes no more sense than sending out an email newsletter that only contains a link to read the newsletter on a webpage. A webpage should show the webpage. An email should show the email. I should not have to explain this.

To continue the thread of obvious things back to the non-meta level, would for the given example the following idea qualify as obvious? `Downrank websites that exhibit user hostile patterns`

I hope so. I would love if search engines would do that.

I also see this when people present studies online which say something like "Eating fast food causes obesity" and you get people replying "well obviously".

On the face of it things might sound obvious, but the study or in the case of blogging the discussion actually attempts to get the to the bottom of why that might be the case.

This is obvious? Am I stating the obvious?

It's why I follow Scott Manly or PBS Space Time specifically. There's lots of the same content on other channels/mediums. But I like them specifically, so why not?

Continuing to state the obvious, this is why you specifically should write if you have opinions you'd like to get out.

Please continue to blog about the obvious stuff. It happens all of the time that I want to explain to someone what I think is an obvious concept and then I am sometimes surprised to find out that there are no good blogs where I could link to for an explanation...

Of course, there’s a whole microblogging platform called Twitter where people do it.

Most search results nowadays are SEO farms. Posts I read are also mostly just someone debugging a weird bug for endless hours only cause they were mad, just grep output and the fix.

personal domain blogs survive faster than medium.

Isn’t it similar to “Just be yourself”? But first you need all the hard work to get to that level so that you can just be yourself. What is obvious to me may have come as a lot of experience and focus in the past.

Granny says one can't benefit from the experience of others. Not entirely accurate but she has a point.

Some "obvious" things come with experience, sometimes it's the opposite: beginner's luck.

I avoid substack because of this. It's totally fine to email people about new posts, but at least let me read your post first. Make me interested. I'll follow you not because one good post (maybe if it's really good) but because several good ones. If your post is good I'll go look at others before leaving. If it looks good, then, and ONLY then will I subscribe.

But I can tell you there's a strong correlation between why you're writing a post and why I'll subscribe. If you're trying to hustle I don't give a shit. You're most likely another pseudo intellectual chasing whatever is hot. What I, personally, want is the experts. I want to see that depth of knowledge. I want to see how you think. I want to read a blog post where I get to know you, not some facade. Not everything needs to be a hustle. Find your niche and your niche will stick with you. If you try to write to everybody you'll end up writing to nobody. Concentrate on making me want to subscribe, not pestering me into it. You're not a used car salesman

Finally someone’s saying it! Also I love how meta this is.

I actually have to write some internal docs and I'm struggling to put things into words. Blogging is hard, even when stating the "obvious"!

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1053/

There's ten thousand people new people each day, and someone has to be the first time they run into something :)

Blogging is a form of improving your writing and communication if you so choose.

Improving articulations is a helpful skill for use with AI too.

As for those popups, I get enraged at the "subscribe to our newsletter" screen-grabbing dialog within seconds of going to a webpage. I really wish there was a good extension for automatically getting rid of them without me having to ever see them. I don't care that a certain percentage of people sign up.

Anyway, there's another side to "stating the obvious" that really annoys me. It's the "I have to post today" posts. People get advice that they need to post regularly, be it a blog or Tiktok or Youtube or whatever. "Post once a day at a fixed time" is common advice. What this leads to is posts without content. It can be "thank you for 275,000 followers" posts or something that's obviously so low-effort and uninteresting I just immediately skip. And then you have to ask what does that do to that person's metrics if they have a low-engagement post? Is it better to have that and post regularly? I'm not convinced it is.

I also feel like eventually people run out of things to say. That's OK. But maybe just stop clinging on for dear life to this audience you've built while having nothing to say.

Anyway, if you post something obvious and long-standing like "popups suck", that's fine... unless it's the only thing you're saying.

Basically call out stuff that are normalized buy annoying

I really constantly have to fight the urge to NOT say/write something because it might be obvious or someone might have said it before.

Just say it.

I recently gave a talk about lessons learned in the past, and it felt really awkward, like, "who am I to tell people what to do?". A few days later, a student walked up to me and thanked me for it, because he adopted a practice I had suggested and thought it was useful. And I had troubles sleeping before the talk because I kept thinking about how plainly obvious it was going to be.

I started blogging again when I discovered that indeed, even if it's only me who finds this useful, it makes sense to write about it. As an exercise in writing, or in case there's at least ONE person on the internet who finds it useful.

Yes!!! This!!!

I find this phenomena happens with viral posts on Reels and TikTok. The first time I see an example of a trend, I'm delighted! I've never seen anything like this before, and what a great idea! But then I see a second example of the same trend, then a third. Soon I'm sick of them.

For the Reel creator, it doesn't matter if their Reel is the "second time" for many people. As long as they happen to catch enough "first timers" in their dragnet, their post will perform well.

The web comic XKCD built a brand around this, I think. I'm not sure whether the creator did this intentionally, but much of XKCD's success is based on saying things that we all think but haven't articulated. On Reddit, it's very common to see posts where OP complains about a tech issue, and the top voted reply is simply a link to an XKCD comic.

A blog can say some things a “real” media outlet can’t. How could The New York Times rail against enshittification when it is a poster child?

Another good idea for posts, is instead of arguing* on the internet you can post your opinion as post. This will help you to structure your opinion, validate it, and may come handy if you will have argument again:) Also arguments usually happen on popular topics, which can bring attention to your blog.

* Of course I mean professional arguments, not political opinions or other 4chan stuff

Disclaimer; have not read the article.

My current feeling about blogging is, that it more then anything else is we’re certian knowledge of AI came from. The arguments for blogging being the thing again also started at the same time AI got traction.

Just identify the bloggers that know their craft, weight them height. And you got yourself a step change in LLM competency.

Paying no one.

My father, who worked as a market research analyst, said that the trick to the job was "point out the obvious before anyone else does".

Web sites and web content are trending towards being enshittified until it just barely becomes worth wading through all of the shit to get to what you actually wanted to consume.

Obvious != known

Obviously I decided to not read this blog post.

Yes!!! This!!!

AI can do a good job of this. Summarize content and then searching the internet to see if anyone has commented a summary like that before.

But I suspect such a blog would not be popular.