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Comment by stackghost | Hacker News Reader

I used to do exactly this, but 99% of my blog's traffic was bots, so I shut it down.

The web is on its last legs. Why bother publishing if nobody will read it? Nowadays I just write explorative/study notes in a notebook. I retain that better than typed writing anyways.

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Genuine question, did you put work into distribution so people knew about it first?

I've known a bunch of people who have said 'blogging is dead' but that's often shared with a lack of sharing the work in the first place or sharing it.

>Why bother publishing if nobody will read it?

The vast majority of blogs go unread, even back on the old web. I used to blog almost every day, for years, back in the early 2000s, and probably no one noticed.

But the fun was in the activity and the self-expression, both in blogging and discovering blogs. And if someone happened to come along and say hi it was a bonus. I'm trying to recapture some of that fun but it's difficult.

If I may, one reason to write about it is to understand it more clearly. Even if nobody reads something I wrote, at least I got better at it.

WOAH ITS HIM

I think he means publishing isn't worth the effort,since he has an offline notebook for writing still.

Unless you think actually going through with the work of making something online is worth the effort.

In my experience, it's the act of writing for someone else that makes me learn the most. It helps clear out the assumptions I had which I had been satisfied with but didn't actually have the evidence for. When writing for myself, I don't think about the assumptions as much, but when writing for others they become a lot more evident to me.

I can't speak for everybody, but it's different for me if there's a chance somebody can read it. I have notebooks offline, too, that nobody will ever see, but they don't get the same fine-toothed comb treatment.

> Why bother publishing if nobody will read it?

Because you want the thing to exist. I make music I don’t expect anyone to ever listen to, I just want the thing to be and I feel good uploading it somewhere I can link to in the future if I want to. Same with a lot software projects people publish on GitHub or other places. It’s also nice to look back at the online archive you built over time. It’s really for myself

What do you think about something like Gemini protocol?

https://geminiprotocol.net/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)

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