I opened an account and "to the point" tweets don't get any engagement.
Only ragebaits, pretentious "I am very smart" type of content wins.
I am sick of my "For you" page and there's no way to reset the suggested content (Instagram has it)
My strategy now is to repost all content everywhere. But X consistently gives me the worst results.
This December 2024 article mentions several publishers telling their poor return on Twitter: https://www.emarketer.com/content/bluesky-surpasses-threads-...
Now there is a chance of us actually reaching your blog/video etc, like right now on hackernews. Sometimes we will like it or not, sometimes people will share it. Now google and bing prioritize scraping it because it is linked from here, it will be indexed fairly quickly, and chagpt will be able to find it.
Soon, when every open platform is just tokens and everything is generated, we will probably move to gated communities and directories, and it will be very difficult for the chatgpt to discover your content.
And even it can actually find it, I am not sure you want everything you create to be seen through the lens of a language model.
Ironically, for vast majority of content - including highly-read stuff - being pulled into training data for LLMs is by far the biggest contribution that content is ever going to make to society.
(IMHO, people who actually care about what they wrote being useful (vs. pulling ad money) should be more appreciative of this, not apprehensive.)
Is it going to be useful for language models to train on it? I think so, and I don't mind that. As long as they develop better world models and understand human language better.
The problem I have is with humans reading generated tokens. Human language is shared experience, the evaluation and interpretation of the symbols depend both on the author and the reader (even though many times they are the same entity).
When a person with HPPD says 'The sky is black', when the symbols enter your mind they are superimposed with your experience and their experience to create meaning. (HPPD is a disorder from damaged filters on the visual system, it seems that raw information from the eye sensors are entering the brain, and they can see the inside of their eyes when they look at the sky, so it looks black, as if the whole sky is filled with 'floaters)
When you read AI generated content, you are both the judge and executioner, the symbols mean whatever you want them to mean, they have no author (in the human sense).
So, I want to write for other humans to read :) Even if nobody reads it.
Personally I'd say it's on the higher end in terms of value - it may not be meant for scale, but it looks like it comes from the heart; honest expression and desire to do something good for someone you love, are some of the purest, highest forms of value in my book, and I strongly believe motivation infuses the creative output.
Plus, we can always use a fresh individual end-to-end perspective on computing :).
(Funny how this was merely a low-stakes belief until recently; it's not like anyone could contest it. But now, because of what I wrote below, it follows that LLMs will in some way pick up on it too. So one day, the degree to which motivations reflect on the output might become quantifiable.)
> The problem I have is with humans reading generated tokens. Human language is shared experience, the evaluation and interpretation of the symbols depend both on the author and the reader (even though many times they are the same entity).
> When a person with HPPD says 'The sky is black', when the symbols enter your mind they are superimposed with your experience and their experience to create meaning. (...) When you read AI generated content, you are both the judge and executioner, the symbols mean whatever you want them to mean, they have no author (in the human sense).
I disagree with that strongly. The LLM is obviously not a human or a person, but it's not a trivial token predictor, either.
Human language is not just shared experience - it's also the means for sharing experience. You rightly notice that meaning is created from context. The symbols themselves mean nothing. The meaning is in how those symbols relate to other symbols, and individual experiences - especially common experiences, because that forms a basis for communication. And LLMs capture all that.
I sometimes say that LLMs are meaning made incarnate. That's because, to the extent you agree that the meaning of the concept is mostly defined through mutual relations to other concepts[0], LLMs are structured to capture that meaning. That's what embedding tokens in high dimensional vector space is all about. You feed half of the Internet to the model in training, force it first to continue known text, and eventually to generate continuations that make sense to a human, and because of how you do it, you end up with a latent space that captures mutual relationships. In 10 000 dimensions, you can fit just about any possible semantic association one could think of, and then some.
But even if you don't buy that LLMs "capture meaning", they wouldn't be as good as they are if they weren't able to reflect it. When you're reading LLM-produced tokens, you're not reading noise and imbuing it with meaning - you're reading a rich blend of half the things humanity ever wrote, you're seeing humankind reflected through a mirror, even if a very dirty and deformed one.
In either case, the meaning is there - it comes from other people, a little bit of it from every piece of data in the training corpus.
And this is where the contribution I originally described happens. We have a massive overproduction of content of every kind. Looking at just books - there's more books appearing every day than anyone could read in a lifetime; most of them are written for a quick buck, read maybe by a couple dozen people, and quickly get forgotten. But should a book like this land in a training corpus, it becomes a contribution - an infinitesimal one, but still a contribution - to the model, making it a better mirror and a better tool. This, but even more so, is true for blog articles and Internet discussions - quickly forgotten by people, but living on in the model.
--
So again, I disagree about AI-generated tokens having no meaning. But I would agree there is no human connection there. You're still looking at (the output of) an embodiment of, or mirror to (pick your flavor), the whole humanity - but there is no human there to connect to.
Also thanks for the example you used; I've never heard of HPPD before.
--
[0] - It's not a hard idea; it gets really apparent when you're trying to learn a second language via a same-language dictionary (e.g. English word explained in English). But also in fields full of layers of explicitly defined terms, like most things STEM.
It also gets apparent when you're trying to explain something to a 5yo (or a smartass friend) and they get inquisitive. "Do chairs always have four legs? Is this stool a chair? Is a tree stump a chair? ..."
I am sorry, by no means I think it is a trivial token predictor, or a stochastic parrot of some sort. I think it has a world model, and it can do theory of mind to us, but we can not do theory of mind to it. It has planning as visible from the biology of language models paper.
> So again, I disagree about AI-generated tokens having no meaning. But I would agree there is no human connection there
What I argue is that language is uniquely human, and it is how it is because of the human condition. I think we agree more than we disagree. I say that the meaning is 'halved', it is almost as if you are talking to yourself, but the thoughts are coming from the void. This is the sound of one hand slap maybe, a thought that is not your own but it is.
I guess I am saying is that AI is much more like Alien than Artificial, but we read the tokens as if they are deeply human, and it is really hard for people to not think of it as human, purely because it uses language in such profound way.
There's so much content out there. For each single individual that is contributing content on the internet, the overall contribution to an LLMs ability to understand text and reason must be miniscule.
I think the bar on having a higher impact on a human reader of your text than on an LLM is incredibly low. Your comment and mine are perfect examples. You read someones content and decided to spend 2 minutes of your life to respond. Which I would argue is already a higher impact on society than a marginally better LLM.
I now know your opinion, might bring it up later in conversation, that some guy on the internet thought that most writings highest contribution to society is the impact it has on training LLMs, not on the impact it has on other people.
One thing is, most of that content eventually goes into obscurity. Our conversation might be remembered by us for a while, and perhaps a couple hundred other people reading it now, and it might influence us ever so slightly forever. Then, in a couple of days, it'll disappear into obscurity, unlikely to be ever read by anyone else. However should it get slurped into the LLM corpus, the ideas exchanged here, the patterns of language, the tone, etc. will be reinforced in models used by billions of people every day for all kinds of purposes, for indefinite time.
It's a scale thing.
FWIW, I mostly think of this in context of people who express a sentiment that they should've been compensated by AI companies because their content is contributing to training data, and because they weren't, they're going to stop writing comments or articles on the Internet and humanity will be that much poorer.
Also, your reply made me think of weighing the impact of some work on small number of individual humans directly, vs. indirect impact via being "assimilated" into LLMs. I'm not sure how to do it, or what the result would be, so I'll weaken my claim in the future.
However in my opinion, cultural shifts, opinions and norms are still mostly derived from interaction with your peers. Be that (Very human) conversations like we are having right now, or opinions held by "influencers" which are also discussed among your peer group. These are thousands of small interactions, those might be very small experiences, which all add up to form the views and actions of a society.
I don't see LLMs playing a big role in this yet. People don't derive their opinions on abortion for example from ChatGPT. They derive them from group leaders, personal experience and interactions with their peers.
And in this context of small things contributing to something big I would wager that all the small interactions we have with other humans do a lot more to form a society than the small interactions have on building an LLM. So to your original point again: I don't think contributing to an LLM is the biggest contribution online content has on a society.
Of course, none of that vast concentration of investor money will go to the authors.
If the government was doing this, people would be screaming about the biggest nationalisation of intellectual property since the rise of Mao.
There's no reason it should. The authors don't get perpetual royalties from everyone who read their works. Or do you believe I should divide my salary between Petzold, Stroustrup, Ousterhout, Abelson, Sussman, Norvig, Cormen, and a dozen other technical authors, and also between all HN users proportionally to their comment count or karma?
Should my employer pay them as well, and should their customers too, because you can trace a causal chain from some products to the people mentioned, through me?
IP, despite its issues, does not work like that.
> If the government was doing this, people would be screaming about the biggest nationalisation of intellectual property since the rise of Mao.
Or call it the public education system and public library network.
You, know, for the "benefit of society", as these companies never tire of saying.
It's pretty clear to me. The authors of books "plagiarized" into the training corpus are at best entitled to one-time payment equivalent to the company buying those books. They're not entitled to percentage of profits generated by the model. Can't think of any convention that would even remotely imply that.
(I suppose it depends on whether you see the training process more like model learning, vs. more like model being a derived work. The latter feels absurd to me.)
As for OpenAI, et al. - they're selling a service that provides value to people. That's pretty much the most basic business scenario, far more honest than most of the tech industry. And they did create the thing providing value. The training data may be a critical ingredient, but only when collected and aggregated at scale, thoroughly blended, distilled down to explicit and implicit semantics, and solidified into a model than then gets served via complex piece of computational infrastructure - all of that is what the companies are doing, all of that is what's critical to providing this fundamentally new kind of value. It's only fair they should be compensated for that.
And to be clear - despite their occasional protestations to the contrary, I don't believe OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and other LLM vendors to be working for the "benefit of society" or "good of humanity". I claim that LLMs as models and as a technology are a huge value to humanity. Companies come and go, business models change, but inventions remain. Even today, between DeepSeek-R1, newest LLama models and countless of their derivatives, society can enjoy the benefits of near-SOTA LLMs without being beholden to a few large tech companies. The models and means to run them are out there, and are not going away.
It can be anywhere on the continuum between them; and the rules need to consider the gap between what happens by default vs. what is considered (economically and/or morally) desirable, which need not be a linear function of the position on that continuum.
The least creative AI model possible returns the nearest match in the training set verbatim. (e.g. Google).
The most creative model possible can from the training data construct a coherent set of vectors that span the n-dimensional space of concepts in that training data, including hypothesising about missing implicit dimensions in the way that we figured out non-Euclidian geometry by going "we can't prove this bit, what if it's wrong?"
I don't know where any given LLM is on this continuum, only that they're certainly not at either end.
I think that economically, we were already far beyond the point where copyright helps actual economic productivity (as opposed to rent extraction) even 50 years ago — easy mass production left us with a small number of massive hits each year, at the expense of most creative people making almost nothing. More recently, micro-payments and subscriptions, models like patreon etc. or YouTube ads, allow a lot of small people back into the market, but even then, it looks like copyright rules are often ignored as "fair use" (even when it isn't) or abused to attack rivals, or even just processed automatically (I think Tom Scott had an example of his own videos being claimed by someone else?)
But people don't only care about money, they do also care about morals — and a lot of people are very upset that human creativity is now SaaS.
OK, if they're so great, so what's wrong with nationalising them without compensation? After all, they're not even IP.
Public libraries do pay reader royalties.
I don't know, I've been on the side of weaker copyright; Aaron Schwartz was driven to suicide, sci-hub is one of the most blocked sites on the Internet. But now it turns out that IP is simply a matter of power. There isn't really a difference between sci-hub / libgen and the scraped training databases other than having money, which suddenly means the rules don't apply.
These are the only motivations? Authors want credit, which is stolen by the robber barons.
No, just the major ones. But it's nice to be honest and consistent about those with your audience, and with yourself.
If you just want to contribute something good to the world, being seen by LLMs in training and retrievable by them via search are both good things that strongly advance that goal. If you also want to make money and/or cred this way, then LLMs are interfering with that - but so do search engines and e-mail and copy/paste.
It's unfortunate, but no one is actually stealing anything (unless a work gets regurgitated in full and without credit, which is an infrequent and unfortunate side effect, and pretty much doesn't happen anymore unless you go out of your way to cause it to happen). Works are being read and interpreted and understood (for some definition of that term), and then answers are provided based on this understanding. If that stops someone from reaching your page, that sucks, but that's been a factor before LLMs too; intellectual property is not meant to be monopoly on information.
(Some of those complains get even more absurd when they get extended to LLMs using tools. As designed and customary, when LLM invokes search and uses the results from some page, it cites it as a source, exposing the URL to it directly in at least two places - inline, and on the overall sources/citations list. Credit is not lost.)
With the situation as it is right now, you're only contributing to some tech oligarchs ability to sell tokens to people.
I chose to put work into my writing and make it freely available on the internet. This isn't the same.
There is a degradation of the soul that happens when it consumes what something with no soul produces.
I have this unpublished book (waiting for better times) where the protagonist is a book binder. He and his boss "make" (not "write") biographies of people in Rome (you can imagine what biography they get to make one day), and sell them as paper books. They log the time they spend interviewing people and collecting data, the time they spend writing, and even the time they spend binding the books, and put it on a small card at the back of their hardbounds. As corroboration, they film everything with an authenticating camera. What they are selling is not text, but human time and effort. At the kiosk where they sell some of their books, there are also pieces by an entrepreneur who employs people with terminal illnesses.
Lots of people will go for a machine-generated quick-fix. But they'll do it because they can't afford better. Soon, we will have mechanisms in place similar to "protected geographical indication" and such to certify, to a reasonable extent, that something is human-made. Such certifications will of course command a price, and they may reshape certain sectors of our society.
Honestly, I'm not sure to whom you're referring. Rome has had a lot of famous residents.
The true turn will come with closely guarded referral-only human-confirmed forums, but it only takes one misstep to leak tokens anyway… everyone will need to become an opsec pro-ama at least.
Popularity is somewhat proxy for 'good', but not always.
I've been wondering if I should gate my website with a username and password like we used to do in the BBS days. A lot of the big players like Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and more do this.
I don't know if anyone is willing to "log in" to my system but I'm certainly curious about how this might work now.
You may feel differently if/when you have children.
The thing I most liked doing in my life was bringing them up so I did the thing I most liked. It WAS fun and enjoying life.
Gets tricky to find a balance, but balance is needed, because your children learn from example; if you sacrifice 100% of your own self to them, they'll never learn how to live.
The Boomer ethic in a nutshell
Thank you.
There are also blogroll communities, but I don't think they are all that popular (if they even let you in).
I heard getting on mailing lists works, but I have no way to even know how you get to that stage.
Not sure what you mean.
Create a blog. Write a post. It's out there.
Everything else you wrote in your comment seems almost the antithesis of the submission: Do things that you like, and sometimes the world will agree.
To me that's only part of the truth. I write because I like it sure, but it's also very unmotivating to just "scream in the void". I want to share idea because I want to hear other opinions on my ideas. I want conversations, not monologues.
I have literally millions of words of writing that no one else has seen. Some of it is a rambling mess, some of it is fairly polished. But having done this has served me extremely well in many areas of life - I am more self-aware, articulate, etc... THAT is the motivation, not whether people have seen the ideas. Perhaps someday I'll refine it further and share it publicly.
Though, I'm regularly drawing upon it all when I have conversations - be it in real life, or in places like this. Why does the "conversation" have to be in the comments section of your own site?
I recently became old enough to be a part of a couple of mailing lists but I just do not find email to be a good medium for articles or discussion.
But it turns out you can buy 1 septillion ipv6 addresses for $500, it's not that hard to register domains and serve static sites for people, and it's not that hard to build a static site generator that packages in standard functionality like RSS and deployments. And AI is generally pretty good at modifying tailwind configs or adding funny UI widgets. So I'm interested in seeing if people might want to participate in a "myspace if it came out in 2025" or "distributed cozyverse", or if regular people would make websites more often if it were truly as easy as clicking a button and paying a few dollars.
There are some really interesting things we can do with social media on the open web with creative application of existing tools. Free idea for the taking: you can use JWT/JWKS and proxy auth providers to implement a "private site" only authorized for access by friends you personally invited.
When I was at my lowest, I got a message from a 14 year old guy who I’m 90% sure was an FBI agent with access to my search history. They said they really liked my posts, and that one little message gave me so much life.
I think as you grow, in career, or in general, folks who get writing always do better than who don't give all things equal.
Keep posting!
A important thing to realize about writing (especially given the current technological advances) is:
Writing is more than just the production of text for other peoples consumption. Writing is an excellent tool to structure thoughts and feelings. Writing isn't just you formulating messages with intent, it is also the text radiating back at you while you write.
LLMs are great to lift the burden of writing bullshit texts or as a (hopefully critical) sparring partner, but we need to realize that a lot of the value of writing is that we structure our thoughts and feelings through it and letting someone else do it takes something from us.
Nonetheless, getting zero views is definitely demotivating. But by keeping at it, you will learn what can increase this number, and also what increases this number in a way that you care about.
I found it immensely joyful to share and talk about content I had made with friends, or bringing it to them when relevant. So don't overfocus on how many people see it, but rather who.
I think I’m learning to live in that space, to write for the freedom of it, while still holding space for the hope that one day someone will stumble across the words and feel a flicker of recognition. Until then, it’s just me, showing up. And I’m learning to be okay with that.
Thanks for putting language to a season so many of us quietly live through.
https://gdpr.eu/right-to-be-forgotten/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten#European...
In many cases URLs have been removed from search results but remain on the original site.
I have seen far more small sites blocking UK users because of the Online Safety Act than I ever saw blocking EU users because of the right to be forgotten.
every hour you write for others could have been spent reading, or practicing your art. Are you balancing that time wisely?
something should also be said about the quality of content that is published for the sake of gaining followers vs the quality of content that is intended for yourself.
also keep in mind that every page you publish competes with the existing canon that your readers could have spent their time on instead.
also: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/schopenhauer-parerg...
I love reading thoughtfully crafted content, but I don't want my inbox filled with email alerts, and I don't have time to check every blog's website to see if they've posted anything recently.
Will RSS ever make a comeback? :(
So that was what was going on. It could find links on the frontpage and it could parse titles and dates from those.
You apparently don't need feeds. No AI required.
It's one of the big things I'll credit Wordpress for - they enable RSS by default so a lot of sites support it without even meaning to.
Now they've expanded into threat intelligence and I'll get popups asking me if I'm interested in the latest CVE or whatever, but I just dismiss those and read my blogs and comics. Not shilling, in fact I work for a competitor, but I use it every day!
There's an interview with Matt Damon where he discusses how winning an Oscar at such a young age freed him. He was no longer chasing that (probably unobtainable) goal and could focus on doing what he wanted.
Reminds me of a "where are they now?" article I read about a football team that won the world cup. They had achieved the highest possible success in their sport, most of them in their 20s.
One managed to go to a world cup again as a coach and reach the final. Some of became TV commentators. Many became coaches, often in lower leagues.
Only one left the sport entirely, invested his money and lived in Florida.
I've heard similar things said about novelists, too.
Whether seen this year or the next, or only ones past, I consider it documentation. And perhaps no one will ever see it directly. But the LLMs will (and already) have integrated all the bits into their strange brain. That it's there, seen or unseen, and free of spam, is what the internet is to me.
Perhaps some day it will all come together again (or for the first time by self determination) with the greed and slop having withered away, yielding a public domain where people no longer litter and shit in the digital halls of collective knowledge.
It's definitely worth the effort.
By content pages, I mean stuff like blog posts, articles, notes, tools, web games, geek art, etc. (not stuff like index pages, tag list pages, and so on). I mostly write for myself. I do often share my posts on HN and sometimes they get some attention, but most of the time, they do not.
All these pages (posts, tools, games, etc.) serve as a personal record of my journey through various technical interests, from the early days of solving mathematical puzzles and writing assembly programs in MS-DOS with DEBUG.EXE, to my current study of algebraic structures and the quirks of Python programming.
Each page is like a snapshot of a phase of my life. Sometimes, I browse my own website just to enjoy the journey it has captured and to remind myself of the things I've learnt over the years.
You wrote your 200th, I wrote my...I think 4th today :D
My latest post is exactly that: https://blog.jgc.org/2025/06/it-was-time-for-dim-bulb-curren... It's very niche, wasn't written up for SEO or whatever, and is just something I'm working on.
Highlighting people who unexpectedly rose to fame is no use, thats just survivor bias, for every Mike Posner there's millions of musicians who spend years trying to make it with no success.
'Write content for your future fans' is also survivor bias advice. In the attention economy most blogs will just be ignored forever.
So here's my advice: Its ok to give up. I think 'never give up' is terrible advice. People can waste years of their lives due to 'never give up'. There is wisdom in knowing when to give up and spend your time on something else. For most people, blogging is a waste of time and they'd be better off going for a nice walk.
I think the argument is 'writing is good'. But writing in isolation provides little feedback or upside, so there is some desire / pressure to publish what you write.
As to why - writing forces you to formulate thoughts in a linear fashion to communicate them with an audience you might not know. I personally want to better develop that skill!
This is like saying that that personal hobbies provide little feedback or upside.
The upside is that you enjoy the activity and what it produces. That's also the feedback.
Are you claiming that nobody should write a diary without publishing it to the world?
But I think publishing your writing requires you to consider an audience and be clear about what you're saying. I've gone back through my journals many times and wondered what I meant when I wrote it?
Additionally publishing something add upside - like someone sending you an email asking a question or others building on your ideas.
ps. I'm not saying this as a success writer, I'm saying this as someone with almost a 100 unpublished drafts and some regrets :)
but why is that desirable?
Some of the posts weren't even remotely optimized for it. Daniel wrote about very nerdy NixOS optimization, Scott wrote a 20K story about the horror of bullshit jobs, etc.
Survivor bias is a real thing, but there's also a real dearth of quality writers out there. I'd encourage anyone who enjoys writing to do it for the love of the game, and as long as you occasionally show it to someone or post it on HN, good things will come.
My life was totally changed around the time I had 100 readers, and that number is extremely achievable. Going beyond that hasn't really helped me that much, as you quickly lose the ability to form deep connections with people.
(However, if you're frustrated by blogging then by all means, give up. I do think that what carries the writers above is that they're in it for the love of the crafts they're writing about in addition to being talented writers. Trying to grind out success sounds dreadful and I feel like it scarcely works.)
Literally people who can’t even hold five complex thoughts in their mind simultaneously can become notable writers because the bar is on the ground for the vast majority of niches.
What digits are we talking about?
If I may ask, in what way do you mean changed? In a personal fulfillment sense or more like financial/networking/etc.?
I am way, way happier. I've met some really amazing people from all over the world. I also have access to a level of technical mentorship that has totally changed the way I engineer -- but you get other people too. I've spent a lot of time with the mythical thoughtful CEO (can confirm that they are an outlier and the median CEO is as bullheaded as they appear), gotten the inside scoop on a lot of stuff that used to confuse the hell out of me, and last week got invited to a group of writers in Melbourne that are helping me get a book out! And it's also, for me, a special kind of awe-inspiring to meet people that have produced truly great literature. I'd never had had the opportunity before that.
That's like, roughly what you'll get at 100 to 200 people if you write things that repel the energy you don't like. At a few thousand subscribers it gets a bit hairier because you don't have time to talk to everyone. I'm also definitely someone that leans hard enough into the parasociality that it becomes regular sociality, which might not be for everyone, and perhaps I'll run into a real sicko one day and regret it.
>It was the end of the "stand up", which Valera had graciously been invited to. They did it sitting down, which was her first clue that one of the Chaos Gods was involved.
I still think about this line, it's just too good.
I also use it for things I want to post over and over again, so now I can just link a variety of arguments instead of making them again.
However, I would also agree that if one's personal metric is "I want to be famous" that just pounding away at it is a bad use of time. [1] I would also agree that while I consider it a generally good exercise often worth the time to at least some extent that per basic Econ 101, the marginal utility does diminish as your "consumption" of "writing blog posts" increases and I'm not recommending some sort of unlimited blank check be allocated to it because it never stops being worthwhile... of course it does. That's true of anything.
[1] If you do want to be "famous" my suggestion would be 1. Be sure you have something to say; if your blog posts are effectively reproducible via a prompt to an LLM you're not going to rise above the noise 2. Be regular, and as such, be willing to be repetitive. 3. Do a bit of promotion, like posting to HN and other places 4. Once you have a base, don't just lean into it; start trying to get into conference speakerships. The "good" ones are hard but there are many conferences starving for content, slots are not actually that hard to come by. 5. Do a good job with those; see numerous resources on how to give presentations, don't be afraid to do some stuff like Toastmasters and stuff if you need to. 6. Pound away at that. It generally seems more likely to me to work than pushing just from the blog angle. That said, you can't skip step 1. It doesn't have to be "unique" but it does need to be something other than just "Hey, you should, you know, write good code."
(The thing I choked on personally is the "be repetitive" part. Way back in the first couple of years of my site, back when it had a different focus, I did it for a while, but got tired of it relatively quickly. One of the major reasons I write things on my site is precisely so I can link to them and not repeat myself as much. However every majorly successful blog I've even been subscribed to is quite repetitive; the same takes applied to a string of news stories, the same points every couple of weeks... it is what it is, I'm not necessarily criticizing it, it clearly works, but it's not what I wanted. As a result I don't have the regularity sufficient to "break out". Well, that's fine, I'm not really seeking to "break out" anyhow.)
Often the people who seem to suddenly "make it" are doing this, but it gets left out of the story.
What I don't believe in is the OP post or many comments in hacker news on the topic: blogging in the hope to gain something beyond self-improvement.
First it's a very different best to write for gaining fame and popularity than to organize your thought. Then the market is totally overcrowded and difficult to beat, even for just a normal revenu stream. Finally: many people, maybe most, get the fun sucked out of them when they try to convert a hobby in a job.
So while I would not avocate to not blog if you want to get rich and famous, I would say it is not really a good strategy
I am in no way a good writer, and I don't have an audience, however a few of the articles I've published on my personal site have resulted in a small number of extremely high quality responses from almost exactly the people I wanted to reach. For example, I wrote a review of an insulin pump and received a reply a few days later from a director at the company thanking me for the review and that he was sharing it with his team.
So I'd say blogging can absolutely can pay off, if you think of it in terms of making connections with the right people over time.
what about creating for the sake of creation? Where the end goal is already achieved by creating - whether or not you gain fame or a huge following from it is secondary. I assure you, people like this still exist, and are probably much happier for it.
As a direct consequence of this choice, I've been able to quit my job and live off building stuff and posting about it online. If I had not started the blog, this would not have happened. I would still have toiled away in anonymity at my job.
Is this guaranteed to happen to everyone who starts a blog? Of course not, that would be a ridiculous claim, I've had blogs before that went nowhere too, mostly because I didn't really have anything interesting to write. Though it does keep happening to a lot of people, eventually myself included.
I'm a big believer in the concept of luck surface area as an explanatory model. The probability of getting lucky is the product of how much you are doing and how much you are talking about it. Maximizing this area maximizes the likelihood of positive career outcomes.
Though I don't think it has to be blogging in particular. Blogging works for me because I enjoy writing. Someone else might do better on youtube, in local tech user groups, in the conference circuit, or even just networking a lot and talking to your friends about your work.
Sticking with it is sort of good advice however, as these things are heavily momentum based. Discovery often takes time, but the more people who discover your content, the more it gets shared, and the more people will discover it. This is generally true in any medium.
Though again, the key is to find something you enjoy. If it feels like a chore, it's unlikely you'll stick with it.
That may sound depressing but there are other things in life that absolutely are worthwhile in these ways. Helping people is generally a better goal in life than self-expression is.
> realize we need instructional blog posts on how to "persevere" or explainers on why writing is valuable even without an external audience
Definitely don't think we need another 10,000 Kubernetes Tutorials published on Medium.com but I think the idea of writing for yourself or just without "having" to do it is something most people don't actually have exposure to. It's really not that common in most communities or people's lives, and most people grow up only ever doing it as schoolwork or an obstacle to a job or something. It's been like this since well before the Internet. In fact, I'd bet that well over 90% of people do not personally know a single person who regularly writes for themselves or just for fun.
Anyway, point is, you read a good post whose goodness was in part due to the thousand posts before it, then think "I need to be as good as this" and you'll fail. I'm sure there's a word for that too.
Easy to forget how long the roots were forming.
I believe that smartphones are occupying a huge portion of the time people used to spend just thinking, and the nature of work/modern living has us out of the habit of doing lots of "meditative" tasks that used to be much more common. I almost never hear anybody suggest spending more time thinking over something but constantly hear advice along the lines of "talk to more people" or "see what other people are doing/did and figure out how you can do that". A lot of what we do think we "think" comes from the increasingly large time we spend consuming hyper-targeted media optimizng for watch-time, or conversing within our social tribe.
When I sat and wrote this post, I was able to think about this stuff for 10 entirely uninterrupted minutes without anything else competing for my attention. It sounds like nothing, but how often do we actually occupy ourselves purely with our own thoughts without either being interrupted or reaching for our phones out of habit?
The only other ways I'm able to sustain that kind of focused thought are by taking walks and programming very late at night. But the extent to which I as a person differ in personality or ideas from an average of my peers is almost entirely from those moments.
I'm tempted to not publish my blog. Write it for myself, and send it as a portfolio when applying for jobs. So that those damn LLMs don't benefit from it.
― Henry Miller (1964). “Henry Miller on Writing”, New Directions Publishing
“… and now its Sam Altman’s reward too!”
― Jayden Milne (2025). “About”, https://jayd.ml/about
I wonder - what is the path toward LLMs keeping around material that has since been removed from the internet? Do the companies building them keep the scraped content around forever?
I think this is underappreciated by almost all writers. You should be doing something very differently with your life if you assume that as opposed to a generation earlier or even five years ago, most of the direct effects of writing will be by people who actually read what you wrote.
And you have the opportunity, a near certainty that most "people" who read what you write in the future are not going to be humans. But humans will interact with what you write with an indirection layer in the middle.
from: https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/understanding...
Some of my least favourite write-ups on my blog have thousands of views, and conversely many of my most favourite ones rarely got any. Chasing views and writing stuff that has any substance beyond HN rage bait are completely two different things.
[^1]: https://rednafi.com
Face it. Blogging, or for that matter any online creative content, is becoming extremely low-rewarding effort. First, no one pays for content any more. Next, they don't even have time to clap, or grasp the quality. And then, there is this AI slop.
About 30 years back, I spent days on an abstract art, perfecting it's shading using only an ink pen. It looked a bit geometric. When I showed it to my college hostel mates, they could not believe it was hand-made. Some of them claimed that they know the instruments which can be used to make it, and dismissed my entire effort.
One trick I have found to maintain focus is to not announce that you are going to write a particular thing. Somehow publicizing a forthcoming work means that I am less likely to actually complete it.
I'm not sure this sounds attractive to most people.
I mean, I'm already generating some content, but it's drowning somewhere in the comments. And then I can't find what I wrote myself.
I prefer to use it as my own library, but share some research with others.
Most (though maybe not all) tech sites will publish a post about the release of the next motherboard and so on 20 times a day, but there will be no news about, for example, PCIe 7.0 and Molex, and if there is such a post, it will be just dry, here is the release and that's it. All the additional information is about it and why it will be useful to incite the audience to expectations, and possibly wishes for potential use. Even on the relevant branches or subreddits where it would be useful, no one even mentions it.
Everything is aimed at a quick release, getting paid for the publication, and that's it.
The further I go, the more I look for small blocks and re-read them once a month.
How much news did you see about another motherboard or GPU with a modified bezel and how much news was there about the development of microled (with its many applications). And in the last two years, something new and interesting has been happening in the microled field.
But where are the tech sites before this... it is better to consider another QHD OLED screen, which is not far from FHD. It's just the same old, same old every day, week, month.
I’m just starting as a blogger and recently wrote about how creativity can feel like a curse, the kind that won’t let you rest until you get the words out. If you’re thinking of pursuing a creative path (or any passion, really), I have one simple word for you:
Start.
"X things always happens"
Hmm, does it actually always happen? What about if I try doing X+Y? What about....
And the questions go on. I feel like I take a lot of shortcuts in my brain or have established "facts" that don't hold up under scrutiny. It's the same idea as rubber ducking a problem, or for me when I get 2 paragraphs into a slack message and realize I've identified the problem and just clear out chat box without ever messaging for help.
"No one is reading" is not true. You read it, and you made the call as to when it was "done". Sure, everything can be improved, but then nothing would get "done".
> I don’t know. I’m still trying to figure it out.
Realistically, by just writing something and hitting the publish button.
There are things I do to put food on the table, where reputation matters, at least within the org (e.g. "that person who shipped code that works and is maintainable" vs "that person who keeps shipping code that breaks prod"), where things often take a lot of time, effort and planning, and where I expect a specific payoff.
Everything else I do in my free time is not that. If I want to do silly things like write a blog post about how Docker is supposed to lead to mostly reproducible builds but sometimes defies reason and how Spring DI is evil, or maybe a blog post about how the Windows bootloader is actually pretty swanky despite me doing some rocket surgery on my drives, or maybe a blog post about how a dual GPU setup is almost good but not quite and how we can't have nice things despite offloading things to a dedicated device being the rational thing to do, then I can do that.
It doesn't even matter if I have all of the details down correctly, whether there is a lot of polish in the thing I'm making, or if anyone bothers to read or interact with it. All of that is ego stuff. Chasing after that validation and obsessing over the details will only give you writer's block or keep worrying about things that matter less than you'd think in the grand scheme of things.
It's not about building a brand, it's not about revenue, it's not about reputation, I write because I feel like it and sometimes even to "rebel" against the status quo because sharing my experiences and my own lived truth feels good in of itself. Furthermore, if they ever become relevant, I can reference my findings with a link. A bit like writing a diary would be like, but in a more public setting.
I have the same problem with programming side projects. Almost every personal project of mine that failed was because I tried to make it "scalable" or solve silly problems (like potential abuse) before I had even 1 customer (myself).
Similarly I can get very hamstrung when I start writing a blog post then get caught up in how it will be received, how I can make it more interesting for others, what if I'm wrong, etc. Not that those things aren't important, they are, but I get hung up on that way too early in the process. The number of blog post drafts that are 2-3 paragraphs long before I gave up because I was swamped with trying to make it "perfect" is high.
I know I'm not a great writer, and that's not really my goal, but I'll never get better without practice and that include publishing.
I know how many of my projects and blog post never saw the light of day because I was too scared to show off what I had done, I'm sure there are many other people out there in the same boat. It's sad to think of how many great ideas or projects exist on a single hard drive (or maybe in a private repo) all because someone is scared to put it out into the world.
I think I have like 100 subscribers to my youtube, just checked and looks like my blog got 133 visits last week. Oh well.
It's also really nice that I can easily send a video to someone when I'm recommending motorcycle routes, or if someone asks me for the millionth time why I moved to Taiwan or some other question I've answered in my blog, I can give a short and polite answer with a link to a blog post or two if they want to know more.
I've also published stuff that gets little attention and leads nowhere, like Emulator-Backed Remakes[2] or ZX Spectrum Raytracer[3], and I'm totally fine with that. I make these things primarily for my own amusement ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I don't know how many people visit my website. I have analytics, but I rarely check them.
[0] https://gabrielgambetta.com/computer-graphics-from-scratch
[1] https://gabrielgambetta.com/client-server-game-architecture....
That's OK. Writing it, helps me to focus my thinking.
Publishing my work as ship-Quality open source (even when not necessary), helps me to ensure that all my work is top-Quality.
> We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then is not an act, but a habit.
- Inaccurately attributed to Aristotle.
I do agree with the OP, in that one should write for one-self for the numerous beneficial reasons such as self-improvement, fun, archiving. However, I think his example has some conflicts with his message.
The articles I regret writing or that feel like a waste are any that seem insincere/designed for one-sided promotion of something. Which I've (mostly) kept off of my own site. Running a blog just for the purpose of driving more traffic or engagement I think would sap all the joy out of it completely.
A comment about the Youtube example:
> This is why YouTubers with millions of followers have hundreds of thousands of views on their first few videos. Those videos didn’t get any views when they were first published. They were revisited after they became famous, by their most loyal fans.
This is a nice example but it depends on the content. If you write an AI blog, readers are probably not going to bother with reading old posts that are no longer relevant. You see it with research papers as well -- if you have an author you follow, you're less likely to read their old stuff. Maybe it's a good idea to write content that don't become stale quickly.
> How to post when only AI is reading
I work now on multiple business projects that interest me. Short term my paying clients, medium term tools I build for myself and clients that I can also sell, long term hobby that might turn into something (adretro.com is my fun).
Before the VC carnival money era, this is probably the default way to build.
"If you don't have to write, don't write."
I've been stuck in this mindset that I need to find a niche people care about, a problem people have, but none of this is gonna get any results (most likely), if you're not passionate about the topic.
So just do what interests you, what you find cool, and the world will adapt.
sircastor•1d ago
I became a lot happier with myself when I stopped chasing that and just decided to post the things that I like and the projects I wanted to do. These days I like to think of my website as part of the “old, good internet”: No ads, no demands, just whatever I like and wanted to write.
It’s worth recognizing that that comfort came around/after I was making decent enough money that I wasn’t also trying to figure out a side hustle. It feels to me like “do the things you like” is a luxury of someone who isn’t anxious about paying all their bills.
cornfieldlabs•1d ago
Couldn't have said it better.
I really didn't get to "do things I love" until I escaped poverty.
didgetmaster•1d ago
Side projects might be fun to code, but bug fixes, tech support, and documentation might be a real chore for you.
I have one of those that I can't wait to sit down and code a new feature; but sometimes have to force myself to do the tasks that make it more 'user friendly'.
themadturk•20h ago
johnnyanmac•18h ago
m4rc3lv•1d ago
sircastor•1d ago
KolibriFly•1d ago
0xEF•1d ago
1. People who use "do what you love" to mean "love what you do," as though you can force yourself to enjoy anything. This is only true for people who lie to themselves and compromise regularly against their own interests.
2. The Lucky Ones™ who happened to accidentally align an enjoyable hobby with a career and think because they "did it," anyone can, without acknowledging that they were simply in the right place at the right time with the right skills, or that the stars don't exactly align the same way for the rest of us.
brabel•1d ago
0xEF•1d ago
I've been asked "okay, but what do you _like_ to do?" which just puts me in a position to have to explain that I have a passion for learning new things and experimentation, but nobody is going to pay me to read books and play around in a workshop all day, since those jobs are few and definitely already filled.
So, it's a hobby, instead.
fragmede•1d ago
Doesn't that go for most things though?
Designer, across all fields exists; game designer, creative technologist, research scientist. Just because you can't land that job right out of the gate is no reason not to try, and to become an insurance adjuster instead (unless you do want to be an insurance adjuster). In team sports everyone wants to be the star, but even if you're not, if you just love the game, you can always find some way to be involved, even if it's selling t-shirt outside the stadium.
marginalia_nu•1d ago
To be fair, advice doesn't have to be applicable to everyone in order to be useful to someone.
Extremely few people get to become astronauts, but that doesn't go to say there isn't relevant career advice for those who do aspire to become one.
Chalking outcomes up to luck is also not a very useful attitude. Life undeniably has a huge random element, but it's more akin to the randomness of the stock market than a pure dice roll. You don't have control of every outcome, but your choices and decisions can massively tilt the scales in favor of getting "lucky".
sircastor•1d ago
harrall•1d ago
BurningFrog•1d ago
For me it took understanding how things are connected and that doing the superficially unfun things are a necessary precondition for the superfun things to happen.
Learning to appreciate what you have instead of hate what you're missing is also a very fundamental mental health principle.
This is of course much easier said than done.
geeunits•1d ago
johnnyanmac•18h ago
sph•1d ago
It’s just a reminder to find time for what you love even if you have other things that demand your time. And, if you can, to always leave enough space for yourself. For far too many of us, there is only work, more work, with the silly hope to one day find the time to dream again. You won’t.
munificent•1d ago
Very few people get to take the thing they would do completely for free and make money off of it. At the same time, very few people have a job where every single aspect of the work is miserable toil that brings them no joy.
Work is complex and there is a continuum of jobs that have more or less aspects that resonate with you. I think better advice is to seek jobs that let you bring more of your joys to bear while acknowledging that no job will be paid fun. And when in a specific job, try to find the aspects of it that you love and make the most of those to the degree that you're able.
We have a much richer ability to navigate our careers than simply treating any job as all bad or all good.
neom•1d ago
begueradj•1d ago
sircastor•1d ago
DavidPiper•1d ago
Financial freedom is one of the lenses through which you always have to filter life advice from all sources.
brazzy•1d ago
The real lesson is that you should not rely on popularity-based success to pay your bills, because there is no knowing how long it will take until you have any success; it may in fact never come.
It's that kind of thing that should be the side hustle. You'll have only limited time for it, but at least you know how to pay your bills and can do it the way you want.
The other option is to be a starving artist who also feels bad about compromising their vision to make something marketable.
pards•1d ago
I encourage my kids to keep their hobbies as pastimes, not as income sources. As soon as you try to make a living from your hobby or passion, it sucks the joy out of it.
Make money from your job; derive joy from your hobby. Separation of church and state.
Cthulhu_•1d ago
triceratops•1d ago
Pick something you medium like that someone will pay you money for. Life is too short to work on something you have no emotions about.
socalgal2•1d ago
bookofjoe•1d ago
0cf8612b2e1e•1d ago
goostavos•1d ago
bookofjoe•1d ago
elevatortrim•1d ago
Effort required to become a good musician is comparable to a surgeon (likely more) yet the chances of success is comparable to that of a football player.
johnnyanmac•18h ago
Thing is that the state wants to take more and more of your time for less money. So you lose the ability to enjoy church at some point.
We need huge work reform before we can truly follow this wisdom.
sph•1d ago
Incidentally I also believe one would have more chance to market their own creation in the real, physical world than the Internet. I believe we’ll eventually see leaflets and indie books being distributed to passersby for free like 100 years ago.
In any case, create for yourself. Create without ever expecting an audience. If this doesn’t sound fun, you probably just like the publicity rather than the act of creation itself.
kevindamm•1d ago
skyyler•1d ago
But yes, that does happen.
abhaynayar•1d ago
adolph•21h ago
In 2011, AOL CEO Steve Case took to Quora to reveal just how successful all those free trials were. “At that time I believe the average subscriber life was about 25 months and revenue was about $350,” Case wrote. “So we spent about $35 to acquire subscribers.” Because that $35 had a gigantic return, AOL was happy to keep pumping money into free CDs.
Marketing manager Reggie Fairchild chimed in on the Quora thread to claim that in 1998, AOL used the world’s entire CD production capacity for several weeks.
https://www.vox.com/2015/5/12/8594049/aol-free-trial-cds
stavros•19h ago
brewdad•14h ago
al_borland•7h ago
Retric•18h ago
The odds 5+ people see your content is probably the same as it ever was, but ‘success’ has been redefined in terms of ever larger follower counts.
sph•13h ago
More eyeballs, sure, but worth 1/1000th of a visitor coming straight from a webring for your own niche, or that found you in the right section on Yahoo and AltaVista.
blahaj•1d ago
sircastor•1d ago
mattslip•1d ago
nuancebydefault•23h ago
polishdude20•18h ago
Have you heard of parts therapy? It operates on the idea that we "contain multitudes" that all are trying to do their best for us. If you learn to include parts of yourself in this web of relationships, where different parts of you are distinct "people" that need pleasing, you may start "pleasing" yourself more often?
Like, I'm imagining zoomed out, there's nuancebydefault4's circle in the middle and everybody in your life is also a circle. You're connected by lines in this web. But zoom in and you can see that inside your circle, is a web of relationships of different parts of you. The part that needs love, the part that needs intellectual stimulation, the part that needs rest etc.
Anyways just a post run thought Im having while the endorphins are kicking in...
nuancebydefault•9h ago
robertlagrant•1d ago
I don't think this is a feeling; it's a fact. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is related to this.
socalgal2•1d ago
munificent•1d ago
I understandably was fairly burned out by writing after that. I also tend to cycle out hobbies. So I got into making electronic music for a bit. (Fun but hard.) Lately—a surprise to me—the hobby that's been the more rewarding is knitting. I think I just really needed a more tactile thing to do in my free time. I've been really enjoying knitting and it's so much fun picking up a new skill.
But the whole time, there's a little voice in the back of my head going, "You know, if you spent this time working on a new book, you'd get more money and recognition..." Hitting middle age and starting to really feel the finite nature of time definitely doesn't help.
I wonder if it's something similar for you where it's easier to sink time into random projects before you start thinking of your time as a finite economic resource.
sodaplayer•1d ago
I also got a small collection of synths and grooveboxes, so seeing you start your Tiny Wires channel was a nice reminder that even those authors have things outside of software.
One of my favorite moments lately was just hanging out with my wife in the living room after setting up all my synths there and just jamming with her present as she also worked on her hobby.
munificent•19h ago
That sounds so nice!
nathan_douglas•1d ago
munificent•1d ago
nathan_douglas•22h ago
I hoped at some point I would produce some magnum opus that would make it all worthwhile. I thought that would happen in my twenties, and then my thirties. In my mid-forties, I think I just want to do little sketches for the rest of my life, always hinting at something and never revealing it. I can do actual work at my job. Which, based on my personal finances, I will also have for the rest of my life :)
gravez•1d ago
Something that's been working for me lately is to choose the topics where you have something to say. It's a bit broader than the things you like and allows you to just react to an inner spike to respond. Helps train the muscle for writing
vitaflo•1d ago
I had a popular site once 25 years ago. Popularity is fun but it’s also demanding and draining. I much prefer a slower pace online now that I’m older.
I’ve also shifted from trying to be “smart” or insightful to just documenting random niche things that don’t have a lot of other info about online. Everyone has something like this in their life/career however seemingly insignificant. That makes the few connections I get from my site even more special.
godelski•1d ago
I think of it like how we say it is good to be lazy. Not lazy as in do no work, but lazy in be efficient and don't put off what is easily done now but hard later.
When writing for yourself you are writing for people like you. People with interests in similar topics, that are facing similar problems, and probably think somewhat like you too. After all, most of us really aren't that different. It's easy to notice small differences because we're similar.
Instead, when you write for others you don't chase those things that make you unique you chase what you think a more average person (in whatever niche) wants. You distance yourself from them just as you distance from yourself. You become more likely to just create more of the same stuff that's already out there. You follow instead of lead.
There's tons of exceptions of course and the qualifiers shouldn't be ignored. All I'm trying to say is that the different approaches come with different biases. You should definitely be writing code documentation to general audiences but your blogs? Imo, that should be you. Not everything needs to be work. Just be the fucking nerds that you are