Comment by inSenCite

Comment by inSenCite 9 days ago

My biggest challenge with writing blogs/newsletters is the fear of publishing, not getting it "perfect", or being horribly wrong about whatever I'm writing about.

To get over this I just made simple personal blog/site using GH pages/jekyll/markup that doesn't have 1. A marketing version of a "publish" function and 2. the posts are perpetually in DRAFT.

Basically there is no 'done' which leaves me more comfortable in putting my thoughts on the internet instead of leaving them in my head. I can keep going back to the ideas and refining them.

ravenstine 9 days ago

I can relate.

However, something to remember is that, even when you're right, you'll still be wrong to many people on the internet.

My biggest barrier to getting back into blogging is the low return on investment. Absolutely nobody I know outside of developers on HN actually reads blogs today. Everyone seems to rely on YouTube/TikTok, ChatGPT, mainstream news articles, and maybe whatever blogspam The Google decides to surface. The days of "if you build it they will come" are long since dead, and even if I were to find regular readers, is it really worth my time to entertain or inform them when I could be out fishing on my boat?

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ryanstorm 5 days ago

I agree with you, but just for kicks I'd like to go through your examples.
First, blogging is alive and well in the outdoor sports space. "Trip reports" serve as incredibly helpful tools for research. In climbing, [Steph Abegg](https://www.stephabegg.com/tripreports/chronology) has one of the most useful sites cataloging, detailing, and photo logging all of her ascents. The late Marc-Andre Leclerc was a beautiful human, and while there are films and memories about him, it's his [blog](https://marcleclerc.blogspot.com/) that allows the world to get a truer sense for who he was.
I'm probably in the minority, but I prefer blogs over YouTube for their ability to parse the info more easily. TikTok takes most of the control in how it presents any info you might find and tops it off with immeasurable distraction.
ChatGPT can be great for quickly gathering relevant knowledge, but it still needs cross-referencing, and lacks the creative and novel elements that comes from a valuable human blog post.
Mainstream news articles tend to lack personality and voice.
"If you build it they will come" seems to still hold true for the posts and trip reports I've written. I've been pleasantly surprised by the email I've receive in my inbox asking esoteric follow-up questions, wondering how they even found my posts in the first place.
Overall traffic is admittedly mostly non-existent, and that's fine as I'd be glad to help or inform the few that do come across my posts. Though more to your point, I do wonder how many potential (younger?) readers will never come across a blog post because it's not ingrained as a place to look for info, as opposed to YouTube/TikTok etc.

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nineteen999 8 days ago

I mean if your goal is to be internet famous, have lots of followers in the tech space then yeah there are plenty of people doing that on Youtube.
I suspect a lot of junior devs set up blogs more as an experiment in setting up a linux server, static site generator, experimenting with Go/Rust/Ruby/PHP or whatever. Most lose interest when they realise the vast majority of people out there just aren't interested in their content and they get demotivated.
To me personally the word "blog" always sounds like something unpleasant somebody before you left in a toilet for you to discover. It's a shitty sounding word.

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theappsecguy 9 days ago

Well put, I also did exactly this. It’s just markdown, as soon as I deploy it’s live, no publish step.

I’m writing to help myself get better at technical communication and to solidify the concepts in my own head in depth.

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yoyohello13 9 days ago

What helps me is realizing that basically no one is every going to read what I write. And if they do actually read it, then that's a good problem to have.

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