Comment by dewey

Comment by dewey 5 days ago

Define "worth it", but I've written a blog post about some printer driver issue two years ago and it now happened twice that someone (Older person, not very technical) reached out over email and asked for some further help and I could walk them step by step through using a Terminal, booting into macOS recovery mode and fixing the issue.

The Apple store and Epson told them to do a clean install so they were very grateful and it made me happy that I could help them. Worth it for me!

theshrike79 4 days ago

I think the issue nowadays is that people expect to have a MILLION FOLLOWERS and a revenue stream and a personal brand and and...

In the ye olden days people just blogged about stuff they found interesting. If nobody read it, it was still out there for someone to find. I can remember multiple times where finding some obscure blog helped me debug an issue I had.

Now it's all hidden in Reddit or even worse in TikTok or Youtube videos that won't get indexed properly.

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carlosjobim 14 hours ago

In ye olden days, people who were online had a stable income from a cushy job or retirement, with ample of free time and energy to do a bit of blogging.
In today's world of global economic depression, everybody is fucking bloodshot eyed desperate to make enough money to have a roof over their head. So if they have time and energy to make a quality blog, it means they are scraping by financially and need to monetize ASAP. And if they are employed it means they don't have the time or energy left when they're at home to make a quality blog.

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jmclnx 5 days ago

Yes, define "worth it".

If you want thousands of people reading it, probably not. If you just want it there for posterity, I would say yes. In that case maybe see if it is in the wayback machine.

I have moved my site to gemini with a gopher mirror, I find that far easier to maintain and I do not really care who or if anyone sees it :)

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nicce 5 days ago

If the "worth it" includes provable portfolio of skills, I don't know a better place than series of well-written blog posts.

Other "worth it" could be the development of your writing skills, documenting own learning path and so on. Maybe something can be even useful for you as well later on.

If you think "worth it" as a way to get attention, get job offers automatically e.g., likely not worth it unless it gets HN front page.

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anileated 4 days ago

Note that anyone not living under a rock in 2025 would assume a significant probability that the articles in your blog are generated with an LLM, making it hardly a signal of skill.

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- amonith 4 days ago
  
  I see your comment grayed out as if it was downvoted but this is 100% true and my colleagues share your sentiment. I still think writing is valuable (as is note-taking as a whole) for personal reasons but most people I know assume that most new professional content is LLM generated. Only if the writing is s*t we kind of believe that it was written by a human but that is also bad for obvious reasons.
  
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bitbasher 4 days ago

I've had hn "front page" blog posts multiple times, and no I never got any job offers ;p

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- skydhash a day ago
  
  I think it’s more kind of a supportive role. Like a portfolio for an artist, it helps with marketing yourself to the other person. Like: “Yes, I know embedded programming, I even blogged about $PROJECT I did a while back”. Having something that can be independently verified and judged helps more that talking.
  
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raudette 4 days ago

I wrote an article on how to resolve ink blobs smearing onto a page for Epson Expression printers years ago - just based on the people who've written me (which is just a fraction of the number that have found and viewed the page), I've extended the life of many Epson printers.

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