I studied acting in college. My tastes ran toward experimentalism. By my senior year I was a devotee of Jerzy Grotowski. He argued that in essence, theater was nothing more than an interaction...
I studied acting in college. My tastes ran toward experimentalism. By my senior year I was a devotee of Jerzy Grotowski. He argued that in essence, theater was nothing more than an interaction between an actor and an audience.
Then, in an audacious move, Grotowski concluded that the actor doesn’t need the audience after all. The artistic journey of the artist is the valuable essence of theater, and it can be accomplished alone.
Since then, I’ve been far less worried about whether anyone else might involve themselves in my theatrical journey. Relating to an audience has its own value, but it isn’t as necessary as most people think.
That's an interesting perspective. I guess it depends how people define art - as a relationship between the creator and the creation, or as the medium by which the artist communicates to the...
That's an interesting perspective.
I guess it depends how people define art - as a relationship between the creator and the creation, or as the medium by which the artist communicates to the audience.
It sounds like Grotowski's ideas roughly match my favourite idea about art from Alan de Botton, which seems to imply an audience, but can equally apply to the artist alone.
We might define art as anything which pushes our thoughts in important yet neglected directions.
I suppose, think of it this way. Does an aspiring artist need an audience? As far as I'm aware, most artists learn their craft with minimal involvement of others. Actors will have their fellow...
I suppose, think of it this way. Does an aspiring artist need an audience? As far as I'm aware, most artists learn their craft with minimal involvement of others. Actors will have their fellow actors but that's a requirement of the craft, and they're attempting to work as a cohesive unit so I don't think they count as an audience. Painters and writers often learn by countless works which never see the light of day. Musicians typically play for themselves.
So I would agree that an audience is not a requirement of an artists journey. It's certainly something most artists strive for, creating something worthy of an audience, but it's not a requirement.
We regularly apply that perspective to other types of art - playing music is a big part of me but I’m perfectly happy (and actually prefer) playing for no one but me. Similarly people paint for...
We regularly apply that perspective to other types of art - playing music is a big part of me but I’m perfectly happy (and actually prefer) playing for no one but me. Similarly people paint for the sake of painting or write poetry for their own private enjoyment or personal growth. Acting is I guess more performative by nature but there’s no reason it needs to be.
I had a blog for limited time (self-hosted, that's why it was limited). I wrote irregularly and always about some technical stuff, almost manual-like. I didn't care if anybody finda it or reads...
I had a blog for limited time (self-hosted, that's why it was limited). I wrote irregularly and always about some technical stuff, almost manual-like. I didn't care if anybody finda it or reads it, it was almost as my own backup of my own findings - just public so anyone could possibly find it and put it in practice themselves.
I should start the same thing again. I still have many things to write about and I still don't careif somebody reads or even finds it. It could become handy to myself in the future and if it becomes handy to somebody else, that would be great.
Now, does my server even has Apache installed? I need to redirect some ports and start thinking about how to approach this. Would I go for PHP once again? Maybe I'll write it as HTML files and just make some script hat would generate menu/homepage structure manually when I add new post... Yes, that seems plausible. I don't want to mess with databases... I think.
I recommend trying a static site generator like Hugo or Pelican. You write markdown, execute one command to convert it to HTML, then upload the resulting files. A basic conf file lets you generate...
I recommend trying a static site generator like Hugo or Pelican. You write markdown, execute one command to convert it to HTML, then upload the resulting files. A basic conf file lets you generate a menu and a homepage to your liking.
SSG is the way to go here. Not sure your technical prowess, but you're on this site, so I assume a hair more than the standard netizen? I'll write this out even if you get it, because who knows,...
SSG is the way to go here.
Not sure your technical prowess, but you're on this site, so I assume a hair more than the standard netizen?
I'll write this out even if you get it, because who knows, might help illuminate someone else.
I use GitHub to host, write, and publish my articles in Markdown1, and then I use Cloudflare Workers to build the site around my content using Eleventy (Jekyll is usually used, or Hugo) since I can have a new page or edit compiled and published to my site in about 20 seconds after clicking 'save'. No need to host anything, and unlimited bandwidth, with no real server management.
You don't have to use Cloudflare, I just prefer their build system and speed, you can use the built-in Github Pages system, or Netlify, or a thousand other static site generators + hosters, all of them let you use a git repo as your core.
Usually it works like this: You have a directory called src, the source of everything, this includes your theme, and another folder called posts which holds all your posts. Each blog post is in its own file so hello-world.md, at the top you define the name, date, and tags (and layout sometimes) in frontmatter. So your post looks like this:
title: Hello World!
date: 2025-02-10
tags: hello
---
This is your hello world post!
then your static site generator will take all your markdown posts, and force them into your theme, outputting static files (raw html). This way you don't have to handcraft any HTML. Usually the compiled site is stored in /public or _site. When you make a change or add a new post, or update your theme, just recompile the site.
You can do this manually on your own computer, or set up a GitHub Action, or Cloudflare Worker, or Netflify Deploy that checks for any new changes on GitHub, and automatically builds the site for you.
You can use a custom domain on all of those btw, for free if you own it, or use their defaults.
This way, you don't need to run a server, or worry about scripting, or wordpress or any other security nightmare, It's just plain html (and css/js if you want) being sent to the users. no dynamic web servers needed. Plus, it's free.
1 GitHub has the nicer raw markdown editor for hosted git services - don't even try GitLab, its beyond buggy, especially on mobile for writing.
My first blog was PHP as it was a thing I knew at the time. For fun I started writing it in Ruby (not Ruby on rails, just Ruby). I got it working to some extent but never set it to "production"....
My first blog was PHP as it was a thing I knew at the time. For fun I started writing it in Ruby (not Ruby on rails, just Ruby). I got it working to some extent but never set it to "production". This was like 10+ years ago. Articles were stored in MySQL database and the blog had no frontend for editing, I wrote posts directly to database. So much for technical prowess. Oh, I hosted everything on my own hardware at my house.
I have 24/7 machine running on public IP, I have domain and I will definitely host the blog there. Since I learned some things about security, I'm going static webpage that I would either write myself (I mean adding posts and menu entries, I will use some template for the frontend/UI) or write posts as discrete files already in HTML andthen generate the homepage/menu part by script. If it's my own script or something made for this usage, I can't tell now. But I'm taking notes of your advices and will have a look at the options.
One can say I'm technically quite advanced but stuck in the past :-) Thus I'm grateful for knowing new things from folks like yourself.
If it was literally zero readers, then I might as well just write stuff in a personal diary. There is a point to putting it on the web, and while it is true it is not necessarily about being...
If it was literally zero readers, then I might as well just write stuff in a personal diary. There is a point to putting it on the web, and while it is true it is not necessarily about being widely read, but I would wager most people who blog do like if at least someone reads something once in a while. Maybe someone will find a post several years later and appreciate that, and if that reader actually reaches out by email, a comment or guestbook, then that is way more valuable than seeing a big number in some analytics dashboard.
Or alternatively it gets ingested by a LLM, and then regurgitated without attribution at a later date. Then it all depends on how you see the value of that: you will have helped someone, but never...
Or alternatively it gets ingested by a LLM, and then regurgitated without attribution at a later date. Then it all depends on how you see the value of that: you will have helped someone, but never get the acknowledgment, and as a side effect empowered a LLM.
This is the conundrum I have with blogging and commenting in general, and I think will drive a lot of the more interesting discourse off the open web overall. However, your interpretation of the above may differ from mine.
I have just made peace with that, as no amount of robots.txt can keep them all away and their existence shouldn't dictate how actual humans engage with an open web it was originally made for.
I have just made peace with that, as no amount of robots.txt can keep them all away and their existence shouldn't dictate how actual humans engage with an open web it was originally made for.
On a related topic, I take photos of birds and put them on Flickr. I get single digit views for most photos and I have one follower so I was quite surprised when certain photos were racking up...
On a related topic, I take photos of birds and put them on Flickr. I get single digit views for most photos and I have one follower so I was quite surprised when certain photos were racking up double digits within minutes, sometimes triple digits with a bit more time. Then it hit me. It's the bots ingesting anything with the word 'tits' in the title. I had a good chuckle at that.
That is also true, and it’s why I continue to engage on places like this. But it has reduced the value of blogging, and to me makes closed web more appealing (and even real life discussions!...
That is also true, and it’s why I continue to engage on places like this. But it has reduced the value of blogging, and to me makes closed web more appealing (and even real life discussions! Whhhaaatttt)
In my opinion, if you have a small blog (eg. what's said in the article applies, you have either 0 or a couple of readers) you should just make all of your content public domain (CC0) and not...
In my opinion, if you have a small blog (eg. what's said in the article applies, you have either 0 or a couple of readers) you should just make all of your content public domain (CC0) and not expect to get anything back. Unless you suddenly get to the top 1 spot on Hacker News for like two days in a row, no amount of attribution will bring you a noticeable amount of new readers. Other people who cite you in their small blogs will probably give credit to you anyway.
Thats exactly my take on this. I agree that if you want to do something, just do it, but why post anything on the internet at all? Thats fine if you just want to write, but by posting it on the...
Thats exactly my take on this.
I agree that if you want to do something, just do it, but why post anything on the internet at all? Thats fine if you just want to write, but by posting it on the internet you’re at the very least putting your creative work out there to be scrutinized by the masses and and at worst gobbled up by gen ai.
If you wanted to just write, you could do it freely in a private space and not have to respond to any person who has something to say about it. Seems to me like it would be quicker to just write, and not maintain a blog.
Its also quicker to just go about your life, and not post on social media about it.
Im not even comfortable with the amount of time I spend using Tildes to procrastinate on work, and I know most people spend far more time on social media than I do. I wonder if its possible to estimate how much productivity we lose as a society because of it.
My first exposure to what would be called “blogs” was Xanga and LiveJournal. The way those were pitched, the second in particular, basically was that it was a personal diary that you just happened...
My first exposure to what would be called “blogs” was Xanga and LiveJournal. The way those were pitched, the second in particular, basically was that it was a personal diary that you just happened to be leaving out there. It’s like putting a note in a bottle. It’s likely nobody will read it and those who do won’t care. But you cast your line out there just to see what it catches. You’re not concerned about the message finding an audience, you’re focused on authentically connecting with someone across the vast chasm by more honestly baring your heart.
A large part of the motivation for me is the idea that someone might read it. That encourages me to take it a step further and make sure it is good. For whatever the definition of good is for me...
A large part of the motivation for me is the idea that someone might read it. That encourages me to take it a step further and make sure it is good. For whatever the definition of good is for me on that day.
It is easy to say: no-one reads it, just put it in a document on your hard drive. And then the next step is: why bother writing it down at all? If you're the only one reading it, you already know what you are writing, it is already in your head.
But that is not how it works. Writing helps your thinking, and it works best if you take one step further outside your own mind. Not "do I understand this now", but "would someone else understand this?" That pushes you to see your own blind spots a bit better, makes you try harder to articulate it well. That makes for better writing, and therefore better thinking.
I've mentioned in the odd comment here and there that I was debating starting another blog, as someone who wrote a mildly popular Livejournal for years. The reason I haven't yet is because I don't...
I've mentioned in the odd comment here and there that I was debating starting another blog, as someone who wrote a mildly popular Livejournal for years. The reason I haven't yet is because I don't quite agree with Andy--I don't disagree that writing for yourself alone has value in the practice of it, I disagree that it's sufficient.
Blogging forces clarity. It makes you structure your thoughts, sharpen your perspective. You stop writing fluff because — let’s be honest — you’re writing for yourself. And if you can’t keep yourself interested, nobody else stands a chance.
Bluntly, if I'm writing for myself, I put less effort into it. I have years of keeping paper journals to prove it, heh. If I'm writing with an imaginary reader in mind, I put more effort into it--I think more about whether the flow of thoughts makes sense, the structure of the arguments, the prosody of the sentences, if the references need explaining, and I think a lot about the rhetorical tone in a way that I simply don't if it's just for me.
Even if no one ends up reading it, I still put the effort in. I'm never looking for a large audience, but I do want the possibility of someone, somewhere stumbling across it and having that work be the best it can be for that person. Which is a bit corny, for sure, and maybe I'm overselling the idea. But the occasions where someone actually has reached out over a post that maybe didn't even get ten readers, back in the days where people still bothered to do that, kept me honest about what and how I was writing.
I agree that writing for yourself is a perfectly fine thing to do, and I appreciate what Andy's going for in the idea of the act of creation itself having intrinsic value to the creator. But what I'm interested in is communication and style, and those are discrete skills, and they don't get better in a vacuum. So I still haven't quite convinced myself that this counts as chopping wood and carrying water. At least, in my opinion. Maybe better to say it's not going to get my wood chopped.
I was about to write a comment saying the exact same thing. I have a hard time understating the value personal writing has brought to my life. Journaling, either in a reflection-style or doing...
I was about to write a comment saying the exact same thing.
I have a hard time understating the value personal writing has brought to my life. Journaling, either in a reflection-style or doing prompt Q&A journals, have been enormously helpful in clarifying and noticing my own thoughts.
However, writing for some audience (even hypothetical), like I do on Tildes, is a wholly different experience. I still get a lot of clarity about my own thoughts, but I’m also forced to structure the language in a way that somebody who is not me can understand.
When I write a comment or post too haphazardly, I often write in a way that makes sense to me, and then I’ll get very confused responses and realize there was a critical piece of my thinking I left out. Just the idea of an audience forces me to hold myself to a higher standard.
How will somebody who doesn’t know me or my experiences react to this set of paragraphs? Their perspective is separate from my own before they even begin reading. That practice is incredibly valuable in many different environments.
I write on my anonymous blog (which means I can't link it here as this account is attached to my actual identity) because my soul yearns to express itself. However my professional tech career...
I write on my anonymous blog (which means I can't link it here as this account is attached to my actual identity) because my soul yearns to express itself. However my professional tech career trajectory has paid the price for some of my writing over the years. For example back in 2018 I wrote a blog post on my public website called "Agile is Good and Scrum is Dumb".
A few years later I interviewed for a software engineering job and one of the interviewers had combed through my personal website and we ended up spending half of the interview debating the merits of this blog post. 100% chance that I did not get that job because of that post. It puts one in a tough position. I stand by that post, even seven years later. Scrum is amazingly stupid. But having an entire job interview get derailed because of that post was a less than great experience.
So a few years back I fired up an anonymous blog. Readership is still very low because doing that basically required me to rebuild my audience from scratch. But I can post whatever I want there without fear of retribution and without worrying that it will come back to bite me in the ass later. Ironically I'm in the twilight of my tech career now after 25 years. The job I have now will almost certainly be my last in this industry.
I take great joy in knowing that I'll never have to go through another tech interview cycle ever again. I also take great joy in knowing that no matter what tech opinion I express on my blog, I won't have to hear negative feedback from it about people who have the power to negatively impact my existence (outside of the handful of individuals who are aware of the fact that the blog actually belongs to me).
TLDR: I write because I must express myself. Whether or not others read the content is largely immaterial.
Feels shitty to be in that position indeed. But was there a point after that where you were like thank goodness I didn't get that job knowing that you might not get along with your colleagues....
100% chance that I did not get that job because of that post.
Feels shitty to be in that position indeed. But was there a point after that where you were like thank goodness I didn't get that job knowing that you might not get along with your colleagues. Asking from someone who just started the software engineering track!
Oh yeah 100% In retrospect I probably did myself a favor as there are other aspects that were definite red flags. For example that same guy who interviewed me repeatedly refers to himself as a 10x...
Oh yeah 100%
In retrospect I probably did myself a favor as there are other aspects that were definite red flags. For example that same guy who interviewed me repeatedly refers to himself as a 10x engineer on his own personal website.
But how people react to blog posts that are published in the professional sphere can go either way. It worked out in my favor THAT day but there were likely other days where it didn’t and I just don’t know about them.
I enjoy writing small-scale frontend code. For me, a blog is an opportunity to add code to my website. It currently has only one post - but I had to write a bunch of code to make that post show up...
I enjoy writing small-scale frontend code. For me, a blog is an opportunity to add code to my website. It currently has only one post - but I had to write a bunch of code to make that post show up properly, like markdown templates and css and a custom code highlighting theme and stuff. That was my main motivation for writing. My about page was only created because I wanted to add sidenote support to my website. I don't think I'll have the motivation to write another post until I come up with some idea that requires a new feature not currently supported by my site.
Because every blog has no readers at first. Yeah but there are popular blogs, and one thing they all have in common is that they started, without guarantee that anyone would read them. There is a...
Because every blog has no readers at first.
There are billions of blog posts out there. The internet is an infinite void, and your blog is a whisper in a hurricane.
Yeah but there are popular blogs, and one thing they all have in common is that they started, without guarantee that anyone would read them.
There is a functional purpose to hope in situations like this: if you don't bother trying unless there's a significant probability of success, you won't bother. There's no free lunch. All you can do is make a good thing and then roll the dice.
Wanting to succeed in a saturated field of billions is not foolishness, it's spirit.
I have a bearblog also. Bearblog has a Discover tab that lists all the blog posts by vote. The most popular content is usually very small posts about bearblog or blogging itself. Anything that is...
I have a bearblog also. Bearblog has a Discover tab that lists all the blog posts by vote. The most popular content is usually very small posts about bearblog or blogging itself. Anything that is not about blogging will get, at the most, one-tenth of the votes that posts about blogging accrue.
So the author definitely wrote for an audience there, which is why they got 900 votes. A good chunk of those visits was probably generated by bearblog itself. My top post on bearblog is about blogging. It is not even particularly useful or high quality.
My experience is that posting on Tildes and sometimes specific subreddits may give around two dozen visits and sometimes a few reactions. I wouldn't write a blog for literally zero people. That would be pointless. I might try journaling instead.
That makes sense. All of bearblogs combined wouldn't have as many votes in a week. I guess I'm a little surprised that such a short post saying something that trivial got so much engagement. That...
That makes sense. All of bearblogs combined wouldn't have as many votes in a week. I guess I'm a little surprised that such a short post saying something that obvious trivial got so much engagement. That shouldn't surprise me though, that's essentially how Twitter works.
EDIT: Also, I fail to see how, by the logic of the article, blogging would be any better than journaling.
My take on this is that I treat my blog (and its grand total of one article so far) in the most basic meaning of the term. The word originated as a contraction of web log, meaning it's a record of...
My take on this is that I treat my blog (and its grand total of one article so far) in the most basic meaning of the term. The word originated as a contraction of web log, meaning it's a record of events you keep on the Internet. With me being acutely aware of my memory being seriously deficient, having somewhere I can properly structure my thoughts in writing and access them later gives it all the purpose it needs to exist as far as I'm concerned. Of course, I could have decided to keep that "log" elsewhere, as local files in my computer, written down on physical paper, or in cloud storage, but while I have no explicit desire to build up an audience (nor set up expectations of what I'd put on there and how often, which would logically follow from that) I figured having it be publicly accessible could only be beneficial. If I put it into writing, then by definition at least one person, me, wants to remember it. Maybe someone else might?
I studied acting in college. My tastes ran toward experimentalism. By my senior year I was a devotee of Jerzy Grotowski. He argued that in essence, theater was nothing more than an interaction between an actor and an audience.
Then, in an audacious move, Grotowski concluded that the actor doesn’t need the audience after all. The artistic journey of the artist is the valuable essence of theater, and it can be accomplished alone.
Since then, I’ve been far less worried about whether anyone else might involve themselves in my theatrical journey. Relating to an audience has its own value, but it isn’t as necessary as most people think.
That's an interesting perspective.
I guess it depends how people define art - as a relationship between the creator and the creation, or as the medium by which the artist communicates to the audience.
It sounds like Grotowski's ideas roughly match my favourite idea about art from Alan de Botton, which seems to imply an audience, but can equally apply to the artist alone.
I suppose, think of it this way. Does an aspiring artist need an audience? As far as I'm aware, most artists learn their craft with minimal involvement of others. Actors will have their fellow actors but that's a requirement of the craft, and they're attempting to work as a cohesive unit so I don't think they count as an audience. Painters and writers often learn by countless works which never see the light of day. Musicians typically play for themselves.
So I would agree that an audience is not a requirement of an artists journey. It's certainly something most artists strive for, creating something worthy of an audience, but it's not a requirement.
We regularly apply that perspective to other types of art - playing music is a big part of me but I’m perfectly happy (and actually prefer) playing for no one but me. Similarly people paint for the sake of painting or write poetry for their own private enjoyment or personal growth. Acting is I guess more performative by nature but there’s no reason it needs to be.
I had a blog for limited time (self-hosted, that's why it was limited). I wrote irregularly and always about some technical stuff, almost manual-like. I didn't care if anybody finda it or reads it, it was almost as my own backup of my own findings - just public so anyone could possibly find it and put it in practice themselves.
I should start the same thing again. I still have many things to write about and I still don't careif somebody reads or even finds it. It could become handy to myself in the future and if it becomes handy to somebody else, that would be great.
Now, does my server even has Apache installed? I need to redirect some ports and start thinking about how to approach this. Would I go for PHP once again? Maybe I'll write it as HTML files and just make some script hat would generate menu/homepage structure manually when I add new post... Yes, that seems plausible. I don't want to mess with databases... I think.
I recommend trying a static site generator like Hugo or Pelican. You write markdown, execute one command to convert it to HTML, then upload the resulting files. A basic conf file lets you generate a menu and a homepage to your liking.
Thanks for the tip. I will have a look at that, I don't want scripted page anymore (due to various vulnerabilities I don't even know about).
SSG is the way to go here.
Not sure your technical prowess, but you're on this site, so I assume a hair more than the standard netizen?
I'll write this out even if you get it, because who knows, might help illuminate someone else.
I use GitHub to host, write, and publish my articles in Markdown1, and then I use Cloudflare Workers to build the site around my content using Eleventy (Jekyll is usually used, or Hugo) since I can have a new page or edit compiled and published to my site in about 20 seconds after clicking 'save'. No need to host anything, and unlimited bandwidth, with no real server management.
You don't have to use Cloudflare, I just prefer their build system and speed, you can use the built-in Github Pages system, or Netlify, or a thousand other static site generators + hosters, all of them let you use a git repo as your core.
Usually it works like this: You have a directory called
src, the source of everything, this includes your theme, and another folder calledpostswhich holds all your posts. Each blog post is in its own file sohello-world.md, at the top you define the name, date, and tags (and layout sometimes) in frontmatter. So your post looks like this:then your static site generator will take all your markdown posts, and force them into your theme, outputting static files (raw html). This way you don't have to handcraft any HTML. Usually the compiled site is stored in
/publicor_site. When you make a change or add a new post, or update your theme, just recompile the site.You can do this manually on your own computer, or set up a GitHub Action, or Cloudflare Worker, or Netflify Deploy that checks for any new changes on GitHub, and automatically builds the site for you.
You can use a custom domain on all of those btw, for free if you own it, or use their defaults.
This way, you don't need to run a server, or worry about scripting, or wordpress or any other security nightmare, It's just plain html (and css/js if you want) being sent to the users. no dynamic web servers needed. Plus, it's free.
1 GitHub has the nicer raw markdown editor for hosted git services - don't even try GitLab, its beyond buggy, especially on mobile for writing.
My first blog was PHP as it was a thing I knew at the time. For fun I started writing it in Ruby (not Ruby on rails, just Ruby). I got it working to some extent but never set it to "production". This was like 10+ years ago. Articles were stored in MySQL database and the blog had no frontend for editing, I wrote posts directly to database. So much for technical prowess. Oh, I hosted everything on my own hardware at my house.
I have 24/7 machine running on public IP, I have domain and I will definitely host the blog there. Since I learned some things about security, I'm going static webpage that I would either write myself (I mean adding posts and menu entries, I will use some template for the frontend/UI) or write posts as discrete files already in HTML andthen generate the homepage/menu part by script. If it's my own script or something made for this usage, I can't tell now. But I'm taking notes of your advices and will have a look at the options.
One can say I'm technically quite advanced but stuck in the past :-) Thus I'm grateful for knowing new things from folks like yourself.
For me, publishing is more about getting it to a place where it's readable by another person. Like a quality check.
If it was literally zero readers, then I might as well just write stuff in a personal diary. There is a point to putting it on the web, and while it is true it is not necessarily about being widely read, but I would wager most people who blog do like if at least someone reads something once in a while. Maybe someone will find a post several years later and appreciate that, and if that reader actually reaches out by email, a comment or guestbook, then that is way more valuable than seeing a big number in some analytics dashboard.
Or alternatively it gets ingested by a LLM, and then regurgitated without attribution at a later date. Then it all depends on how you see the value of that: you will have helped someone, but never get the acknowledgment, and as a side effect empowered a LLM.
This is the conundrum I have with blogging and commenting in general, and I think will drive a lot of the more interesting discourse off the open web overall. However, your interpretation of the above may differ from mine.
I have just made peace with that, as no amount of
robots.txtcan keep them all away and their existence shouldn't dictate how actual humans engage with an open web it was originally made for.On a related topic, I take photos of birds and put them on Flickr. I get single digit views for most photos and I have one follower so I was quite surprised when certain photos were racking up double digits within minutes, sometimes triple digits with a bit more time. Then it hit me. It's the bots ingesting anything with the word 'tits' in the title. I had a good chuckle at that.
Do you also post boobies?
Tragically I have not yet had the chance to see boobies in person. One day hopefully!
I hope one day you photograph the blue footed booby, it's a magnificent bird
Me too friend, me too!
That is also true, and it’s why I continue to engage on places like this. But it has reduced the value of blogging, and to me makes closed web more appealing (and even real life discussions! Whhhaaatttt)
In my opinion, if you have a small blog (eg. what's said in the article applies, you have either 0 or a couple of readers) you should just make all of your content public domain (CC0) and not expect to get anything back. Unless you suddenly get to the top 1 spot on Hacker News for like two days in a row, no amount of attribution will bring you a noticeable amount of new readers. Other people who cite you in their small blogs will probably give credit to you anyway.
Thats exactly my take on this.
I agree that if you want to do something, just do it, but why post anything on the internet at all? Thats fine if you just want to write, but by posting it on the internet you’re at the very least putting your creative work out there to be scrutinized by the masses and and at worst gobbled up by gen ai.
If you wanted to just write, you could do it freely in a private space and not have to respond to any person who has something to say about it. Seems to me like it would be quicker to just write, and not maintain a blog.
Its also quicker to just go about your life, and not post on social media about it.
Im not even comfortable with the amount of time I spend using Tildes to procrastinate on work, and I know most people spend far more time on social media than I do. I wonder if its possible to estimate how much productivity we lose as a society because of it.
My first exposure to what would be called “blogs” was Xanga and LiveJournal. The way those were pitched, the second in particular, basically was that it was a personal diary that you just happened to be leaving out there. It’s like putting a note in a bottle. It’s likely nobody will read it and those who do won’t care. But you cast your line out there just to see what it catches. You’re not concerned about the message finding an audience, you’re focused on authentically connecting with someone across the vast chasm by more honestly baring your heart.
A large part of the motivation for me is the idea that someone might read it. That encourages me to take it a step further and make sure it is good. For whatever the definition of good is for me on that day.
It is easy to say: no-one reads it, just put it in a document on your hard drive. And then the next step is: why bother writing it down at all? If you're the only one reading it, you already know what you are writing, it is already in your head.
But that is not how it works. Writing helps your thinking, and it works best if you take one step further outside your own mind. Not "do I understand this now", but "would someone else understand this?" That pushes you to see your own blind spots a bit better, makes you try harder to articulate it well. That makes for better writing, and therefore better thinking.
I've mentioned in the odd comment here and there that I was debating starting another blog, as someone who wrote a mildly popular Livejournal for years. The reason I haven't yet is because I don't quite agree with Andy--I don't disagree that writing for yourself alone has value in the practice of it, I disagree that it's sufficient.
Bluntly, if I'm writing for myself, I put less effort into it. I have years of keeping paper journals to prove it, heh. If I'm writing with an imaginary reader in mind, I put more effort into it--I think more about whether the flow of thoughts makes sense, the structure of the arguments, the prosody of the sentences, if the references need explaining, and I think a lot about the rhetorical tone in a way that I simply don't if it's just for me.
Even if no one ends up reading it, I still put the effort in. I'm never looking for a large audience, but I do want the possibility of someone, somewhere stumbling across it and having that work be the best it can be for that person. Which is a bit corny, for sure, and maybe I'm overselling the idea. But the occasions where someone actually has reached out over a post that maybe didn't even get ten readers, back in the days where people still bothered to do that, kept me honest about what and how I was writing.
I agree that writing for yourself is a perfectly fine thing to do, and I appreciate what Andy's going for in the idea of the act of creation itself having intrinsic value to the creator. But what I'm interested in is communication and style, and those are discrete skills, and they don't get better in a vacuum. So I still haven't quite convinced myself that this counts as chopping wood and carrying water. At least, in my opinion. Maybe better to say it's not going to get my wood chopped.
I was about to write a comment saying the exact same thing.
I have a hard time understating the value personal writing has brought to my life. Journaling, either in a reflection-style or doing prompt Q&A journals, have been enormously helpful in clarifying and noticing my own thoughts.
However, writing for some audience (even hypothetical), like I do on Tildes, is a wholly different experience. I still get a lot of clarity about my own thoughts, but I’m also forced to structure the language in a way that somebody who is not me can understand.
When I write a comment or post too haphazardly, I often write in a way that makes sense to me, and then I’ll get very confused responses and realize there was a critical piece of my thinking I left out. Just the idea of an audience forces me to hold myself to a higher standard.
How will somebody who doesn’t know me or my experiences react to this set of paragraphs? Their perspective is separate from my own before they even begin reading. That practice is incredibly valuable in many different environments.
I write on my anonymous blog (which means I can't link it here as this account is attached to my actual identity) because my soul yearns to express itself. However my professional tech career trajectory has paid the price for some of my writing over the years. For example back in 2018 I wrote a blog post on my public website called "Agile is Good and Scrum is Dumb".
https://jaylittle.com/post/view/2018/3/agile-is-good-and-scrum-is-dumb/
A few years later I interviewed for a software engineering job and one of the interviewers had combed through my personal website and we ended up spending half of the interview debating the merits of this blog post. 100% chance that I did not get that job because of that post. It puts one in a tough position. I stand by that post, even seven years later. Scrum is amazingly stupid. But having an entire job interview get derailed because of that post was a less than great experience.
So a few years back I fired up an anonymous blog. Readership is still very low because doing that basically required me to rebuild my audience from scratch. But I can post whatever I want there without fear of retribution and without worrying that it will come back to bite me in the ass later. Ironically I'm in the twilight of my tech career now after 25 years. The job I have now will almost certainly be my last in this industry.
I take great joy in knowing that I'll never have to go through another tech interview cycle ever again. I also take great joy in knowing that no matter what tech opinion I express on my blog, I won't have to hear negative feedback from it about people who have the power to negatively impact my existence (outside of the handful of individuals who are aware of the fact that the blog actually belongs to me).
TLDR: I write because I must express myself. Whether or not others read the content is largely immaterial.
Feels shitty to be in that position indeed. But was there a point after that where you were like thank goodness I didn't get that job knowing that you might not get along with your colleagues. Asking from someone who just started the software engineering track!
Oh yeah 100%
In retrospect I probably did myself a favor as there are other aspects that were definite red flags. For example that same guy who interviewed me repeatedly refers to himself as a 10x engineer on his own personal website.
But how people react to blog posts that are published in the professional sphere can go either way. It worked out in my favor THAT day but there were likely other days where it didn’t and I just don’t know about them.
I enjoy writing small-scale frontend code. For me, a blog is an opportunity to add code to my website. It currently has only one post - but I had to write a bunch of code to make that post show up properly, like markdown templates and css and a custom code highlighting theme and stuff. That was my main motivation for writing. My about page was only created because I wanted to add sidenote support to my website. I don't think I'll have the motivation to write another post until I come up with some idea that requires a new feature not currently supported by my site.
Because every blog has no readers at first.
Yeah but there are popular blogs, and one thing they all have in common is that they started, without guarantee that anyone would read them.
There is a functional purpose to hope in situations like this: if you don't bother trying unless there's a significant probability of success, you won't bother. There's no free lunch. All you can do is make a good thing and then roll the dice.
Wanting to succeed in a saturated field of billions is not foolishness, it's spirit.
I have a bearblog also. Bearblog has a Discover tab that lists all the blog posts by vote. The most popular content is usually very small posts about bearblog or blogging itself. Anything that is not about blogging will get, at the most, one-tenth of the votes that posts about blogging accrue.
So the author definitely wrote for an audience there, which is why they got 900 votes. A good chunk of those visits was probably generated by bearblog itself. My top post on bearblog is about blogging. It is not even particularly useful or high quality.
My experience is that posting on Tildes and sometimes specific subreddits may give around two dozen visits and sometimes a few reactions. I wouldn't write a blog for literally zero people. That would be pointless. I might try journaling instead.
It was sitting at the top of HN for a solid day or so yesterday, that's certainly playing a major role.
That makes sense. All of bearblogs combined wouldn't have as many votes in a week. I guess I'm a little surprised that such a short post saying something that
obvioustrivial got so much engagement. That shouldn't surprise me though, that's essentially how Twitter works.EDIT: Also, I fail to see how, by the logic of the article, blogging would be any better than journaling.
My take on this is that I treat my blog (and its grand total of one article so far) in the most basic meaning of the term. The word originated as a contraction of web log, meaning it's a record of events you keep on the Internet. With me being acutely aware of my memory being seriously deficient, having somewhere I can properly structure my thoughts in writing and access them later gives it all the purpose it needs to exist as far as I'm concerned. Of course, I could have decided to keep that "log" elsewhere, as local files in my computer, written down on physical paper, or in cloud storage, but while I have no explicit desire to build up an audience (nor set up expectations of what I'd put on there and how often, which would logically follow from that) I figured having it be publicly accessible could only be beneficial. If I put it into writing, then by definition at least one person, me, wants to remember it. Maybe someone else might?