How to post when no one is reading

Couldn't have said it better.

I really didn't get to "do things I love" until I escaped poverty.

Financial freedom is one of the lenses through which you always have to filter life advice from all sources.

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.

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.

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.

I don't think this is a feeling; it's a fact. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is related to this.

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

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.

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

You wrote your 200th, I wrote my...I think 4th today :D

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!

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.)

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.)

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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...

You may feel differently if/when you have children.

The Boomer ethic in a nutshell

"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.

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!

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.

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.

> 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.

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)

This December 2024 article mentions several publishers telling their poor return on Twitter: https://www.emarketer.com/content/bluesky-surpasses-threads-...

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.

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.

"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".