Ask HN: How do you build a reputation without social media? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you build a reputation without social media?

7 pointsunbeholden5 comments

I've recently started writing a blog to boost my online presence as I think it would be beneficial for my career. The thing is I don't enjoy being active on social media which feels like a major constraint. I'm curious about your thoughts on this matter and what you'd do in such situation.

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Whatever happened to offline reputation? In my opinion, real ultimate power comes from using social media to boost ideas rather than oneself... you have to assemble yourself a "following" in the offline sense if you want to be successful in life, the universe, and everything.

Once you're "cool", once you've had your moment of applause (or if you really pull it off, once you've had your name chanted over and over by a crowd)... then the sky (or the stars) is the limit.

How do you become cool?

I can't give you a FAQ or walkthrough, but whether your passions lie in art or science focusing on your passions and sharing what you come up with seems to be a core component.

I'd focus on following your passions OP, the time you save not scrolling Reddit or whatever will pay off in spades when you have some project or artwork you've created.

Past performance is no guarantee of future results OP... focus on being your authentic self, focus on being productive and not just doomscrolling, and I suspect eventually good things will come, because your following you've built up offline will boost you when you decide to make that leap onto social media.

Linking to your blog on your profile here is a starter :)

But seriously, it is kind of difficult and it depends on your definition of social media. Is Hacker News a social media to you for example?

I've had some great success in the past just posting my articles here. As you can see from my post history I'm not exactly "active", posting 6 times in the last year.

There is always the traditional routes of paying for targeted advertising, email campaigns and so on. However this depends on the type of "growth" you want. Does your blog have a comment section? If not you kind of need to post it somewhere for you to get any feedback whatsoever. If you are writing solely for the purpose of advancing your own career I struggle to see why the articles would be interesting to read for others. So I at least suggest having some other motivation than that.

I realise that my answer contains a lot of "ifs" but it is really hard to answer such a vague question without any particulars.

Thanks for your reply. Yes I consider HN a social media. I like to read through it from time to time but being introvert in real life I also don't have the urge or need to comment on what I read.

I really like the idea of adding comment section to my blog posts.

I'm adding the link to my profile as well.

I see. In that case you could see social media as a one-way street. You post your articles and you don't have to go back and read or interact with comments on the respective site. You could even use some crossposting solution to post to all the medias at once (I think these exist still).

I suspect growth will be slower if you don't interact at all on these platforms, but by the sounds of it that would be an acceptable trade-off for you.

On my biggest post/article I did not have the time or effort to respond to even 10% of the comments here, and that is/was totally fine. The article and its comment section on HN had a life of their own which I was not required to partake in.

> I also don't have the urge or need to comment on what I read

Wait until you see a comment by other person about a topic you know. It's not necessary to write just to write, but it's very helpful for the community if you can provide some information from time to time.

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