The web comic XKCD built a brand around this, I think. I'm not sure whether the creator did this intentionally, but much of XKCD's success is based on saying things that we all think but haven't articulated. On Reddit, it's very common to see posts where OP complains about a tech issue, and the top voted reply is simply a link to an XKCD comic.
Blogging can just be stating the obvious
131–138 of 138 posts
Re: Blogging can just be stating the obvious
#132I find this phenomena happens with viral posts on Reels and TikTok. The first time I see an example of a trend, I'm delighted! I've never seen anything like this before, and what a great idea! But then I see a second example of the same trend, then a third. Soon I'm sick of them.
For the Reel creator, it doesn't matter if their Reel is the "second time" for many people. As long as they happen to catch enough "first timers" in their dragnet, their post will perform well.
Re: Blogging can just be stating the obvious
#133An engineer friend of mine, after a decade in industry where he rose to management, decided to go get an MBA at a top ten management school. Compared to engineering, he said it was easy, since everything they teach you is obvious common sense . I thought that meant the degree was worthless. But he said just the opposite. Even though it's all obvious common sense , it really helps to have someone lay it all out togeth…
Common sense is gold. It's also hard to find. Ask yourself where, if you were interested, you might find a book full of common sense about say, the airline industry. It's a hard question, right? Most stuff will be either too technical, or too shallow, or simply annoying.
Relatedly, I've found that AIs are spectacularly good at common sense. Nowadays, if I ask myself where I can find common sense about the airline industry, the answer is "Ask an AI, of course." We've never had the ability to find common sense so easily.
Re: Blogging can just be stating the obvious
#134There's also a social component to blogging, right? When you post something it tells me about who you are. It helps establish my (probably parasocial) relationship with you. And when you post something, I might be interested in it, even if I wasn't interested when someone else posted about it, because I'm interested in you and interested in what you have to say. I think that human communication is about pure relation…
We're all just birds displaying our plumage.
Re: Blogging can just be stating the obvious
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
How the information is shared can be as important as the act of sharing it in the first place. You might have a particular voice and style for communicating these ideas, but your audience may have otherwise passed it over without your unique approach.
Writers often help the reader secure knowledge that they already feel is correct but have not yet full distilled.
This is why we (or I) tend to follow blog and website that resonate.
Re: Blogging can just be stating the obvious
#136Basically call out stuff that are normalized buy annoying
Re: Blogging can just be stating the obvious
#137> So it must be that a key ingredient to blogging is simple: have a willingness to state something that seems obvious to you but nobody else is saying it. Or if someone else is saying it, just link to them and say, “Yes!!! This!!!” As a young mathematician in grade school, I had boundless enthusiasm to prove and present basic theorems in number theory and geometry. Now, as a PhD mathematician who has since pivoted in…
> Are you not just noise competing with other noise, drowning out the valuable signals in your domain for your own personal gain You have an audience willing to give you the benefit of the doubt to learn something they’re unfamiliar with. It’s specifically the fact that you chose to highlight a topic that makes your audience pay attention. Perhaps nobody else could have gotten their attention and adjusted their persp…
“Why does the bird sing?” said the Master.
Not because he has a statement, but because he has a song.
https://www.wisdom2be.com/gems-poetry-wisdomstories/the-song...
Re: Blogging can just be stating the obvious
#138Most search results nowadays are SEO farms. Posts I read are also mostly just someone debugging a weird bug for endless hours only cause they were mad, just grep output and the fix. personal domain blogs survive faster than medium.
I'm looking forward to AI summaries killing SEO farms.
True, but it feels like a double-edged sword; spammers are already shifting their text to "AI SEO" which is basically just formatting text to get a higher chance of being cited by an LLM. If anything, it'll make independent blogs much more important.