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Why blog if nobody reads it?

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Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?

#161

Post by marcus_holmes »

zoogeny wrote: post #137
totallykvothe wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your comment highlights a fundamental difference in how most modern people understand religion from how our ancestors did. In the pre-1970 Catholic mass, the priest faced the altar and spoke in Latin. The mass was changed in 1970 so the priest faces the people and speaks in the vernacular. The shift in understanding is clear. Religion used to be about God, and about our obligations to and relationships with H…

I think it may be the case that your possession of a tidbit of trivia and your particular interpretation of changes/reforms that came after Vatican II is causing you to interpret my comment in a different light than it was meant. I was actually envisioning something closer to the monastery that Alyosha was a part of in The Brothers Karamazov. It reminds me of the cliché admonishment of priests that pray in the street…

>If you know you will not (or perhaps should not) blog to gain an audience, why should you do it?

I'm an atheist, so (knowing there are no gods) should I perform a ritual?

Is the ritual for the gods' benefit, or for mine?

Is the ritual for its own sake, something we do because we have always done it?

Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?

#162

Post by SamPatt »

Tyler Cowen has said he wrote his last book for the AI.

I'm nobody, and I'm in there because I wrote a lot for a popular open source project I was involved with a decade ago.

Who knows if it'll be good or bad, but if you put stuff out there or do something notable, you're in the AI weights.

Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?

#164

Post by hoaitx »

I've been writing blogs for over 5 years, and I've drawn some conclusions:

- Writing is first and foremost a learning process. I've learned a great deal, such as how to write, present, and persuade, not to mention the immense amount of knowledge I've acquired while researching for my articles.

- Writing is a means of self-expression. It may seem a bit vain, but my point is that by writing, you continually learn and improve each day. This makes you better than you were yesterday, and I believe that looking back on your past achievements will never leave you disappointed.

- Writing is a way to inspire others. Have you ever read an article that completely changed your perspective? That's what I'm talking about. And certainly, you can write to motivate others as well.

- Writing is a way to receive empathy. I think I've "bookmarked" numerous blogs by others who share valuable insights with the community.

- Writing is a way to alleviate stress. I'm not sure if anyone else is like me, but I can spend hours fine-tuning my content, and during those times, I feel truly at ease.

- Lastly, I don't want to stop at just writing blogs. I hope to write a book of my own in the future. Just thinking about it motivates me to work even harder.

Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?

#167

Post by uzername »

I've used mine as a personal knowledge base that happens to be public. It's silly how many times I've come up in search results months or years later after I'd forgotten having solved this problem before.

A semi-related story: Freshmen year in college, I was about a week ahead in the sci curriculum and I blogged regularly about novel errors I encountered and how I fixed them. During lab late in the semester, I happen to look up into the next row. I found the duo there reading my blog post.

Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?

#168

Post by araes »

minimaxir wrote: post #37

Over a decade, I've learnt to blog as if no one will ever read my blog posts. With social referral traffic now completely dead, the only traffic I get to my blog is when my posts appear on Hacker News ( https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=minimaxir.com ), and even that is going down year-over-year. However, the process of writing a blog post forces me to invent new workflows and is in itself very educational, so i…

> With social referral traffic now completely dead, the only traffic I get to my blog is when my posts appear on Hacker News

Not being a blog writer, that seems rather crazy to hear with how "social" the WWW has supposedly gotten. WP claims, there's 33 sites "with at least 100 million (monthly) active users". [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_platforms_with_...

Top sites are up at multi-1000 million / month. Sure, some of the top sites (Youtube, Instagram, TikTok) are very heavily video based. Yet, it still seems amazing that with that many users there's so little "sharing" in terms of long form written essays or blogs. That the situation was actually better in terms of referrals before there was all the sharing? Now there's actually less organic referral traffic, and Hacker News is apparently one of the best. Walled garden issues? Better fit of the subject matter to readers? Completely videos everywhere? Decline of reading in general?

Last stats I could find from dang have:

2022, Nov 3, 5M monthly unique, 10M page views a day, 1300 submissions a day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33454140

2015, Mar 17: 3-3.5M monthly unique, 2.6M page views a day, 300K uniques a day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9220098

Compared to somewhere like Facebook that supposedly have 3070M monthly uniques, yet apparently produce almost no referral traffic whatsoever, that's a wildly disproportionate ratio of effectiveness for the audience size.

Edit: Taken another way, in what seems like a pessimistic view. If only 1% of Facebook still read long form writing. And only 1% of those actually decided a post was worthy of clicking on. That would still amount to 300,000 views. That seems like a lot.

Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?

#169

Post by Sylamore »

ZeWaren wrote: post #6

I document technical things on my blog and hardly anyone reads it. But later on when I need that thing again, I just go there and I have the perfect documentation available for the topic (it's perfect since I wrote it hahaha).

I used to do that, now I just keep a OneNote with the things that would have been blog entries once upon a time - it's available across all my devices and I can export it to PDF when I do need to share something with someone - and I don't have to worry about someone defacing or hacking the site hosting it.

Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?

#170

Post by FpUser »

simonw wrote: post #11

Writing on a blog is a very inexpensive way to establish your credibility about different subjects. This pays off later down the line when you can link people to things you've written in the past. Credibility is a very valuable commodity. It's worth investing in ways to build more of it. Don't assume people will stumble across your content (though they will eventually via Google). Actively send links to people who yo…

>"...way to establish your credibility about different subjects..."

Or the other way around

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