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10 years of writing a blog nobody reads

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Re: 10 years of writing a blog nobody reads

#161

Post by riazrizvi »

a_bonobo wrote: post #57
riazrizvi wrote: post #36

Writing a blog is like talking in the town square. Except because it’s digital, we seem to forget how communication works. If you just start talking in the town square, you’re standing alone talking. Sure a person who passes by might pause, but the odds you’re saying something really relevant to them are low, so they’ll move on. The whole question of how you get in front of the right people and tweak your message bas…

Related, I think people have stopped.... reacting on the internet? I've been part of the X/Twitter to Bluesky migration and people often mention how 'quiet' Bluesky is. I think that's not due to algorithmic intervention of product design etc., I think people are just tired. The novelty of shouting at strangers on the internet has worn off - how many internet fights have we gotten into that did nothing in the end exce…

I think the aggressive bots/AI, and bad moderation policy, have poisoned online discourse in popular channels.

You can still find real people in niche communities (like here), where good moderators can maintain a grip on quality. Though perhaps HN has some secret moderator sauce, I’m not aware of.

Humans are just migrating off the old, big platforms that no longer feel real.

Re: 10 years of writing a blog nobody reads

#162

Post by d-lisp »

josephg wrote: post #132
d-lisp wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

--- part2 > [spotify streams] To me, we're in a difficult position because the only way you have to quantify the value of an artwork (music in this case) is the number of streams it has. Call me a mad man but it is not rare for me to hate most streamed music and to prefer streamed music. Yet I seriously doubt I am "musically dumb". What I find instead is that advertisment, reputation, exposure, a good label, radio st…

> Now if you wrote a small piano piece, there is no way you could predict if it will become a hit or not. It depends on factors that are really far from being limited to "the piece in question". This is where I think we really disagree. If I want to make music people like, I’m pretty sure piano lessons would help me. Theory. Rhythm. Learning to sing. Then I need to practice! Making a smash hit isn’t predictable, but…

Fair to me, we agree more than you may think !

I didn't say [learn piano = don't learn piano].

What I said is the banal : no matter how you're skilled, there's no guarantee of success, and in the small window of opportunity that is "becoming successful", there are (maybe normally distributed) skilled and non skilled people.

Not sure about "most overnight successes are 20 years in the making"; if I want to be perfectly rationnal, I recognize that this sentence is often false (but don't have the data to analyze this in depth, I would love to be able to check this though).

I don't want to offend you by any mean, but we have a tendency to pick up some examples and to hallucinate something from that few examples (which is a natural and quasi-reasonable thing to do when you have a sufficient large dataset); here you tell me about Louis CK, and while it can be true that they did better over time, I am pretty sure we can find counterexemples of this, no ? I imagine that's not a rare thing to meet people that prefer early-xxxx more than later-xxxx.

> Ask anyone successful.

I decided to erase what I meant to answer here (maybe it's time to move on haha).

Well, I think I understood you position, I'm glad we took the time to talk. The internet is full of these opportunities and I enjoy that from time to time, even if thinking in a language I master less than my main one is always tiresome and somewhat "violent" (I feel dumber in English ?). (Wow, it's late in Australia !)

Re: 10 years of writing a blog nobody reads

#163

Post by noboostforyou »

cryptonector wrote: post #79
gmuslera wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After all we said and done, we will be only a memory in some future AI model. And maybe it will answer the meaning of the number 42.

The answer is: let there be light.

I love that short story from Asimov

Re: 10 years of writing a blog nobody reads

#164

Post by accidc »

xnx wrote: post #14

The scraper bots probably read it and now it is ever so slightly altering the weights in some massive AI model. That's not nothing.

I captured a very similar thought in the footnotes of one of my comments here.

A numerical distillation of our aggregated thoughts will live on for potentially longer than any ordinary person could have hoped for (and maybe wanted).

We actually get our own slice of immortality.

Re: 10 years of writing a blog nobody reads

#165

Post by keybored »

hekkle wrote: post #30
keybored wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s just less literate people feeling the need to out themselves.

It has nothing to do with literacy, the em-dash simply is not on the standard US QWERTY keyboard. This means that people who purposefully use it, either have to copy-paste it from somewhere or (if they-re on Windows), use "Alt + 0 1 5 1". This is very obviously not a natural behaviour that 'literate' people use when they write.

You have to take a step back. The first part is not about writing prose. It is about consuming it. And all publishers who are mainstream and respectable use proper English symbols. Now they might use ASCII apostrophe instead of the recommended left single quotation mark. But using a single hyphen or two hyphens or three hyphens for an em-dash is out of the question.

Literacy starts with consuming texts and doesn’t stop once you have learned to read comfortably. People who consume a more varied selection of prose than, say, programming mailing lists will have seen plenty of em-dashes in their time and won’t balk at people using normal punctuation.

Re: 10 years of writing a blog nobody reads

#166

Post by keybored »

hekkle wrote: post #41
wlesieutre wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can type "--" in most writing software and it will turn into an em-dash. On a Mac, this includes TextEdit by default, or literally every text input field if you enable the "smart dashes" setting. I can type — right now in my web browser with two presses on my ordinary laptop keyboard and no memorizing character ID numbers, not exactly rocket science. If you're using Word or other fancy word processors, you don't…

> Have all the people parroting "dash means it was written by ChatGPT" never used a word processor? Probably not, this is "HACKER" News, if I type two n-dashes on a website, I EXPECT two n-dashes, otherwise things like HTML comments would break the page.

Why would you write to n-dashes? HTML comments use hyphens.

Re: 10 years of writing a blog nobody reads

#167

Post by nanfinitum »

petterroea wrote: post #99

One of the tough pills I and probably many other developers have had to swallow when maturing is that "non-programming skills" from schools are useful and very valuable, actually. Writing is one of them. Everyone loves a programmer that can explain themselves. An opinion isn't worth having if you aren't able to defend it either. Maintaining a blog therefore seems like a great way of improving your writing skills whil…

One benefit of blogs that isn't mentioned enough is the opportunity to express unorthodox ideas, and the chance to defend them to form a good thesis.

Diversity of thought is pretty valuable. So is training yourself to think independently, come up with your own premises and learning to build sound arguments, which you also get from writing and discussing ideas.

Re: 10 years of writing a blog nobody reads

#168

Post by GMoromisato »

purplecats wrote: post #108
GMoromisato wrote: post #61

[Self-promotion warning] My blog that nobody read turned into a published book. An editor for a small publishing firm happened to come across my blog and thought that it might be good as a book. He contacted me and after about a year of work (more than I expected) I finished the book and got it published. It's not that popular, but I'm very happy with it. My point is that you don't need a massive audience. If you can…

congrats! fun little story. how much did you make from it?

Not very much. Maybe $10K over 10 years. Do not quit your day job!

But I'm hoping to make $2K from the Anthropic settlement, so I got that going for me.

Re: 10 years of writing a blog nobody reads

#169

Post by GMoromisato »

nivethan wrote: post #78
GMoromisato wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was my old astrophotography blog: https://neurohack.com/Astrophotography/index.html And the book it led to is 101 Amazing Sights of the Night Sky: https://www.amazon.com/101-Amazing-Sights-Night-Sky/dp/15919... Neither is very popular, but it was a lot of fun.

Picked it up :) The look inside was great, it reminds me of an old astronomy book that I was obsessed with a long time ago.

Awesome! Let me know what you think.

Re: 10 years of writing a blog nobody reads

#170

Post by GMoromisato »

tristramb wrote: post #122
GMoromisato wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was my old astrophotography blog: https://neurohack.com/Astrophotography/index.html And the book it led to is 101 Amazing Sights of the Night Sky: https://www.amazon.com/101-Amazing-Sights-Night-Sky/dp/15919... Neither is very popular, but it was a lot of fun.

It always pleases me to see pictures of NGC 4216, the edge-on spiral galaxy with a star beside its nucleus. I used to use it as a pointer to the short-period contact binary star CC Comae Berenices back when I used observe eclipsing binaries with my Celestron 8.

Nice! I was never much of a visual observer--I never had the patience.
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