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Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

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Re: Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

#191

Post by wiether »

bji9jhff wrote: post #34
JonChesterfield wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The content will be discovered just fine. It'll get embedded in the LLMs on the next round of training. Won't be attributed to your blog of course, but an approximation to the information will still get out there.

Knowing mega corps will suck my blood thanklessly is of no solace.

You can also see it that way: big corps are funding the computing cost to ingest and propagate your ideas to millions of people, for free to you.

The alternative would be to setup yourself a system that could serve those people.

Re: Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

#192

Post by spankibalt »

Brajeshwar wrote: post #94
simonw wrote: post #88

Here are some reasons to start a personal blog: 1. It's a great way to learn. Teaching something to someone else has always been the best learning tool, and writing about something with an audience in mind is an effective way to capture some of that value. 2. It can be a big boost in job hunting. As a hiring manager two of the most important questions I have about a potential candidate are: Can they code? Can they co…

I like Point No. 4. By now, I have enough articles to point to when people ask the same questions over and over. I have been asked, “Do you always have a blog post for these questions?” Another advice or a deduction that I learnt from reading biographies and many historical books is — write as if you are writing for a stranger, even on your own personal blog/diaries/memoir — when you get older, your younger self will…

"[...] write as if you are writing for a stranger, even on your own personal blog/diaries/memoir — when you get older, your younger self will become a stranger and you will have forgotten a lot of things in that life you lived."

How bizarre. Well, memory spaces are just that, I suppose. I write diaries and letters since before I entered school and my younger self does feel anything but a stranger to me; many of my memories are as lucid to me as they were all those decades ago, both life-changing as well as trivial ones.

Re: Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

#193

Post by wiether »

soiltype wrote: post #144
jclarkcom wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, for example this article including charts and summaries were generated by AI. https://jonathanclark.com/posts/ai-coding-million-lines-2025... Typically I act as an editor rather than a direct writer with cursor now replacing word

I'm sorry to be harsh, but honest question - What's the purpose of using AI to create toy software that already exists (eg. YouTube downloader)? Normally the purpose would be to learn how to create that type of software, but that's presumably being skipped. Similarly... what's the point of blogging if you're not writing it yourself? This post is very long, but seems to basically just be riffing on the title over and…

See Simon's comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46011877

Re: Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

#194

Post by raffael_de »

wiether wrote: post #190
raffael_de wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A list of all sites indexed by Kagi Small Web is on GitHub: https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb/blob/main/smallweb.tx... As a Kagi customer I have to say that's a disappointingly short list and static approach :/

A a Kagi customer I have to say that finding the Small Web list "disappointingly short" is kinda hilarious

If you consider how huge the web is then 23887 websites is not covering a small but a tiny part. Also the approach of maintaining such a list manually seems fairly uninspired.

Re: Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

#195

Post by biztos »

HeinzStuckeIt wrote: post #123
ghaff wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sites like this one really emphasize monetization. Natural I suppose since it's startup-focused. But people used to be fine with blogs not having a monetary element at all.

I wonder how much of that mercenary approach to blogging today resulted ultimately from the 2008 crisis. It feels like there was less pressure to make ends meet, and consequently no pressure to hustle, before that. And maybe it is also the influencer self-branding culture of Instagram being seen as the default internet, so when people do alt-internet things they carry over those same values knowingly or unknowingly.

Additional factors that come to mind: the slow realization that you could be writing for an audience of one (yourself) after a brief surge of "famous bloggers"; and the rise of other forms of writing (social media, etc) that at least give you the illusion of an immediate audience. "Engagement metrics" and so on -- even if they represent the opposite of attention.

I think a lot of what used to go onto blogs now goes elsewhere, but doesn't necessarily stay bottled up in the mind of the would-have-been blogger. Even while pseudo-blogging platforms like Substack are having something of an upswing of esoteric low-audience content.

And I can say from experience that it's tough keeping a blog going when you have near-zero readership, even if you still consider the act of writing something and putting it out in public to be instrinsically valuable to you.

Just as a simple example, I have a once-in-a-while newsletter+blog on a niche topic, and I could get way more eyeballs if I'd just rephrase things as a Reddit post, but I'm nostalgic about it living its own life on the Free-ish Web. Or, I suppose, this comment right here, which could just as well be on a personal blog with a "backlink" to yours.

Re: Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

#196

Post by wonger_ »

lightveil wrote: post #151

the problem I always have with starting a personal blog is that-I want to write about my projects, but I also want to write about introspective life things. And I'm always fearful that introspective life things would detract (perhaps significantly, if they are too revealing) from employers/etc looking at me as a potential hire. This is not so much about politics (I don't find a strident need to blog about my politica…

I feel similarly. Sometimes I feel like spinning up an anonymous account on bearblog.dev or matatora.blog where I can write freely without any hassle. For now, though, I have a microblog section as a secondary stream that mixes tech with low-stakes, personal, non-tech bits (music, pictures, showerthoughts, etc).

Re: Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

#197

Post by heikkilevanto »

I have never been much info blogging, but I am in the habit of writing things down in small text files on my computer. It has almost the same benefits as a personal blog that has no outside readers, and a bit less stress about having to write something or worry about what I can say in public...

Re: Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

#199

Post by the_gipsy »

simonw wrote: post #88

Here are some reasons to start a personal blog: 1. It's a great way to learn. Teaching something to someone else has always been the best learning tool, and writing about something with an audience in mind is an effective way to capture some of that value. 2. It can be a big boost in job hunting. As a hiring manager two of the most important questions I have about a potential candidate are: Can they code? Can they co…

Do you use AI to write content nowadays? Or to review and format it?

Re: Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

#200

Post by wiether »

lightveil wrote: post #151

the problem I always have with starting a personal blog is that-I want to write about my projects, but I also want to write about introspective life things. And I'm always fearful that introspective life things would detract (perhaps significantly, if they are too revealing) from employers/etc looking at me as a potential hire. This is not so much about politics (I don't find a strident need to blog about my politica…

> I could just choose to write completely pseudonymously instead.

That's the route I decided to choose when I started my professional career. I already had a personal (pseudonymous) blog. And that's where I put the stuff around work.

I decided to go this way for many reasons.

First, because I don't want it to be a source of pressure. If I talk about work stuff and make a big mistake, then people can call me out on it and it would tarnish my reputation.

Second, because I want to share things for free and to help others first, not to help myself/my career.

Last and related, if I was using it as a self-promoting media, I would focus on things that would help my career, not on things that I find funny or that I think can help someone else. So it would BE work. And it would only take a few months before I would be tired of it.

Also since I've mostly worked on heavily regulated things, I'm quite limited about what I could publicly communicate.

Now, I have my own personal room on the Internet where I can discuss everything I want, without feeling any pressure about how or what or when I should write about anything.

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