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Why blog if nobody reads it?

andysblog.uk

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Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?

#201

Post by righthand »

theshackleford wrote: post #172
righthand wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn’t say don’t do something. I said do something and understand a modern consequence. Go ahead publish but don’t be surprised when your work isn’t attributed correctly in the future and empowers people you may not agree with. Blogs aren’t the only form of publishing and sharing. Maybe after the AI winter subsides it might make sense again. A world where people were encouraged to publish to share knowledge ended u…

> Go ahead publish but don’t be surprised when your work isn’t attributed correctly in the future and empowers people you may not agree with. Why would I be surprised when this has already been occurring for a very long time? What exactly is the part here that is modern?

What might not be modern to you might be modern to someone less technically adept.

Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?

#202

Post by throwup238 »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #161
zoogeny wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Why not? As an atheist you are probably best positioned to notice the ostensible pointlessness of it all and come to the conclusion that rituals are and have always been about the people doing them. It’s always been for our sake. Just like funerals are for the living to get closure, since the dead body at the center of proceedings can’t possibly give a damn.

Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?

#203

Post by high_priest »

Surprisieg, but quite alot of people actually visit my blog posts. There is definitely more traffic on loosely written content, than on services & professional fronts. And it is quite easy to turn this traffic into organic & trusting visits to business oriented URLs.

Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?

#204

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

The stats say https://andrew-quinn.me/ gets at least a trickle of traffic, and usually these days for the more obscure stuff I write, like my guide on using `reposurgeon` to convert SVN to Git repos for the first time. I feel the hours I have saved far outweigh the hours I spent writing that article and that's good enough for me.

Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?

#205

Post by card_zero »

righthand wrote: post #133
monsieurbanana wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But not the only or main intention. He's never stated that he didn't want to share knowledge and he doesn't have to, it's already implied.

Sure but the intention exists none the less.

If you nominally have an audience (if you feel like you do, regardless of the reality), you'll perform differently, same as with speaking. This may be a good thing.

Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?

#206

Post by [deleted] »

n_ary wrote: post #14
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…

Agreed, after a year or two, blogs become your experience logs to prove experience and credibility once the landscape is killed by GenAI slops and SEO scams. Anyone can generate a big portfolio of projects these days(be it graphics, video, software, writing etc) but blog posts from 2023 and before are proof and undeniable.

[deleted]

Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?

#207

Post by vekker »

sebmellen wrote: post #96
deadbabe wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A dark pattern on your self hosted blogging website is to backdate blog posts and make yourself seem very good at predicting future trends. There is no reason why you have to write a blog over a long period of time, you could quickly pump out several blog posts and link to them to establish credibility quickly.

We need better timestamping services for this. I tried to write out an initial spec here, but I haven’t been able to write any implementations yet: https://github.com/sebmellen/proof-of-origination .

There's this on the Bitcoin blockchain: https://opentimestamps.org

Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?

#208

Post by quacksilver »

sebmellen wrote: post #96
deadbabe wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A dark pattern on your self hosted blogging website is to backdate blog posts and make yourself seem very good at predicting future trends. There is no reason why you have to write a blog over a long period of time, you could quickly pump out several blog posts and link to them to establish credibility quickly.

We need better timestamping services for this. I tried to write out an initial spec here, but I haven’t been able to write any implementations yet: https://github.com/sebmellen/proof-of-origination .

I guess you can use a third party like archive.org, if the blog is crawled by it, the owner doesn't get them to delete it, and there is no politically motivated revisionism going on based on the archive.org maintainers.

I would be suspicious of a reasonably popular blog claiming to have predicted stuff and not being able to back that up with an archive.org capture (or raw scraper data), though I guess it is somewhere where storing a hash on a blockchain may offer some benefits for edge cases.

Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?

#209

Post by sudomateo »

I was chatting about a related topic with my wife today. The premise was that there are many technology related blogs and not enough blogs about obscure topics (e.g., chocolate, woodworking). People interested in those obscure topics struggle to find genuine information because very few people are writing about them, much less making any content about them.

I think most of us in the technology field tend to forget just how many resources are out there for technical topics and often see blogging as a waste of time or a "whisper in the hurricane" when we should be encouraging people to keep writing about technical topics and more.

Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?

#210

Post by firtoz »

sudomateo wrote: post #209

I was chatting about a related topic with my wife today. The premise was that there are many technology related blogs and not enough blogs about obscure topics (e.g., chocolate, woodworking). People interested in those obscure topics struggle to find genuine information because very few people are writing about them, much less making any content about them. I think most of us in the technology field tend to forget ju…

There's a lot of Tiktok accounts for woodworking, but, yeah, unsure how persistent or informative those may be.
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