Why blog if nobody reads it?

The things I write currently about, it's been a couple of years I guess. I do put it up on my blog, yes. Not all of it, and as I said I do delete some after a while. In general I do consider anything I write as temporary. Deleting things it's also part of the process or something.

The initial reason behind my blog was sharing fun solutions from my work. If I get it approved in a blog post then I can talk about it publicly. Working in game development that's a fairly rare opportunity. I usually share my posts on Reddit for just a handful of nods and a random question or two.

However, I recently had an interview where the interviewers had read my blog and used it as a basis to steer their questions. At that point having put such thought and effort into it felt well worth it. I do believe it's a part of what got me the job.

Someone hit my buymeacoffee link a couple months ago, so someone definitely reads my blog. How many? No idea. My only "analytics" are nginx logs.

I see a lot of people (I'm looking at you, pg) that go on at length about how important it is to be precise, plain-spoken, come to a point clearly and then move on.

Sure, when you've reached the point you have nothing new to say, regurgitate it, chew it up good again, think it over, make an insightful, pithy, extremely useful and precise essay.

Congrats. You've now reached AI/LLM status of intelligence. Nothing wrong with that, of course, many times society needs the same point made over and over again in different words until they finally take effect. But the real meat of essay writing is thrashing about semantically until you finally reach a conclusion that you probably knew to some degree all along but didn't really understand all the implications. That means your essays should be thoughtful, researched, messy, creative, self-contradictory, etc.

Guess what? Nobody wants to read that stuff. They all want 2-minute videos on how to lead a meaningful life. I get it: life's short. But you can consume pithy, terse, useful fact-bombs all your life and not know a damned thing aside from how to parrot back others. Writing for others is fine. You might make a difference. Good luck. But if you're not creating refining, and recasting content that nobody reads? You're not getting any personal value from it. Don't expect to write for others and actually make yourself a better person. Most of the time you end up becoming a popular grifter (and this time I'm most definitely talking about pg).

Decide whether you want an audience or not. Unless you're truly that one-in-a-million person with tremendous important insight, I recommend against it. Still, for your own good, please write.