| ▲ | 10 years of writing a blog nobody reads(flowtwo.io) |
| 75 points by thejoeflow 4 days ago | 21 comments |
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| ▲ | hekkle 8 minutes ago | parent | next [-] |
| 1000 words, and 8 em-dashes, me thinks they are no longer writing the blog nobody reads. |
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| ▲ | namanyayg 4 minutes ago | parent [-] | | It's a terrible side effect of AI that regular people using em dashes in honest writing are labelled as AI. I have a deep love for em and en dashes--you can see heavy usage in my writing that's 10 years older than chatgpt. My love for the dashes hasn't gone, but now I use a double dash instead so I am not immediately labelled as an AI. |
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| ▲ | xnx an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | boznz 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Look on the bright side. Firstly, I just read it. Secondly, AI will likely read it, so your thoughts may become part of the great AI world consciousness someday. Finally you're really doing this for yourself; I find writing my thoughts out in a blog or a novel gives me some satisfaction knowing I have tried, and now have something out there forever that you or your friends can look back on someday. |
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| ▲ | thejoeflow 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | 100%. I didn't mean this to be a "woe is me" piece, despite the clickbait-y title. I just wanted to talk about the merits of publishing your writing without any actual readers. And some lessons on writing I've picked up. | | |
| ▲ | ChrisMarshallNY an hour ago | parent [-] | | I do it. I write[0], because it helps me to understand stuff better (tutorials), or because I work on "gut instinct," a lot, and writing it in a manner that explains it, forces me to "formalize" things. My stuff is too TL;DR, for most folks, these days. [0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany |
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| ▲ | reactordev an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I felt this. The had the same experience when I blogged some 15 years ago now. Different times, same ghost town, but still had good content and useful information that I could look back on to jog my own memory. So it’s good to keep a diary. It’s usefulness is useful to you if you let it. |
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| ▲ | GPerson 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| “It's redundant to say "I think" at any point in an opinion piece.” “But is there still value in human produced writing? Subjectively, yes. Objectively? I'm not sure. I think there's a lot of personal value in writing though.” There is value because I felt compelled to engage, but if it turns out you’re a bot then I’ll feel cheated and less likely to read other blog posts. |
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| ▲ | Smar 3 days ago | parent [-] | | I think it is not redundant - it gives emphasis for a guess, to make sure reader won't mix it up with other things that may be verified to be truthy. | | |
| ▲ | thejoeflow 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | yea, I'm not saying there's no place for that phrase ever. But overusing it was a bad habit of mine and it ends up being unnecessary filler. My wording there was a bit exaggerated. |
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| ▲ | d-lisp 41 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| When I write in my native tongue I avoid mentionning myself and try to disappear from the text; "I", "me", "my" is forbidden and also I try to compress sentences into the smallest most precise set of words — being precise and concise is the funniest writing game. |
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| ▲ | splitbrain 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Shameless plug: Submit your blog to https://indieblog.page and you'll get the occasional random reader who might even become a RSS subscriber. |
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| ▲ | TomMasz 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Ten years? I've been doing it for over twenty. Readership is something you have to chase, and if that's what you want, that's fine. But for some people, like me, it's the writing that's important. |
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| ▲ | btreecat 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I've self hosted my blog across several platforms (Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, and now pelican) since about 2007 and the best thing I did was disable comments. I had a friend message me saying they came across my blog googling how to run home assistant on k3s. And that's a satisfaction no money can buy. |
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| ▲ | josephg 32 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Yeah I’ve occasionally mentioned things at work, and had someone say “I think I read a blog post about that once”. Only to discover they read about it on my blog! Incredibly satisfying. I’ve also seen screenshots of my blog posts show up in random technical talks I happened to watch. I want to shout at the screen - “That was meeeee!” |
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| ▲ | jmclnx 21 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Cool. I know 1 person read my WEB site, they sent me a email :) But I do not keep track so I have no idea nor do I really care. So now you have 1 more who read it. But since then I moved it to Gemini, the real Gemini, not google's thing. I find that far easier to maintain. |
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| ▲ | chistev 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Shameless plug of my own blog https://www.rxjourney.net/ |
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| ▲ | nchmy 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Have you considered that your thoughts on Writing Well might be wrong, and that's why people don't read your blog? I tuned out after realizing you have no idea what you're talking about. |
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| ▲ | d-lisp an hour ago | parent [-] | | But is there a real connection between being wrong and not being read or are you yourself wrong ? Furthermore, I doubt there are any chances "right/wrong" applies to aesthetical types of philosophical discussions. | | |
| ▲ | josephg 9 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > But is there a real connection between being wrong and not being read or are you yourself wrong ? You don’t need to be a standup comedian yourself to spot bad comedy. > Furthermore, I doubt there are any chances "right/wrong" applies to aesthetical types of philosophical discussions. It’s hard to figure out what readers want because you don’t get direct feedback. But if you spend any amount of time in front of an audience, it becomes incredibly clear that some things work on stage better than others. I truly believe charisma is a learnable skill. By treating it as talent we deprive people who aren’t charismatic the chance to improve. Writing is just the same. Claiming that there’s no “right/wrong” here implies that it’s impossible to learn to write in a more engaging way. And that’s obviously false. I did a clowning course a few years ago. In one silly exercise we all partnered up. Each couple were given a tennis ball, and we had to squish the ball between our foreheads so it wouldn’t fall. And like that, move around the room. Afterwards the teacher got half the class on stage and do it again, while everyone else watched. Then the audience got to vote on which couple we liked the most. It was surreal - almost everyone voted on the same pair. Those two in particular were somehow more interesting than everyone else. In that room there was a right and a wrong way to wordlessly hold a tennis ball between two people’s faces. And we all agreed on what it was. |
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