> So it must be that a key ingredient to blogging is simple: have a willingness to state something that seems obvious to you but nobody else is saying it. Or if someone else is saying it, just link to them and say, “Yes!!! This!!!”
As a young mathematician in grade school, I had boundless enthusiasm to prove and present basic theorems in number theory and geometry. Now, as a PhD mathematician who has since pivoted into other fields, when I'm considering new mathematical content, I feel only the stymying influence of a million invisible eyes all around me asking, "Don't you think this been done before, better, by others? Do you really want to waste your and your readers' time with your DIY reinvention? Are you not just noise competing with other noise, drowning out the valuable signals in your domain for your own personal gain?"
All this to say, on a statistical level, it is fair to say no one ever has any original thoughts, and the ones most capable of elucidating existing ideas can be the ones least motivated to do so.
If every blog, op-ed, and social media post in the world were stripped of all informatic redundancy, what would the compression ratio be? Among these resources in particular, I just see the same old arguments and observations trotted out in varying tonal registers.
> Are you not just noise competing with other noise, drowning out the valuable signals in your domain for your own personal gain
You have an audience willing to give you the benefit of the doubt to learn something they’re unfamiliar with.
It’s specifically the fact that you chose to highlight a topic that makes your audience pay attention. Perhaps nobody else could have gotten their attention and adjusted their perspective the way you can. Not necessarily because you’re intrinsically better, but because they’ve chosen to pay attention to you.
I’m scrolling Hacker News and this post happened to be on the front page. Your comment happened to be the first comment. Im in the audience for OP and for you. If this post or your comment hadn’t been here, I’d have been doing and thinking about something else. Is that good or bad? I don’t know. But it is different. The human tendency to be receptive to convenient information sources, regardless of their novelty or whether they’re of maximum quality, may be adaptive.
> If this post or your comment hadn’t been here, I’d have been doing and thinking about something else. Is that good or bad? I don’t know.
Indeed the consequences are not thought about often. My motivations for commenting are for catharsis and parasocial connection, and (if you're like me) your reasons for reading are for entertainment and parasocial connection. I believe most of the dressing up as "being accurate and helpful" or "learning new things and growing" are just negotiations that make it palatable to our conscious sensibilities and self-image.
> The human tendency to be receptive to convenient information sources, regardless of their novelty or whether they’re of maximum quality, may be adaptive.
And that begins to touch on another aspect of my demotivation, which is, "Why bother creating value? It won't help the reception." Unless you're contributing some huge objective boon to humanity, the reception largely boils down to marketing and dumb luck. I've seen too many of my life's works languish in obscurity to put any more emotional attachment into the thing. One must labor only for one's own inner satisfaction, but what if that means one is left with no motivation to labor at all? Then, I suppose, that's just the death of a laborer and the birth of a slacker.
Popularity is not quality, and quality depends on the audience and your own value system, not internet randos.
One of the signs that you're writing really great or really bad is if people ignore it. You're not popular so if it's really good nobody cares, and if it's really bad? Well, it's bad.
The problem comes when you write a really good essay that's just a point or two less than perfect. It's flawed enough to gain readers. It's insightful enough to help people. But guess what? Now you're in a popularity war with all the other bozos who want to create content around your topic.
That's why the greatest compliment you can receive is "Well, heck, that's been done before. There's nothing new here."
Everything has been done before. Don't sweat it. I am reminded of a great scene from the TV show Third Rock From The Sun where John Lithgow's character accuses another professor of plagiarism. His line is roughly "It's obviously shabby and repeats things done before. Take a look at the text. (he then holds up a book) Have you ever heard of the _Dictionary_??"
Write for yourself. Use writing to learn stuff. Done.
How the information is shared can be as important as the act of sharing it in the first place. You might have a particular voice and style for communicating these ideas, but your audience may have otherwise passed it over without your unique approach.
I think this is some sort of modern academia bias. What you say it is true in academia, most things have already been thought and studied and that's why any academic book or paper has a citation in every sentence. I understand why this rigor is important in academia, but is it in the rest of the world?
If I have an interesting thought about a topic and I share it with an audience that is not PhDs, to them it might be interesting and insightful and provoke new thoughts.
Most likely yes, someone in the 70s somewhere in the world already wrote a paper about this idea or even a book. Does it matter though? Sharing ideas gets people thinking and the fact that someone else already extensively thought about something doesn't make my thoughts less relevant. If anything, by sharing it I could get a comment pointing me to a book or paper that would help me understand better the topic or expand my ideas further.
I don't think that what's worth sharing are only documents that quote everyone else that already talked about it and their thoughts. That might work if I want to prove that my work is at boundaries of human knowledge or that is the most plausible explanation for something, but if I just want to share ideas then I find it limiting. Not just because it limits the people with the knowledge to write anything to a handful, but also because for those people there is this anxiety of "not worth it, wasting people time" if it's not researched for months like you mention. Share your thought, if some expert will find it wasteful or naive they will not read it, but someone else might and it might open their mind.
This makes me think about philosophy, if you really dig down into it virtually all philosophy ideas were already discussed first by Plato and Aristoteles. You cannot find a modern philosophy thought that isn't in some way already discussed by those two. Should then all philosopher in history not write anything because it was not really an original thought?
> Sharing ideas gets people thinking and the fact that someone else already extensively thought about something doesn't make my thoughts less relevant. If anything, by sharing it I could get a comment pointing me to a book or paper that would help me understand better the topic or expand my ideas further.
"Relevant" needs disambiguation. It does not make your thoughts less valid in any moral sense that you should feel ashamed of them or anything, but IMO, it does mean that they are less worthy in the attention marketplace. If these thoughts are not competing in the attention marketplace, and rather being shared amongst acquaintances, or offered up in the aim of constructive criticism, then it does not risk turning the attention marketplace into a competition of hustling mediocrity.
> Should then all philosopher in history not write anything because it was not really an original thought?
Most (continental) philosophy is closer to art in my opinion than scientific inquiry. If you accept it as art, then you at least open the door to there being many valuably different ways of saying "love is good" or "reality is complicated" or what have you. And if you consider it as something beyond art, well, then it has some very pointed questions to answer.
"I know this" is different from "I know you know this", which is different from "You know I know this", which is still different from "you know I know you know this"
This is one of my favorite videos. After the first penguin jumps the crowd follows till then they confused. Regardless the sight of penguin jumping is breathtaking.
> it is fair to say no one ever has any original thoughts, and the ones most capable of elucidating existing ideas can be the ones least motivated to do so.
This statement, combined with the previous one, is interesting, to say the least. It could easily be taken as self-aggrandizing, and maybe your feeling of "only the stymying influence of a million invisible eyes" is partly because of your style?
> Among these resources in particular, I just see the same old arguments and observations trotted out in varying tonal registers.
Languages are themselves redundant, because it aids in comprehension.
Sometimes people need to hear the same thing over and over before it sinks in.
Sometimes it needs to be said in different ways, before it sinks in.
Sometimes it can be short and pithy, and other times it can fill a short book.
How many books simply restate and elucidate the Serenity Prayer? As far as I can see, their numbers are legion, and, more to the point, many of them sell.
tl;dr: Yes, everything worth saying has been said before. That doesn't mean that it's not still worth saying.
> This statement, combined with the previous one, is interesting, to say the least. It could easily be taken as self-aggrandizing.
Not self-aggrandizing. There are very few things that I consider myself "(among the) most capable" of explaining, and most of them are not interesting to people. There are many more things that I'm somewhat competent in explaining, but those suffer the intimidation of the eyes.
> Maybe your feeling of "only the stymying influence of a million invisible eyes" is partly because of your style?
Not sure how you mean "style," but it is some sort of inferiority complex or insecurity. I do not claim it is a good or rational feeling.
> How many books simply restate and elucidate the Serenity Prayer? As far as I can see, their numbers are legion, and, more to the point, many of them sell. tl;dr: Yes, everything worth saying has been said before. That doesn't mean that it's not still worth saying.
Religion is a primeval failure mode of language, in my opinion, or at least an example of language being used not to communicate information, but to engage in social, emotional, and political ritual. Are those rituals a good thing on the whole? Even if they are, why dress it up with all these theological truth propositions and elaborately fraudulent mythologies? Why do we have to be so verbose and repetitious, and pretend there's really 10,000 books' worth of depth to the Serenity Prayer?
You essentially coupled "I used to do this thing, and now I'm really credentialed but I don't do this thing any more" with "the ones most capable of elucidating existing ideas can be the ones least motivated to do so."
> Religion is a primeval failure mode of language, in my opinion, or at least an example of language being used not to communicate information, but to engage in social, emotional, and political ritual.
The core of the Serenity Prayer is not really religious. Sure, it starts off "God grant me the..." but really, that's not really different than saying "Today I hope I have the strength to..."
In any case, many of the books saying the same thing are not religious at all.
> You essentially coupled "I used to do this thing, and now I'm really credentialed but I don't do this thing any more" with "the ones most capable of elucidating existing ideas can be the ones least motivated to do so."
I'm not claiming it's a good or rational thing that I'm not motivated. (I'm also not claiming this happens to everyone with credentials.) I'm very nostalgic for that unembarrassed enthusiasm I once had, because, were I to possess it now, at least I would have a shot at producing something of value.
You may have gotten the wrong impression when I coupled this rueful sentiment with a criticism of the verbosity and redundancy of blogs and self-help books. These two things are in tension with each other but not strictly contradictory. "I am large, I contain multitudes."
> You essentially coupled "I used to do this thing, and now I'm really credentialed but I don't do this thing any more" with "the ones most capable of elucidating existing ideas can be the ones least motivated to do so."
One way AI can help here is identifying prior art. Write a quick sketch of you idea, and ask an LLM with uncapped long-running web search capability to find if any prior art exists!
The added value of the LLM here is probably zero. Just type a search propmt in a search engine. If the top 5 results don't cover the same ground your article is covering, at the very least, your article will expose new knowledge to people using that search term.
Typing up LLM instructions and reading the output is probably more work.
A couple other versions of this that have always stood out to me:
1) There's always a new cohort of people that don't know the things you know. You assume since you know it, everyone does. But kids coming up, or whoever, aren't you. They don't know this stuff yet. You can easily be the first time they've heard "make something people want" and where that comes from. The Curse of Knowledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge
2) There's always another tone/anecdote/verse that makes whatever idea more palatable to someone out there. They might not like the PG version, or the Wired version or the Daring Fireball version, whatever. There's probably some version of you in this lesson that someone out there vibes better with.
Reminds me of this tweet thread from Emmett Shear (cofounder of Twitch):
"I used to struggle w needing to be “creative” or “original” in my work. At some point I had a breakthrough that really helped me: I cannot repeat an idea, no matter how basic or common, without imparting some of my worldview into it.
Even by choosing which basic ideas to amplify, I impart some small amount of myself into each output. It’s literally impossible for a given tweet to be “unoriginal”. Equally impossible to be Truly Original too of course, since you’re always remixing others thoughts.
This POV does put a premium on cultivating and developing one’s worldview, since that is the underlying originality simmering under the surface of each “basic” thought. The best writing is rewriting, including of other people’s words, and the lens is your whole mind."
When I look back on the really helpful blog posts I have read, they have all been really basic. Whether they described a programming technique or a recipe for a new meal, it was a clear description that was important - not how esoteric the knowledge was.
There is a place for complex blog posts on arcane subjects but posts on "common knowledge" are even more important. There is a 15 year old out there somewhere that needs to know how to use the different smart pointers in C++ or how to properly care for a cast iron pan.
And link rot. A lot of sites from back when are straight up gone, sadly. Maybe you get lucky on archive.org. Or in your pan case, affiliate farming where the bias or technical expertise is suspect.
(Aside, for a lot of cooking I’ve gone back to dead trees and I realized one day I have so many cookbooks, why am I looking at some lifestyle recipe blogger?)
Or the information actually goes out of date and best practices change. There’s been like 25 years of standard revisions since I first learned C++.
ha. speaking of the devil. for the "curse of knowledge" mention i made above i had a link that google served me up to a post that was totally rotten now. so i went back in to include the wikipedia version.
Yeah, whatever's obvious to you might not be obvious to someone else, and your take on a common take may appeal to certain people more than existing ones.
Plus let's be honest, there are a surprising number of topics where the obvious hasn't actually been documented in any real way, or where finding an answer to certain questions is near impossible. In those cases, just having an answer publicly available rather than say, on Discord or Google Docs can be a huge help.
A lot of the blogs I follow and enjoy the most have writers that often times just put a borderline one-liner and thats that. I think over the years what I value the most is the admiration I feel for the constancy some people have, posting every week for years on end. Of course I appreciate the content, and substance, but I value them more for actually staying true and showing that sometimes there just isnt much one can say, regardless, they still check in...
I don't think i ever went past the 5-blog count on any of my attempts.
While the "thankfully not all books are worth reading" adage is presumably very true of blogging as well, I do still feel some admiration for bloggers, even when their blogs could be perceived as "useless". Even to put something "useless" out there can be an act of bravery itself sometimes (in a "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act" George Orwell sense).
I've felt the "chilling effect" way too often when considering if I really want to put an idea out there that might later turn back to haunt me (even for things I would not consider controversial). I am very aware of the irony that oddly enough, psychologically I don't perceive the same level of danger from random HN comment threads though.
There's also a social component to blogging, right? When you post something it tells me about who you are. It helps establish my (probably parasocial) relationship with you.
And when you post something, I might be interested in it, even if I wasn't interested when someone else posted about it, because I'm interested in you and interested in what you have to say.
I think that human communication is about pure relationship socialization as much or more than it is about actually communicating information or ideas.
I had a post on here this week that was briefly popular. There were numerous folks who posted that the material “wasn’t new.”
I felt like it should be implicit that people who already know what I was writing about are not the target audience. But here they were, commenting.
At the same time, the page got upvoted quite a lot and the comments were filled with folks who had lots of interesting reactions and additions. Despite the fact that this was “old news”, it seemed implicit that for many it was new news.
Sometimes we should trigger conversation. I believe we shouldn’t index on novelty- we should index on impact. Your post is a nice defense of those who discover and share what they discover.
I read a lot of beginner/tute FP stuff. A mistake they make is doing 2 sentences of "here's how to conceptualise this new notation and what Int -> Int -> Boolean means"
And then they get bored and just go full bore ¿ conjunctivitis applique to unbound ¤ variable 》》-> is a Mongolian {....} ... forgetting they were in tutorial mode. Or, showing examples which embed syntax which is apparently the same as before but "oh shit, I forgot a : means something else in this context" so having explained syntactically what a : means.. confusing you again.
Or showing REPL prompts without explaining if the # is a prompt or part of the command. The list is frankly endless.
Decades ago, this was C programmers trying to explain basic imperative syntax and then using a "compute prime" with a recursive function call or a ternary operator or bitshift.
So my next blog maybe will be "seven cardinal sins of blogs about basics" which will have only one sin: forgetting the job, the only one job you had (or apparently set yourself)
Hahaha, this is so accurate. I do this so often because I start off with a certain mindset and then when I get maybe 10% of the way through I find that I won't finish the post in any time if I write at this pace. So I have this idea! "Imperfect is Okay! I'll publish it and refine it over time by expounding on each section". Then I publish it and never look at it again. Hilarious! In the end, this entire genre of writing is no longer useful so I suppose not much harm is done.
In a meta way, this blog post itself is example of that: sounds obvious that blogging can just be stating the obvious, but I still enjoyed reading it, and it served as a good reminder. I guess part of what makes it feel good is confirmation bias, but it can also be nice to read something that confirms your beliefs especially if the other side(s) are very loud online.
I would also add that it is just expressing oneself, and therefore it is ok for it to be non-original thought: you are not publishing a scientific article, you are expressing your opinion, adding to the general discourse online, making your voice be heard, and also just capturing your thoughts into something concrete.
I never imagined my blogs to be useful to anyone. For me, they're mostly just things I felt like sharing but with no particular audience in mind.
Over the years though, I find myself receiving email from people who I helped. I even googled quite a few things in the past years only to find the first answer to be a blog of mine. So I unblocked myself a few times.
Blogging is fun. What's obvious for you isn't for everyone.
indeed! this is pretty much exactly how i feel about mine as well. i blog for myself, mostly. i enjoy the act of writing, just about whatever is on my mind at any point in time and inspires me to write about it. i know that i have some readers (like you, i've gotten very kind emails from people who have stopped by my site), and i am very thankful for those readers.
but even if i had zero readers, i would still enjoy the act of writing and putting it out there. i can go back to my blog and look through the years, and see how my outlook on things has changed, how i've grown over time. and the process of writing itself is just cathartic, at the same time.
There's seeing something and recognising it as something you've seen before.
There's being able to recite it without seeing it.
There's being able to explain it.
There's _knowing_ it. Where your life is an active demonstration of having made it _part_ of you.
To the extent we obtain wisdom with life, it's usually a progression of things progressing deeper down the layers, years, perhaps decades after they attained level 1.
I'd insert another important level of knowing which I feel deserves the name "understanding" and that's knowing its relationships to other thing you also know. Perhaps even that's almost all there is in knowing something. The more relationships to it that you know, the deeper your understanding of it.
To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand HN comments. The humour is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of theoretical physics most of the jokes will go over a typical commenters's head.
The fact that someone makes a simple observation is probably suggestive that despite its simplicity, it doesn't stick fully, maybe it's even anti-memetic.
Perhaps repeating such simple truths is like a spaced repetition system for society
Most search results nowadays are SEO farms. Posts I read are also mostly just someone debugging a weird bug for endless hours only cause they were mad, just grep output and the fix.
At one point Google (and I presume other search engines) actively searched for and penalised content / SEO farms, hostile user patterns like invasive popups, even policing site performance. It's like they just gave up.
I was never a prolific blogger. I do write a LOT internally at work and I write very long messages in group chats.
With the advent of LLMs, I've felt even less need to publish publicly. It's as if an LLM can either produce something higher-quality and more tailored to the reader's context in a shorter period of time. Or the topic I write would be so niche that it should just be in a group chat.
> if an LLM can either produce something higher-quality and more tailored
LLMs won’t always do this well. The best ideas in my backlog are the ones where the LLMs won’t finish my thoughts because they’re contrary to what 1000 people said on a forum somewhere. Or because I’m relaying an original personal experience.
But even if LLMs can finish your thoughts, it’s probably good to post anyway. Because in five years LLMs, maybe two commercialized, or their trained opinion may shift. A dated blog post is a nice Ebeneezer, a memorial to the Zeitgeist it hails from.
Happens to me too. I don't think I could spit out words about random topics on a constant basis that happen to be interesting to someone else. On the other hand I know I could write a whole book easily, but I just don't know what it would wirte about.
Problem with getting old is that you’ve seen it all. A bright eyed 25 year old blogging about this thing called a “Unix pipe operator” gets boring the 200th time it shows up on the front page of HN.
Something obvious to others may not be obvious to you - and to be fair it was a key ingredient in blogging.
I find it extremely sad that blogging shifted from personal writing to a performative act - we can feel ashamed stating something obvious because the expectation is to get approvals and shares, rather than us writing something we find intriguing, interesting or worth writing down.
It's why I follow Scott Manly or PBS Space Time specifically. There's lots of the same content on other channels/mediums. But I like them specifically, so why not?
Continuing to state the obvious, this is why you specifically should write if you have opinions you'd like to get out.
If I wanted to write something completely new, I'd write a paper, not a blog post. After all, blogging is ultimately about organizing my thoughts on topics that are already known.
In that sense, my personal problem is that no one visits my homepage (www.makonea.com). Ultimately, I think conveying thoughts on such topics also depends to some extent on reputation.
What I like about comedy is it reveals what people think but don't say. If someone laughs at a joke, it's because they believe it to be true or accurate.
I also see this when people present studies online which say something like "Eating fast food causes obesity" and you get people replying "well obviously".
On the face of it things might sound obvious, but the study or in the case of blogging the discussion actually attempts to get the to the bottom of why that might be the case.
Isn’t it similar to “Just be yourself”? But first you need all the hard work to get to that level so that you can just be yourself. What is obvious to me may have come as a lot of experience and focus in the past.
I avoid substack because of this. It's totally fine to email people about new posts, but at least let me read your post first. Make me interested. I'll follow you not because one good post (maybe if it's really good) but because several good ones. If your post is good I'll go look at others before leaving. If it looks good, then, and ONLY then will I subscribe.
But I can tell you there's a strong correlation between why you're writing a post and why I'll subscribe. If you're trying to hustle I don't give a shit. You're most likely another pseudo intellectual chasing whatever is hot. What I, personally, want is the experts. I want to see that depth of knowledge. I want to see how you think. I want to read a blog post where I get to know you, not some facade. Not everything needs to be a hustle. Find your niche and your niche will stick with you. If you try to write to everybody you'll end up writing to nobody. Concentrate on making me want to subscribe, not pestering me into it. You're not a used car salesman
My favorite thing about substack is that it completely doesn't work in my 3-year-old browser. They managed to fuck up serving static pages with text via some ungodly JS bloat, I suppose. Blogging, of all things! It's the simplest form of web content possible!
My current feeling about blogging is, that it more then anything else is we’re certian knowledge of AI came from. The arguments for blogging being the thing again also started at the same time AI got traction.
Just identify the bloggers that know their craft, weight them height. And you got yourself a step change in LLM competency.
My father, who worked as a market research analyst, said that the trick to the job was "point out the obvious before anyone else does".
Web sites and web content are trending towards being enshittified until it just barely becomes worth wading through all of the shit to get to what you actually wanted to consume.
The most useful blogs I read aren't the ones with novel ideas. They're the ones where someone took something I vaguely understood and wrote it down clearly enough that I could explain it to someone else. That's surprisingly rare and valuable.
Most knowledge lives in this awkward middle ground where everyone sort of knows it but nobody has written a clean version. The person willing to write the obvious version usually ends up being the reference.
Rather, let the AI search the web for an idea. If the idea hasn't been published widely in the last 3-4 years, it's a safe topic for a blog post today :)
(Next level: unleash the AI to find such under-posted topics, check them against your list of interests, and offer to you for inspiration.)
> So it must be that a key ingredient to blogging is simple: have a willingness to state something that seems obvious to you but nobody else is saying it. Or if someone else is saying it, just link to them and say, “Yes!!! This!!!”
As a young mathematician in grade school, I had boundless enthusiasm to prove and present basic theorems in number theory and geometry. Now, as a PhD mathematician who has since pivoted into other fields, when I'm considering new mathematical content, I feel only the stymying influence of a million invisible eyes all around me asking, "Don't you think this been done before, better, by others? Do you really want to waste your and your readers' time with your DIY reinvention? Are you not just noise competing with other noise, drowning out the valuable signals in your domain for your own personal gain?"
All this to say, on a statistical level, it is fair to say no one ever has any original thoughts, and the ones most capable of elucidating existing ideas can be the ones least motivated to do so.
If every blog, op-ed, and social media post in the world were stripped of all informatic redundancy, what would the compression ratio be? Among these resources in particular, I just see the same old arguments and observations trotted out in varying tonal registers.
> Are you not just noise competing with other noise, drowning out the valuable signals in your domain for your own personal gain
You have an audience willing to give you the benefit of the doubt to learn something they’re unfamiliar with.
It’s specifically the fact that you chose to highlight a topic that makes your audience pay attention. Perhaps nobody else could have gotten their attention and adjusted their perspective the way you can. Not necessarily because you’re intrinsically better, but because they’ve chosen to pay attention to you.
I’m scrolling Hacker News and this post happened to be on the front page. Your comment happened to be the first comment. Im in the audience for OP and for you. If this post or your comment hadn’t been here, I’d have been doing and thinking about something else. Is that good or bad? I don’t know. But it is different. The human tendency to be receptive to convenient information sources, regardless of their novelty or whether they’re of maximum quality, may be adaptive.
> If this post or your comment hadn’t been here, I’d have been doing and thinking about something else. Is that good or bad? I don’t know.
Indeed the consequences are not thought about often. My motivations for commenting are for catharsis and parasocial connection, and (if you're like me) your reasons for reading are for entertainment and parasocial connection. I believe most of the dressing up as "being accurate and helpful" or "learning new things and growing" are just negotiations that make it palatable to our conscious sensibilities and self-image.
> The human tendency to be receptive to convenient information sources, regardless of their novelty or whether they’re of maximum quality, may be adaptive.
And that begins to touch on another aspect of my demotivation, which is, "Why bother creating value? It won't help the reception." Unless you're contributing some huge objective boon to humanity, the reception largely boils down to marketing and dumb luck. I've seen too many of my life's works languish in obscurity to put any more emotional attachment into the thing. One must labor only for one's own inner satisfaction, but what if that means one is left with no motivation to labor at all? Then, I suppose, that's just the death of a laborer and the birth of a slacker.
and then I’m reading you
Popularity is not quality, and quality depends on the audience and your own value system, not internet randos.
One of the signs that you're writing really great or really bad is if people ignore it. You're not popular so if it's really good nobody cares, and if it's really bad? Well, it's bad.
The problem comes when you write a really good essay that's just a point or two less than perfect. It's flawed enough to gain readers. It's insightful enough to help people. But guess what? Now you're in a popularity war with all the other bozos who want to create content around your topic.
That's why the greatest compliment you can receive is "Well, heck, that's been done before. There's nothing new here."
Everything has been done before. Don't sweat it. I am reminded of a great scene from the TV show Third Rock From The Sun where John Lithgow's character accuses another professor of plagiarism. His line is roughly "It's obviously shabby and repeats things done before. Take a look at the text. (he then holds up a book) Have you ever heard of the _Dictionary_??"
Write for yourself. Use writing to learn stuff. Done.
How the information is shared can be as important as the act of sharing it in the first place. You might have a particular voice and style for communicating these ideas, but your audience may have otherwise passed it over without your unique approach.
Writers often help the reader secure knowledge that they already feel is correct but have not yet full distilled.
I’ve never thought about it quite like that, but it’s a great point. So, thanks for sharing the thought in this unique way.
Yes, for instance science communication is a whole field. Otherwise we wouldn't hold Carl Sagan et al. in such high regard.
I think this is some sort of modern academia bias. What you say it is true in academia, most things have already been thought and studied and that's why any academic book or paper has a citation in every sentence. I understand why this rigor is important in academia, but is it in the rest of the world?
If I have an interesting thought about a topic and I share it with an audience that is not PhDs, to them it might be interesting and insightful and provoke new thoughts. Most likely yes, someone in the 70s somewhere in the world already wrote a paper about this idea or even a book. Does it matter though? Sharing ideas gets people thinking and the fact that someone else already extensively thought about something doesn't make my thoughts less relevant. If anything, by sharing it I could get a comment pointing me to a book or paper that would help me understand better the topic or expand my ideas further.
I don't think that what's worth sharing are only documents that quote everyone else that already talked about it and their thoughts. That might work if I want to prove that my work is at boundaries of human knowledge or that is the most plausible explanation for something, but if I just want to share ideas then I find it limiting. Not just because it limits the people with the knowledge to write anything to a handful, but also because for those people there is this anxiety of "not worth it, wasting people time" if it's not researched for months like you mention. Share your thought, if some expert will find it wasteful or naive they will not read it, but someone else might and it might open their mind.
This makes me think about philosophy, if you really dig down into it virtually all philosophy ideas were already discussed first by Plato and Aristoteles. You cannot find a modern philosophy thought that isn't in some way already discussed by those two. Should then all philosopher in history not write anything because it was not really an original thought?
> Sharing ideas gets people thinking and the fact that someone else already extensively thought about something doesn't make my thoughts less relevant. If anything, by sharing it I could get a comment pointing me to a book or paper that would help me understand better the topic or expand my ideas further.
"Relevant" needs disambiguation. It does not make your thoughts less valid in any moral sense that you should feel ashamed of them or anything, but IMO, it does mean that they are less worthy in the attention marketplace. If these thoughts are not competing in the attention marketplace, and rather being shared amongst acquaintances, or offered up in the aim of constructive criticism, then it does not risk turning the attention marketplace into a competition of hustling mediocrity.
> Should then all philosopher in history not write anything because it was not really an original thought?
Most (continental) philosophy is closer to art in my opinion than scientific inquiry. If you accept it as art, then you at least open the door to there being many valuably different ways of saying "love is good" or "reality is complicated" or what have you. And if you consider it as something beyond art, well, then it has some very pointed questions to answer.
Most relevant xkcd I thing:
https://xkcd.com/2501/
https://xkcd.com/1053/
"I know this" is different from "I know you know this", which is different from "You know I know this", which is still different from "you know I know you know this"
“When everybody knows that everybody knows” by Steven Pinker is about this.
Indeed. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_knowledge_(logic)
Maybe society just rewards the first penguin to jump into the sea.
tangentially related:
https://youtu.be/4PwDFddpo4c
This is one of my favorite videos. After the first penguin jumps the crowd follows till then they confused. Regardless the sight of penguin jumping is breathtaking.
Well, the first few do jump, the next bravest continue jumping in, but some do get pushed off the cliff into the water too :)
Thanks for the video!
The first penguin certainly rewards the orcas.
> it is fair to say no one ever has any original thoughts, and the ones most capable of elucidating existing ideas can be the ones least motivated to do so.
This statement, combined with the previous one, is interesting, to say the least. It could easily be taken as self-aggrandizing, and maybe your feeling of "only the stymying influence of a million invisible eyes" is partly because of your style?
> Among these resources in particular, I just see the same old arguments and observations trotted out in varying tonal registers.
Languages are themselves redundant, because it aids in comprehension.
Sometimes people need to hear the same thing over and over before it sinks in.
Sometimes it needs to be said in different ways, before it sinks in.
Sometimes it can be short and pithy, and other times it can fill a short book.
How many books simply restate and elucidate the Serenity Prayer? As far as I can see, their numbers are legion, and, more to the point, many of them sell.
tl;dr: Yes, everything worth saying has been said before. That doesn't mean that it's not still worth saying.
> This statement, combined with the previous one, is interesting, to say the least. It could easily be taken as self-aggrandizing.
Not self-aggrandizing. There are very few things that I consider myself "(among the) most capable" of explaining, and most of them are not interesting to people. There are many more things that I'm somewhat competent in explaining, but those suffer the intimidation of the eyes.
> Maybe your feeling of "only the stymying influence of a million invisible eyes" is partly because of your style?
Not sure how you mean "style," but it is some sort of inferiority complex or insecurity. I do not claim it is a good or rational feeling.
> How many books simply restate and elucidate the Serenity Prayer? As far as I can see, their numbers are legion, and, more to the point, many of them sell. tl;dr: Yes, everything worth saying has been said before. That doesn't mean that it's not still worth saying.
Religion is a primeval failure mode of language, in my opinion, or at least an example of language being used not to communicate information, but to engage in social, emotional, and political ritual. Are those rituals a good thing on the whole? Even if they are, why dress it up with all these theological truth propositions and elaborately fraudulent mythologies? Why do we have to be so verbose and repetitious, and pretend there's really 10,000 books' worth of depth to the Serenity Prayer?
> Not sure how you mean "style,"
You essentially coupled "I used to do this thing, and now I'm really credentialed but I don't do this thing any more" with "the ones most capable of elucidating existing ideas can be the ones least motivated to do so."
> Religion is a primeval failure mode of language, in my opinion, or at least an example of language being used not to communicate information, but to engage in social, emotional, and political ritual.
The core of the Serenity Prayer is not really religious. Sure, it starts off "God grant me the..." but really, that's not really different than saying "Today I hope I have the strength to..."
In any case, many of the books saying the same thing are not religious at all.
> You essentially coupled "I used to do this thing, and now I'm really credentialed but I don't do this thing any more" with "the ones most capable of elucidating existing ideas can be the ones least motivated to do so."
I'm not claiming it's a good or rational thing that I'm not motivated. (I'm also not claiming this happens to everyone with credentials.) I'm very nostalgic for that unembarrassed enthusiasm I once had, because, were I to possess it now, at least I would have a shot at producing something of value.
You may have gotten the wrong impression when I coupled this rueful sentiment with a criticism of the verbosity and redundancy of blogs and self-help books. These two things are in tension with each other but not strictly contradictory. "I am large, I contain multitudes."
> You essentially coupled "I used to do this thing, and now I'm really credentialed but I don't do this thing any more" with "the ones most capable of elucidating existing ideas can be the ones least motivated to do so."
I read that as a reference to Dunning-Kruger.
One way AI can help here is identifying prior art. Write a quick sketch of you idea, and ask an LLM with uncapped long-running web search capability to find if any prior art exists!
Sorry, I don't mean to single you out in any way, but why does AI/LLMs have to get shoehorned into every discussion here? It's getting exhausting.
The added value of the LLM here is probably zero. Just type a search propmt in a search engine. If the top 5 results don't cover the same ground your article is covering, at the very least, your article will expose new knowledge to people using that search term.
Typing up LLM instructions and reading the output is probably more work.
A couple other versions of this that have always stood out to me:
1) There's always a new cohort of people that don't know the things you know. You assume since you know it, everyone does. But kids coming up, or whoever, aren't you. They don't know this stuff yet. You can easily be the first time they've heard "make something people want" and where that comes from. The Curse of Knowledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge
2) There's always another tone/anecdote/verse that makes whatever idea more palatable to someone out there. They might not like the PG version, or the Wired version or the Daring Fireball version, whatever. There's probably some version of you in this lesson that someone out there vibes better with.
Reminds me of this tweet thread from Emmett Shear (cofounder of Twitch):
"I used to struggle w needing to be “creative” or “original” in my work. At some point I had a breakthrough that really helped me: I cannot repeat an idea, no matter how basic or common, without imparting some of my worldview into it.
Even by choosing which basic ideas to amplify, I impart some small amount of myself into each output. It’s literally impossible for a given tweet to be “unoriginal”. Equally impossible to be Truly Original too of course, since you’re always remixing others thoughts.
This POV does put a premium on cultivating and developing one’s worldview, since that is the underlying originality simmering under the surface of each “basic” thought. The best writing is rewriting, including of other people’s words, and the lens is your whole mind."
from: https://x.com/eshear/status/1539393474612498434
3) It's validating to know that other people see the problem, and it can create a discussion around it.
When I look back on the really helpful blog posts I have read, they have all been really basic. Whether they described a programming technique or a recipe for a new meal, it was a clear description that was important - not how esoteric the knowledge was.
There is a place for complex blog posts on arcane subjects but posts on "common knowledge" are even more important. There is a 15 year old out there somewhere that needs to know how to use the different smart pointers in C++ or how to properly care for a cast iron pan.
And link rot. A lot of sites from back when are straight up gone, sadly. Maybe you get lucky on archive.org. Or in your pan case, affiliate farming where the bias or technical expertise is suspect.
(Aside, for a lot of cooking I’ve gone back to dead trees and I realized one day I have so many cookbooks, why am I looking at some lifestyle recipe blogger?)
Or the information actually goes out of date and best practices change. There’s been like 25 years of standard revisions since I first learned C++.
ha. speaking of the devil. for the "curse of knowledge" mention i made above i had a link that google served me up to a post that was totally rotten now. so i went back in to include the wikipedia version.
https://xkcd.com/1053/
I knew which one it was even before clicking.
I actually have to write some internal docs and I'm struggling to put things into words. Blogging is hard, even when stating the "obvious"!
Yeah, whatever's obvious to you might not be obvious to someone else, and your take on a common take may appeal to certain people more than existing ones.
Plus let's be honest, there are a surprising number of topics where the obvious hasn't actually been documented in any real way, or where finding an answer to certain questions is near impossible. In those cases, just having an answer publicly available rather than say, on Discord or Google Docs can be a huge help.
A lot of the blogs I follow and enjoy the most have writers that often times just put a borderline one-liner and thats that. I think over the years what I value the most is the admiration I feel for the constancy some people have, posting every week for years on end. Of course I appreciate the content, and substance, but I value them more for actually staying true and showing that sometimes there just isnt much one can say, regardless, they still check in...
I don't think i ever went past the 5-blog count on any of my attempts.
While the "thankfully not all books are worth reading" adage is presumably very true of blogging as well, I do still feel some admiration for bloggers, even when their blogs could be perceived as "useless". Even to put something "useless" out there can be an act of bravery itself sometimes (in a "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act" George Orwell sense).
I've felt the "chilling effect" way too often when considering if I really want to put an idea out there that might later turn back to haunt me (even for things I would not consider controversial). I am very aware of the irony that oddly enough, psychologically I don't perceive the same level of danger from random HN comment threads though.
There's also a social component to blogging, right? When you post something it tells me about who you are. It helps establish my (probably parasocial) relationship with you.
And when you post something, I might be interested in it, even if I wasn't interested when someone else posted about it, because I'm interested in you and interested in what you have to say.
I think that human communication is about pure relationship socialization as much or more than it is about actually communicating information or ideas.
Thank you for sharing this observation.
I had a post on here this week that was briefly popular. There were numerous folks who posted that the material “wasn’t new.”
I felt like it should be implicit that people who already know what I was writing about are not the target audience. But here they were, commenting.
At the same time, the page got upvoted quite a lot and the comments were filled with folks who had lots of interesting reactions and additions. Despite the fact that this was “old news”, it seemed implicit that for many it was new news.
Sometimes we should trigger conversation. I believe we shouldn’t index on novelty- we should index on impact. Your post is a nice defense of those who discover and share what they discover.
I read a lot of beginner/tute FP stuff. A mistake they make is doing 2 sentences of "here's how to conceptualise this new notation and what Int -> Int -> Boolean means"
And then they get bored and just go full bore ¿ conjunctivitis applique to unbound ¤ variable 》》-> is a Mongolian {....} ... forgetting they were in tutorial mode. Or, showing examples which embed syntax which is apparently the same as before but "oh shit, I forgot a : means something else in this context" so having explained syntactically what a : means.. confusing you again.
Or showing REPL prompts without explaining if the # is a prompt or part of the command. The list is frankly endless.
Decades ago, this was C programmers trying to explain basic imperative syntax and then using a "compute prime" with a recursive function call or a ternary operator or bitshift.
So my next blog maybe will be "seven cardinal sins of blogs about basics" which will have only one sin: forgetting the job, the only one job you had (or apparently set yourself)
Hahaha, this is so accurate. I do this so often because I start off with a certain mindset and then when I get maybe 10% of the way through I find that I won't finish the post in any time if I write at this pace. So I have this idea! "Imperfect is Okay! I'll publish it and refine it over time by expounding on each section". Then I publish it and never look at it again. Hilarious! In the end, this entire genre of writing is no longer useful so I suppose not much harm is done.
In a meta way, this blog post itself is example of that: sounds obvious that blogging can just be stating the obvious, but I still enjoyed reading it, and it served as a good reminder. I guess part of what makes it feel good is confirmation bias, but it can also be nice to read something that confirms your beliefs especially if the other side(s) are very loud online. I would also add that it is just expressing oneself, and therefore it is ok for it to be non-original thought: you are not publishing a scientific article, you are expressing your opinion, adding to the general discourse online, making your voice be heard, and also just capturing your thoughts into something concrete.
Wrote something like this earlier today [1]. There was something really nice about not thinking too much about the details and letting it be rough.
[1] https://graybeard.ing/llms-are-grep-on-steroids/
I never imagined my blogs to be useful to anyone. For me, they're mostly just things I felt like sharing but with no particular audience in mind. Over the years though, I find myself receiving email from people who I helped. I even googled quite a few things in the past years only to find the first answer to be a blog of mine. So I unblocked myself a few times.
Blogging is fun. What's obvious for you isn't for everyone.
indeed! this is pretty much exactly how i feel about mine as well. i blog for myself, mostly. i enjoy the act of writing, just about whatever is on my mind at any point in time and inspires me to write about it. i know that i have some readers (like you, i've gotten very kind emails from people who have stopped by my site), and i am very thankful for those readers.
but even if i had zero readers, i would still enjoy the act of writing and putting it out there. i can go back to my blog and look through the years, and see how my outlook on things has changed, how i've grown over time. and the process of writing itself is just cathartic, at the same time.
and as you mentioned, it's fun! :)
People already know a lot of things.
But which "know"?
There's seeing something and recognising it as something you've seen before.
There's being able to recite it without seeing it.
There's being able to explain it.
There's _knowing_ it. Where your life is an active demonstration of having made it _part_ of you.
To the extent we obtain wisdom with life, it's usually a progression of things progressing deeper down the layers, years, perhaps decades after they attained level 1.
I'd insert another important level of knowing which I feel deserves the name "understanding" and that's knowing its relationships to other thing you also know. Perhaps even that's almost all there is in knowing something. The more relationships to it that you know, the deeper your understanding of it.
Commenting on Hacker News is often just stating the obvious, but people still upvote! ;)
To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand HN comments. The humour is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of theoretical physics most of the jokes will go over a typical commenters's head.
Yes!!! This!!!
/s
Stating the obvious (or maybe not). A bit of internet history, the word blog comes from web log, and shorten to take just the last 4 letters.
I like actually taking the full form weblog and nudging the space we get also 'we blog'.
The fact that someone makes a simple observation is probably suggestive that despite its simplicity, it doesn't stick fully, maybe it's even anti-memetic.
Perhaps repeating such simple truths is like a spaced repetition system for society
Most search results nowadays are SEO farms. Posts I read are also mostly just someone debugging a weird bug for endless hours only cause they were mad, just grep output and the fix.
personal domain blogs survive faster than medium.
At one point Google (and I presume other search engines) actively searched for and penalised content / SEO farms, hostile user patterns like invasive popups, even policing site performance. It's like they just gave up.
> personal domain blogs survive faster than medium.
Google has been aggressively de-indexing websites in the last few months
There's also just so much overwhelmingly bad advice out there that sometimes, stating the obvious real thing is worth doing.
I was never a prolific blogger. I do write a LOT internally at work and I write very long messages in group chats.
With the advent of LLMs, I've felt even less need to publish publicly. It's as if an LLM can either produce something higher-quality and more tailored to the reader's context in a shorter period of time. Or the topic I write would be so niche that it should just be in a group chat.
> if an LLM can either produce something higher-quality and more tailored
LLMs won’t always do this well. The best ideas in my backlog are the ones where the LLMs won’t finish my thoughts because they’re contrary to what 1000 people said on a forum somewhere. Or because I’m relaying an original personal experience.
But even if LLMs can finish your thoughts, it’s probably good to post anyway. Because in five years LLMs, maybe two commercialized, or their trained opinion may shift. A dated blog post is a nice Ebeneezer, a memorial to the Zeitgeist it hails from.
Happens to me too. I don't think I could spit out words about random topics on a constant basis that happen to be interesting to someone else. On the other hand I know I could write a whole book easily, but I just don't know what it would wirte about.
I would value any human writing, even if clumsy or in need of a good editor, more than anything an LLM produced.
https://sive.rs/obvious "Obvious to you. Amazing to others."
Granny says one can't benefit from the experience of others. Not entirely accurate but she has a point.
Some "obvious" things come with experience, sometimes it's the opposite: beginner's luck.
Problem with getting old is that you’ve seen it all. A bright eyed 25 year old blogging about this thing called a “Unix pipe operator” gets boring the 200th time it shows up on the front page of HN.
One of these days, the strays will line up with me. Then pass me, then I will get old...
Something obvious to others may not be obvious to you - and to be fair it was a key ingredient in blogging.
I find it extremely sad that blogging shifted from personal writing to a performative act - we can feel ashamed stating something obvious because the expectation is to get approvals and shares, rather than us writing something we find intriguing, interesting or worth writing down.
This is obvious? Am I stating the obvious?
It's why I follow Scott Manly or PBS Space Time specifically. There's lots of the same content on other channels/mediums. But I like them specifically, so why not?
Continuing to state the obvious, this is why you specifically should write if you have opinions you'd like to get out.
If I wanted to write something completely new, I'd write a paper, not a blog post. After all, blogging is ultimately about organizing my thoughts on topics that are already known.
In that sense, my personal problem is that no one visits my homepage (www.makonea.com). Ultimately, I think conveying thoughts on such topics also depends to some extent on reputation.
This is often, but not always, also what stand up comedy is.
What I like about comedy is it reveals what people think but don't say. If someone laughs at a joke, it's because they believe it to be true or accurate.
I also see this when people present studies online which say something like "Eating fast food causes obesity" and you get people replying "well obviously".
On the face of it things might sound obvious, but the study or in the case of blogging the discussion actually attempts to get the to the bottom of why that might be the case.
I have a simple blog if anyone is interested: https://landenlove.com/
Isn’t it similar to “Just be yourself”? But first you need all the hard work to get to that level so that you can just be yourself. What is obvious to me may have come as a lot of experience and focus in the past.
I avoid substack because of this. It's totally fine to email people about new posts, but at least let me read your post first. Make me interested. I'll follow you not because one good post (maybe if it's really good) but because several good ones. If your post is good I'll go look at others before leaving. If it looks good, then, and ONLY then will I subscribe.
But I can tell you there's a strong correlation between why you're writing a post and why I'll subscribe. If you're trying to hustle I don't give a shit. You're most likely another pseudo intellectual chasing whatever is hot. What I, personally, want is the experts. I want to see that depth of knowledge. I want to see how you think. I want to read a blog post where I get to know you, not some facade. Not everything needs to be a hustle. Find your niche and your niche will stick with you. If you try to write to everybody you'll end up writing to nobody. Concentrate on making me want to subscribe, not pestering me into it. You're not a used car salesman
My favorite thing about substack is that it completely doesn't work in my 3-year-old browser. They managed to fuck up serving static pages with text via some ungodly JS bloat, I suppose. Blogging, of all things! It's the simplest form of web content possible!
Probably because they are trying to fight people that are trying to add them to their adblock. Which what a crazy thing to fight...
As if you need another reason to avoid substack, they host Nazi content.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/feb/07/revealed-how-s...
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1053/
There's ten thousand people new people each day, and someone has to be the first time they run into something :)
Yes!!! This!!!
Yes!!! This!!!
Of course, there’s a whole microblogging platform called Twitter where people do it.
Disclaimer; have not read the article.
My current feeling about blogging is, that it more then anything else is we’re certian knowledge of AI came from. The arguments for blogging being the thing again also started at the same time AI got traction.
Just identify the bloggers that know their craft, weight them height. And you got yourself a step change in LLM competency.
Paying no one.
Finally someone’s saying it! Also I love how meta this is.
My father, who worked as a market research analyst, said that the trick to the job was "point out the obvious before anyone else does".
Web sites and web content are trending towards being enshittified until it just barely becomes worth wading through all of the shit to get to what you actually wanted to consume.
Blogging is a form of improving your writing and communication if you so choose.
Improving articulations is a helpful skill for use with AI too.
The most useful blogs I read aren't the ones with novel ideas. They're the ones where someone took something I vaguely understood and wrote it down clearly enough that I could explain it to someone else. That's surprisingly rare and valuable.
Most knowledge lives in this awkward middle ground where everyone sort of knows it but nobody has written a clean version. The person willing to write the obvious version usually ends up being the reference.
AI can do a good job of this. Summarize content and then searching the internet to see if anyone has commented a summary like that before.
But I suspect such a blog would not be popular.
Rather, let the AI search the web for an idea. If the idea hasn't been published widely in the last 3-4 years, it's a safe topic for a blog post today :)
(Next level: unleash the AI to find such under-posted topics, check them against your list of interests, and offer to you for inspiration.)