I used to blog and quit (pulled all of my content from the web). I still have a landing page, which serves as a general "This is who I am, I'm a real person" because I have a business and people Google my name.
I couldn't find a good reason to continue publishing content for everyone to read. I also gave up on the open source community at the same time.
The idea of "giving back" to the community is gone. The open source (and open knowledge) web is gone. People (and companies/ML models) take/pilfer/plagiarize/rehash/profit from your contributions and you get squat in return. I decided to no longer take part in it.
I can write on my own, privately. I can share and link to content with private links. I don't need the vanity, opportunities or monetization (ie, peanuts).
Apparently this is a controversial opinion based on the position of the comment, but I feel like it's a painful truth.
Spending double digit hours to polish up an insightful or useful article then posting it publicly to the internet feels like playing the lottery. There is a chance that you'll get "monetization", "opportunities", or "notoriety"; but you can be sure that the house is getting their cut. With the current web scraping models out there, it feels like the house's cut is only getting bigger and your upside is getting slimmer.
Sure posting a tutorial that you wrote anyways to help yourself digest something has low personal downside, but you're basically just crowd sourcing away a technical writer's job at whatever entity is responsible for (or benefiting from) the tech you're researching.
Maybe this is "pulling the ladder up behind you", but it feels more like "not being climbed on in a human pyramid". I would have no problems with "content" I spent time producing only benefited individuals with no compensation in return (probably still citations if warranted), but like OP said the reality is that your "content" will either be:
- not generically valuable in the first place
- iterated on without credit
- digested into the beast (blog spam & ML models) with no compensation
That's never what open source was about. It's the tragedy of the commons.
I don't disagree--drive-by comment just to say that's unfortunate as there's often really brilliant, unique, esoteric and useful content scattered about individual blogs (as my bookmarks can attest), that is very difficult to find elsewhere, if at all.
The thing that pushed me over the edge was browsing personal sites I found via http://wiby.me/
I was reading fairly old gamedev, emulation and other blogs. The content and spirit of them made me realize how things have come along since and depressed me. Said fuck it.
There's nothing wrong with un-publishing old stuff if it no longer reflects how you think, or if you feel it's not relevant anymore. You can always keep a private archive.
I think a lot of people think of blogs as "production-quality writing", which is natural because for part of the 2000s, blogging = money/recognition. That era is over, no matter how many people start (and later abandon) Substacks.
In general, writing/podcasting/making videos with the primary intent of directly monetizing them has pretty long odds. The recognition angle may be useful if it's connected to your day job and anyone cares if you have a public persona or not. It's been useful for me but you have to have the right expectations going in or you'll probably be disappointed.
I was going to say something similar. Journaling has been way more valuable to me than I realized before. Among the many notes I jot down to myself every day, I write blog-like entries where I dump out my current thoughts, including very intimate ones. Surprisingly, I get about as much enjoyment as I got out of blogging but without the need to consider an audience besides myself, especially when it comes to making sure that I won't be misunderstood. The act of writing down my thoughts has been really helpful in processing them, coming up with new ideas, understanding my emotions, and planning for the future.
People can get the same thing out of blogging, but I came to really dislike the nature of online content today, and all the considerations one has to take in order to make one's blog "readable" undermines the personal benefit one can get from the act of writing.
It was one thing back in the early days of the web when a blog could be scrappy and written in a very personal way. Those days are long gone. If you want to write a public journal in a personal and informal way, and interact with an audience, then be prepared to have some malcontents tell you to "cite your sources" about the most trivial shit, despite you never having made the promise of writing academically. If you're not making money, why bother listening to the peanut gallery? And let's say you want to make money off your blog; first off, blogs are not easy to monetize, and with money in the picture you now have to think about the voice you use, the structure of your writing, whether you're being too offensive, etc. In other words, you now have a shitty job on top of your day job!
Yeah, count me out. I know some people get enjoyment and profit out of blogging, but the wild west of the blogging is in the past, and the current state of the internet is largely not for me as someone who might otherwise want to produce content. The only content I generate is here in HN comment sections.
In case anyone reading this is interested in getting started journaling, what I do is use Apple Notes and encrypt all my notes. The nice thing about the encryption is that the notes aren't easily searchable, and the Notes app will lock the notes after a few minutes if you aren't interacting with them. The safety of the encryption allows me to write virtually anything to myself, which I've found to be a really good thing for my mental health. My more formal entries are just a title, a date, bullet points for what I've achieved that day, bullet points for things I still need to do, and a "debriefing" section where I can just write about whatever I'm thinking about the current or previous day.
I hope the open source communities can go back to their roots before the bubble crashed first. With the advent of auto code writers we could see a true open source renaissance. I'm trying to publish in this space[0] but I want to reach a better model than slapping sponsors on a newsletter.
I couldn't find a good reason to continue publishing content for everyone to read. I also gave up on the open source community at the same time.
The idea of "giving back" to the community is gone. The open source (and open knowledge) web is gone. People (and companies/ML models) take/pilfer/plagiarize/rehash/profit from your contributions and you get squat in return. I decided to no longer take part in it.
I can write on my own, privately. I can share and link to content with private links. I don't need the vanity, opportunities or monetization (ie, peanuts).