> "I keep this blog for me to write, not necessarily for others to read."
This is now to me the "old school" internet creator attitude (that I still possess). I don't blog as much any more but do create content elsewhere - a lot of it is for my own enjoyment and creative outlet, to blow off steam, whatever - the fact that other people may want to watch it is secondary. I do try to do things people want, but only if I want to do it.
The only reason I highlight this is that the up and coming generations absolutely do not see content creation in the same way. I got in an absurd argument with an early 20 something on a social media platform about how annoying ads were that were disguised as content. The response was overwhelmingly "Well, how else do you expect content creators to make a living?"
I do not disagree that creators should be able to monetize their content however they please, but the fact that people see that as the end and only goal of content creation is baffling to me and almost certainly making it worse. This same person tried to tell me it's been the same way since the earliest days of youtube - which they would have been in diapers around that time - is absolutely not true. The idea of content creation as a full time career is relatively new, and I hate it. The worst part is if you don't participate in the type of obnoxious engagement hacking or buried ads that these "professional" creators do, the algorithms punish you for it.
I seriously hate the term "content" used for "creative output". It is a terrible, derogatory word, that makes me sad. Content is only there to have something to sell, to fill the blank space around ads, the actual content of the content doesn't matter. That people refer to themselves as "content creators" is a sign that they see the value of their creative output only to make money.
I can't explain why, but I always cringe a little when I hear someone say that they "consume content."
Maybe its because I can't tell if brings up animalistic connotations (a pack of feral hipsters picking at the remains of an endangered podcast on the Serengeti), or if they are intentionally being elitist ("It would be a waste of time to simply read Chomsky's work, an educated person would make the effort consume it.")
What most consumers want doesn’t align with what is healthy to eat. You could get water and a decent salad from chick-fil-a, but when nobody buys the health options they eventually get taken off the menu.
A friend of mine was playing the game Slay the Spire and was loving it -- he said something along the lines of, "It's very well designed, and there's so much content!" That always kind of skeeved me out. I think because there's this odd self-awareness of it all?
Ha. This is is exactly what turns me off of Slay the Spire. It's a filler game, full of filler content, designed to fill your time. And not, as far as I can tell, much more than that.
"Content" is a commodity. I don't see a huge difference between the folks who view creative work as "content" and talk about it as if it's fungible and can be valued per uni of weight, and art speculators who buy up works of art they've never seen and then leave it warehoused in some freehold somewhere.
I can't really blame people who do creative work for catering to folks who think about their work this way - everybody's got to eat - but I'll still gladly bemoan the pervasive cultural debasement.
Couldn’t really disagree more, although I guess I see where you’re coming from. Slay the Spire to me lacks “content” at least the way you’re using it - there are 4 classes that essentially have never changed and the levels are pseudo randomly generated and otherwise don’t change much run to run.
However, attaining very high levels in that game requires a depth of skill, strategy, and math that is constantly startling to me, and I used to play card games professionally.
This is exactly why my 12 yr old by likes Genshin Impact (a Zelda type game on the phone): "it always got these new characters" etc. Like infinite scrolling, it's an endless loop to get more gems so you can level up so you can get more new characters as they come up so you can get more gems so you can level up ad infinitum. It's basically like an advanced candy crush that you can just zone out and mindlessly do forever. I hate it.
I think your comment kinda provides the reason why the term “content” is used; there are so many verticals out there that its just easiest to say “I’m a content creator.” From there, if the audience remains captive, you can explain that you make videos about sewing sweaters with embedded controllers for cats.
Also, don’t get me wrong, I’m pretty conflicted on the term. I just like to believe people are using it in good faith when they describe themselves, and don’t just see “content” as a means towards an end.
It makes perfect sense to use the word content where it’s a convenient abstraction. But humans don’t watch/read/play or fall in love with abstractions. The specifics matter.
Loads of people think "it's film night" or "I want to watch a film" and then "what shall I watch?"
The same with music: "I'll put some music on ... what should I put on?"
And with food: "I want to eat something, what shall I eat?"
People turn the radio on while driving, or the TV on in the background, for 'company' without caring what's on it.
People pick up something - anything - to read while on the toilet, not caring if it's literature, magazine, or the ingredients of the shampoo bottle.
The desirable feature is entertainment, distraction, novelty, escapism, sound instead of silence, activity instead of rigor mortis, ideas instead of void, life instead of death. Not just actionable facts to be studied.
I remember in the 90s "content is king" was a catchphrase, this was before the modern internet. Though I had no idea it was a Bill Gates phrase, found this while looking for more info on it (since it's been ages since I've thought that way, after the post 2007/2011-ish shift of the internet).
Heh, my brother-in-law have described “content” as being the “love language” of our boomer dads.. the sharing of material (surprisingly often on TikTok these days) that none of us really care about yet continually gets sent out to us. Seemingly the favoured way to keep in touch.
Not a boomer but honestly every year that passes I can tell my cognitive decline by how much harder it is to not send these things to my kids.
I have a folder full of them marked 'inheritance' so that I can be assured my kids will find it when they scour my computer after I'm dead. They are going to be so stoked!
Have you considered opening a high interest account for the inheritance?
Inflation is a sad fact of life.
A funny picture that would get a heartfelt laugh out of most anyone this year, could be eliciting as little as a sensible chuckle 30 years from now!
That’s why it’s important to not just shove all your memes onto some USB drive and sticking it in the mattress. Think wisely, let the Meme Bank be the custodian of all your funny pictures and videos.
Just by looking at a period of 10 years back compared to now, we can see a stark difference between the meme collections that families kept at home vs the meme collections of families that kept their memes in Meme Bank.
There are two factors that contribute by an outsized amount to the lowering of value of the meme collections of average Joe over the years:
Firstly, resolution and compression artifacts. Where ten years ago a 640 by 480 pixels jpeg would have garnered applause from the people you showed it to, the people of today expect more. And all you’d be getting today for that once glorious meme, would be responses asking you “y’all got any more of them pixels?”
Secondly, stale pop-cultural reference. That meme you’ve got referencing a scene from a movie from last year. Yeah, it might still be funny today. In thirty years, usually not so much.
Here at Meme Bank, we take care of these things and that’s how we’re able to keep your meme collection as funny as ever.
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The challenge is that every fruit must have its seed. (Even seedless varieties are artificially created by labs which then themselves can be viewed as the seeds, but I digress..)
Nothing of value to others is truly created in a vacuum. It must have some system of re-uptake, of value being conferred back to the creator or else it will never repeat.
Ads are one potential way that can be accomplished, but as much as we hate ads we can't just expect them to go away and leave the "content" alone. We have to replace them with some other superior way of remunerating the creators.
I wish flattr would have took off as a service, that sort of low-friction idea seemed quite promising.
> That people refer to themselves as "content creators" is a sign that they see the value of their creative output only to make money
and it is that way.
the worse thing is that you have a younger generation thinking that it's the future of work or something. "Why do I need to do well in school when I'm going to make cute TikTok videos and people are going to pay me lots of money" (almost verbatim words from a 12 year old boy)
We got a great new word for it now: "slop" (as in, "AI-generated slop").
It can be human generated as well, and the key point is exactly as you wrote it -- it only exists to sell ads around it and has minimal or even negative (wrong or outdated information, poor reasoning, etc.) nutritional value.
Content describes a place in media in a formal way, by saying where it goes and what its role is. This way to categorize "content" makes it a form.
It's similar to how Content Management Systems used to manage the layout and navigation of a website, but never managed the content. They accessed the content that came out of the database, but surely there had to be an author to manage the content. The CMS did everything but.
This museum definitely has some nice content, even better than the content at the library!
I think the use of the word 'content' stems from the times when all this technological innovation had more emphasis on programming and design and people were busy to find ideas/applications for all the newfound possibilities. Content was an afterthought.
I remember being busy with building a website - around 1998 or so - and only afterwards asking myself what I should use it for. I already got my high from finishing the programming/coding, now I had to fill it up with content.
Some years later, throw some marketeers and MBA type people in the mix, mix it with SEO and ads, and a legitimate need for 'content' arises. Doesn't matter what content, just content. Google is going to decide whether it's good content ('good' of course meaning 'monetizable').
Content is absolutely the best word for most of the shit they are shoveling. I would never use this term to describe a musician or author though I admit it isn't possible to objectively prove the difference and I wouldn't be surprised if younger people can't tell at all.
Perhaps an indication of its superficiality is the awkwardness of describing something as "content about" a topic. Its more like a binary, on/off, in that way similar to a lightbulb.
Welcome to the hyper capitalist world that has been created over the past 60 years. This is the result of always needed growth in your economic system.
Economic growth is another way of saying "improving people's lives". An economic system which always needs to improve people's lives is a good thing, actually.
When you compare modern first world to 60 years ago, people's lives have significantly improved. And if you do the same in developed countries, the difference is unbelievable.
Problem is the 10-20 year window doesn't look so good.
Only vampires don't realize you can't suck every last drop out out. Every good manager knows you can't count on more than 80% employee utilization in the best circumstances with the best people. Now companies expect zero hour employees (part time employees who are guaranteed zero hours/zero schedule but expected to move their lives around their job, which is one of three part time jobs they need to survive) to do more than that by requiring employees do the manager's job of finding shift coverage off hours using their personal phone, etc while also being 100% utilized during work hours, with zero overlapping roll coverage. That isn't sustainable and no way live, and is an unreasonable expectation from a zero hour job.
It seems to me that you're equating economic growth with "sucking every last drop out". Please correct me if I misunderstood you, but it is a completely nonsensical proposition.
> When you compare modern first world to 60 years ago, people's lives have significantly improved.
I disagree that most people's lives have "significantly improved" compared with the 1960s. We have more things, but I don't think that our lives are that much better, or even better at all. In the 1950s and 60s most families could get by with a one income household -- try that today.
Even medically - on the one hand our physical health has improved through advances in medicine and life expectancy has increased considerably (mostly due to vaccines). On the other hand we have a huge increase in mental health problems. Per-capita suicide rates in the US are higher today than they were in the 1960s.
(If you're in the top 10% then yes your life has "significantly improved". If you're in the bottom 50% then probably not.)
>I disagree that most people's lives have "significantly improved" compared with the 1960s.
Obviously, you're only looking inside the US. People's lives in the US haven't improved by that much because the US has been squandering its advantages for the last several decades. Outside the US, especially in developing nations, people's lives are far, far better than their parents' and grandparents'.
>In the 1950s and 60s most families could get by with a one income household
Only in the US, because of its post-war economic boom. In most other places, everyone had to work.
Yes, all fair points. I was of course referring to the US.
But comparing Europe today with the 60s isn't a fair comparison considering the entire continent was devastated -- physically and economically -- during WW2 and it was a long road to rebuilding. Same with Japan.
> especially in developing nations
That much I agree with, but the original post was talking about developed countries (US/Europe/Japan primarily)
>I disagree that most people's lives have "significantly improved" compared with the 1960s. We have more things, but I don't think that our lives are that much better, or even better at all. In the 1950s and 60s most families could get by with a one income household -- try that today.
This impression is contradicted by a mountain of data. Ourworldindata.org is a good place to start.
Anecdotally, when I talk to elderly people, they nearly all agree that they've witnessed substantial improvements in living standards. They're not always keen on the cultural changes, but they nearly always view modern living as "better off."
The promise of communism is that the worker owns the means of production, the worker, not the goverment. If the goverment owns your means of production, it's just a corpo disguissed as a country.
I think this is a common misconception of the comparison between "capitalism" and other forms of economic distribution. It's not capitalism that equates everything to dollars, it is how the universe works. This was the beauty of Karl Marx's thinking. He postulated that the best way to measure value is in the amount of human labor that goes into the output. However, once you have a medium to equate the value of a new chair into labor then I can come up with an another transformation to equate that labor into some defined quantity of glass beads. It turns out that choosing Labor as the "value" is completely arbitrary, and so dollars (or yen or gold) works just as well as a medium for conversion.
Choosing labor as the value is worse than arbitrary, because labor is far less fungible than (say) commodities. The value of labor depends on whose labor it is for the job. Half an hour's labor by one person can turn apples, flour, butter, and sugar into a delicious pie; half an hour's labor by a different person will create a soggy mess. In one case, labor adds value; in another case, it destroys value (can't use that flour for anything else now.)
> This was the beauty of Karl Marx's thinking. He postulated that the best way to measure value is in the amount of human labor that goes into the output.
This is indeed the most beautiful insight of Karl Marx that I ever read. This predicts perfectly why all socialist/communist economies collapse. They value inefficiency. The more work is needed to build a product, the more valuable it is --- according to Marx. That is one of the most fundamental error in his theories.
You're assuming socialist/communist economies must, for some reason, be run exactly the same as capitalist economies. Of course if you're trying to mix both it will collapse.
The point of Marx isn't that we should create markets where the value is decided by the amount of labor. The point of Marx is that if Labor creates value, then Labor should be in charge. The problem being that Labor is hard, so the end goal cannot be to maximize Labor (or value), contrary to your implied way of thinking were the most value must be created.
If maximizing value is not the goal, then why should Marxism redefine value in a counter-intuitive way?
Btw, "Labor" cannot be in charge, outside the UK at least, because Labor is an abstract concept. In Marxist societies people are in charge that pretend to have the laborers best interest in their hearts. But as they "Some are more equal than others."
> If maximizing value is not the goal, then why should Marxism redefine value in a counter-intuitive way?
Because it's only an exchange value and doesn't take into account the myriad of things that also have value but are not a consequence of work ? And the goal of Marxism might not be to maximize exchange value ?
> In Marxist societies people are in charge that pretend to have the laborers best interest in their hearts
Hard disagree, looking at societies applying values evolved from Marxist theories I see people in charge of themselves. I think of the old Commune de Paris, of the Spanish Revolution, of the Rojava. You need to look further than the one example you have in mind.
Somehow the increased accessibility of being an independent entertainer instead of having to work in a toxic entertainment industry that regularly covered up widespread abuse means that capitalism bad.
This seems unnecessarily negative and pessimistic. "Content" is the stuff or substance that people want to consume as opposed to all the associated stuff (branding, SEO, "hooks", whatever). "Content creator" recognizes that there is similarity between long form video essays and shorts and blogs and live streams - and that people who do one often do others.
I don't agree. The emphasis on content implies it's the output that is most important, and that you can split it out from all the nonsense you differentiate above. Many of the people in this thread counter that the act of creation is the most important part. Just stop with "Creator" (or builder or writer).
If you write only for yourself, what motivates you to actually finish, and more importantly, polish a post?
I write for myself all the time, in private: I have a journal, a paper notebook, thousands of notes in Obsidian. Yet doing a blog post feels like a massive undertaking every single time, especially the later writing and editing: explaining stuff that is obvious to me and no one else, replacing idiosyncratic abbreviations, fixing formatting issues, fixing blogging engine or hosting stuff. I think I struggle with these parts because doing those tasks doesn't benefit me very much.
So how do you do these things within the framework of writing for oneself? Any takes on this?
I can answer for me (I've been blogging just over 20 years at this point). There's a couple of main reasons for me to write a blog instead of just an obsidian note.
Firstly, the process of writing a blog post makes me think through my assumptions as I'm explaining the concepts it covers to other people. On more than one occasion I've realised while writing, that my understanding of the topic wasn't entirely correct, so it's useful here.
Also I blog so the information is available to others. If I spent a decent amount of time working things out, it's possible that a blog could save other people in similar situations effort, so that's handy.
Lastly I blog so I can point people to a post instead of explaining a topic in detail, it's a handy time saver for things that come up a lot.
As to benefits, well it wasn't deliberate but blogging contributed to me getting my last two jobs, so in that sense I guess it's paid off pretty well!
I have 500+ posts over ~9 years and the polish is what lets me absorb what I've written into memory.
If I look at the titles of all of my posts I can pretty much recall the details of the post to a reasonable degree, certainly enough to get a complete gist of it and understand the head space I was in at the time.
If I stick to internal chicken scratch notes then I have a harder time remembering things later. I guess you could say it's the process of writing a somewhat coherent post that has a beginning, middle and end that's really helpful for retention.
For me personally, the effort of 'polishing' a post makes it drastically more valuable to myself in the end: I think harder about the material; I notice problems with my thinking that I would have glossed over otherwise; I explain things in ways that will be more useful/legible to me-five-years-from-now.
Committing myself to publish posts is, in part, sort of a motivational hack to get me to do the polishing. The possibility that someone else _might_ read it and judge me for it pushes me to put much more effort in than I would if I kept it private. (I wrote a short blog post on this: https://brokensandals.net/personal/reviews-as-notes/)
I probably wouldn't see this as a sufficient reason for blogging if I believed that _literally_ nobody would _ever_ read the stuff I post. But it is a significant benefit that's available even if I only have a very tiny and sporadic audience.
> If you write only for yourself, what motivates you to actually finish, and more importantly, polish a post?
Because I will eventually have the same problem again and if it's not documented to hell and back it will take me days to figure out what I did the last time to solve it.
The third time you find a 10 year old post by yourself asking how to solve the same problem you're having now and posting "nvm - I got it" is the time you appreciate documentation and run books.
Writing for my future self (I know from coding) is like writing for another person. So making it readable, sources cited, etc. is being kind to future me.
Also, it’s like that old saw about teaching - if you can’t explain something to another, you probably don’t really know the topic. The exercise of writing about something with another person in mind helps me organize the information and understand it at a deeper level.
"Writing is thinking. The clearer your thoughts, the better the output. It's kind of the main reason why writing is an essential part of the learning process (especially in schools)."
I don’t write too much anymore, one of my blogs got a lot more exposure and attention than I was comfortable with and people online in general are weirdo freaks and annoying to deal with. I guess I didn’t fuss too much with that stuff, the quality was likely poorer than it could have been. Same with my video stuff, I just don’t care that much if it’s polished. Audience feedback sometimes helps but isn’t that motivating to me.
>> and people online in general are weirdo freaks and annoying to deal with.
This is definitely the current internet and not the typical experience back when blogging was very popular. It's too easy to access and produce low-quality contributions today, which (ironically?) is something that blogs countered and also probably led to their decline.
> This is definitely the current internet and not the typical experience back when blogging was very popular.
This has been my experience for much of the last ~15 years as an extremely niche internet personality but it is definitely worse lately, particularly the amount of outrage people can generate out of nowhere over the most benign things - my response is always an exasperated "you're perfectly free to simply not consume this." But people then take it waaaaay too far.
If I publish what I write then it forces me to actually put some effort into making it readable but I don't necessarily think of the audience when I'm writing. Just more of from a perspective of spelling and grammar. Personally it's the knowledge of the fact it will be public is the accountability I need to put in that extra effort and future me is grateful I can comprehend what current me is saying.
The approach can be similar. I mean, I write for myself; nobody reads my blog. They can, sure, but nobody does because I almost never give out the URL to anyone.
So the result is I don't feel the need to care too much about explaining, etc. except when I want.
> especially the later writing and editing: explaining stuff that is obvious to me and no one else
I don’t do this. I write expecting the audience to pretty much have read the entirety of my blog to understand any single entry. I like to think there’s a mystique to it — I’ve long enjoyed unpacking the ideas of obscure thinkers, myself.
Then: I’ve known of maybe 10 people over a combined five years that have made the effort to read a lot of my stuff.
I can't speak for the original author, but crafting a great blog post is fun. And, there are thousands of people a day who read my blog, but even if it were zero it would be the same.
The "polish" and working on it is part of craft, it's no different than carving something out of wood and not showing it to anyone. You still had fun creating the product and shaping it how you wanted.
for me, i've saved myself time and energy at least 10 times by writing stuff down and publishing it on my blog/forums. i know i help people, but i mainly do it for Future Sergio.
just dont do any of that. write at the level you want to write at and publish what you have. its a kind of self esteem work to say “what i write for myself is fine to make public”
and then being public also inspires slightly higher quality
> The idea of content creation as a full time career is relatively new, and I hate it.
I do too, but IMHO unfortunately us older generations have a lot to answer for when it comes to this. My teenage daughter plus all of her friends all want to be content creators. It's the 21st century equivalent of becoming a pop star or being a TV personality. As an industry we've automated away a lot of the jobs that these kids otherwise could have had, handed them a bunch of shitty tools and algorithms and shown them that this is a way to make money. I don't find their attitude all that surprising.
And it's not really new. Being a YouTuber or TikToker was obviously not possible before those platforms existed, but people were musicians, actors, or other sorts of performers, or wrote stuff that they tried to get published, it's all the same drive. Some wanted to do it to become a star and get paid, others did it for the love of the craft.
The internet is a new avenue for this, that's all.
>21st century equivalent of becoming a pop star or being a TV personality
Which were always lottery professions at best. Being influencers/YouTube stars/etc. may seem more accessible these days but it's probably mostly an illusion. There are (mostly) plenty of jobs but most of them are probably pretty unglamorous.
* It's more accessible to be an influencer today than a pop star 20 years ago
* Becoming an influencer is a lot like being a lottery winner.
Bands on the radio had massive audiences. A decent Youtuber is getting 10k views on their video, which is a much smaller piece of the pie than any band that aired on the radio in the early 2000s. But for every Youtuber with 10k views there's hundreds, maybe thousands, of Youtubers with videos in the single digit of views.
Conversely, there's far, far more "decent Youtubers" with 10k views now than there were bands on the radio 30 years ago. Only a very lucky few bands ever got airtime like that. 10k-view Youtubers are common.
Indeed and that's what I think is motivating so many people to become "content creators". And I don't know if that's a bad thing. If you're getting 10k views you have a comfy community around you and you're at the least making side income money. That's plenty to complement a not very demanding day job. Being a member of these comfy communities is fun, it's like being in a much smaller version of HN.
And my generation all wanted to be popstars, actors and models (well I wanted to program computers, but whatever). Kids don't change that much, it is just us who are getting older.
Totally, I quit high school at 15 to become a rock star. It didn't pan out.
I think the difference is the automation, the algorithms designed to maximise for maximum engagement of human attention. Growing up in the MTV generation, these algorithms were handled mostly by humans, and their reach was limited due to television, radio and print media being the dominant form of communication with the audience.
Now we have an Internet, everyone including our kids is connected, everything is only a click away, and the algorithms run at massive speed due to the compute power of today.
Agreed. I think part of this shift came with the transition to use real names online everywhere. Now what you put out there really matters because you might be judged for it years later. So if you're limited in your creativity, why bother creating something you don't enjoy if it doesn't have the potential to make you money?
Personally I'm keeping my real name Gmail but I've created a no-name account on Proton and am starting to use that for certain platforms. I want to try and get back to something like the days of creating random logos in Gimp and posting them to my Geocities page that no one viewed other than a friend or two and I didn't care.
It's the flip side of every other employment possibility having such poor prospects. Do you spend 4 years getting a degree no one will hire for so you can bag groceries to pay off debt, or do you bag groceries to live while trying to break through as a creator?
For most people, there aren't many options available. All the best opportunities are in cities no one can afford to live in anymore.
Still, it's surprising that they can't even conceive of doing anything without profit motive as an incentive. This isn't the first time I've heard of this kind of inter-generational dialogue. Perhaps Millennials and Gen-X are uniquely idealistic (or naïve) generations.
The "Hawk Tuah" girl is a perfect example to me. She had a funny moment, and I think 15-20 years ago it probably would have just been a funny meme for a few years and a "oh you're that girl from the meme" at parties for her entire 20's. Like that's exactly how that would have played out. Now she quit her job, has sponsorships, got a major podcast deal - over a single viral moment. It's nutty to me, personally, but people seem to see this as perfectly normal.
I watched her podcast and some interviews, and it's clear that, while not the most educated person, she exudes charisma and has a relatable sense of humor. She seems like a natural entertainer.
As for education, she's from the south and her mom is an absent drug addict so I give her a pass (I have the same background and it is extraordinarily difficult)
I think she's a special case, and she'll prove that over time. I'm happy someone in her position got a chance to share her personality with the world. Wishing her the best.
I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with what she did or that she does not have talent. It’s more crazy to me that this is seen as a natural progression of someone’s online career.
The part I don't like is an entire army of people now think doing exactly the same thing is a viable strategy to similar success. We should view this as a lottery win, not career development
I don't know, I feel it's hard to know what a natural progression in one's online career looks like, given the relative nascence of the medium. Film underwent similar phase transitions over time before settling on the star system, which we are now seeing begin to fail as well.
It's certainly not sustainable to give a podcast to every person who says something that goes viral on TikTok, so I wonder how things will look in another 30 years.
That was pretty much the situation with reality TV twenty years ago. Everyone was aghast that some random person could appear on a show and instead of being cast aside for our amusement at the end, they were able to build a personal brand and get a career out of it. It’s predators all the way down.
Interesting point. I'm not sure what her plan for her life was, but I could understand her making that decision if the rather explicit nature of her comments precluded it. Maybe she felt she had no choice but to own it.
15 years ago "Shit My Dad Says" got a TV show. People have spun momentary stardom into book deals and gigs forever. NYC, Hollywood, all the music cities past and present, and the last couple of SV booms were built on trying to generate it. "You're good at that, you should sell it" has been a constant refrain to creatives with any level of skill for decades. Some people went for it.
The scale changed, and that's meaningful, but some kinds of people have always been on the lookout for a path to fortune.
Let's not confuse what they do for money with what they do for fun. For example: A lot of happy programmers can't conceive of doing it for fun: they log in, do a good job, log out, go tend to their sheep and work on their woodshed.
You might not have the full picture of someone's life from a context-constrained conversation. There are things I'm good at that I tend to only want to do with a profit motive. I have plenty of unmonetized hobbies though.
> A lot of happy programmers can't conceive of doing it for fun
I don't think that's true. I think even people who fit that description are aware of others who find it fun. I guess what I was saying is, it doesn't even occur to them that someone would do something absent any profit motive.
>Still, it's surprising that they can't even conceive of doing anything without profit motive as an incentive.
Realistically, what percentage of the workforce in any field would continue working if they stopped getting paid (or took a 75% pay cut)? 1%? 0.1%? The reason people work is to make money that they can spend on the things they need to live, and hopefully have some left over for the things they enjoy.
I love programming, building hardware, tinkering, etc in my spare time (as one of my hobbies), and I'm employed as an embedded engineer. I like my work. If my company stopped paying me, I would be looking for a new job immediately. Does that mean I don't enjoy my work? No, I just have this job to make money so that I can afford to live and do all of the things I enjoy.
I would argue that yes, people who believe people should enjoy their work without a "profit motive" are naive, or at least sufficiently wealthy to forget what it's like to rely on income from employment.
I always struggle to understand this sentiment. There seems to be a huge labor shortage, particularly for physical and skilled labor.
Auto mechanics change 120/hr for labor, someone recently quoted me 40k to spend a week landscaping my residential back yard, and an arborist wanted 3k for a single day of chainsaw work pruning a big tree.
none of those things are accessible to someone who has say, a 4-yr fine arts degree. They're also extremes and not typical, unless your car is at the dealer, your backyard is on a make-over show, or that tree is hanging over your house & powerlines
I guess my fundamental question is why arent these jobs accessible? They dont reqire any degree at all, so it seems like they should be open to both the 4 year art graduate and a high school graduate.
I live in a high cost of living area, but these are typical prices here. Call 10 autoshops and thats the typical rate. Even people on yelp operating out of their house arent much cheaper. Heck, residential plumbers charge $150-200/hr.
So what is the bottleneck? Is it regulatory barriers to opening businesses? Is it a lack of knowledge? Is it poor discovery in the information age? Unions?
It seems like there are lots of people making great money doing these things, and lots of people looking for work.
I'm not sure how you imagine the process of getting into one of these no-degree businesses goes. You don't just "start doing it." First, you need tools and transportation. Then you need to know what the hell you're doing. Then, probably, some certifications. And now you have to find people to pay you in a highly competitive market full of scammers who make it even harder to sell services.
The usual path is to work for someone else until you have the skills and tools and certs to strike out on your own. That someone is not going to hire you if it looks like you won't stick around as soon as a better option comes along. And no bank will give a startup loan to someone who's never done it before.
People make great money doing these things because they've done all this for years and built up the tools and skills and certifications and referral network to make it. You don't start charging $200/hour any more than you start out in SV making $1m/year.
so now we are starting to get somewhere. It seems you think the bottlenecks are similar to the ones I flagged such as knowledge, discovery and certification.
If you know a way to find the people starting that aren't charging 200/hr, please let me know because I want to hire them.
You can always try putting out an ad on Craigslist: "Need someone to fix my car (or landscape your yard or prune your tree, whichever thing you're trying to get done) for $X/hr. No experience or certification or warranty of any kind required, if you get hurt I guess I'm paying your medical bills, if you've never done this before now's your chance to muddle through and find out how on my dime, and if you ruin my property well then it sucks to be me."
What point are you trying to make in relation to the cost of labor and barriers to entry?
You might have a point that everyone is so rich these days that they are willing to pay $200 an hour for a reputable plumber to unclog their toilet rather than take the risk it with a $50 plumber without 500 yelp reviews.
This would certainly explain the trouble young people seem to be having starting plumbing businesses and introducing some well needed competition.
I think this would fall under the discovery or triangulation problem.
What point are you trying to make by saying "send anyone who will bill me less than $200/hr my way"?
Literally zero people are stopping you from trading arbitrary sums of money to arbitrary people with zero experience and convincing them to wield a power tool at whatever problem you have with your property.
Yes, you need to find people willing to try. Yes, some of those people might see liability problems or find the entire arrangement sketchy and wonder what con you're trying to pull on them.
But I guarantee if you keep looking you'll find somebody with lower critical thinking skills who is game for whatever you suggest and could use $X/hr for whatever X is greater than minimum wage that you specify.
Depending on the state or country you live in and the task you want performed, it might be illegal for them to do the job without a license (plumbing comes to mind), but at least some of the job types you talked about do not strictly require licensing to perform publicly anywhere that I am aware of.
Mostly I guess I am trying to uncover what your unspoken expectations are about the unskilled labor you are after. Most people give a damn about what happens if they pay somebody to improve their property in some fashion and they ruin it instead. That's what insurance and bonding is for. Most people don't want to be on the hook for hundreds of thousands in medical bills if an uninsured worker injures themselves on your land.
Insurance, workman's comp, bonding, licensing, and trade school education all cost money that normally contributes to the $120-$200/hr rates you're talking about. These are also "only on the clock for the few hours some client needs something" rates for the person in question and not "guaranteed 40 hours a week working on an employer's schedule" rates, so should not be compared directly against the hourly rate of an office worker.
If that's all you're trying to point out, then I agree and think that goes without saying. I'm not denigrating skilled labor. I think more people should go into it because it's a lucrative and high demand career.
In addition to what you said, it is also true that the cost of skilled labor is quite high relative to historic benchmarks.
Kye seems to think that smart and hard-working young people can't enter these fields due to various barriers, and I want to explore what those barriers are.
Do you have any thoughts to bring on the topic. Kye seems to think established companies are limiting training to drive up prices.
I tend to agree, but think there is more. I agree because my wife tried to break into being an electrician union because it starts at 100k salary per year, but ran into issues with limited spots used to drive up prices
I'm more inclined to think it is discovery is a big part of the problem for people trying to start small business. If you aren't a national chain or in the first 2 pages of yelp, you will have trouble finding customers, even if you are smart and talented.
Yep. Once you have any level of education past high school, lots of the better jobs just won't hire you. They assume you're biding your time until a better job comes by and any time or money spent training you will be wasted.
The "labor shortage" is a fantasy created by people with jobs to offer having unrealistic expectations.
All that book learnin' changes you. With life and experience and life experience, you can stop coming off as a stuck-up out of touch asshole to people doing this kind of work.
My entire generation got endless refrains of the message that these are the kinds of jobs you fail into if you don't get a degree. That doesn't break easily. It seems like the next crowd gets similar messages.
If I understand you, maybe that is another psycological bottleneck on the side of workers. Hopefully time will change the perception and people will realize that a plumber making 200/hr isn't a failure, and has advantages over being unemployed with a 4 year art degree and 200k debt.
You've severely misunderstood. No, the problem here is the person with the jobs to offer who is overly picky about beginner attitude, won't hire anyone, then goes on Facebook and yells "no one wants to work anymore!"
The person with the degree understands they messed up after years of job hunting and would be happy for the normal working gig, but it's not on offer to them.
Seems like from what you described, the main challenge is reliance on entrenched businesses are gatekeeping the entry knowledge and training.
I wonder if trade schools would be a good way to bypass this bottle neck.
I suppose you would still have the problem of people selecting the low ROI degree instead of trade schools, but they would still have the option after they understand "they messed up".
You bag groceries and spend your time looking to break through in the industry your degree is in. You are infinitely more likely to be successful finding a real job than wasting your time and energy hoping to win the influencer lottery. If you wanted to be a content creator what the hell did you get a degree for?
I really feel this with podcasts; everyone seems like they need to make a buck now. Before about 2015 there were so many great podcasts that people did for fun or because they wanted to get a message out. Slowly, one by one, they started adding sponsorships for Blue Apron and NatureBox and SquareSpace (these were the VPMs of 2015). Now even the most niche podcast has algorithmic ads. I frequently hear creators say that these ads make very little money but I guess the creators think they're losing out by not including them.
I remember listening to The Skeptics Guide to the Universe back then and thinking "everyone else is adding ads but I bet this one never will, they've been doing it ad-free for like a decade". Then a year later they had ads. It's just sad to think of what we've lost.
Investigative journalism went down the drain for the same reasons. Clickbait content is so much cheaper to produce and has the same effect, because you can produce hundreds of clickbait articles in the same time.
Soon every video has to have Mr.Beast's ADHD inducing video cutstyle because otherwise the algorithms will punish you for producing too slow content.
I miss the old days where I could just watch a Carmack interview for 4 hours straight and listen to their insights without getting a burnout after 15 minutes of video time.
It always seems to me there’s room for a platform like the “old” youtube that doesn’t behave this way? Or maybe youtube just has too much critical mass for that ever to work.
A lot of producers that want to make longer content about a topic at some point dual upload or switch to nebula, as far as I can tell in my interest niches. Not sure if there are other platforms.
(I also like to watch a lot of those oldskool slow nature documentaries while coding. In Germany, arte, NDR and WDR have some nice ones in their media platforms.)
The idea of content creation as a full time career is literally ancient, e.g. musicians have been paid for thousands of years. The Napster-era ideology that "information wants to be free" is the outlier.
This is a dishonest framing, I think. The scale and type of content, especially the way it is expected to be consumed, on top of a hyper-monetized ad framework was not a thing in ancient times. I also think very few people picked up a lute in those days with the idea that they were only going to play if it made them money (artists have for much of modern history notoriously made a poor living). The point I was making was not that an artist making a living from their art is a new thing, no one is making that point.
> the fact that other people may want to watch it is secondary
I don't do much social networking (deleted FB, Twitter) but I still have an IG account because I like seeing pictures of interesting places, so I mostly follow thru-hikers, world travelers, cyclists, etc. I've seen the transition where some of these world travelers just start posting content for themselves, and others just happen to enjoy them. Then they slowly get more viewers because whatever they're doing is interesting, and eventually it reaches a point I guess to where money can be made, then it switches to content creator mode. And then it's not about sharing what they're doing or their interests with others, it's about views and catering to the viewers. It's not wrong or bad--I guess it's nice they can fund their lifestyle through that, but it becomes "ad-funded entertainment", which is a huge turn-off for me, that's when I unfollow.
If I find an account interesting, the first thing I do is look at the follower count. If it's a high number, I don't follow the account because it's already clear what that account is.
I write when I've had something on my mind for a while and I need to get it out of my head. Also helps me to work through it in more detail.
I've had a few things get picked up here that got some good attention but many people complain that what I write is too long. It's usually too long because I'm trying to complete the thought for my own sake. One of these days, I could honestly see writing a book because those long posts are usually shortened as much as I can.
> I do not disagree that creators should be able to monetize their content however they please, but the fact that people see that as the end and only goal of content creation is baffling to me and almost certainly making it worse.
It is 110% making it worse, but I feel the need to point out this attitude is not coming from nowhere. We're getting squeezed on every side, everything in life is more expensive year over year, wages are stagnant at best and falling at worst. Doing shit just for the sake of doing it is increasingly becoming a luxury the young can't afford. It isn't that nobody wants to, it's that they literally can't justify spending time on things they find interesting, fulfilling or otherwise beneficial without some kind of monetary gain at least possible in the future because they're struggling to afford the basics of life, let alone whatever they might need to make or do whatever they might want to.
I don't mean to come down on you in particular, I just see this attitude everywhere, and it's frankly dismissive as fuck of the genuine economic vice that the young find themselves in right now. You want people to do stuff without an eye directly towards how it can make them money? Cool, odds are damn good a whole lot of the people you're complaining about would very much love the freedom to do something that doesn't make money without feeling like they're screwing themselves possibly into going hungry tonight.
Agreed! I find myself writing or other content that I don't share around. Just sits on my site. Helped me by getting it out of my head and if someone stumbles on it, great. If not, all good!
I realized I had become a boomer when I saw people using the term "Youtuber" as a normal job description which, through all my life, I had thought of as a "joke" profession like "Influencer."
Now they're all real, and I'm officially boomed. Youtuber, Influencer, Content Creator, Streamer, even VTuber. I'm sure the world of professional TikTokers is also upon us.
I think author missed #8: I've personally benefited so much from the writings shared by others that it feels amiss to not share back things I've learned and little tips and tricks. One of my most viewed blog posts is a really short and simple one on simulating drag-and-drop of files with Playwright automation. I found no such information when I ran into this problem so the only logical thing to do was to share it for the next person that ran into this issue.
I always encourage devs I mentor to write more and to share what they learn. For all of the reasons that the author listed, but also because it's a mechanism to give back to the community that all of us rely on whether we're writing code, making a recipe, doing a craft, learning a new hobby, etc.
A lot of younger devs tell me "why would anyone want to read my writing" and I show them YouTube and how many different videos there are on how to make a pancake (and more are added every day!). There's a different audience for every voice and someone out there is looking for your voice. Everyone should make a habit to write in long form.
20-years ago, I wrote about India’s National Anthem - Jai Hind. I think because of a new video that was popular then. My blog is at the top on Google when searching for “jai hind lyrics”. This shoots up really high, especially around India’s independence day. I think more and more people these days need to look up the lyric to sing.
Google keep reminding me that this is one of the best performing page visits. So, I have updated it to include more information that will be useful to those looking for it.
Heh, similar sentiment... I just post things because I like having my own 'open notebook' that I can search easily, and the most popular post, by far, is about how to sync a shared Google Calendar with mac/iOS.
I only had to do it once, but the process was so simple yet undocumented, I thought I'd post it on my blog.
And now, for an entire decade, that post is basically Google's own documentation, since it's the top result for this common problem.
Interesting points, and it's wonderful that we can use blogs for other purposes and that they can evolve over time.
I think people get hung up on the tech stack of a blog, so while I appreciate the timeline, I think we put too much emphasis on that in general..
Personally; have one sole purpose for my blog: to turn the arguments you conclude in the shower into something productive.
It's somewhat cathartic to write down in as many words as you want to, with as much time as you want to: the actual underpinning arguments of a stance you hold, with citations and alternative opinions considered.
Writing a comment on HN is nice, but largely there's a time pressure, wait a day for a good response and the conversation has concluded... or, make it too long and you lose your audience.
A blog post allows you time to reflect, not be reactive, and to truly get your point across, and people are more likely to read it.
Agreed on getting hung up on tech stack. On the other hand, it's a mostly-harmless way to try learning new tech, which is fun.
I've bounced between almost a dozen different stacks and platforms and these days I've wound up back at WordPress (self-hosted).
I do have an itch to start my own platform though, based on Haven.org. (I'd contribute but I'm not a Ruby dev!)
Feels like I just go through phases. Gutenberg's been a little annoying to learn and WP always felt heavy for what I need, but it's also always offered whatever functionality when I need it.
"I keep this blog for me to write, not necessarily for others to read."
This is the key to do anything over a long period of time but certainly applies to blogging. Nothing is better than intrinsic motivation and something you do for yourself. I have a blog that I try to keep up with. I fail to be consistent and one reason always has been me asking "Who should I write it for" instead of "What do I want to write about for myself". Something to take away here.
It’s a spirit from the old Internet that we’ve all but lost. Replaced with the toxic “write for engagement” spirit that brought us SEO, blogspam, influencers, “YouTube Face” thumbnails, ragebait, and now AI slop.
Same for writing and releasing open source software. Write software that you want to write and don’t worry about how many users you have or how many pull requests you get or how many GitHub stars you have. These are empty vanity metrics, and another side of the same “write for engagement” coin.
I think some of the blame has to do with how metrics and analytics started taking over every aspect of online culture (as is hinted at).
I noticed I tried to optimize my blog more when I was using Google Analytics; that whole setup really pushes you to look at certain metrics like time on site, bounce rate, etc.
The best decision I've made for blogging sanity a few years back was to switch to a simple self-hosted analytics solution that just focuses on total traffic and referrers, which is mostly helpful to see if a post hit some aggregator like HN or Reddit... but even that's fundamentally a vanity metric.
I also feel this with X/Twitter, where everything feels like a promotion for a course or a book or a new product.
Posting things because they are fun to write is a lost art.
A couple of observations from the text that resonate with me:
* "Blogging helps me become a better writer, which in turns helps me become a better developer." Yes. Writing is super-important as a developer, particularly in a corporate setting, because communicating ideas clearly is critical in convincing others and in showing your contributions. And to be a better writer, well, one has to write more and blogging helps with that!
* "The posts have grown larger and more ambitious." I've noticed a similar change in my own blog, where posts have grown from frequent 300-word long posts to infrequent 3000-word long posts. Other platforms like Twitter have captured the space of short form writing and, more "importantly", consuming such content.
> Other platforms like Twitter have captured the space of short form writing
Does this ever feel like a waste? Are there good thoughts, ideas, and quips you've written and shared, that were then essentially lost to time? Since those thoughts are not archived on your website, when (if ever) do you (or anyone else) ever get to see them again?
Yes. That's why I have "microposts" on my blog's home-made SSG. I add an entry to a JSON5 file with the text, the RFC 3339 date, and a GUID (for permalinks) and it gets built into the site as a Tweet-like entry.
This reduces the friction in sharing things, since building a whole new page takes a few minutes.
I actually archive any sort of short-form writing that I think is valuable in my site :) In fact, I compose Twitter threads first as a regular post where each paragraph fits in a tweet, then copy/paste those onto Twitter, and then share the link to the "real" post at the end (to avoid my content being slurped into "thread reader" apps).
But there are lots of short, one-off random-thought tweets that are not worth archiving other than for downloading a copy of your data from these services and saving it offline.
If I know I’m going to like them later, I post them to my blog first and let it crosspost to Mastodon for me. If I post to Mastodon first and it catches more interest than I expected, I’ll pull it back to my blog and maybe expand it into a bigger post.
I have had a blog since 2001 (wow! about to hit 25 years soon), while many of my peers have dropped off. Remember, this was the time when Wikipedia started. I’ve neglected it and have not taken care of it as much as I used to 10+ years ago. I did away with analytics about 5 years ago. WP-Engine grandfathered me while I was on WordPress, but I gave that up, too.
Now, I write for myself, mostly to remember things that I can re-read later. And to have a URL on the web that I can give out with answers to topics that I have to answer repeatedly. I write plain text without any front-matter, or tags, as simple as it gets that GitHub Pages can spit out. If the basic CloudFlare analytics is to be believed, it continuous to be pretty well visited.
But I like tinkering with it, and there are many unfinished articles. I think I will keep it for as long as I can. https://brajeshwar.com
> I worry that if I add statistics to the blog it’ll change from an activity I perform for the activity’s sake, to an exercise in hunting clicks where I write for others instead of for myself.
If I ever finally find the motivation to start a blog, I think this is a key point. Vanity metrics would be demotivating.
That is how YT creators were getting burn outs they got hooked up on vanity metrics but then if one of your videos bombs you are hit quite badly so your metrics for following 10 videos is going to be bad. So they had to pump the content like crazy and there is no vacation time, because then your metrics also go down.
For career YouTubers it's hard to blame them when those metrics are directly tied to their paycheck, which could easily fall below what they need to make a living if they don't pump the numbers enough. The system is practically designed to make them neurotic about making Number Go Up at any cost.
Letting the metrics steer the ship is a fool’s errand in this kind of blogging, but I do find it an interesting novelty to see how people are getting to my stuff, search terms for organic visitors, etc. It doesn’t drive what I write, but it’s kind of neat to confirm that there are, in fact, a couple other people on the planet interested in the same things.
I recently did start a blog and I'm constantly fighting the who should I write for dynamic because of vanity metrics. Even if your blog has a specific focus or evolves like the original posters blog did, the stats are always staring you in face. Self-motivation seems to be the only way to counter this problem.
If your blog provider supports it, adding a “Open a Random Post” button on your blog makes the experience much more fulfilling in the long term, as you (and others) can revisit different posts from different eras. Websites don’t have physical form that readers can navigate, so we can take advantage of that by adding serendipity manually.
For my own personal, non-technical blog that I have kept going since 2006, I added an "on this day" feature that shows posts for today's date (or closest matching) for past years. Collapsed version shows posts from 1, 3, 5 and 10 years ago; expanded version shows all 18 years. It's like a little time machine that gives me little gifts of past posts.
To be honest, the OP has it right. I write this blog for the same reason I did decades ago: it's fun for its own reason. I used to have hundreds of hits back then. Now I think the only reader is me and my one friend with an RSS reader. But one day if discovered by an LLM, maybe it'll scoop me in and I'll be one bit of a machine intelligence :D
Coincidentally, I noticed my blog’s first post¹ is from September 24, 2009, so yesterday it became exactly 15 years old.
I have taken great care to preserve all of the posts on my personal website, but unfortunately I don’t write new posts very often lately. I wonder if that’ll change.
This resonates with me. I had a recent stint of not writing due to very intense discouragement and feeling like a bit of a fraud. Like Jonas, I was writing for myself and kind of lived in a bubble where my posts had no comment system and I saw around 5 visitors per day on average with the odd boom to hundreds to thousands for a day or two. This was rare. I didn't worry much about what I wrote so much as how much I enjoyed writing it.
Eventually I was struggling in the job market and someone suggested that my writing was hurting my prospects. They found the odd typo and grammar mistake, thought the content wasn't particularly good, that it was hard to follow/disjointed, etc.
I immediately took it all down and felt like a bit of a fool to have thought anyone would actually find it useful. Maybe I should have written it but kept it offline like a personal journal, I thought.
After a year or so it occurred to me how incredibly wrong all of that was. I never should have taken anything offline. I've hired people before, many times, and not once did I stumble across a candidate's personal blog and think "ugh, typos. grammar mistakes. no thanks". These things are a signal of a person's character, curiosity, ability, and all kinds of other factors that matter a lot. Almost always these things helped people I was hiring more than it hurt. There's the odd case where I could tell the site wasn't followed through on and that's not great, but it's very relatable too.
I took a while but started writing again, started sharing it in an attempt to shake the self-doubt out of myself, and it has been an incredibly refreshing and rejuvenating experience. Writing reminds me of what I love about programming, because I primarily write about the things I find fascinating or engaging. It gives me a greater sense of knowledge and ability as I've covered a topic so thoroughly. It's a mental exercise not only in writing itself, but understanding.
Jonas says this and I couldn't agree more: something about it is just fun. I can't put my finger on it. When I'm writing, I'm in a focused and engaged state almost instantly. It's where I want to be.
If you doubt yourself and feel like writing isn't for you—even though you enjoy it—I hope you can take something from my experience and realize that it's still worth it. No one cares if you don't write like an acclaimed author. No one cares if there's the odd typo or bad grammar. The point is to enjoy it, and share that with people who are curious. The more you do it, the better you'll get. It can become a real source of joy in your life.
I share many of the author's reasons for having a small and non-committal blog. I also think that one of the overriding reasons I have a blog is that I spend a lot of my waking hours reading (it's how I access and understand the world). Therefore, it only feels natural to want to write a text and become part of this writing (and reading) club.
So glad to hear that there are other folks out there who continue to blog over long periods of time. It has the potential to create such an incredible resource, for the general public, for history, and for — of course — the writers themselves.
I've written on various blogs, including my own, since the late 90s, but I have been blogging consistently on a single instance for a little over 17 years. I've seen my writing shift from long form to rapid fire and back again.
I've also noticed that it's become mostly formulaic, as a way of dispersing information to folks. But it's those rare occasions where I'm actually struck with the inspiration to write a longer form thought piece that really brings me back to the whole reason I started my current blog.
Again, super happy to read this piece and the comments here. I'll remain hopeful that it inspires others to start — or to return to — blogging. It's really an incredible means of communicating with one another.
I have no idea who this person is, but I loved reading this article. The author is clearly a better writer than me and managed cleanly assemble the reasons most of us do this.
I also run a blog and have since 1997. Didn't start seriously contributing until 2008 or so. It's a labor of love and I do it for many of the reasons stated here. Love to write, love to push myself to make things more "usable" for folks other than me. And it helps me check myself on certain topics (do I understand this enough to teach it to someone else?)
I have been hassled by some younger folks who say "blogging is dead" (can't argue with that) and it's a waste of time because it will never make me viral, rich, or famous (I knew that before I started). But I do it for me, and I still recommend other people do it as well. It's good for the soul.
With all the AI generated content, we will be having AI models using AI generated text on the internet. Blogs from people who are hopefully not using AI to generate text might be the only valid source of truth in a near future
I more worry about AI hoovering up my hard work and that makes me think about the honesty of my beliefs about why I write.
In my hobby domain, authors were traditionally very protective of obscure sources, it was all about getting the book published, becoming recognized authority. There would be a sense of pride in having an expensive limited-run book. They were/are gate-keepers extraordinaire.
I kind of hate that hoarding of knowledge. But maybe my approach wasn’t about the virtue of making info available to all, but more like Bezos’ theme of, “your margin is my opportunity”.
I still appreciate some recognition and am not writing to feed a machine. Someone back during the Industrial Revolution remarked that the machines and engines are supposed to aid people but when you go into a factory you see the people climbing all over the machines to fix them, and sometimes at great risk of injury, like we are here for the care and feeding of the machines.
> I more worry about AI hoovering up my hard work... I still appreciate some recognition and am not writing to feed a machine.
I don't get this focus on so-called AI. Google and other bot farms have been hoovering up hard work wholesale for decades, even intercepting clicks and credit via things like AMP
If people give up writing, then only bots will be writers. Damn the technology and keep posting
I think the discussion around AI-generated content is worth exploring beyond the obvious concerns. If you're original and use AI as part of your creative toolbox, that's great, what matters is the work you produce and the unique touch you give it. There’s no rule that says we have to post an unfiltered output of an LLM.
On the research side, it would be fascinating to explore measures of randomness or originality within LLM models. I'm sure many researchers are already investigating how genuinely novel content like new poetry can influence and evolve these models over time.
- The fact that every post has links to the sourcecode!
- Open source
- No ads, no trackers, no popups
- I can tell you use this all the time. So I know you strive to make your content as good as possible _for you_. Which is a strong signal that it will also be good _for me_.
- I love the timeline (but wish they were done in a way that reflects scale, see user test video for more)
I love my blog. I post like maybe 4 times a year when I feel suitably inspired.
I find HN far and away the most random aggregator. Reddit is very reliable for me. When I share my posts on HN they almost never get traction. But then they randomly do months later when someone shares the same post! Kind of annoying.
My blog is artisanal handcrafted HTML and CSS. I honestly find it much easier and simpler than generators.
I currently host on Cloudflare for free. I was previously on Netlify.
My blog is honestly one of the best things I’ve done for my career. Writing skills are super valuable but no programmers are taught how to write. It’s not a skill we explicitly develop. Learning how to express ideas for various audiences is super useful. I’ve gotten, imho, pretty good at both writing and presenting and I attribute a lot of that to 10+ years of blog writing.
Writing, updating and saving your progress in several drafts is the only place where you write for yourself, but as soon as you publish them online it automatically becomes for everyone using the internet. And
> I keep this blog for me to write, not necessarily for others to read
is the exact opposite mindset sentence (or whatever people want to call it) of what I wrote in my Medium account bio, which is "I write for myself so that everyone can read it."
Your trajectory is quite similar to mine, particularly working with Kohana and Jekyll over the years.
My blog, in its current iteration, has also recently turned 15 (first post on June 27th, 2009). Reflecting on this long journey and how it has helped my career, I've decided to write a book about the experience.
If you'll excuse a bit of self-promotion, those interested can find out more at https://codertocto.com.
I hope sharing my journey might be helpful to others on a similar path.
One is that the developer doesn't really want to ultimately write a game.
Creating the assets needed for a game, as an example, can be daunting. Implementing high scores, audio, saving game state.... There is a lot of work to create a game beyond the rendering part.
Or the developer is intimidated by the more qualitative nature of the "game part" of the game. The engine can be measured in FPS, etc. How do you measure how fun the game is?
A recent approach I took was to write the game "firstmost" — the game engine was a necessity to realizing that goal. FWIW, I used SDL to create a kind of sprite engine. The "engine" was bare-bones but allowed me to recreate a shareware game of mine for Steam.
After the project was done I began a second (sprite-based) game by first moving over the same game engine code. But this new project required I extend the engine (there were new "feature requirements" unique to this new game).
In this way the engine can evolve from project to project, but never becomes a means to no end.
(And if you do it right, you ought to be able to pull the engine back into the original project with a minimal of refactoring.)
Maybe I'm just suggesting something that everyone already knows.
I have a different theory. Making your own engine is a way to turn the enthusiasm I have now into something productive now.
If I want to make a character jump in Unity I need to familiarize myself with Assets, GameObjects, Cameras (don't forget the CamRotate component!), C#, Rigidbody and Colliders. My hunger for programming has turned into homework. But if I make my own engine I have more control between where I am, where I wanted to go, and what do I need to do in order to get there.
It is also probably a waste of time as I'll solve over and over problems that the game engine has been refining for decades. But I definitely see the appeal.
Isn't that a special case of the Inner-platform effect - writing an X is boring, so create a platform for creating X-like applications. Of course, this can be repeated ad nauseam - to the level of "general-purpose tool-building factory factory factory"...
Your game needs sprites, so you could write code that loads the one graphics format you need at the 2 or 3 sizes you need. While doing that you decide it looks hacky so you add support for more formats, better scaling, ... suddenly you have gone from doing that one thing your game needs to something that supports everything every game on the planet might need but usually doesn't. By the time you have done that for every system in the game, you now have an "engine" but are burnt out on the project.
I appreciate the author's reflection on blogging for 15 years, but I didn't fully connect with the vibe. I've been maintaining several blogs (both personal and business) for years, and even had a personal webpage that shared personal content before the 2000s. It reminds me of artists like Edgar Allan Poe, who, despite their struggles, couldn't stop writing. When it's in your nature, there's no 'off switch' no matter the circumstances.
I started my blog when I went to college in the late nineties, and if I don't count the few years after grad school when I stopped altogether, it's been updated fairly consistently this whole time. It's changed a lot: I used to write full articles and short stories every week, but now that is rare (though it still happens: I just did one a few days go). It's evolved into being mostly a commonplace book now.
What's more, all search engines are disallowed, and there are no comments, so it's just for me and a few people who know about it. Design-wise, it's just a single file with minimal HTML, and thousands of entries, sorted by time. You can search it with cmd-f, or have the page scroll to a random entry. It loads in about a second. There are at least two ways it gives me value: in having an archive of 25+ years of things I thought were important, and giving me a reason to keep my eyes open for things to think and post about.
I think that's an unusual reason to have a blog, but I also think the people who started blogs to make money or get hired are probably out of the game by now, too.
I guess I've been blogging on https://blog.jgc.org/ for 19 years now. I don't know where the time went. I keep doing it because I have new stuff to write about (from time to time). I suppose I'll keep doing it until I don't (have new stuff to write about).
Something that gives me pause (to actually write into a blog) or to put up any toy projects / exploratory code as FOSS is I am not too keen on the idea of LLM companies and similar scraping that for their dataset [1].
Its not really a new problem, scraping the web and similar for monetary profit has been a thing for decades, but it feels worse in some ways?
At least I certainly have paused and had more of a reluctance to making minor things available with no strings attached than I historically have been.
Same goes for writing into sites like HN or Reddit really.
Perhaps that is being selfish, after all there is some value in documenting things for other humans to find out about, maybe time-capsule of a blog is a better fit for this? Although blogging about anything particularly niche / context heavy is likely irrelevant a few years on.
EDIT:
[1] As in not help them even in a minuscule way, anymore than has already been done with them buying / scraping any public content already written.
I personally hope the internet and it's archives stick around for a long time. I wonder whether the future will be interested in the past. Who among us might live in obscurity today, only to be a star in 2424?
In this age of metrics and analytics, it's easy to get caught up in chasing views. But writing for yourself rather than for clicks seems like a much more sustainable long-term approach.
I really enjoyed that post graph of theirs. I've shied away from battling with plain CSS over the years. I think it's a good time to finally lean into this weakness of mine.
I am trying to get myself into doing it regularly.
One of my main thoughts was documenting things I have found I had to do to with certain projects to get it the way I want, like homebrew packages I need to install and what to setup for if and when I wipe my computer and start fresh or get a new computer and want to set it up like I am used to.
I have had many times I forget little things I had to do and end up going through the whole spiel of getting it to work correctly.
My personal blog is over 23 years old now. I am sure I wouldn't do it this long for anybody but myself. I haven't checked the readership figures for years, though I know some people read it, because they comment. I think it's nice, though I think if nobody read it at all, I'd still be doing it.
If you have stopped blogging, been meaning to get back on it, or simply want to start, but been put off by the popular platform options, I'm working on a blogging platform myself that sheds the crummy modern bits of the web: https://lmno.lol. Here's my own blog https://lmno.lol/alvaro (about 10 years worth of posts). You can read the blogs on your phone, your desktop, your terminal. No JS needed.
The end-goal isn't to restrict, but rather safeguard readers (avoid injecting questionable JS that's everywhere on the web). Is styling what you're after? Something else? Happy to consider different scenarios and open those up.
Oh, I see. I completely understand no JS, I just want the freedom to use HTML & CSS to add some dimensionality (eg floats, sidebars) and images (eg captions) to plain text.
Does it support latex formula and code highlighting? There are some things I absolutely need in a blog, and I can't seem to find a simple one that supports everything.
While you can embed code blocks, you can they aren't syntax highlighted yet. It's on the roadmap. I take it you mean to render latex? I'd need to figure out if I can render server-side. Trying to avoid client-side JS. I can add a feature request to the backlog.
The more desireable things can be added over time. I need to launch first. I also need to be mindful of what's added, so I things stay fairly lean and snappy.
I just started blogging again regularly after 15 years of neglect. It feels like it's too late. While I do see traffic from Google, I often wonder if it's just not worth the effort. I will probably use it more like a journal, than any sort of commercial side hustle. I do enjoy writing with more of my personal style, knowing it will contrast against the AI drivel.
This is now to me the "old school" internet creator attitude (that I still possess). I don't blog as much any more but do create content elsewhere - a lot of it is for my own enjoyment and creative outlet, to blow off steam, whatever - the fact that other people may want to watch it is secondary. I do try to do things people want, but only if I want to do it.
The only reason I highlight this is that the up and coming generations absolutely do not see content creation in the same way. I got in an absurd argument with an early 20 something on a social media platform about how annoying ads were that were disguised as content. The response was overwhelmingly "Well, how else do you expect content creators to make a living?"
I do not disagree that creators should be able to monetize their content however they please, but the fact that people see that as the end and only goal of content creation is baffling to me and almost certainly making it worse. This same person tried to tell me it's been the same way since the earliest days of youtube - which they would have been in diapers around that time - is absolutely not true. The idea of content creation as a full time career is relatively new, and I hate it. The worst part is if you don't participate in the type of obnoxious engagement hacking or buried ads that these "professional" creators do, the algorithms punish you for it.