I blog because I want to share knowledge. That’s how I have fun. It feels rewarding to sit down and formulate your thoughts after spending a week researching a topic for a side project. Oftentimes, such topics are largely unexplored: with the basics being too obvious and other topics laid out clearly, the remains are bound to be unconventional.
To me, that’s a positive thing. It’s my chance to make progress in a stale and closed industry, not to mention that exploration is a lost art in the age of vibecoding.
I love weird and deeply technical blogs like The Old New Thing, jart’s, and Lemire’s, and for a long while I had assumed that others would love mine the same way. Sure, I’m not as good at writing, but the ideas should shine through regardless.
But it’s a mistake to assume other people are just like you. I posted links to Hacker News and Reddit, I set up analytics, and the numbers didn’t make sense.
I reached for straws. I thought my posts were too long, so I wrote shorter ones. I added illustrations. I tried being aggressive to spark interaction, and I tried being agreeable to get upvoted, but nothing worked. I eagerly awaited a discussion, but if there were any comments, it sure seemed like their authors didn’t read the post.
For a long time, I’ve oscillated between blaming myself and thinking I’m too unique to relate to anyone. Of course, that’s not how things are, but I sure wish someone told me earlier. So if you’re thinking about writing, this is my speck of advice to you.
People don’t read to technology boards to have a discussion. People come there to waste time, because they have nothing better to do. HN is where technofascists come to spread hate, r/programming is where juniors come to get angry at people using tabs for indentation, Lobsters is where misfits come to feel a sense of community, and Lemmy is there.
These places are not for software development. They’re places for the community, however fractured it is nowadays. Links are just an excuse to have a discussion. That’s why posts on AI, local celebrities, and company blogs are popular as ever – they’re an ice breaker. And if so, you don’t need to read the post to comment.
Repeat after me: if people are criticising something, they are not responding to me. If nine people criticise you for choosing an uncommon syntax for initializing an array (hi), you don’t need to listen to them if that’s not the point of your post.
People don’t mention Rust or Zig in the comments because they think it’s a good fit for your project, but because they’re part of the ten thousand that needs to figure it out for themselves, and that’s where they decided to take it out. And as people learn, they grow out of these spaces, and new amateurs come in. It’s Eternal September (but don’t buy the propaganda, this phenomenon has existed since the beginning), and you can’t solve this problem by switching to another, better moderated platform.
Raymond Chen and others are upvoted not because of their technical content, but because at the beginning they were the only knowledgeable people out there, and now there’s a cult of personality – and with time, you’ll find out not all of them are that good. You cannot manufacture the same position for yourself without making it a full-time job, compromising with your goals, and burning out in the process. I know, I tried.
If you want success on HN, you can pivot to simpler, entertaining topics. A fun post on webdev is my most upvoted one. I didn’t enjoy it, the responses gave me nothing but headaches, and I beat myself for trying to imitate that “success” ever since.
So I no longer expect much. I stopped writing posts because they might do numbers, and started writing posts about stuff I’m personally having fun with. Occasionally I’ll write a cool piece and hope the zeitgeist will favor me, but that’s not the focus.
Oddly enough, this approach is more successful. Unpopularity acts as a filter: if someone finds my post, they likely spent a while researching this exact topic, so we’re well-aligned on the context. This works even on HN: you’re more attentive when trying to solve a problem vs relaxing after a long day. Sometimes people just aren’t in the right mood, and being the first thing they get theirs hands on is suboptimal.
And sometimes, such isolation helps build connections. I’ve met a few cool people because they wanted to personally tell me they enjoyed something. And on the flip side, I periodically send an email to underappreciated people that I find by chance.
So that’s where I am at the moment. I don’t get as much short-term dopamine, but I’m having more fun.
