> The more precise and niche the words I input, the better the internet would match me with people I could forge meaningful relationships with.
Relatable and counter-intuitive. I have this reflex when I write that I’m trying to reach an imaginary broad audience. But whenever it’s extremely specific, to the point when I don’t expect anyone to even know what I’m talking about, it tends to drive more “engagement”, in a good way! In a way it makes sense, when I’m reading some generic truism, I don’t get any itch to engage, even if it was well written.
If you, like me, have been stuck writing and it’s slow and ends up bland, I can recommend just changing the mental “audience”. Just assume you’re talking to someone who really gets you – perhaps your younger self or a nerdy friend. Don’t be defensive, trying to convince a hypothetical, hyper-intelligent skeptic.
To me it can make the difference from dreadful and tedious to pure delight.
To me it can make the difference from dreadful and tedious to pure delight.
Yes. My wife worries a lot about this; she was worried that her 16,000-word, three-part essay guide on how to find clinical trials, and what the process was like for us (https://bessstillman.substack.com/p/please-be-dying-but-not-...) would be too long and peculiar. Instead, it's found a wide audience, and perhaps most vitally, she's gotten a lot of great emails and comments from readers. Astral Codex Ten in particular has great readership. I'm not sure whether she's forged meaningful relationships that way yet, but the potential is there.
And if some people are put off by the peculiarities and quirkiness, so be it. To be for everyone is close to being for no one, as you mention.
Reading your journey and the beautiful writing by your wife and sister(?) was absolutely gripping. I donated what little I can to the cause. I truly hope the pharma research world can help you out. Cancer has affected too many people in my life.
Hey Jake, good to see you are still here! I’ve been following your story from afar and it’s wild to see a comment from you on HN. Hope all is (as) well (as can be) given the circumstances!
This, 100%. The audience varies slightly, but 99% of time I'm talking to a friend or a colleague. And, it's not even about the subject matter, but rather the voice I use.
> If you, like me, have been stuck writing and it’s slow and ends up bland,
To me this is a sign that I'm either tired or don't care about the subject, but haven't realised that yet. Write about the things that matter to you (harder than it seems).
The Death of Google Reader was a canon event and only recently do we seem to be moving back towards the kind of internet that can support these kind of blogs instead of the Big Centralized Platforms.
Granted it could support it all along but, for a time, people wanted to see what the fuss was all about at the Big Platforms. I'm glad that bloggers kept blogging and that talented writers, old and new, are still going at what I consider my favorite part of the internet since it's modern inception in the 90s.
Reading will always be my performed form of content despite more and more people moving to YouTube for better exposure and money but for all you who feel the need to write: KEEP IT UP!
As a counterpoint, a blog post is sometimes (often times?) more about the writing than the receiving of responses.
Is throwing a bottle with a message in it into the ocean a "complex search query to find people?" I wouldn't phrase it that way.
The article does say:
It will seem like I am mainly talking about how to use writing
to forge meaningful relationships ... But lurking behind it is
a larger idea. Namely, that you can shape yourself by reshaping
your relationships. By changing who you are addressing, and the
responses you garner, you steer your development.
and I don't disagree with that, but at the same time, just forming the words helps you shape yourself, regardless of whether it involves other people. Or maybe the other people can just be in your own head.
I've got countless drawings and writings that nobody else will ever see, and likely will die with me. But they were very important for my self-shaping.
Maybe this is just a personality difference between me and the author — some people define themselves more in terms of their relationships with others than otherwise.
But regardless, I liked the article (:
There is some fine line between just being yourself and "singing into the void" as it were, versus trying to use your voice to make changes in the world.
I must admit I lean towards the former, but the idea of "the summoning of a new culture" at the end of the article is interesting.
I support your view, and also lets be honest - author is very good at writing beautiful queries/blogs, but not so good as making a solid statement, because... well his statement is flawed on many levels, and the examples he gives are not analogous, and do not constitute a proof to his thesis.
Besides his expose jumps from his main thesis to arguing how easy it is to become viral on some social network, particularly if you know whom to tag. Well my posts can become very popular on hacker news by replying to the right peple - that's fine. Or by annoying everyone in the comments section by being obnoxious (or not too careful with wording). But this does not imply at all that I was actively pursuing a goal, or aiming for it. It may be a result of personality trait. Some people talk, others write, and the rest - does not.
The fact that the essay at http://worrydream.com/refs/Licklider-IntergalacticNetwork.pd... is beautifully written and Licklider was apparently impactful on the initiation of Internet does not imply neither whether the essay predates actions Licklider undertook, nor that he was aiming for such an impact. In fact many may argue that what we have as the Internet today, 10, 20, 30 years ago is not a result of single vision. I don't think there's universal agreement on Jacquard being THE father of programming, because he's the first person in modern history who employed some sort of programs.
We can with ease argue that the idea of intergalactic-anything goes back to Jules Verne for example. We can easily say that Dune kicked the LSD culture with this spice thing, and that the idea of inter-worlds communication is taken from Azimov's Foundation. Why not say that William Gibson queried for someone to write him a cyberpunk 3D, and some filthy rich guy read it and decided to act upon it...
This is such an oversimplification of the role of written text, and even though I kind of agree with the author that like-minded people may write in similar fashion, I have seen more proof that like-minded people, who talk alike, actually do not get so well together.
I think the author is reading too much into his past viral successes.
It is very possible to write about niche topics with gusto and at length, but without finding an audience or a circle of peers. Twenty years ago it was common to call this the "long tail," a term popularized by a bestselling middlebrow book.
I put my trust in the "long tail" of the Internet audience and wrote in public for a few years. The experience did not shape me intellectually, as reading a good book or learning a skill might have done. And it did not bring me into contact with a circle of peers who learned from each other.
The author even offers the example of his wife, who published a long piece of writing in a niche different to his and did not benefit in the "search query to find people" way.
I think there is a likelier and more specific explanation for the author's observations. Namely, over the past decade, guru figures like Scott Alexander have popularized a style of academic-sounding essay-writing that is diffuse, meandering, and often very long. Fans of this kind of writing also reward authors who aspire to global or timeless significance by writing about a set of "cornerstone" topics that includes Plato, Roman stoics and the Roman Empire in general, Tolstoy, Enlightenment-era American political philosophy, and popular takes on behavioral economics and evolutionary psychology.
Some of this guy's posts struck gold with this audience and got widely disseminated through their social networks. I strongly suspect that writing about historically and thematically adjacent topics (e.g., Russian Realists other than Tolstoy) would produce a lot fewer "search results" for the author.
This makes me wonder if I should be writing on substack. I currently use a static site generator and host with netlify[1]. This is great because it is simple and I have complete control over the site. But at the same time I can’t see when people visit my site and there is no comment section. I rely or external forums like HN, lobsters, and Reddit to have a discussion. And I have no way of knowing when my content gets shared because I can’t see the traffic.
But my purpose of writing is the same as the authors, to find like minded people and have a discussion with them. It’s kind of cure for intellectual loneliness.
You might want to look into using giscus[1] for a commenting system on your blog. All it needs is a public GH repository to host the discussions, after which you simply embed a script into each blog post, and visitors will be able to leave a comment using their GH account.
I would love for you to keep an open mind. Medium changed a lot last year and still has a lot more room to go. A lot of the content mill and clickbait has effectively gone, either disincentivized or removed from recommendations. That made room for great stories to come back. (Still a subscription though because that’s the way to get out of the attention economy)
I don't really know what to say about Disqus, it always felt like something in the design of its interface was a bit off-putting. For me, Privacy Badger always blocks the embed and I think people from privacy-conscious circles would definitely avoid loading it.
I (somewhat) recently saw a post[1] from an author I like that sent me down the rabbit hole and it seems like Disqus also tends to inject ad scripts into the websites that host it (which, honestly, makes some business sense because they are a for-profit and not a lot of people are using their non-free plans).
In that same article, it was also mentioned in an edit that Giscus[2] seems like a viable solution. In my eyes, it really looks like it's the best client-side comment library out there and when I start my blog I'll try to use it for comments.
That resonates with me. I have a blog, and it's far away from being one of the big ones everyone knows about. I write for an imaginary audience, partly to help myself think through ideas by organizing them into words, mainly just for the fun of shouting into the void.
I've had a surprising amount of feedback from strangers who say hi or ask for a followup to something I'd written about. It's a little gift each time that happens. I can't imagine that anyone would care about something I had to say, and yet here's this real person who wants to have a conversation about it.
I try to never write my Internet comments for me. I write for the imaginary bored teenage version of me who ran across what I wrote, at 6 pm on a Thursday night, and found it interesting, or at least amusing.
There's some interesting ideas here about the desire for human connection among the way-too-online, which is richer than "interesting stuff gets routed to your inbox" but the writer doesn't seem to see it, merely hint at it.
Edit: In fact it kind of mirrors how social media went from a tool to foster human connection to a tool to see interesting content...
Readit News
Relatable and counter-intuitive. I have this reflex when I write that I’m trying to reach an imaginary broad audience. But whenever it’s extremely specific, to the point when I don’t expect anyone to even know what I’m talking about, it tends to drive more “engagement”, in a good way! In a way it makes sense, when I’m reading some generic truism, I don’t get any itch to engage, even if it was well written.
If you, like me, have been stuck writing and it’s slow and ends up bland, I can recommend just changing the mental “audience”. Just assume you’re talking to someone who really gets you – perhaps your younger self or a nerdy friend. Don’t be defensive, trying to convince a hypothetical, hyper-intelligent skeptic.
To me it can make the difference from dreadful and tedious to pure delight.
Yes. My wife worries a lot about this; she was worried that her 16,000-word, three-part essay guide on how to find clinical trials, and what the process was like for us (https://bessstillman.substack.com/p/please-be-dying-but-not-...) would be too long and peculiar. Instead, it's found a wide audience, and perhaps most vitally, she's gotten a lot of great emails and comments from readers. Astral Codex Ten in particular has great readership. I'm not sure whether she's forged meaningful relationships that way yet, but the potential is there.
And if some people are put off by the peculiarities and quirkiness, so be it. To be for everyone is close to being for no one, as you mention.
> If you, like me, have been stuck writing and it’s slow and ends up bland,
To me this is a sign that I'm either tired or don't care about the subject, but haven't realised that yet. Write about the things that matter to you (harder than it seems).
Granted it could support it all along but, for a time, people wanted to see what the fuss was all about at the Big Platforms. I'm glad that bloggers kept blogging and that talented writers, old and new, are still going at what I consider my favorite part of the internet since it's modern inception in the 90s.
Reading will always be my performed form of content despite more and more people moving to YouTube for better exposure and money but for all you who feel the need to write: KEEP IT UP!
Is throwing a bottle with a message in it into the ocean a "complex search query to find people?" I wouldn't phrase it that way.
The article does say:
and I don't disagree with that, but at the same time, just forming the words helps you shape yourself, regardless of whether it involves other people. Or maybe the other people can just be in your own head.I've got countless drawings and writings that nobody else will ever see, and likely will die with me. But they were very important for my self-shaping.
Maybe this is just a personality difference between me and the author — some people define themselves more in terms of their relationships with others than otherwise.
But regardless, I liked the article (:
There is some fine line between just being yourself and "singing into the void" as it were, versus trying to use your voice to make changes in the world. I must admit I lean towards the former, but the idea of "the summoning of a new culture" at the end of the article is interesting.
Besides his expose jumps from his main thesis to arguing how easy it is to become viral on some social network, particularly if you know whom to tag. Well my posts can become very popular on hacker news by replying to the right peple - that's fine. Or by annoying everyone in the comments section by being obnoxious (or not too careful with wording). But this does not imply at all that I was actively pursuing a goal, or aiming for it. It may be a result of personality trait. Some people talk, others write, and the rest - does not.
The fact that the essay at http://worrydream.com/refs/Licklider-IntergalacticNetwork.pd... is beautifully written and Licklider was apparently impactful on the initiation of Internet does not imply neither whether the essay predates actions Licklider undertook, nor that he was aiming for such an impact. In fact many may argue that what we have as the Internet today, 10, 20, 30 years ago is not a result of single vision. I don't think there's universal agreement on Jacquard being THE father of programming, because he's the first person in modern history who employed some sort of programs.
We can with ease argue that the idea of intergalactic-anything goes back to Jules Verne for example. We can easily say that Dune kicked the LSD culture with this spice thing, and that the idea of inter-worlds communication is taken from Azimov's Foundation. Why not say that William Gibson queried for someone to write him a cyberpunk 3D, and some filthy rich guy read it and decided to act upon it...
This is such an oversimplification of the role of written text, and even though I kind of agree with the author that like-minded people may write in similar fashion, I have seen more proof that like-minded people, who talk alike, actually do not get so well together.
It is very possible to write about niche topics with gusto and at length, but without finding an audience or a circle of peers. Twenty years ago it was common to call this the "long tail," a term popularized by a bestselling middlebrow book.
I put my trust in the "long tail" of the Internet audience and wrote in public for a few years. The experience did not shape me intellectually, as reading a good book or learning a skill might have done. And it did not bring me into contact with a circle of peers who learned from each other.
The author even offers the example of his wife, who published a long piece of writing in a niche different to his and did not benefit in the "search query to find people" way.
I think there is a likelier and more specific explanation for the author's observations. Namely, over the past decade, guru figures like Scott Alexander have popularized a style of academic-sounding essay-writing that is diffuse, meandering, and often very long. Fans of this kind of writing also reward authors who aspire to global or timeless significance by writing about a set of "cornerstone" topics that includes Plato, Roman stoics and the Roman Empire in general, Tolstoy, Enlightenment-era American political philosophy, and popular takes on behavioral economics and evolutionary psychology.
Some of this guy's posts struck gold with this audience and got widely disseminated through their social networks. I strongly suspect that writing about historically and thematically adjacent topics (e.g., Russian Realists other than Tolstoy) would produce a lot fewer "search results" for the author.
But my purpose of writing is the same as the authors, to find like minded people and have a discussion with them. It’s kind of cure for intellectual loneliness.
[1] https://coredumped.dev/
I have my email on my personal site and when an article reaches the frontpage on HN I usually get some emails related to the post.
I don’t want my website to be a distribution channel. The last thing I want is to be managing visitors to my home.
I’ll let the distributors do their thing to pass my content around and I’ll own/manage my own content on my homepage.
https://untested.sonnet.io/Instead+or+writing+a+comment%2C+w...
Substack is neat, but I'd prefer a nice, self-hosted alternative.
(or POSSE - "Publish (on your) Own Site, SyndicateElsewhere").
[1] https://giscus.app
Substack does look better, but not sure if it's sustainable
I paid for stats for a while, but it was depressingly low. But I'm chugging along for myself, like a public notebook.
I (somewhat) recently saw a post[1] from an author I like that sent me down the rabbit hole and it seems like Disqus also tends to inject ad scripts into the websites that host it (which, honestly, makes some business sense because they are a for-profit and not a lot of people are using their non-free plans).
In that same article, it was also mentioned in an edit that Giscus[2] seems like a viable solution. In my eyes, it really looks like it's the best client-side comment library out there and when I start my blog I'll try to use it for comments.
[1]: https://www.supergoodcode.com/adventures-in-linking/#first
[2]: https://giscus.app/
I've had a surprising amount of feedback from strangers who say hi or ask for a followup to something I'd written about. It's a little gift each time that happens. I can't imagine that anyone would care about something I had to say, and yet here's this real person who wants to have a conversation about it.
Edit: In fact it kind of mirrors how social media went from a tool to foster human connection to a tool to see interesting content...