The corollary is that if you find that post, say something. Drop the author a note, leave a comment. No one else does. For every YT celebrity, there are thousands of people posting good content on the internet and not knowing if it's being seen or appreciated by anyone.
I run a tiny blog. Every now and then, I check the server logs. Specifically, the user agent strings. While crawling feeds, most feed readers adjust their user agent string to include how many of their users have subscribed to that specific feed. That way, I know that at least 9 people on this planet see my posts. Myself included, that's 10! :)
100 upvotes, if I could. There is too little positive feedback in peoples' lives, if any. For this reason, I habitually cold email people who's stuff has moved me in some way (think, feel, pause etc...). Universe knows, I need it too :D So I put a "standing invitation" [1] front-and-center on my site, copying Derek Sivers and patio11. I get maybe a handful of "hello from an Internet stranger" emails, but every time it makes my day / week / longer if the conversation rambles on languidly. Email is so great for slow-mo thoughtful banter.
Glad to hear that other people do this as well. I very rarely get a response (not the intent), but hope it makes at least someone's day.
I've done this for a few books, two video games, and a composer. One of the smaller indie studios wrote me back a nice email about how much it meant to them.
A guy posted about how to fix a broken car socket (cigarette lighter or whatever you call them) on a 1999 Honda Civic. Apparently there's little... Transistors or something under the glove box. Never knew they were there. It was like a 50 cent fix. Would never have known if this person hadn't posted. I did drop him a note of thanks
About two years ago I wanted to replay a game demo I remembered from an old (early 00') computer magazine demo disc. The actual game was nowhere to be found anywhere on the internet, but I did locate the developer and sent him an email.
Turns out the game was never actually released - its only public existence was as a demo game alongside a bunch of other games and software. He still had the installer for the game, which was small enough to fit as an attachment in the reply he gave.
He didn't say, but I got the distinct feeling that I might have made his day asking about that game he made more than 20 years ago.
There was a blog I followed and really admired ten or fifteen years ago. One day I was reading one of his posts and in the middle of it was an exuberant note of thanks for an article I wrote doing a close read of Ruby's TSort package.
Super niche, mostly irrelevant to all but a vanishingly small number of people, and yet I had proof that someone I admired found it useful.
It's been years, and it still makes me smile when I think of it.
You never know what impact you might make on others.
Quite right. My late father used to do free audiobook recordings for LibriVox¹ and while I know he enjoyed their forums, after he died we discovered a little clutch of hand written letters from people who had enjoyed his recordings. It warms my heart to know how pleased that would have made him and was one of the brighter moments when clearing out the family home.
These signs of appreciation are, themselves, truly appreciated.
Yes please! This sort of feedback keeps me going through the harder times. I could have sold out a million times if it wasn't for the feedback of grateful readers keeping me on the right path. A kind comment never fails to make my day!
I made it a habit of showing gratitude to content creators, as well as to open source maintainers.
I did this recently when a blog post described the exact, very niche issue I was having with a production server. This post described the symptoms of the issue clearly and included a flow-chart of required fixes. There was no preamble, just clear guidance. It was more an incident management manual than a blog post, and it saved me a lot of Googling under considerable stress.
I sent the author a quick thank you, explaining how it helped me in my hour of need. Exactly as others have said here, it goes a long way to making the effort of blogging worthwhile!
I reached out to a person on Gemini in 2021 and we've spoken basically every day since.
You never know what kind of connections are out there unless you try.
Total party skills, arguably the most balanced astute commentary of current events… definitely that I’ve come across. Hidden behind a game master facade.
This is the philosophy I use for my TIL posts - if something took me a few hours to figure out despite searching for a solution first it's a very strong signal that it is worth writing about.
Whenever I fix something or struggle with an issue I ALWAYS write myself a blog post and make sure to cram in the exact errors/SEO Keywords I searched for while trying to glue together a solution.
Two days ago, I was looking on how to get Gamescope working with a new computer on NixOS. I searched around, and found a Reddit post about it [1], found that they had a Github Gist attached to it, and then realized that I was the guy who posted it. I had completely forgot that I had done this work already.
My most useful stack overflow answer is one where I barely knew what I was doing (something back in MVC.net) and while I managed to fix the problem, which was the same as the one asked about, I didn’t understand any of the marked “best answers” or how they were relevant, so i wrote out how I’d fixed it in “I clicked here and typed this to match that” terms. Much later I knew enough to realize that of course my answer was exactly what those other answers were saying to do, but mine still got buckets of votes from all the other poor folk googling without having yet understood the bindings and views and magic connections between pieces that Visual Studio was making.
I use a robots.txt[^1] to try to prevent them from calling my site. But they're probably doing it regardless ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Don't want to completely kill my site from indexing, but if I did I'd 100% set up a tarpit.
Something I wish I had done more. You think you don't need to make a note because it's fresh in your head at the time, but years later, even the context is gone. Expecting to remember arcane solutions to things you do rarely is unrealistic. I've gotten better but still have a ways to go. One thing that removes the barrier is to just have common log to put everything, perhaps with some tags, so you can quickly open it and type your thoughts when they're fresh, without having to worry about packaging it just right.
I think that perhaps the most important part of this is that if you write the post you wish you'd found, chances are you'll find it useful again at some point in the future.
So much of what I write has proven itself useful to me again even years after publication. Adding search functionality to my site and including my microblog posts there has extended this further.
Good point! I can never remember the steps to install the Ubiquiti management app on Arch after repaving my workstation (which I do ever other year or so). But I blogged about it in 2019, so I use that as a reminder.
I really wish more people did this. I make it a point to show my gratitude when I encounter similar resources. One helped me cycle across Korea. Another helped me fix a very specific device.
It's a shame that Google, social media and AI strip mine the work of these helpful people and rob them of their reward.
I'm imminently posting one such Web page, which took me many person-days to figure out, when I couldn't find the info.
Posting is actually delayed because I'm experimenting with how to do this more sustainably than I have in the past. Which means generating dollars somehow, and also making it harder for "AI" crawlers and services to rip off everything. :(
It’s a rush to feel appreciated when somebody takes the time to enjoy your craft - be it writing, cooking, or developing a tool. It’s deflating to put something out there and it simply disappears into the ether, never to be recognized nor celebrated. 10 years into my Medium account I’ve experienced both and at this point, I simply can’t quit because writing is my journey and audiences are fickle. So be it, such are the terms and conditions of the craft.
Agreed. A typical post on my blog gets no comments. The mean is probably one because the posts that do get comments normally get three or four. The biggest dopamine hit I've had in 19 years of blogging was seeing this post hit #1 on the HN front page... and I doubt I'll see that happen again.
I'm working one of such blog posts as we speak. Past few months I've been purely publishing articles in my domain (Kubernetes) that go really deep into things that I've discovered the hard way, or code walkthroughs in OSS codebases.
Readit News
[1] https://www.evalapply.org/index.html#standing-invitation
I've done this for a few books, two video games, and a composer. One of the smaller indie studios wrote me back a nice email about how much it meant to them.
About two years ago I wanted to replay a game demo I remembered from an old (early 00') computer magazine demo disc. The actual game was nowhere to be found anywhere on the internet, but I did locate the developer and sent him an email.
Turns out the game was never actually released - its only public existence was as a demo game alongside a bunch of other games and software. He still had the installer for the game, which was small enough to fit as an attachment in the reply he gave.
He didn't say, but I got the distinct feeling that I might have made his day asking about that game he made more than 20 years ago.
Super niche, mostly irrelevant to all but a vanishingly small number of people, and yet I had proof that someone I admired found it useful.
It's been years, and it still makes me smile when I think of it.
You never know what impact you might make on others.
These signs of appreciation are, themselves, truly appreciated.
¹ https://librivox.org/ - if you'd like to hear him then try The Prisoner of Zenda: https://librivox.org/the-prisoner-of-zenda-by-anthony-hope/
I made it a habit of showing gratitude to content creators, as well as to open source maintainers.
This idea seems similar. I have some accounts on social media that is being used for read-only. That's unfortunate reality.
HN does not do reply notifications, so please send me a link - my contact is in my profile :)
I sent the author a quick thank you, explaining how it helped me in my hour of need. Exactly as others have said here, it goes a long way to making the effort of blogging worthwhile!
Total party skills, arguably the most balanced astute commentary of current events… definitely that I’ve come across. Hidden behind a game master facade.
https://youtube.com/@totalpartyskills
Here's my most recent one, about using a Tailscale exit node to proxy scraping traffic from GitHub Actions: https://til.simonwillison.net/tailscale/tailscale-github-act...
> Simon Willison is the master of this and even has a subdomain devoted to his
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/1dahr3g/steamos_base...
https://www.michael1e.com/how-to-replace-the-eufy-spaceview-...
Still don’t know how to respond when i get fucked by LLM authoritarians (Grok, ChatGPT, etc.).
They don’t give the traffic back / incentives or even cite us as the source. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
[^1]: https://github.com/ai-robots-txt/ai.robots.txt
So much of what I write has proven itself useful to me again even years after publication. Adding search functionality to my site and including my microblog posts there has extended this further.
But I've searched for things and found my own old blog posts on occasion.
I gave a talk about the "why" which turned into a long blog post: https://nicolasbouliane.com/projects/all-about-berlin
I really wish more people did this. I make it a point to show my gratitude when I encounter similar resources. One helped me cycle across Korea. Another helped me fix a very specific device.
It's a shame that Google, social media and AI strip mine the work of these helpful people and rob them of their reward.
Posting is actually delayed because I'm experimenting with how to do this more sustainably than I have in the past. Which means generating dollars somehow, and also making it harder for "AI" crawlers and services to rip off everything. :(
Could I ask for a link?