Do people write (blog) for themselves any more? This blog post frames the whole experience as an extroverted attempt to please the audience that is not yourself. Which is totally fine if you regard blogs as a medium directed primarily outwards, at others. I am just curious whether anyone writes primarily for themselves (in order to better organise their thoughts, or leave a reference for their future self), where any readership is purely accidental, not the raison d'etre? I know that I do.
If time allows it and I want to ensure I understand some concept, explaining it to someone tend to be very useful. Writing a blog post is then a great way to do so without requiring one of my friends to listen!
I do this without even publishing the posts. As mentioned in one of the other comments, I am vary of making these accessible for the public due to lack of "oversight". I feel like there's a responsibility when sharing information, and if I'm not 100% sure what I've written is correct, I don't want to mislead people. And even if correct, one should really ask themselves if it actually adds something to the topic which is otherwise not easily accessible. I think this is especially important to ask today when there is so much information already available.
Hence I actually think writing blog posts as means of understanding is a really goof approach; whether or not the piece should be made public is something that should then be judged case-by-case.
Many of the reasons why I blog are for my own benefit, but it is also fun if people read what I write, so it is a mix really. My reasons in roughly order of importance:
- Knowing what I think
- Sharing knowledge
- Venting
- To learn (when I get comments on my views)
- To remember better, e.g. for books I've read
- To have an archive to refer people to
- For the thrill of having people read what I write
I use my blog for venting as well. And love the experience, knowing that it's not a social network and no-one will rush at me screaming angrily. I just worry sometimes that some of my rants go against the dogmas of the mainstream liberal orthodoxy, and if someone did chance upon my blog, they might get upset — and oh, I don't know, fire/not hire me.
Yes, people do! From my time in HN, I've accumulated a list of links to smaller/niche blogs, that you wouldn't stumble on by chance, except if you were searching for something extremely specific. You don't have to add analytics and play the numbers game, but just as ig0r0 mentioned, it's a great exercise to improving your writing, document your learning experience or an obscure solution for easy future reference.
It's easier than ever to get started (as easy as forking a Github project and uploading your markdown), and as a bonus it might also look good on a CV.
I'm a few years and 200+ posts deep on my blog and I still mostly write for myself.
Not because I'm a selfish dickwad, but most of my posts ends up being drawn from real world development experience, and to further improve my ability as a developer, I write about the experience openly.
It seems like a win win situation. I get a better understanding of what I'm doing and it becomes a searchable reference for myself and anyone else who happens to stumble on one of my posts.
I write for myself. To repeat an aphorism, I don’t write because I can write, I write because I can’t not write.
I couldn’t even begin to confidently tell anyone to read what I write. Statistically, 90% of my blog posts sink without a trace. My last post was about a novel but highly pessimum solution to a programming puzzle.
Who ought to read that? And why? It was a pleasant diversion to write, and if someone finds it a pleasant diversion to read, great! But how could I tell anyone that they ought to read it?
As it happens, I have been blogging for fourteen years, and if you throw enough spaghetti at the wall, some of it sticks. Thus, I have a small but durable reputation as an author.
In that time, I have resisted the urge to closely track metrics and adjust my writing to improve its popularity. I’ve tried to get better at being me, without becoming a copy of any of the bloggers that are really popular.
It’s my hobby, it’s supposed to be for me and for those who have their own reasons in finding it delightful.
...All that being said, within the non-negotiable bounds of writing for myself, and speaking in my own authentic voice, there is lots of room to improve my writing.
Structuring a post to be easier to digest isn’t just about writing for others, it is also a forcing function for structuring my own thoughts. In what order should I present this idea? What is essential, what is inessential, and what actually detracts from the essential idea?
Questions like these work their way back to improving my own thinking about an idea, and that is part of why I write and what I gain from it. This is why I unapologetically revise my posts dozens of times when they hit HN or go viral on Twitter: The feedback offers a clue as to how well I’ve structured my thinking, and restructuring it helps me understand the subject better.
Writing is rewriting. Without agreeing or disagreeing with any specific piece of advice in TFA, the general idea of applying some structure to writing to make it digestible nad to communicate your ideas clearly is valuable not just for the writing itself, but for your own thinking.
I do. I'm honestly not sure what my reasons are, I certainly don't have any kind of "following".
Mostly I think I get an enjoyable sense of accomplishment from getting down "properly" the stuff I find myself contemplating and discussing with people. It's almost like flushing a write buffer: get it from working-memory to blog, and it's done!
There's definitely a learning process and I feel I'm noticing improvements to my output and approach, which is also a satsifying outcome.
Does blogging to keep from repeating yourself count as for yourself or for others? That's why I've kept a blog since 2000 or so. I'm no extrovert, but I still have to deal with people and I often end up making the same observation or explaining the same thing over and over in different conversations. When I catch myself doing that, I try to frame that thought in the clearest way I can as a blog post. Then I can point people to it in chat/email, or people I don't even know can find it themselves. In some ways it reduces the amount of direct interaction I have to be involved in.
I plan on doing something like that. I work as a programmer and recently I've been tackling some interesting problems and I've been thinking about documenting everything (the problem, my approach, my solution etc...) my goal is to have that blog as a future reference for myself and track my progress... if anyone comes to my blog and read that stuff then that is even better!
I think a lot of bloggers write primarily for themselves. But I also think many are secretly or subconsciously hoping it'll find some kind of audience. Which makes sense, because if you literally do not care at all whether anyone else reads this or finds it useful, you wouldn't bother publishing it.
A blog is a communication device, so it doesn't make a lot of sense to do it solely for yourself. I think to myself a lot (sometimes out loud) and I write for myself a lot, but I wouldn't talk into a phone with a dial tone to myself :)
So perhaps this piece is also useful for people who write primarily for themselves, but also would like to remove any barriers to others finding and enjoying the fruits of their efforts.
> if you literally do not care at all whether anyone else reads this or finds it useful, you wouldn't bother publishing it
Remember the diaries (I wonder when they gained popularity? in the 18th century? in the 19th? surely they've been with us longer than that). They could be read by others, and indeed there was a tradition for young lovers to give each other their diaries to read, but they were (or were supposed to be) written primarily for those who wrote them.
Same for laboratory logs (or other professional logs; I am not sure who kept them besides sea captains). They could be read by others, and might be informative to others, but were written primarily for the writer himself.
As for publishing, web publishing is so easy and makes the writing so accessible it's arguably easier to "publish" your writings on your web site than to keep them in a notebook in a drawer.
> It’s not easier to blog than write to a local text file.
For many developers who have harnessed static site generators that turn local markdown (or orgmode, etc.) files into htmls, it is essentially one and the same thing.
Sure we do. I personally I have a programming blog mainly as a "reminder" about how I solved the programming problems I had. And it happened to me a few times that searching for a solution led me to my post :)
"For yourself" and "for an audience" are not mutually exclusive. I find them to be mutually reinforcing.
Fo myself, as the topic and exposition are intrinsically motivated. For others, as that goads me to bidging chasms and leaps of reason otherwise obscured, and for which Future Me often thanks Past Me.
I write for myself first but it's a great feeling when others find value in my writing. As such, readers are usually on my mind. My posts often evolve over time.
