Posted by magoghm 12/27/2025
But that wasn't enough. Someone else wrote that my article was useless and I write at a 7th grade level. I turned off the monitor, went for a walk. I decided that blogging wasn't for me. It was time to delete my blog. I was so embarrassed.
When I came back, there was a reply to that comment. It said something like "that's a good thing, 7th grade level writing means we can all understand it easily". And that was enough to keep me going. 13 years so far.
The problem with environments designed to make interaction low-energy and gamified like Reddit, is that it gathers just the worst people. I've got ~63k karma there, and disengaged some years ago and I can't tell you how much ditching that, twitter and Facebook improved my mental health. There's some great fun to be had there, but it's often the same thing over and over again and increasingly drowned out by utter crap. They've taken multiple actions that have destroyed the sense of community and have become a poster child for ens*tification, unfortunately.
On YouTube, I also sometimes get mean comments, though at least there the automatic moderation catches them so they don't show up publicly and I can shadowban the offenders off the channel easily. None of the content is even controversial, YouTube just attracts a lot of angry people that feel entitled to speak what's on their mind.
I wouldn't publish in an environment where blocking or banning people is difficult. They're not entitled for me to engage with their hateful drivel. My blog also doesn't have comments. At the end of the day, I will say what I want to say.
One of my projects for the next few weeks is to get my blogging stuff up and running again but with a couple of tweaks:
1. I'll never allow on-blog comments again, ever. The signal/noise was always so poor. I'm sorry that you had a similar experience and the unpleasant odour of drive-by sniping got to you. For what it's worth, I'm always interested in finding new writing on tech topics, and I try to never be mean: I am not unique in this, so consider if there's another way.
2. If I ever publish code, it'll not be on a SaaS platform like GitHub, I'll manage the release through tar.gz/zip files, and if people don't like that, fine. I'm not after pull requests or starting a "real" OSS project. If somebody wants to take that OSS license code and host/manage it, godspeed to them.
3. I will write some code that looks for links back to my blogs, so if something I write is referenced by another blog, I'll learn about it at some point and I can go take a look, and that would be interesting. A long, long time ago there was some automation around this using web hooks that almost became a standard, so I'll look into whether that is a thing or not any more.
In my experience if somebody is writing a blog about something they are normally more constructive and thoughtful than if they are just writing something in a text box while "driving by". I'm OK with those articles normally even if they're critical or in disagreement with me about something.
Even with a following, most of the time when you publish it goes into the abyss. Every once in a while something hits but most of the time it takes a lot of patience and resolve. I've had some good visibility over the years from Reddit and Hacker News (though any post I make now on HN is marked as [dead]). It's not always fair and others can "pay" to get the visibility.
I've seen some of the other comments talking about the burden of OSS but I haven't felt that. I set my own agenda and fix what I want to fix. If someone wants to change my priorities that becomes a paid effort.
My blogging and publishing almost never comes up during an interview. Afterwards, I am openly told it's why they either asked for me, or why they chose me over another candidate. This has happened at almost every job I've accepted.
My writing style or content is not all that special. As the saying goes, 90% of success is simply showing up.
Just being explain complex topics in simple ways can go a long way, even if you're not an amazing author.
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Addition: This is especially true with topics so expansive that even great LLM often conflates subtopics in weird ways. While this gap is rapidly closing, being able to clearly explain complex interconnected topics in simple ways is absolutely an advantage.
Here's some of my work - it's free until Jan 1. https://inkican.com/smashwords-white-hot-scifi-winter/
The advantage now is being able to preserve semantic fidelity as everything else accelerates into noise. Work that stays legible and grounded seems to compound in ways raw visibility no longer does.
Usually this only applies to business related websites, but lawyers could even argue a personal blog is business related due to the possibility existing for me to advertise products.
So yea, while I would love to share my work publicly, its simply not feasible due to medieval laws in place.