A startup blogger writes a polemic with a blatantly baiting headline. Within 24 hours, another startup blogger will write a rebuttal with an equally baiting headline. Both will incite winding debates on Hacker News.
Meanwhile, other people will somehow manage to create value, ostensibly the goal of both bloggers, without writing confrontational screeds, perhaps even writing insightful blog posts intended to inspire and challenge rather than stir up conflict.
So you wrote a blog post titled "You made your site in 5 hours - nobody cares".
Nobody should care.
I was doing my usual reading this morning and I started to recognize a pattern. Not just this morning, but a pattern that has been occurring over the last year or more.
It goes like this:
* Blogger sees a link to some app on [Reddit,Digg,Hacker News]
* Blogger thinks the app is stupid and insignificant
* Blogger takes the time to write a rant about it
I understand why this happens. I have done it myself. Bloggers do this because there are posts out there that have been made in just minutes or hours that turned out to generate a huge number of page views. The allure is tremendous.
Here is the part that gets me: There are so many bigger problems out there to blog about.
Even with a CS background, I would expect a blog post that is supposed to be a "A Critical Review" to at least try to be fair and reasonable.
It doesn't have to be neutral in my opinion. But it should clearly separate personal judgement or opinion from facts and overall rational.
In the "About me" section the author says:
>Originally I started this site attacking the big corporate interests (Google, IBM and VMWare) that drove this effort forward, but that really doesn’t speak to my intended audience. It also came off as acerbic, which I am fine with in regards to corporations and their CEOs, it does not do justice to all the engineers that slaved over the Kubernetes project. So I deleted those posts. Now, I just want to start, provoke, prod, or push a dialog forward, because if you just follow the tech blogs, you would think we should be running a Kubernetes cluster on our lawn mowers.
Even if the blog is not about simply "attacking the big corporate interests" anymore, the language clearly puts forward the post's agenda.
In my opinion, the post should have a different title, one that is clearly indicating the author's intention to highlight the negative things about Kubernetes and the documentary.
Functionally, for the reader of Hacker News, it has the same form of and effect as blogspam. It's a blog entry, it doesn't add much, and it just links to the real content.
But presumably it lacks the intent of blogspam. Bruce Schneier's blog has quality original content, and nobody is trying to game the system. Probably Schneier just wrote this blog entry to bring an interesting story to his readers' attention, and one of them posted it here.
This is why you should have a blog: Because when you throw your reddit comments onto your own website and show a "post archive" on the sidebar, you're a blogger worth being submitted to Hacker News.
The point is valid, but the presentation and profane clickbait are lower tier.
I would not even begin to disagree with you about the merits of beautiful prose, but would the article have been anything more than a collection of entertaining images and vitriol if the author hadn't been skewering a very real and obvious and silly trend?
Most of us have probably shaken our heads at some startup name or another, or rolled our eyes at a particularly unbearable lump of marketing-speak. So underneath all those pretty words and images lies a sentiment we understand and can sympathize with.
If you want your blog READ instead of skimmed for buzzwords and facts, write things worth writing.
What you point out is an interesting effect. Blog posts that are controversial know that there's a chance a sh$#storm will ensue in the comments. In the case of general bloggers, such as researchers i.e. not people who are actively trying to troll or generate pageviews, but on personal blogs, how does this affect writing that is controversial?
I don't know academic publishing well enough to compare. I think that as far as controversial claims that would make it to somewhere like Hacker News, the effect is that if the controversial statements are wrong, then the comments will shoot them down, and the story will be buried. Furthermore, the rest of the comments will pile on the first comment that points out that the blog post is mistaken.
Perhaps an effect of this is that you can tell from the tone that some blog posts take, that they are being extremely careful to lay a rock-solid foundation, and kind of "convert" their readers who might otherwise vehemently disagree with them. For a recent example, check out this blog post:
I think there's some truth to this. Some junior developers make it a goal to be seen as a respected blogger, so they feel the need to write something, even if they have nothing to say.
Someone posted a blog post to Hacker News which summarized another summary of an original article -- and neither summary adds any thought to the original idea. In fact, they strip the original article down to a single idea and attempt to make it as outrageous as possible.
People on the Internet get really angry about this. "Of course you should have a dateline on your posts!" "Readers are smart enough to understand when something has long-term value!"
Don't listen to them. Of course readers are smart enough to perceive long-term value in a blog post. But they don't, because appreciating that value requires them to expend mental energy to fight against the blog format. Instead, they see a blog post and:
* Assume that because it's on the blog it was written in a single draft.
* Assume that it's part of some larger conversation amongst lots of bloggers.
* Assume it's an invitation to a discussion among readers rather than your definitive take on an issue. (For extra fun: add a series of complaints about not having "comments" enabled on whatever you wrote.)
* Assume that it'll end up syndicated along with the rest of your blog posts on "Planet People Like You" or whatever blog aggregator you end up on.
* Assume that it'll be followed up on in some future post.
In general, the reader isn't wrong about this! Those beliefs are continuously validated by the majority of blogs. Which makes me wonder why anyone would sink days or weeks of effort into a piece only to deliberately position it alongside every other dashed-off blog post.
I think you can get immediate value just by doing what Patrick said: write a blog, but don't call it that. But you can do things that are much more creative, too. Our crypto challenges started out as a text file of 40 3-paragraph challenges. We thought about putting it up on the website, but we worried that we'd end up getting skimmed by people on (not to put too fine a point on it) HN who wouldn't really understand them, and end up "debating our own posts" with those people. So instead of publishing them, we accepted email addresses for people who wanted them, and doled them out 8 challenges at a time. More than 12,000 people signed up; we're finally releasing them in their entirety, along with solutions in every single mainstream language and a bunch of weird ones, in a Black Hat talk this year. It became one of our most profitable recruiting vehicles.
It was originally a blog post. Man, that would have sucked, if we stuck a date and a title on it and hit "publish".
You know I am going to confess to a couple of biasses here.
Bias 1 - When I saw the article title in the listing of all the new submissions on hacker news, I thought to myself - "Sheesh, Here is somebody who wants to just become popular without a goal in mind. Why can't they just work on some thing they are passionate about and write about that to teach others"
Bias 2 - then I clicked on the article and saw who The author was. Oh damn there MUST be something poignant here.
I am pretty sure two biases don't unbias each other. Either way Simon has really good points in documenting your TIL items. As someone who can lose track of time building and coding, blogging is the last thing on my mind (unless a blog post is a pr for a new feature I am releasing), Simon's advice strikes a nice balance!
Meanwhile, other people will somehow manage to create value, ostensibly the goal of both bloggers, without writing confrontational screeds, perhaps even writing insightful blog posts intended to inspire and challenge rather than stir up conflict.
Maybe it's writing polemics that is horseshit.
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