I've been having fun with my blog for many years. And now it's a big source of revenue for me. Still, I treat it almost the same way as before: a place where I get to share my ideas and discoveries.<p>The sheer act of writing helps me structure my thoughts and helps others grow. Win win!<p><a href="https://dsebastien.net" rel="nofollow">https://dsebastien.net</a><p>What I did a while ago was splitting notes and articles: <a href="https://notes.dsebastien.net" rel="nofollow">https://notes.dsebastien.net</a><p>Publishing unpolished notes is a great way to remove needless pressure
[Self-promotion warning] My blog that nobody read turned into a published book. An editor for a small publishing firm happened to come across my blog and thought that it might be good as a book. He contacted me and after about a year of work (more than I expected) I finished the book and got it published. It's not that popular, but I'm very happy with it.<p>My point is that you don't need a massive audience. If you can reach one person and make them laugh, or teach someone something new, or give someone hope when they really needed it, then your writing will be worth it.
Looking forward to post about writing a book nobody reads ;)
I am now intrigued in your blog, if it's still online?
It was my old astrophotography blog: <a href="https://neurohack.com/Astrophotography/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://neurohack.com/Astrophotography/index.html</a><p>And the book it led to is 101 Amazing Sights of the Night Sky: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/101-Amazing-Sights-Night-Sky/dp/1591935571" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/101-Amazing-Sights-Night-Sky/dp/15919...</a><p>Neither is very popular, but it was a lot of fun.
Its probably the Archive if you follow the link
The scraper bots probably read it and now it is ever so slightly altering the weights in some massive AI model. That's not nothing.
After all we said and done, we will be only a memory in some future AI model. And maybe it will answer the meaning of the number 42.
I have no idea about the journey that atoms of my body took to reach where they are now (as me, myself). I wish them good lucky on their future endeavours. I think we should get acclimatized to similar process about "Ideas and Concepts that we think originates from Us". These concepts will be meat grinded into large LLMs and hopefully help someone in future.
Writing a blog is like talking in the town square. Except because it’s digital, we seem to forget how communication works. If you just start talking in the town square, you’re standing alone talking. Sure a person who passes by might pause, but the odds you’re saying something really relevant to them are low, so they’ll move on.<p>The whole question of how you get in front of the right people and tweak your message based on their reactions, and then setup a routine so you have a dependable performance-audience, all seem to be lost on many folks.
Related, I think people have stopped.... reacting on the internet? I've been part of the X/Twitter to Bluesky migration and people often mention how 'quiet' Bluesky is.<p>I think that's not due to algorithmic intervention of product design etc., I think people are just tired. The novelty of shouting at strangers on the internet has worn off - how many internet fights have we gotten into that did nothing in the end except waste time? It's only worse with a coin flip's chance of the other person being an LLM. We're all tired.
This is relatable. I often find myself starting a reply on here, really thinking it through as I type it out, and then hitting delete on what I just wrote. Sometimes I even hit submit, and then delete a few moments later.<p>It's just hard to justify engaging. Worst case, I get a fight on my hands with someone who's as dogmatic as they are wrong, which is both frequent and also a complete waste of my time. (A tech readership is always going to veer hard into the <i>well, akshually...</i>) Most likely case, I get fictitious internet points. Which - I won't lie - tickle my lizard brain, just as they do everyone else's. But they don't actually achieve anything meaningful.<p>Best case is that I learn something. Realistically, this happens vanishingly infrequently, and the signal-noise ratio is much, much worse than if I just pulled a book off my shelf.<p>I suppose this is all an artifact of time and experience. Maybe I've just picked all the low-hanging fruit, and so I no longer have the patience to watch people endlessly repost the same xkcd strips from fifteen years ago, navel-gaze about tabs or spaces, share thrilling new facts that I have in fact known for many decades, etc. And while I'm very excited for them to discover all these things anew (and anew... and anew...), it's just not a good use of my time and patience to participate.
Spot on. Ten or fifteen years ago, participating in the internet was something I got excited about, now I just get excited about getting away from it.
What if having an audience isn’t the goal?
I saw this Carl Jung quote shared on Substack recently.<p>"Loneliness does not come from having no people around you, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you"."<p>I'm using writing as an outlet for an active mind these days. Thoughts that seem important to me and need to come out even if there is nobody there to read them.
Totally random rant.<p>I have a lot to say. About lot of things.<p>I don't blog because, most of the time, I'm worried about what people might think. Sometimes I speak up in public and people are confused, so - I think - it will only be amplified online. Sometimes I want to share a bit of code, and I'm not sure if the formatting will please everyone. Or naming convention.<p>But most of all it's putting it all together.<p>There was this famous kid who only talked in tweets because he had ADHD. Sometimes series of tweets. Like 20 of them. But always in tweets, because that gave him control, and removed - or add, depends on your point of view - constraints.<p>Anyway - don't be like me. Speak up. Tell people what you want them to hear.
If you want happiness through writing, write only for yourself. Never check site visitor analytics, comments, shares. Only care if you're enjoying the writing. To make it easier you can also write under a pseudonym.<p>Some of my worst habits formed seeing early posts go viral and then getting addicted to that endorphin hit. The amount of time I wasted checking analytics and new subs would probably equal the time it would take me to write 10 more posts or read a couple books.<p>But congrats at sticking to it for 10 years!
Look on the bright side. Firstly, I just read it. Secondly, AI will likely read it, so your thoughts may become part of the great AI world consciousness someday. Finally you're really doing this for yourself; I find writing my thoughts out in a blog or a novel gives me some satisfaction knowing I have tried, and now have something out there forever that you or your friends can look back on someday.
“It's redundant to say "I think" at any point in an opinion piece.”<p>“But is there still value in human produced writing? Subjectively, yes. Objectively? I'm not sure. I think there's a lot of personal value in writing though.”<p>There is value because I felt compelled to engage, but if it turns out you’re a bot then I’ll feel cheated and less likely to read other blog posts.
how will people sharpen their thinking if they don't write their own words? the value in human writing even with llms remains almost the same. you won't get better stuff without it
I think it is not redundant - it gives emphasis for a guess, to make sure reader won't mix it up with other things that may be verified to be truthy.
Shameless plug: Submit your blog to <a href="https://indieblog.page" rel="nofollow">https://indieblog.page</a> and you'll get the occasional random reader who might even become a RSS subscriber.
Ten years? I've been doing it for over twenty. Readership is something you have to chase, and if that's what you want, that's fine. But for some people, like me, it's the writing that's important.
I don't want to break his streak, what it is about ?
It even has comments so you won’t be breaking the streak if there ever was any.
Appropriately enough, it’s about writing.
I've self hosted my blog across several platforms (Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, and now pelican) since about 2007 and the best thing I did was disable comments.<p>I had a friend message me saying they came across my blog googling how to run home assistant on k3s. And that's a satisfaction no money can buy.
Yeah I’ve occasionally mentioned things at work, and had someone say “I think I read a blog post about that once”. Only to discover they read about it on my blog! Incredibly satisfying.<p>I’ve also seen screenshots of my blog posts show up in random technical talks I happened to watch. I want to shout at the screen - “That was meeeee!”
When I write in my native tongue I avoid mentionning myself and try to disappear from the text; "I", "me", "my" is forbidden and also I try to compress sentences into the smallest most precise set of words — being precise and concise is the funniest writing game.
I felt this. The had the same experience when I blogged some 15 years ago now. Different times, same ghost town, but still had good content and useful information that I could look back on to jog my own memory. So it’s good to keep a diary. It’s usefulness is useful to you if you let it.
It seems like the author wants writing to be a bigger component of their life than it is. I hope the author is able to accomplish that goal. Maybe 100x their output and turn their blog into something a few people read. Hopefully the "20 years of writing a blog nobody reads" is a revelrous experience for the author's handful of readers.
Remember the days when people actually made money out of writing blog posts?
1000 words, and 8 em-dashes, me thinks they are no longer writing the blog nobody reads.
I clicked on some random post from 2020, 19 em-dashes.
You do realise there are AI checkers online.
<a href="https://www.zerogpt.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.zerogpt.com/</a> assesses this content as: 27.49% ChatGPT<p>While this writer obviously had a lot of input into the model, they even state (or more accurately according to zerogpt, ChatGPT wrote this whole paragraph) "The writing process should be highly iterative", so they have added their own flavour into the writing, but it is <i>still</i>, (probably not for much longer) but still obvious when this is used.
It's a terrible side effect of AI that regular people using em dashes in honest writing are labelled as AI.<p>I have a deep love for em and en dashes--you can see heavy usage in my writing that's 10 years older than chatgpt.<p>My love for the dashes hasn't gone, but now I use a double dash instead so I am not immediately labelled as an AI.
It's not that hard.<p>Period (.) ends the sentence, comma (,) breaks up the sentence. If the next sentence is closely related, end the sentence with a semi-colon (;). For every other type of break--especially those that resemble the natural and chaotic shifts of thought we all have--use an em-dash. (Oh, and put text you want to be optionally skipped in parenthesis.)<p>Em-dash is probably the most natural punctuation; it best matches the kinds of shifts our brain does when thinking.
It may be due to AI proliferation, or the culturural bias I have, but I increasingly find em-dashes <i>jarring</i>.<p>As you point out, authors use them for the "natural and chaotic shifts of thought we all have" and when there are lots of these shifts it feels like I have to keep track of multiple conversations at once.<p>For example, in the article we have:<p><i>If your goal is to have other people read—and hopefully enjoy—your writing, you should make an effort to edit your thoughts.</i><p>When I read this I instinctively pause the 'main' thought/voice, read the aside, then re-establish my train of thought. In my opinion the sentence reads just as well without the aside:<p><pre><code> If your goal is to have other people read and enjoy your writing you should make an effort to edit your thoughts.
</code></pre>
[edit - putting comma back in to break up the long sentence]<p><pre><code> If your goal is to have other people read and enjoy your writing, you should make an effort to edit your thoughts.
</code></pre>
I think this is the only aside formatted like this in the article. The other em-dashes take the place of pauses in sentences, places I would normally use a comma or semicolon, or are used to introduce a list where I would typically use a colon.<p>Again this is probably a cultural thing, maybe a reaction to AI as well, but I find the em-dash a lot more though-interrupting than the other punctuation choices and I wonder if it's something I'll get used to or not.
IMO the em-dash version is way easier to read in this example, FWIW.
I think I took out an extra comma too, which hurts readability.<p>Personally I write with too many asides, normally done with commas and parentheses. It's a comforting habit to fall into, and makes getting your thoughts out so much easier, at the expense of interrupting the reader's train of thought.<p>I don't normally notice when I'm writing with asides so the jarring em-dashes were a good reminder to try and edit them out where I can.
I would have used parenthesis for that example, since it departs and returns to the main line of thought so cleanly.
It's okay. Give it a few years and every writing style will be being used by AI. We'll then be able to use whatever style we like as no one will be able to tell our writing from AI anyway.
Agreed. I've used the em dash for well over a decade and love it, but am having to train myself to not use it simply to not appear as though my text is written by AI.<p>At least avoiding the "it's not just that X, it's Y" style that AI loves is easy enough!
Yeah, just writing in Word (and few other) will get your - turned into em dashes. Personally I hate them. Mostly coz of random editors making GNU cmdline options into emdash and so breaking copying but I also think they are ugly, way too long in most fonts
Ha ha, now labeled as old — when on a typewriter it was common to use two dashes as a fake em dash.
I don't know when the phrase "em dash" got popular. It was probably due to web development, because, unless you were into typesetting, nobody knew what "em" was. We always just called them dashes--two hyphens make a dash.
When you feel the need to dive in with a dash (m, n or otherwise), why not stop ... think for a while: consider going in with a colon instead?
It’s just less literate people feeling the need to out themselves.
It has nothing to do with literacy, the em-dash simply is not on the standard US QWERTY keyboard. This means that people who purposefully use it, either have to copy-paste it from somewhere or (if they-re on Windows), use "Alt + 0 1 5 1". This is very obviously not a natural behaviour that 'literate' people use when they write.
You can type "--" in most writing software and it will turn into an em-dash. On a Mac, this includes TextEdit by default, or literally every text input field if you enable the "smart dashes" setting. I can type — right now in my web browser with two presses on my ordinary laptop keyboard and no memorizing character ID numbers, not exactly rocket science.<p>If you're using Word or other fancy word processors, you don't even have to type two hyphens. One will do, and it looks at the grammar and changes to the correct type of dash for you automatically.<p>Have all the people parroting "dash means it was written by ChatGPT" never used a word processor?
> Have all the people parroting "dash means it was written by ChatGPT" never used a word processor?<p>Probably not, this is "HACKER" News, if I type two n-dashes on a website, I <i>EXPECT</i> two n-dashes, otherwise things like HTML comments would break the page.<p><!-- This is a HTML comment for your reference -->
If you're writing in MS Word, LibreOffice, or most word processors, typing a word and then two dashes and then a word, without any spaces, <i>like--this</i> will generate an em dash automatically. I learned how to do it in Freshman English in high school. Though I was also taught to double space after a period.<p>To revise GP's comment: <i>it’s just less computer literate people feeling the need to out themselves</i>.
Pandoc has had "smart" typography[0] which generates em-dash and en-dash for a long time. I found a forum post for 2011 where people were discussing em dashes and such. That thread indicates that John Gruber created a Markdown extension in 2004 which was already handling en and em dashes[2].<p>[0] <a href="https://pandoc.org/demo/example33/7.1-typography.html" rel="nofollow">https://pandoc.org/demo/example33/7.1-typography.html</a><p>[1] <a href="https://pandoc-discuss.narkive.com/PHmQaAgM/en-dashes-vs-em-dashes-revisited" rel="nofollow">https://pandoc-discuss.narkive.com/PHmQaAgM/en-dashes-vs-em-...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants/" rel="nofollow">https://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants/</a>
Many (most?) WYSIWYG editors automatically convert two hyphens (--) to em dash, no need to specifically look out for it.
On Mac you type opt-shift-hyphen — like this — and on Win/Linux you use a compose key.<p>A lot of people who care about typography/grammar have spent a moment to learn to do this. Once learned, you can use it for the rest of your life.
The compose key on Linux makes deliberate use much easier (rather than automatic replacement which often triggers when I don't want it). There's a compose key utility for Windows, but has some minor annoyances like many input (mouse or keyboard) macro extender applications.
It's not just less literate, it's also people who feel the need to be amateur prosecutors.<p>It's the same thing as judging people who wear their hair too long, or wear pajamas on the plane, or who wear pants that are too baggy, or who have children out of wedlock, etc. Some people are deeply convinced that society is on the decline and that they have a mission to ensure everyone else stays in line.<p>It's been that way throughout history.
The article didn't read at <i>all</i> like AI-generated text.
I wrote with em-dashes before it was cool, and I’m certainly not going to stop due to our robotic overlords (who I welcome wholeheartedly).
Shameless plug of my own blog<p><a href="https://www.rxjourney.net/" rel="nofollow">https://www.rxjourney.net/</a>
If you want to become a better writer, write comments, not blog posts. And if you engage with others, it becomes more fun.
I will never not find it insane that in college they have word <i>minimums</i> for essays, instead of maximums. Imo going to college ruins many people's ability to write clearly.
Cool. I know 1 person read my WEB site, they sent me a email :) But I do not keep track so I have no idea nor do I really care. So now you have 1 more who read it.<p>But since then I moved it to Gemini, the real Gemini, not google's thing. I find that far easier to maintain.
Have you considered that your thoughts on Writing Well might be wrong, and that's why people don't read your blog? I tuned out after realizing you have no idea what you're talking about.
> My goal now is to use less words to convey an idea. Everyone's interpretation of words is different, so using more precise language will just muddle your ideas.<p>What?