alt Hacker NewsBlogging in 2025: Screaming into the Void
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Like many here, I too blog for the mental exercise of composing, the human desire to express, and a faith that posting to the public web is some how intrinsically worthy. On the first point I've found I get a lot of benefit from the posts I never even publish as I'll keep chewing over subjects which I'm mentally composing a post about and gain a lot of personal clarity in the process.
One thing I've wondered though (and am mentally composing a post about) is whether there's more good in ai digesting ones writing that we might first feel.
Here's a thought experiment: Would you feel good if someone read your blog and learned something from it? Probably yes. Would you feel good if they passed along something they learned to others, likely in their own words? Probably yes. What if they couldn't recall, or didn't choose to reference where they saw it? Probably still yes, although (speaking personally) my ego would probably prefer they did credit. What if the reader who passed the learning along was the ai?
In a sense we're still contributing to the public discourse and culture when we write, just mediated by models. If a model gives someone a slightly different answer in part because of something you wrote, you've still had an impact on the ultimate human reader.
Just to lay my cards on the table I'm no AI booster, nor doomer. In general I think it's over hyped and may well have a net negative effect if steered by those current at the wheel and consumed without due care, but it has its place where it can be useful.
I gave up on reaching anyone. Now I blog for myself alone. My blog serves only 1 real purpose, which is to build and host my resume, but I enjoy writing anyways.
Shameless plug as always when the topic comes up: submit your blog to https://indieblog.page to be discovered. subscribe to its RSS feed or mastodon account to discover indie blogs one random post at a time.
Having a lot to deal with is same as having nothing. Having 10,000 applicants for a job is same as not having any, if a human need to process all of them.
Human attention and processing breaks down. Filters will be used, to cut the volume down to human levels. Automation becomes an indispensable layer between human-to-human interactions. Humans become cells served by the filtered feeds from automation, with no direct to other humans.
I have been blogging for awhile. Not too concerned if it gets read. I post articles on hackernews if it's relevant to the tech crowd. My writing is really for me. And maybe my family will want to read it some day.
I don’t relate to this that much. Of course the AI crawlers have come in hard, but at least https://taoofmac.com still gets a very large amount of human visitors (either organicallly or return visits, plus RSS).
I think the real issue is that people now consume much more than they contribute or comment (even if I did get rid of comments years ago due to automated spam, I do get one or two e-mails a week plus a bit of feedback on social networks). And, of course, people have unrealistic expectations about publishing online making you more visible/reachable (there is just too much out there).
Their photos are worth reposting for the few who won't read past the first paragraph. This is cool.
There are two issues:
- Hosting a website is not so easy for the average person, even the tech savvy person, specially if you try to learn it now using the way large websites are developed.
- Static site blogs lack interactivity: people can't comment on your blog. You have to post a link to Twitter or HN (here!) and interact with people over there.
- Static site blogs also don't usually let people "subscribe" by email or whatnot, so unless people bookmark your website or follow you on Twitter, they are not going to find your content.
P.S. this is a problem area I'm trying to work on, at least on the technical front.
My website[1] will be hitting 25-years next year (2026 JUN 11). I stopped caring about comments, reactions, SEO, etc. for a while; I just post whatever I want these days.[2]
Of course, I like the fact that sites such as Adobe, Wikipedia, WordPress, IBM, the US Patent (mostly via Google), Russian and Chinese Websites, and quite a few other prominent websites maintains their links that points to some of my articles.
I do hope indie blogging makes a comeback. When the only objective of the post is for the author to ‘scream into the void’, it’s refreshing in this day and age.
I second the sentiment expressed. I used to blog often and cross post on Medium and Twitter.
At peak, every third post I wrote went viral. But then I stopped because I had no return from it.
I recently started writing on my blog again: https://shivekkhurana.com
The main reason was to get back into the habit of writing, and by extension thinking. ChatGPT has weakened my thinking capacity.
Speaking about blogging, for those who run on WordPress at least, do you get lots of bot traffic from China and Singapore recently? They usually appear in pair. (https://support.google.com/analytics/thread/378622882/google...)
I have two niche blogs( civilwhiz.com and mes100.com). Those bot traffics increase my visitor count in Google analytics by more than 100%. It's super annoying when the analytics are distorted by bots traffic.
In the past, you also used to ping a bunch of search engines (eg Technorati) for each new post. Going forward, you should be able to ping AIs but there should be a paywall before they can train on your content.
Also, how are AIs going to train for new languages and business rules in the future? People may start to get defensive. It must be worth something.. enter x402.
AIs are dumb - they can't really make sense of anything new without a human first to put it into context.. right? Remember that!
I was about to subscribe to the RSS feed, but there wasn't one. Pared down a bit too far!
(RSS feed is how you -used to- follow blogs you thought were interesting)
I find blogging to be a step further than screaming into my mic daily and transcribing it. At least I can formulate it a bit better when I type.
Most of my use for my blog posts is linking people to them on IRC and forums. I don't need or want search engine traffic. It's true there's no money or the churning waves of activity associated with that money in blogging anymore. And that's great. Social media siphoned off the profit chasers and all their running in place activity to stay on top of the eternal wave of now in recommendation engines.
>how many people are really going to read it directly
For me probably very few if any :) It does not help I moved to my site Gemini (the real gemini, not google's thing) a year or 2 ago. Not that I blog much anyway.
But I hope some future digital archeologist may find our blogs and get a view into what non-corporate controlled people thought :)
Note, I find Gemini and Gopher far easier to maintain then anything on the WEB. FWIW, I mirror my items on gopher.
Did I miss this magical time where every blogger was getting thousands of hits? Posting on the internet has always been screaming into the void.
> So if you have a blog nowadays with all kinds of useful information ... how many people are really going to read it directly?
and
> If the answer was on a forum, blog or any other website the AI will fetch it behind the scenes and summarize it for you.
Because of exactly this(AI stealing people's traffic and exposure, becoming de facto gateway into the internet and keeping the real users away from actual content creators, controlling the narrative or getting paid for other people's work), I have become convinced that in order to preserve humanity and freedom on the internet and avoid being totally controlled by social networks and these AI information manipulators, there is great need to paywall all content. It is horribly sad that it came to this, because internet was not made to become like this, but I see no other way to preserve its essence. One of the reasons I have created Gethly.com was because paywalls will become necessity.
In the past, search engines were helpful because they guided users to your content and for that functionality, they got paid money from showing some ads on their own search result page. But with AI bots, they are literally stealing all the information out there, all the traffic the websites would otherwise generate, and are stealing people's money because these AI bots/agents have paid versions, which only turns their theft into profitable crime. These AI tools bring no value to the content creators whose content they are stealing and preventing real users from discovering and connecting with the authors. Only their users see value in them as it allows them to avoid doing the manual work of searching the information themselves. But this comfort comes at an astronomical cost because in time, this will completely kill content itself as people will stop creating it due to lack of traffic and interest from real users when AI bots will come in once, steal the content and then sell it to the end-users for ever and the content creators will not get one more page hit.
These are dark times, people just don't get it yet how bad thins will get.
Ughhh how I wish I trusted the void enough to scream into it anything of substance! Shitposting on HN at least just annoys people.
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Yes, the distribution is super hard. I recently changed how I blog and building entire platform around that called LakyAI (https://lakyai.com). The idea is being able to run multiple blogs in parallel with crosslinking, sharing resources, reposting to platforms that give you distribution, repurposing the blogs entirely, and more. I am at the beginning but if someone is interested in some novel ideas just drop me an email at [email protected].
I too have been throwing messages in bottles into a silent sea for a pretty long time, but I think I'm okay with that. It doesn't help if you also have difficulty adhering to quintessential blog SEO best practices.
1. Consistent theme - A diverse set of interests and a lethal dose of ADD make this virtually impossible
2. Consistent updates - My articles tend to be rather unusual, and I'll often combine them with customized interactive layouts. Even a monthly post would be pretty ambitious for me.
On a slightly related note, I'm hoping that zines [1] see a resurgence in popularity as I could see it being a good point of entry towards possibly gaining readership for those whose sites are inadvertently running in stealth mode.
[1] - Such as Paged Out (https://pagedout.institute)