[antirez]

Well maybe I live in another world but I think more or less the opposite. You can write about programming and people will love it, and in our industry there are a great deal of people that are at the same time not gross and with good arguments. But...

there are many ways to write about programming: one is to actually write about programming, that is, posts containing some experience to share about some technology, or a pattern one writer noticed about programming languages that is interesting, or how to implement such algorithm in a better way, or just this-is-how-I-made-this-stuff and so forth. People tend to love this stuff, if you search the HN / progreddit / slashdot archives.

Then there is another way to write about programming: the speculation. A few well known blogs really master this art, as they are able to run successful programming blogs for years without actually ever really writing about programmings. In this blogs you'll find a mix about obvious things narrated in an inspirational way, a few rants about why people should do A instead of B, and so forth.

My impression is that the latter kind of blogs, not really designed to share what you think, but more to think about what you could share to be interesting and cool, are the ones more often subject to criticisms.

[dasil003]

There's another dichotomy: abstract vs concrete. The more abstract, the larger the potential audience. That's the reason why Joel is so much more popular than the guy writing about OCaml optimization techniques for numerical analysis.

But writing about generalities is not only hard more open to criticism as you suggest, but they are also harder to come up with because they require more condensed knowledge. Coming from that perspective I can understand why Joel says he has nothing more to write about, and I think it's reflected in the quality of his posts recently.