[sdegutis]

I had a blog for a decade but I realized that I would post something and nobody would read it, but then a famous programmer would post the same thing in their own blog a year later and everyone would hear about it. So I concluded that blogs are only for the well known programmers and that it’s a waste of my time to share my thoughts with “the web” as a general entity. Instead I share my thoughts with individuals when requested (which mostly just means answering my kids’ questions). Well, also commenting here but I’m not convinced that’s been beneficial to anyone either so I’m seriously considering giving up that too.

[drakonka]

I blog to share my thoughts with myself, but in public. I blog with the intent of consolidating what I'd just learned or experienced in my mind. I've had some popular posts inbetween years of content that nobody cares about, and sometimes I'll have a reader email me about an old post I wrote and describe how it's helped them in a recent project. Or sometimes someone will comment about how they just saw a post mentioned in a conference slide, and they're commenting on it _from_ the conference. Or I'll notice traffic coming in from an online newsletter about some programming topic. Those emails and brief spikes make me feel nice. The occasional acknowledgement from a reader is like a bonus to what's essentially a private diary I don't expect anyone to take interest in.

[sdegutis]

I get that idea and it’s not new: one blog said in its subtitle “letting google index my thoughts”. But it’s the equivalent of talking out loud. Sure someone might hear you accidentally and benefit but most of the time it should be kept to ourselves. If something should be said, it should probably be written in a book. That will set at least some bar to prevent the constant stream of noise on the internet. Everyone complains about the quality of content going downhill and the signal to noise ratio being unbalanced but the solution is for all of us to consider that we’re probably generating a lot more noise than signal. So I for one will quit blogging and comment a lot more rarely and if I have something more important to say I’ll write a book. Getting published isn’t infallible of a mark of signal but it’s better than git push.

[drakonka]

Most of the kinds of posts I get positive feedback on aren't something I'd ever consider interesting or important enough for a book. Personally I don't have a problem with blog noise/"talking out loud" on the internet. I think it's more up to the people who don't want noise to decide what noise is for them and to implement their own filter strategies. I can't even count how many times I stumbled across some blog post casually written that the author likely didn't expect to be noticed at all, but which provided some useful or just plain interesting information to me. It wouldn't make it into a book, but I'm glad it made it into this person's little corner of the Internet for me to discover.

[saagarjha]

Many of my blog posts were written mostly for this reason and I get occasional emails from people who find my thoughts helpful.

[dredmorbius]

My own blogging has served, variously:

- As a public record of the evolution of my ideas and thinking. (Often embarassing.)

- As a reference for things I've found useful, and contextualised.

- A place I can post my highly original thoughts ... to be told "oh, X came up with that years / decades / centuries / millennia ago." Happens far more often than I'd have ever dreamed.

- As a place I can refer to / link to my own best efforts at explaining some idea or principle. Rewriting from scratch continuously is tedious.

- Rarely, for discussion.

- As a very loose bookmarking service. (Only a small fraction of references end up there, but the ones which do tend to be significant.)

- Something of a shingle, though I've not leveraged that as yet.

Every so often a particular post will take off, and it's generally exciting when it does. Rarely the pieces I pour my sweat and tears into, though that happens occasionally. What the World decides to Take an Interest in is a wonderously fickle phenomenon.

There's also the tinkering on the blog itself as a technical means of presenting, distributing, and organising information, which I find interesting.

[papln]

Blogging is also for your own benefit, and to have a history of your ideas. You can also post your bog articles to HN, Reddit, etc. And blogging like much else is a bit of a marketplace / ecosystem. We don't need you are blogging on generic popular topics that anyone can and does write about, we need you to blog about niche topics that aren't being covered.

[disneysockputty]

Smart person. I've had the same thoughts. HN is often fun and occasionally interesting, though, so I keep engaging.