[endothrowho333]

It's pieces like these that remind me why good writing skills are important, and one shouldn't stray from the basics unless they're fully aware of the trade-offs. For this article, it would be: write a better hook, and make sure to include a rudimentary thesis statement, because I wasn't able to deduce what you were trying to persuade me of, within the first few paragraphs.

With a title like "Why build this blog -- or anything -- on IPFS?" You were trying to persuade me, right?

I had to read through what is essentially every single cooking recipe on the web, before I got to the actual filling. I.e a whole lotta aimless wandering and musing, that is only tangenitally related to the topic at hand, before giving me what the title promised. Similarily to cooking blogs, this page is 2/3 filler, and 1/3 actually giving me what the title promised "So……why IPFS?"

> 1. Ownership, control, censorship

The author goes on to chastise Medium's censorhsip practices, but not too long ago he mentioned self-hosted Wordpress and staticly-generated Github pages. Wordpress and Github pages get over these hurdles and are easier to setup than IPFS.

> 2. Resilience

Suffice to say, the point of this pargraph was "DNS and HTTP unrobust, webservers fail under unforseen circumstances." Ok, well how does IPFS do things differently? You never explained how IPFS works, much less how it gets over any of the aforementioned issues you outlined.

> 3. Elegance

> But I will say that content addressing strikes me, and many software people who come across it, as obviously superior to host-based addressing along certain dimensions.

Never touched upon or elaborated.

> Plus, it's super cool. You should try it!

Atleast you have a call to action. Otherwise, this post fails to even come close to making me interested in IPFS.

[notyourday]

> Suffice to say, the point of this pargraph was "DNS and HTTP unrobust, webservers fail under unforseen circumstances." Ok, well how does IPFS do things differently? You never explained how IPFS works, much less how it gets over any of the aforementioned issues you outlined.

If DNS and HTTP are not working absolutely no one will care about some blog being up.

[stanferder]

I think bloggers deserve some leeway in how they write; it's an informal medium and maybe the author's usual audience is arriving with a lot of shared assumptions.

Still, I wish IPFS had been defined within the post. I had to look it up on Wikipedia; presumably it's "Interplanetary File System".

[endothrowho333]

Yes, it occurred to me that his audience already had a background in IPFS and I wasn't his prospective audience; yet, then why craft the title to seem like it was meant for people who have no idea what IPFS is, because surely those with prior knowledge of it, would already be able to answer for themselves "Why... IPFS?"

I think my main problem with this blog post, and many others, is that they come off too "stream of consciousness," instead of something more structured, and easily-digestable.

It's obvious the author can write[0], but at risk of being presumptuous, it seems like it was hastily written and submitted to HN for the sole purpose of generating traffic.

[0] This is a much better piece, albeit short: http://teetotality.blog/posts/think-do-build/

[tunesmith]

My goodness, this is harsh. I was thinking it was a very well-written article and I appreciated its clarity.