Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by xwdv 1620 days ago
If you don't have anything interesting to say, I recommend playing devil's advocate and becoming an internet troll. Once you decouple interesting things to say from your actual opinions and feelings (which as mentioned, are often boring and just regurgitations of the top most popular comments), it becomes quite liberating to write about a lot of things. You can now take any position, any angle you want, on a specific topic, and have no obligation to stick to your own personal thoughts. Your personal feelings often hold you back from actually saying something interesting and novel, since most of our feelings are often just carbon copies of whatever the most popular sentiment in a community is.

It will also vastly improve your writing style. You can choose a blunt inflammatory approach to writing, or take a more subtle passive aggressive style that skirts Poe's Law. Either way, when you do this for a long time you will really get to learn what pushes people's buttons and gets views. It's intoxicating to see long threads of discussion spawned from something you say, and it becomes a game to figure out how you can spawn huge discussions using as few words as possible.

When you write from an opposing view of your actual opinions you also end up learning a lot about the strengths and weaknesses of your opinion based on the replies people write. In fact, a good way to often learn about a topic is to say something blatantly wrong and watch as people come to correct you with hard hitting facts and arguments. You can later use these same arguments in your own genuine debates with other people!

Honestly, there's a lot of surprising benefits for a writer trolling around on the internet, but the downside is that it seeps toxicity into communities, since the people you troll tend to believe you are a true believer of what you say, and when they take you seriously it tends to brew pointless animosity. I often say trolling is for people who just love to write (about anything!) and genuine internet discussions are for those who love to be right.