Ask HN: To Blog or Not?

Writing is a good way to express your ideas and formalize what you are thinking. When you are sharing it with people, you open yourself up to scrutiny and pressure from the world, pushing you to think harder about the way you express ideas.

If you're uncomfortable with some stuff being shared and potentially being cancelled or used by an LLM or something, I think it's okay to shield. Shield things that are important to you and that you can't possibly have seen. Create everything else in public.

If it's not shared, what's the point of thought?

The way I see it you will get cancelled no matter what you do. Some people do not like that other people have opinions that go against the marketing. So I say blog because it's better that spending all your life watching tiktok videos or influencer content. Be a producer instead of a consumer even if you are not getting a million hits. As for the AI scrapping the odds are low unless you are making tonnes of text that can shift the needle it won't matter. If your writing is unique it won't have a cross reference so it will be ignored as if you are speaking a dead language.

"Being cancelled" isn't a new phenomenon, it's just the activity of "cancelling" is seen as the ultimate expression of justice for all these keyboard SJWs.

I don't write for other people, I write so that I can look back in time and see how I used to think. I write mainly because my memory is fallible and changes how I remember things. 99% of the things I write are never published, and the 1% that is published goes on my personal site that's hidden from search engine crawlers.

Why do you care if what you write is used to train an LLM. Re the second part, if you can't say what you want, you've already lost. That doesn't mean you shouldn't try writing diplomatically if you're aiming for a wider audience, but there's no harm in having opinions, even if some online type eventually finds something to feign outrage over. Just ignore them.

Do it if you want to, or don't. It doesn't matter.

I have a blog since almost 20 years now. Some people reach our about it sometimes. People really seem to care about some of the things I published.

But my life would be no different if I didn't have a blog. I feel no pressure to update my portfolio and make it a perfect pitch for my person. I have nothing to sell. I just share what I want to, on my own terms.

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Blog if you want to, don't blog if you don't want to. It's as simple as that.

> People dig up things you said in the past and cancel you according to whatever is trending that day.

Don't say anything extreme and you'll be fine??

I've been reading a lot about blogging recently, to help with my perfectionism. My notes on some of the best posts I found are here: https://chavanniclass.com/2023/08/14/16-learning-in-public-a...

It's my attempt at reminding myself of all the times that someone else's blog posts have helped me solve a problem or think from a different perspective about something that was bothering me. They've given me direction, purpose, reassurance. They've saved my life.

Your writing could do that for someone. We might not think that a simple tutorial or a list of thoughts could be life-changing, but things are unpredictable. You have no idea who will find your stuff and what impact it will have on them. The cost of keeping what you know to yourself is greater than the cost of being ridiculed. People will always find ways to put down others, so it's better to make something meanwhile, rather than censor yourself in the fear that it might happen.

Don't stop yourself from writing and sharing your stuff. It's one of the cruellest things I did to myself. I wouldn't want anyone else to think that they or their thoughts don't matter.

You've blogged in the past. Please do so again, for your own self (I'm assuming you wouldn't be "torn" if you didn't care about it) if not for others.

All the best, and I hope you do share a link here when you start writing again.

My thinking is that companies are using AI LLMs for selection now. Maybe the goal is to eliminate bias but I suspect the opposite actually happens. The goal used to be compatibility more than capability and if AI now provides the filtering you get hyper compatibility selection. In order to achieve compatibility you need to develop in the dominant language, style, and platform of the employer which may not be stated in the job requirements and occur as near as possible in the center of a bell curve.

What that means practically is that bias is amplified. It used to be that having a blog and large portfolio demonstrated your experience, but that experience may be a weapon used to deselect you.

That imposes a challenge. If you cannot be selected for an interview then everything is irrelevant. Once you are selected for an interview these open proofs of experience are the tie breakers between candidates.

Where I have seen success lately has only occurred in these constraints:

* A given project has technical constraints, like a security clearance, that eliminates selection based upon culture compatibility. When this occurs then be awesome, not average.

In that above scenario I am getting offer letters two thirds of the time I get to the interview. Otherwise my failure rate is about 100% resulting in being dropped from consideration the moment they get your resume. If it felt like a game before job hunting is exclusively a game now.