Link Blog: Why Blog If Nobody Reads It

Link: https://andysblog.uk/why-blog-if-nobody-reads-it/

I'm under no illusion that I have no audience here. I don't even go to the "trouble" of putting a tracker on any of the pages. I don't invite comments or interaction. So why do I do it? The linked article is an excellent summary of a lot of the reasons.

A long, long time ago I used to blog little technical solutions I'd found and I had trackers on the blog. There was a pretty constant but very low stream of people coming to my blog from search engines because I had solved the exact problem they had. 

This trickle of people didn't make any dfference to my life - I was blogging anyway, and these were just by-products of my writing down my tech solutions and insights.

One day, much later, I wrote up my reverse engineering of some malware and that got some serious traffic. It does still get consistent traffic today for some reason. But you know what? It changed nothing in my life.

I also wrote something about "identity theft" and submitted it to HackerNews - it went to the front page. It received an obscene amount of traffic and a good set of interactions. But you know what? It changed nothing in my life.

I then went through a period of self hosting where I blogged quite a lot about my interests but I lost most of the content in my endless shuffling of platforms. During this period I also stopped adding trackers to my blogs. I can't remember if there was a "why", I just stopped.

And I still blog. I do it "blindly" to whether it's consumed or not. Occasionally someone I know mentions that they've seen somedthing I've written (not entirely sure how or why since I don't promote it) and we talk about it. But you know what? It changed nothing in my life.

I still blog. Maybe a bit less than I want to, but I still do it. In a subtle way, removing the tracker code turned out to be a poignant moment - it's when I (possibly without planning) switched from external validation of my efforts to write stuff (clicks, reads, viewers) to internal validation ("I wrote it because I wanted to").

(One thing I remember is that I briefly considered chucking my talking points into an LLM so that I could make sure "I" was churning out as much "content" as possible. What hubris! And what a close call with adding to the cancer of the modern internet.)

That internal validation is a much cleaner way of living; it changes the pace of what I'm doing. If I don't blog, fine. If I do blog, fine. Is it poorly written? Fine. Is it so beautifully written that it's going to get me plaudits? Yeah, sure it is. But I wrote it and the act of writing - as the linked blog says - 

When you write, you think better. When you think better, you create better.

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