Introduction

I didn’t know who Adolfo Ochagavía was until last month, but I admire him now. He wrote one of the most genuine blog posts I have ever read.

It is called, “To Broadcast or Not to Broadcast,” and you really should just go read it. It was unfairly ignored on Hacker News, and we should fix that.

A few days ago, Jonas Hietala published a post about why he’s still writing after 15 years of blogging. And you should really read that post too, even though it wasn’t ignored.

Then Jimmy Miller wrote about “Being Raised by the Internet” since he didn’t have the best childhood. You should read that one too, even though it wasn’t ignored either.

And I realized that it was time for me to write a post that I have intended to write for years, a post talking about not just the good things, but the bad and the ugly too.

The Good

Jimmy talks about how people on the early Internet, some he can’t even remember, published material that he used to build himself and his early skills. This is a wonderful thing!

Jonah talks about writing simply for the joy of it, a fantastic reason! He also mentions that publishing is a quality forcing function for thinking and for projects, as well as a documentation tool.

Adolfo talks about what keeping a blog has done for him, and it is mostly positive. Yes, he did blog out of necessity, but he got enriched thoughts, received technical insights, and met interesting people. And I’m sure that his clients, past, present, and future, appreciate it too.

Most of all, I believe that, if people appreciate Adolfo’s posts, it is because he writes “heart to heart,” and if I can tell, so can others. I believe that the people who helped Jimmy did the same, and it seems like Jonah does the same.

All of this is broadcasting at its best.

The Bad

Adolfo does mention some downsides:

• A blog post can take 4-20 hours, a massive time investment. Half a week on a post can be tough for a freelancer!
• Fear and imposter syndrome, although most bloggers have a false imposter syndrome, unlike me.
• There is unconstructive criticism and trolls.

I will say that, with time, the first problem becomes less of a problem. On blog posts that I would agonize over, I would spend more than a week. This is one such blog post. However, after 11 years, even though I agonize, I am spending only about 4 hours, only a tenth the time.

Experience does bring speed.

For fear, well, there’s nothing you can really do about that except to face the fear. I have done this many times, and it sucks, but it’s possible to push through.

For unconstructive criticism and trolls, Adolfo’s advice is pretty good:

Sometimes unconstructive feedback does get to me and I start doubting myself: maybe I did write a low-quality article this time. In those cases, I reach out to good friends who know me well, and their opinion helps me get a more objective view of things (spoiler alert: the trolls are never right).

It also helps that he did not make the mistake I made. Speaking of which…

The Ugly

Neither Adolfo, Jonah, nor Jimmy mentioned any truly ugly things about blogging. I have plenty, but all of the ugliness of my experience comes from me.

I actually alluded to it before: I had, and have, a blog about my personal struggles.

While that may not seem ugly at first glance, I am an ugly person. And I don’t mean ugly, as in, bad looking (though I am), I mean ugly, as in, I have flaws. And while I have gotten better over 11 years, there are still ugly parts to me. That’s just a fact.

I don’t see any ugly parts to Adolfo or Jonah, and I hope I never do. Jimmy may have seen some, but he didn’t say, and I certainly didn’t see any in him either.

And that may be why they see blogging as such a good thing; I mean, they don’t see it as perfect, but the gist I got from their posts is that they like it.

For me, it’s entirely different. I like writing, yes, but I do not enjoy blogging, and I sweat every time I submit one of mine to Hacker News or Reddit.

The reason why is because I exposed my ugliness. See, people give what they receive; they saw ugliness, and they gave me ugliness in return. And like a fool, I responded with more because I am deeply flawed.

And also unlike Adolfo, most of the unconstructive criticism I received was deserved.

The Advice

So my first piece of advice if you would like to broadcast: whatever you do, do NOT show any of your ugly parts.

If you do, you will be soundly punished. This is why publishing sucks for me and why I can’t sleep any night I publish and submit on Hacker News. So just avoid that problem and don’t expose ugliness. People will see you as more amiable.

“Wait, Gavin, I thought you liked Adolfo’s genuine, heart-to-heart writing.”

I do, but if there’s anything 11 years have taught me, it’s that you can be genuine without showing the ugly parts.

When I started, I did think that showing the ugly parts was necessary, and because I value that above most other things, I made the choice to show my ugliness at the outset. It’s the broadcasting decision I regret the most.

So don’t show ugliness, but still be genuine. If you do, you’ll be charming to your readers.

So how should you be genuine?

Adolfo suggests a way:

I want you to benefit from my articles, regardless of the return I get from them. Every time I write, I ask myself: would it be all right for this blog post to pass unnoticed? If the answer is yes, then I know I’m not writing merely to get people’s attention.

And we see this same principle in Jimmy’s case: people wrote for the benefit of their audience, and their audience was Jimmy.

Thus, the first thing you need to do to be genuine is to write for the benefit of your readers. I know that’s rich coming from me, a blogger who just published an ad post, but it’s true.

Adolfo has another way to be genuine:

While many people in our industry suffer from impostor syndrome, I’ve somehow been spared. Maybe part of the cure was seeing famous bloggers, such as the amazing Julia Evans, openly admit they don’t know everything. It’s nice when you are allowed to be human, isn’t it? I can’t imagine a life in fear of being exposed as a fraud!

In other words, be honest about what you know. Let your readers know what you know. Let them know when you make a mistake. Let them know what holes exist in your thinking.

But those are not the only way to be genuine. Jonah uses another way:

I realize now that the biggest reason I blog is that I enjoy the writing process. I can’t put my finger on why, I just generally like it.

If you like writing, write! Write what you want to write. Even, perhaps, if it’s not for your audience.

If you do that, then your readers will self-select; you can write what you want to write, and the people who read your blog are the ones for whom your blog has value. So in a way, you will still be writing for the benefit of your readers.

Just do not push your posts on people.

My next piece of advice: figure out your purpose before you start.

“Start” could be starting the blog itself, and it could be starting an individual blog post. Just know the purpose because otherwise, you can easily lose track and end up with something you didn’t plan. While that can be a good thing, it doesn’t make for cohesive thinking and writing.

But it may still be a good idea to sit down with a new post for the purpose of vomiting thoughts. That’s called brainstorming, and then you could probably make one or more planned posts out of that.

Regardless, sitting down and figuring out the purpose of your blog is as important as important as deciding on your college major, though not quite as important as deciding on your spouse.

Take it from me, someone who did it right, then did it wrong.

Remember how I said that I have two defunct blogs? Yeah, they had separate purposes, although that happened by accident. But it was a good thing.

However, I lied about when I started this blog; see, I actually started one blog after my previous two went offline, and that was this blog, in January 2018.

Yep, this blog was my personal blog. And for me, I am a techie and a thoroughly imperfect human, all at once, so I put both kinds of posts on this one blog. It was only after counsel from a man I respect highly that I took all of the personal posts and moved them to a separate blog.

This confusion on my part was a big part of why people responded with ugliness. Even if I posted something purely technical, Hacker News denizens would go from that post to others on this blog, and they did not like what they saw.

Now that this blog is purely technical, they see only technical posts.

“But Gavin, if this blog is meant to be purely technical, why are you writing a post about writing a blog?”

This post is advice to technical blogs only, actually, although I will add one more if you are thinking about a personal blog: do not make your ugly struggles public. People like to pounce on them and jab you for it. And the Internet never forgets.

Now, you may think I’m a hypocrite again since my personal blog is still up. But my personal blog is still up because the Internet never forgets; if the Internet is not going to forget, I’ll keep suffering for it anyway.

On the same vein of deciding what your purpose is, as well as how much you are willing to suffer for it, you need to figure out how harshly you will write. Or more specifically, figure out how reasonable you will be.

“Wait, Gavin, didn’t you just tell us to not show any ugliness?”

Yes, but I when I say, “reasonable,” I am using it in the same way as George Bernard Shaw:

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

– George Bernard Shaw

One good side effect of showing my ugliness is that I can now get away with being entirely unreasonable. After all, readers now expect it from me.

But if you are not trying to change the industry or world through your blog, as I am, be reasonable by default.

And if you are trying to change the world, well, you will have to suffer the world’s wrath. The world does not like to be adapted.

But even if you are unreasonable, never act ugly.

The Elephant in the Room

And finally, I guess in these days, I have to talk about AI.

First of all, your site will be scraped. Do not blog if you cannot accept scraping.

Second, try to block the bots if you can. I use this repo as a source of data, along with a shell script to generate config files for Nginx. Then I include those config files in my website configs. I also block certain bad actor nations.

Third, decide whether you are going to use AI or not.

I do not. If you look at my footer, you’ll see “100% AI-free organic content.” And this is true; I haven’t even tried an LLM. And while I won’t give you advice to do the same, I would encourage it because you will stand out more that way since AI regresses to the mean.

Whether or not you use AI, be upfront with your AI use.

And finally, if you are still debating whether to start a blog or not, then please, don’t use AI and start it anyway.

As Adolfo said, blogs should be “Human being to human being.” In this world of spammy AI-written posts, where pure human endeavors like wordfreq die, I want to see more human writing.

Conclusion

So should you broadcast? Only you can decide, but you can decide anything. You could even decide to broadcast yourself on Twitch or YouTube.

But if you have any desire to, at all, I would encourage you to.

Just be smarter about it than I was.