It’s still worth blogging in the age of AI

It really fascinates me how the "other" clientele of HN operates. The world of networking, marketing yourself, creating a resume of sorts through your blogging. I'm just some dude with a decent job occasionally writing blog posts because it amuses me. I'd be pleasantly surprised if a dozen people read them before I die. AI doesn't really factor into the calculus of whether or not I want to continue doing it at all.

Writing is thinking. So is drawing.<p>To think clearly, come up with new ideas, make and truly understand things, we need to put marks on the blank page ourselves, and not just repeat what teachers or textbooks tell us like the majority of students Richard Feynman had during his time in Brazil — <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;v.cx&#x2F;2010&#x2F;04&#x2F;feynman-brazil-education" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;v.cx&#x2F;2010&#x2F;04&#x2F;feynman-brazil-education</a><p>LLMs&#x2F;AIs are useful to help us get farther, faster, like witty, skilled, intelligent friends who sometimes take too many magic mushrooms during conversations.<p>Forgetting about our own agency and individuality is bad for us, and dangerous for society.<p>“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being, with an independent will.” —Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre<p>“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.” ―Primo Levi, If This is A Man<p>To create and be free like an animal outside a cage, ask, write, and draw your own questions. Look, and find out for yourself, rather than blindly believing what others tell you.<p>Two useful books:<p>Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;DRAWINGONTHERIGHTSIDEOFTHEBRAINHD&#x2F;mode&#x2F;2up" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;DRAWINGONTHERIGHTSIDEOFTHEBRAINH...</a><p>The Hand - How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture by Frank R. Wilson <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.penguinrandomhouse.com&#x2F;books&#x2F;191866&#x2F;the-hand-by-frank-r-wilson&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.penguinrandomhouse.com&#x2F;books&#x2F;191866&#x2F;the-hand-by-...</a>

&gt; You&#x27;re building up a portfolio of writing about topics that interest you.<p>This reason resonates with me immensely.<p>You&#x27;re not <i>just</i> writing about what you&#x27;ve figured out, sometimes you&#x27;re actually deepening your understanding as you write! Writing is the thinking process: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32628196">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32628196</a><p>I have been writing every day at my blog for three years now, and it&#x27;s been very rewarding for me to figure out what I actually care about and seeing patterns.<p>I like thinking about it like a bunch of skateboarders lugging the video camera around to capture the moment. (They did this before social media!)<p>P.S., You may also enjoy the similar sentiment in this post: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=42992159">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=42992159</a>

For me, the #1 reason I don&#x27;t blog more, especially about tech topics, is that they take too long. Maybe you can bang out a useful blog post in 20 minutes. For me it&#x27;s more like 4 to 8 hours.<p>I have to make samples. Since I do mostly web tech I want the samples to actually work, no &quot;here&#x27;s some code, trust me&quot;. I also need diagrams. And, I have to proofread since I&#x27;m terrible at getting it right in one or even 5 checks. I write once, add samples, write some more, add images, write some more. Every time I write I add errors, so it always takes multiple passes.

I like writing too. Funnily enough, the age of LLMs makes this even better. I wrote a little MCP server (this is trivial with Claude) that interfaces with my blog so it can full-text search for articles and look up articles and look at recent articles and stuff like that and it is pretty good at finding references in what I&#x27;ve written to thoughts I&#x27;ve had. It&#x27;s a bit trigger-happy when looking up my blog posts (I have to put more in the assistant prompt in the Claude app to get it to stop defaulting there).<p>The other thing that&#x27;s nice is that LLMs make the process of writing better. When I cite stuff I can just screenshot the website and ask ChatGPT to write the citation and then check it. Things like that are more painful to write than to check and LLMs shine there.

Blogging pushes me to explore things I probably wouldn’t otherwise. That’s been the main reason I’ve stuck with it pretty consistently[1] for the past five years.<p>Getting attention was never the goal, so the rise of LLMs has mostly been background noise to me. There have been plenty of times when I’ve searched for something on Google, only to land on my own page.<p>Over the years, though, things picked up. Now, I’m seeing around 30k monthly readers—way more than I ever expected. More than once, I’ve written about something I barely understood, only for the post to hit the front page. Then people corrected me, and I learned a ton in the process. That’s something I wouldn’t trade for anything.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rednafi.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rednafi.com&#x2F;</a>

I think that as more people offload understanding to LLMs, being able to deeply understand a topic will make you stand out more and more. Doing things and explaining them are two of the best ways to get that deep understanding.<p>When I write about a technical topic, I open a new markdown doc and just go. You quickly run up against the limits of your own understanding, which is a valuable exercise.

I started blogging to record the history of projects I&#x27;ve worked on (e.g. Microsoft Band <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev&#x2F;history-of-microsoft-joule-band-v0-part-1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev&#x2F;history-of-microsoft...</a> Launching HBO Max <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev&#x2F;only-300-software-engineers-were-needed-to-launch-hbo-max" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev&#x2F;only-300-software-en...</a>) but, perhaps not surprisingly, my only &quot;successful&quot; article has been the one controversial article I wrote cautioning against using SSR for everything.<p>That said I believe documenting history is important so I&#x27;ll keep sporadically writing down notable events I&#x27;ve been involved in!<p>I also blog a fair bit about AI, and there is no hope getting views there without playing the game.

I think there is a more important reason to blog besides the 3 reasons listed: to force yourself to slow down, organize your thoughts, fill in the holes, and articulate your points.<p>&quot;Writing is understanding.&quot;

I find that thing where people say &quot;I&#x27;m not going to publish anything creative ever again, it&#x27;ll just be used to train AI&quot; <i>so</i> depressing.<p>It feels like such a dismal excuse to avoid andding any value to the world.

The main reason I blog is because I work (or am starting out working in) academia and therefore I have to write papers. To write academic papers you have to write terribly, using passive voice whenever possible.<p>I blog so that I know I am still capable of writing coherently, rather than in horrible academic language.

There is also the gwern point of &quot;You should write so that your voice is present in the future LLM&quot;: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lesswrong.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;PQaZiATafCh7n5Luf&#x2F;gwern-s-shortform?commentId=KAtgQZZyadwMitWtb" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lesswrong.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;PQaZiATafCh7n5Luf&#x2F;gwern-s-sh...</a>

Anyone here seen an LLM actually produce a really novel thought that hasn&#x27;t already been written about ad nauseam?<p>The well of new ideas, or re-formulation of existing ideas with perspective and prose that LLMs can&#x27;t match is plenty deep to be worth hoisting the bucket still.

I blog solely for my own memory. If people find it interesting, ok, but it&#x27;s because I forget stuff and then will go somewhere thinking it&#x27;s interesting only to recall I did this already. If no-one ever reads it, it&#x27;s not really a worry.

The age of AI is the very reason it&#x27;s even more important that we blog. AI in it current form ingests and repeats what we train it to. I don&#x27;t think new ideas will &quot;organically&quot; come out of current generation models.

What the hell are people blogging about that is so generic that an AI could write it?<p>The important part of any journalism is to introduce new facts and findings that aren&#x27;t anywhere else to be found. An AI cannot do that.

&gt; There were a lot of excellent comments, but one thing kept coming up: what&#x27;s the point in blogging if people are using ChatGPT, Claude and DeepSeek to spoon-feed them answers? Who, apart from the AIs, will read what you write?<p>It&#x27;s undeniable that AI has changed the utility of blogging as a means to spread knowledge to others. I agree 100% with the author and most of the comments below that blogging for yourself is great, and that showcasing what you are passionate about is also great. I don&#x27;t think the position people are taking is that blogging isn&#x27;t worth it because that is no longer important.<p>The point I gather, is that it used to be you could find a small nugget of something technical (for example, on stack-overflow, in a manual, etc) and explain it in a way that is approachable to a select audience. Then, over time that audience comes to appreciate learning new and interesting things. Take for example <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kyrylo.org&#x2F;html&#x2F;2024&#x2F;10&#x2F;25&#x2F;why-does-target-blank-have-an-underscore-in-front.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kyrylo.org&#x2F;html&#x2F;2024&#x2F;10&#x2F;25&#x2F;why-does-target-blank-hav...</a> . ChatGPT can practically write this same post by asking the question, and tailor the explanation to any level of expertise, and can break individual concepts down that is 100% tailored to the person asking the question. That is where I think blogging has been turned on its head.

I checked out his About page just because he mentioned that only 1% do it. For my writing, the observation that almost everyone moves on is certainly true. But those few who reached out sometimes become new friends. I&#x27;ve never met any of them in person though. It&#x27;s like a group of friends for whom the connection is that they all read something that I wrote. Also, funny to now see that when doing research I&#x27;ve gotten AI&#x27;s citing my own past posts as sources. Maybe this means I need to reread my own writing.

You writing something personal serves as inspiration to people who just want to write.<p>Many years ago I started writing as a goal to make it something big. But I was very far away from acheiving anything close to my goals, and writing started feeling like a chore.<p>Now I am working on my personal blog as a platform, not only for writing, but for self expression in design and programming. Because I just read your post - it makes me want to speed up the process of finishing my own blog (it contains many engineering quirks that need to be ironed out as it is not a simple website - hence the time taken to make it).<p>So what I am trying to say, when people read your posts - you are moving the needle. You are not changing anything spectacularly, but rather have some influence of people&#x27;s perception over certain things. And now - you moved me closer to finishing what I started months ago - this should serve enough of a dopamine hit for you to continue doing what you are doing, however you choose to rationalize it :) (assuming you even get to read this comment)

Personally I don&#x27;t have a blog, even though I really want to, but I newer seem to be able to get started. Still, I really enjoy reading what others write. One thing a blog post from a real live person can do, which AI can&#x27;t, is to inspire you to dive into a subject and try out things for yourself.<p>There are so many things, books, technologies, tips, tricks, interesting solutions I&#x27;ve picked up over the years because someone wrote a blog post and it got posted on HN or some other site.<p>As more and more content is AI generated I&#x27;ve started to enjoy the writing and ramblings of people with weird little blogs so much more. So to those of you who are blogging: Please don&#x27;t stop.

&gt; So, I don&#x27;t think you can make a name for yourself by blogging alone<p>Or maybe you could if you post bangers like <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ciechanow.ski&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ciechanow.ski&#x2F;</a><p>Nice blog either way!

Related aforementioned thread:<p><i>Write the post you wish you&#x27;d found</i> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43154666">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43154666</a>

I will more likely believe a blog or website if I know it has been made by a real person, and not some hallucinating AI. The style of the prose is usually a giveaway of when AI is used to generate blog articles or websites.<p>I am starting a Masters in Computer Science, and going to learn Java for the first time. I wanted to know how to use default method parameter values. I searched for it and found this near the top of the results:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;skillapp.co&#x2F;blog&#x2F;deep-dive-into-default-parameters-in-java-exploring-the-power-of-customizable-method-arguments&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;skillapp.co&#x2F;blog&#x2F;deep-dive-into-default-parameters-i...</a><p>Java developers will know that the language does not support default method parameter values. I only found that out when I tried to implement it in a test, was surprised it didn&#x27;t work, thought maybe my version of Java was too old, etc.<p>But there is no syntax like &quot;void coolFunction(int x=5){};&quot; that other languages have.<p>One more reason that I will value a human-written article, blog or website. Please keep writing them!

Writing things down reveals the lapses in one&#x27;s own knowledge, and those gaps are opportunities to learn something new.<p>It saddens me a lot that people are now relying on AI to fill the gaps in their knowledge.<p>Humans got where they are thanks to their innate curiosity. If you take that away from us, we become no different from animals.

The more that we have AI trawling our writing, the more important I think it is to realize that AI is part of the audience.<p>I have been thinking about writing more &quot;cookbook&quot; style posts so that users and AI have good modern examples to look at. CSS-tricks is a great example. It has good code and and is easy to search.<p>One thing that articles that include code need to tag good and bad examples. AI will get better at recognizing the bad, but we should have more comments that say &quot;This is bad. Use the better pattern.&quot;

If we don&#x27;t blog, what will the next big AI models be trained on?!

I’m glad he goes out of his way to mention that, basically, effective blogging is downstream of accomplishments in a prior arena. It’s about channeling expertise and experience into a narrative, to summarize the core assertion he’s making, and he’s right. It also correlates to high-value Video content, such as the YouTube channel AmmoNYC (car detailing), where the high level of professional knowledge is yoked with high quality production. Very spot on follow-up to his initial post.

If you&#x27;re not interested in letting your blog posts be used to train AI, remember to update your robots.txt regularly as AI crawlers come up. This is assuming they respect your robots.txt, and don&#x27;t change their user-agent. There&#x27;s a service for this called Dark Visitors[0], though I wish there was a FOSS project to track AI user-agents.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;darkvisitors.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;darkvisitors.com&#x2F;</a>

There was a good reminder in the Hanselminutes interview with Shaundai Person about blogging for yourself. It was a while since I listened so I&#x27;m fuzzy on the details - all I remember is that I enjoyed the interview and there was some relevance to this topic.<p>Also, blogs are no doubt a major source of AI training, so maybe more worth than before.

I&#x27;ve suggested this elsewhere too, but have you considered a mailing list instead?<p>It ticks the boxes about notoriety—which appears to be the main concern of the OP author—with the added benefit of being more difficult for AI systems to crawl for training data.<p>Perhaps we&#x27;ll see more bloggers going the way of a bespoke mailing list.

I wonder if there is a practical test of this question? Are there any moderately successful blogs written purely by an LLM with a human just doing the prompts.<p>As far as I know there aren&#x27;t any but I look forward to being corrected

Gwern said something along the lines of: If you don&#x27;t leave marks in the online world, you&#x27;re invisible to AI.<p>I have no idea what that&#x27;s going to mean moving forward, but it makes sense to me.

Strangely enough, doing work with AI helped push me to blog and be more creative. Something about the artificiality of AI and if the machines can start doing what we do, what else is there?

My 2c: AI can give you the answers if you have the right questions. Having the right questions is a journey of human development through self reading, for which blogs are essential.

I think it&#x27;s more worth than ever. The idea that some of my thoughts might be integrated into some AI model by being used as training data is exciting

One always writes for the potential readers. Even if the human readers are becoming rare, the opportunity to be read forever by all these AIs can only boost our ego :-)

What upsets me about AI is that the proof-of-value in basically articulate prose has gone to zero. I can still write better than AI, but I’m not sure the remaining margin matters, socially speaking.<p>That said, AI is less than 2 percent of what has enshittified the internet. It’s a factor, but corporatization and algorithmic optimization have already done plenty of damage even without LLMs in the mix.

While quite a few folks agree blogging is still worth it in the age of AI, please do your bit to support privacy-friendly services (ie. no tracking). Blogs don&#x27;t &#x2F;need&#x2F; modern web bloat, nor need to resort to adverts &#x2F; paywalls.<p>I happen to build a privacy-friendly option <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;LMNO.lol" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;LMNO.lol</a> (my blog at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;LMNO.lol&#x2F;alvaro" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;LMNO.lol&#x2F;alvaro</a> or <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xenodium.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xenodium.com</a>). I&#x27;m hoping it&#x27;s fairly priced at $1.50&#x2F;month. You pay for hosting and we provide that service (that&#x27;s the extent of our transation).<p>There are others services to pick from like Bear, Ghost, Nekoweb, omg.lol...

Human conscience has not and will not be duplicated by &quot;AI&quot; in the near future.<p>These are simply programs that regurgitate mostly stolen data.

I think blogging isn&#x27;t just about getting views, it&#x27;s more about organizing your thoughts and solidifying what you&#x27;ve learned.

I&#x27;ve been considering starting up a(n extremely) sporadic blog for funsies. What platforms do people use these days?

Ah, the weekly post about if writing blog posts is worth it with the comments reaching the same conclusion.

It&#x27;s still worth doing wood work in the age of IKEA. Perhaps even more so.

&quot;It&#x27;s still worth selling steaks in the age of the hamburger.&quot;<p>Yea. This will never not be true.<p>I just can&#x27;t wait for the age of the &quot;silicon valley visionary&quot; to come to an end.

yes. The research that goes into it helps be finally learn the concept better. Having a few subscribers also want to spend time to write something and put it out.

I believe its even more important now than ever before.

I dont blog for others, I blog for myself and my joy.

I deeply distrust anyone blames AI for &quot;ruining&quot; their creative hobby, or &quot;creative&quot; career. Mostly because the one absolute, will never ever change, always our trump card, is our individual perspective and creativity. AI is a sorting and statistics machine, it can only reproduce (my personal theory about AI hallucinations is pretty simple. AI has been a well known concept for longer than the Internet has been around, pop-scifi and post apocalyptic books, movies, and shows, and causing a societal immune response... And satire, sarcasm, bad photography, bad art, websites with gibberish or incorrect facts just to game SEO algos (many many many that still have generations old SEO text blocks), all being hoovered up by an AI and the techbros supervising it all are MBA dropouts, and&#x2F;or marketing bros. All their AI datasets are so poisoned by the human condition, and as universal, AI hallucinations&#x2F;errors are, it just proves there isn&#x27;t a single model, or a single person, in the AI space who can identify irony. We may be the most destructive thing this earth has ever encountered, but like.. Causing mayhem and chaos so concentrated and complicated it&#x27;s impossible (so far at least) to write code that can decypher it.<p>So yeah, anyways, I left tech almost a decade ago, I&#x27;m a photographer now, and if youve put thought into something. Whether it&#x27;s writing, how a photo is edited&#x2F;processed, a joke, its a gift you&#x27;re giving to yourself, and hopefully some of whatever you felt like creating, a few pieces at the least haha, will be gifts to the world :)

most things are still worth doing in the age of ai

writing for thinking , share ideas with others

blogging is zen and zen is <i>who cares?</i>

am I so unusual in just skimming past and ignoring the AI search results? I didn&#x27;t think a majority of people outside the silicon valley tech bubble were all that keen on getting their questions answered by a chatbot

Yes :)