logoalt Hacker News

Blogging can just be stating the obvious

425 pointsby Curiositryyesterday at 11:46 PM124 commentsview on HN

Comments

jmyeettoday at 4:26 PM

As for those popups, I get enraged at the "subscribe to our newsletter" screen-grabbing dialog within seconds of going to a webpage. I really wish there was a good extension for automatically getting rid of them without me having to ever see them. I don't care that a certain percentage of people sign up.

Anyway, there's another side to "stating the obvious" that really annoys me. It's the "I have to post today" posts. People get advice that they need to post regularly, be it a blog or Tiktok or Youtube or whatever. "Post once a day at a fixed time" is common advice. What this leads to is posts without content. It can be "thank you for 275,000 followers" posts or something that's obviously so low-effort and uninteresting I just immediately skip. And then you have to ask what does that do to that person's metrics if they have a low-engagement post? Is it better to have that and post regularly? I'm not convinced it is.

I also feel like eventually people run out of things to say. That's OK. But maybe just stop clinging on for dear life to this audience you've built while having nothing to say.

Anyway, if you post something obvious and long-standing like "popups suck", that's fine... unless it's the only thing you're saying.

jessinra98today at 12:44 PM

[flagged]

monkamonmetoday at 4:29 AM

[flagged]

Ozzie-Dtoday at 1:22 AM

The most useful blogs I read aren't the ones with novel ideas. They're the ones where someone took something I vaguely understood and wrote it down clearly enough that I could explain it to someone else. That's surprisingly rare and valuable.

Most knowledge lives in this awkward middle ground where everyone sort of knows it but nobody has written a clean version. The person willing to write the obvious version usually ends up being the reference.

charcircuittoday at 12:47 AM

AI can do a good job of this. Summarize content and then searching the internet to see if anyone has commented a summary like that before.

But I suspect such a blog would not be popular.

show 1 reply