How to stop lurking and create content?

18 points by kosmodrom 7 years ago | 6 comments

I became social media lurker and I am consuming tons of information from HN, Reddit, Twitter, etc but I'm almost not publishing or commenting stuff on the Internet. I stopped asking or publishing on the internet years ago when I realized that everything is already there and because people are able to publish things from the smartphone when sitting on the toilet everything now is the noise.

My goal is to create more and consume less so my question is what habits are helping you with this?

muzani 7 years ago |

That's funny. I'm trying to lurk more and say less. Inertia plays a big part.

It doesn't matter if everything has been said before. Literally my most viral posts have been repackaging what someone else said to me. I find that my original thoughts might be a little too deep or required too much prerequisite knowledge. But you can literally just grab something from a favorite book, rewrite the main points and people will love it.

We're in an era of information overload. People on social media want information, but they don't want to actively chase it, and expect it to come to them. You can always just summarize what you learned from someone else.

saluki 7 years ago |

Nathan Barry has a great article on this.

https://nathanbarry.com/consumer-to-creator/

I'm just getting started creating a blog to share programming tips/tutorials things I learn that might help someone else.

n4bz0r 7 years ago | |

Wouldn't call the article great. There is a ton of identical "motivational" n-step articles on almost any topic you can imagine. That is exactly the type of content TS should avoid.

I believe, that in order to actually start doing something of complexity, you have to head-bash the wall of obscurity until you chip enough pieces off of it to assemble something that makes enough sense to proceed with further rounds of torture that are self-improvement.

No articles with image of hipster junk in heading are going to aid you with that.

vinrob92 7 years ago |

I think you answered your question yourself: Create a habit. Just set 1 hour a day where you decide to write, comment (you already did it here with this post) and this will become easier to do it constantly. You just need to get started.

tomcam 7 years ago |

Are you working on anything intensely? I find that when I am researching something with a reasonable amount of depth, I always find areas that are not treated well and that could use a better article on particular areas.

tjkrusinski 7 years ago |

As long as you think "everything is already there" you won't create content.

Quite simply, what do you offer that is unique? Everyone has that thing, find your thing and talk about that.

Intersections are often a great place to start. For example, a carpenter who also is a computer vision engineer and integrates those things. Take two skills you have, slam them together and lean into that.