Ask HN: What are you opinions on bad posts in your blog?

6 points by inconfident2021 3 years ago | 3 comments

I started blogging a while ago, but all my contents are mid at best. How do you level up? There is constant pressure within me to produce but I can't write anything impressive that can help other people. All the things I do rely on collective knowledge of the common, hence I will not be adding anything new on the table. This sabotages my self confidence.

Are you in similar situation too? I am in that 90% of the internet where everything is crap.

eesmith 3 years ago |

Why are you blogging? If it's because you want to write, then go ahead and write.

After all, one way to improve is to practice. If you don't write, you don't get practice.

If you want to write, but not produce crap on the internet, then delete (or not post) your final product.

Think about your audience. Is is really "other people"? That's a broad topic. Perhaps you can narrow it down. What about writing for yourself, of a year ago? What about writing for a co-worker, or friend, or family member?

Things don't need to be "impressive" to be useful. Even a note to yourself for the future might be useful. You could make it sort of daily diary of something neat you did or learned.

If it doesn't make you happy, then stop.

Another way to help people by writing is to be on chat channels or mailing lists where people ask questions about topics you know.

clusmore 3 years ago |

https://blog.codinghorror.com/quantity-always-trumps-quality...

The key to writing good content is just writing lots of content. Some, maybe most, will be crap. That's fine, just don't promote the bad ones.

I recently read the entire Joel on Software archive and realized that the vast majority of posts are fairly uninteresting, but from over 1,000 posts he has a handful of classics and promotes those through the reading lists.

ano-ther 3 years ago |

1 Just write it for yourself and don’t care if it is impressive. The internet is large and there are enough people who will appreciate the way you describe it. Practice will help you find your voice. Experience will show you what kind of posts people enjoy, search for etc.

2 Don’t be too hard on yourself. Especially don’t link page views and likes to your self image. Those show what content “they” appreciate, but says nothing about you personally.

3 Think about what you want with the blog. Fame? Positioning yourself? Giving back to all the people who give free advice on the internet?