If Nobody Reads Your Blog, Why Write It?
Andy from the UK recently wrote a blog post titled Why blog if nobody reads it?, which sparked some discussion on HN.
What Andy argues is simple: the meaning of blogging does not lie in readership, but in personal growth and thought. Even without readers, writing still helps you organize your thinking and sharpen your mind. A blog is like a time capsule that records your own evolution, and perhaps one day it will be found by exactly the person who needs it. The key is not traffic, but sincerity and persistence. His analogy to street photographers is also apt: they press the shutter not to be praised, but to capture a moment. Writing a blog is similar. It is a way to record and express the inner world. What matters is the process itself, not the level of attention.
I agree. In fact, Lao Jiang made a similar point in a Bilibili video back in 2020 about how to improve the depth of one's thinking. Around the 21:30 mark, he gave a sixth suggestion: create things independently. The underlying logic is very close to what Andy is saying.
If you have time and thoughts, you can write something and put it online.
You might ask: with AI developing as fast as it is today, perhaps in the near future personal computers will simply call one API after another. Maybe each of us will be reduced to a pile of numbers: how many tokens we consume, how many songs we listen to, how many videos we watch, and so on. Maybe much of the internet itself will become synthetic data generated by AI, since the human brain is far slower than silicon in both computation and output.
You may say that this is no longer the internet of around 2005. Blogs? Hardly anyone reads them now. Why keep writing?
My answer is this: whether anyone reads it is not the important part. What matters is that, somewhere along your journey, you once thought seriously about a question or a piece of your life.
I think. I write. I was here.