It's still worth blogging in the age of AI
My post about blogging as writing the tutorial that you wished you'd found really took off on Hacker News. There were a lot of excellent comments, but one thing kept coming up: what'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?
I was asking myself the same question when I started blogging semi-regularly again last year, and this post is an attempt to summarise why I decided that it was worthwhile. The TL;DR: blogging isn't just about being read -- it's about learning and thinking, and having a durable proof that you can do both.
Let's start off by summarising the two big reasons to blog about what you've learned, as you learn:
- It helps you make your newly-gained knowledge concrete.
- It will help other people in the future -- they might be looking for the information you blogged about, and find it on your blog.
When we're thinking about AI, it's only the second one that matters; you'll learn better by writing whether or not other people or LLMs read it. But in terms of helping other people, these days you might publish your hard-earned learnings on Linux Network Namespaces, but when, the next day, someone wants to find out how to use them, they ask ChatGPT, it does a search, finds your page, ingests it, and presents the results as its own, perhaps mashed up with some scraps from elsewhere. Sure, your site is probably linked in the "references" section in the response, but frankly, no-one ever looks at that. What's worse, within the next six months your site is likely to be sucked into the AIs' next training run, and after that you won't even get a reference.
Now if the "solving other people's problems" aspect of blogging was purely altruistic, that wouldn't matter a jot. But of course it's not, there are a bunch of other reasons. Three that come to mind:
- Making a name for yourself.
- The sheer dopamine hit of knowing that other people like what you've done -- a higher-effort version of getting an upvote or like on social media.
- Building a portfolio of writing you can point to.
Let's take those in turn.
If you want to blog to make a name for yourself, then you're going to have a hard time. Here's an example: if you're not a regular reader of this blog, where do I (as in, the author of this post) live? What is my day job? No cheating and clicking on the "About" link above, please.
If you knew the answer, you're one of a rare few. Yesterday there were about 35,000 visits to this site thanks to that HN link, and fewer than 300 hits on the "About" page. This is normal! If you write a blog post, then even if people find it interesting, they'll come, read it, hopefully think that it was worth their time, and then move on. That is how it should be, there's no need for someone to become fascinated with your life just because you said something useful once -- and that's a good thing, no-one wants a stalker.
Even if you churn out banger posts again and again, as a pure blogger you're not going to build up a "personal brand" that's worth much.
Think about the well-known bloggers you read: they’re famous because they did something else important. They started a major open-source project, or a company, or invented something. They give regular talks at conferences. They write successful science fiction. Or something else.
So, I don't think you can make a name for yourself by blogging alone, and if you are blogging with that as your goal, I fear you're going to be disappointed.
The dopamine hit is definitely more of a thing. When people comment on my posts, I get a nice warm glow. And when last night, just before I went to bed, I saw that my previous post was #1 on the front page of HN, I took a screenshot and posted it to my "Fellow Geeks" WhatsApp group with the caption "w00t!".
But those moments are rare, and I don't really think AI will make them rarer. Blogging can sometimes feel like you're shouting into the void -- most posts get no engagement, and that has been true since I started back in 2006. You might have 500 loyal readers, or none -- there's no way to tell.
I think that all I can say regarding that is to echo what serviceberry said on HN (bold mine):
The corollary is that if you find that post, say something. Drop the author a note, leave a comment. No one else does. For every YT celebrity, there are thousands of people posting good content on the internet and not knowing if it's being seen or appreciated by anyone.
...and maybe suggest that we all occasionally check the references in our helpful AI-generated responses and drop a line to the authors to say "thanks"!
But let's finish with the last one, which is more positive. I said that you will be vanishingly unlikely to make a name for yourself with blogging on its own. But that doesn't mean it's pointless from a career perspective. You're building up a portfolio of writing about topics that interest you. Imagine you're in a job interview and are asked about X. You reply with the details you know, and add "but I blogged about that in detail a while back, shall I send you a link later?" Or if you're aiming to close a contract with a potential consulting client in a particular area -- wouldn't it be useful to send them a list of links showing your thoughts on aspects of exactly that topic?
Your GitHub profile shows your contributions to open source and lets people know how well you can code. But your blog shows your contributions to knowledge, and shows how well you can think. That's valuable!
It's time to wrap this up. Blogging is valuable because it helps you learn, because it helps others solve problems, because you get a rare buzz when you realise that yes, people are reading this stuff, and because you're building a portfolio of writing to show your skills. The only one of those that I believe AI might harm is the buzz of engagement, and that's so rare for most blogs that I don't think it's worth worrying about.
And after all -- if the AI doom scenario does come true, at least as someone whose thoughts have been regularly published on the Internet, you'll be part of the paperclip maximisers' training set, so they'll remember you in a sense. So there's that.