Why I don't want to be a tech blogger
I was once a tech blogger. I wrote a lot about WordPress, and later about Kirby and other programming stuff. It was good at the time and helped many people, at least according to statistics and some feedback.
I liked it back then. I could help others relatively easily. But the behavior of the site visitors changed over time. At first, I received responses to my posts in the form of comments or emails. That was good. On the one hand, because I naturally enjoy it when someone thanks me for the help, on the other hand, because it helped me improve my writing when people wrote that they didn't understand something.
But one day that was over. The page views continued to rise, and feedback rapidly decreased. People searched for solutions to their problems, found my posts, copied the helpful source code, and then disappeared after completing their work.
I don't blame anyone for that. I do the same thing, and I bet most of you do too. There's a reason there are so many StackOverflow jokes.
That's not a big deal. Although I believe that we could make some bloggers happy by simply leaving a short "thank you" in the comments instead of disappearing silently. But that's just how it is; we're all always in a hurry.
And now AI and LLM are coming, and they will make it even worse. If we ask Bing, ChatGPT, Google, or the SearchEngineOfTheFuture, we will likely not get link lists in many cases. We will get our answers directly in, for example, code snippets. And these contents will come from blogs and repositories and co. Even if such content remains relevant as a source, interactions will continue to decrease.
What I have taken from all of this:
I don't want to write for search engines, I don't want to write for LLMs, I don't want thousands of silent visitors. I want my site to be a place for lively exchange; I like interactions. Creating such a place is difficult but possible.
I will continue to write and speak about technology in my own way, which will hopefully be somewhat entertaining. But I will incorporate it into other topics. The technical implementations should be the engine for the topics that interest and/or occupy me.
Such posts will probably then migrate to the "hub," where some are already slumbering. Here in the blog, they will then perhaps appear as meta-topics.
Why am I writing this down? In the weekly review, I already mentioned that I am currently reading a lot to find out how to proceed here. This is not new, but I want to have more momentum here again. I will now occasionally publish posts like this one. As a reference and anchor for me when I feel stuck with writing.