Michael Nielsen: How to use a personal website to ...
# forumj
Jacob O'Bryant
03/13/2023, 3:28 PMhttps://michaelnotebook.com/wn/website_enhance.html
This made me think a lot about how I (should) use my own site.
> Most personal websites aim at personal connection with other people, or at establishing oneself professionally. They're not usually about helping the author think and create, except incidentally.
I've mostly thought of tfos.co as a tool to help me spread my ideas to other people. I do think that's valuable, but... I'm also attracted to using it more in the way described here. A couple points that stuck out:
- The blog format (mostly chronological, homogeneous list of posts) is really quite terrible for using a site as a personal thinking tool. I like the idea of restructuring tfos.co so that it's more like a map of the ideas I'm thinking about, and each post is its own entrypoint to that map.
- Engagement/# subscribers/reach really does not matter
I've already been heading a bit towards the second point. For a while I was kind of trying to go the build-an-audience route, i.e. use my writing to introduce people to stuff I build. But I've pretty much decided that I'd rather use the stuff I build to introduce people to my writing (I do have unlimited advertising credits on Yakread after all).
Jacob O'Bryant
03/13/2023, 3:28 PM> One of the worst ideas in online writing is the unqualified idea that you should be trying to build an audience or to build engagement. This may be good if you're trying to sell something. But it needs a lot of qualifiers if it's to support good thinking.
> ...
> [footnote 7 & 8]:
> It reminds me of the enormously damaging idea that success in life is equivalent to making lots of money. One way it's similar to that idea is that when you're in a milieu (like Silicon Valley) where a lot of people believe it, it starts to infect your thinking in ways extremely hard to notice and free yourself from.
>
> It's a sneaky idea, too. It informs all sorts of cultural norms in tech and the media, both of which default presume that engagement is good and a sign of value. If you're in contact with those cultures then it's easy to absorb some norms which make this presumption.
Jacob O'Bryant
03/13/2023, 3:35 PMIn this vein, I might switch up the way I use the newsletter. I'm thinking of switching to a more asynchronous writing style. Instead of having Monday be writing day, I'd like to put more time into writing informally throughout the week, like hashing out my ideas here in Discord. And then I can gradually take ideas I write about here and move them onto tfos.co. Instead of writing one article per week and never touching it again, I envision having a bunch of articles/pages which I continually refine and which are never necessarily "done," all interlinked.
Then the weekly newsletter would switch to mostly a list of links + summary, for updates I've made in various places to the site, for recent discussions on Discord, and for stuff I've read.
(I think Gwern does something kind of like that? I don't follow him myself so not sure)
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joerter
03/13/2023, 5:32 PMBeautiful. It reminds me of this recent post I read: https://fs.blog/why-write/
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Jacob O'Bryant
03/13/2023, 11:21 PMNice 🙂