Why and how to write things on the Internet (2022)

Summary

Recently I noticed that most existing “why you should write a blog” articles (e.g.) have at least one of two shortcomings, according to me:They mostly focus on counterarguments to not starting a blog, rather than positive arguments in favor of starting one—as if people’s natural state is to produce amazing blogs and the only thing holding them back is silly misconceptions. This might be true for extreme outliers like Scott Alexander, but personally, my natural state is to play lots of video games and I need to be convinced to do other stuff instead.They don’t set the reader up to actually get the benefits of blogging, because they don’t give concrete enough advice on the mechanics. I’ve learned a lot of things about blogging which, if I’d known them earlier, would have helped me improve much faster (and therefore would have made me much more likely to keep blogging, since part of my motivation for writing is being good at it).So here’s my own take on this genre of post, with positive reasons why you, yes you, should consider writing things on the Internet, and a guide that’s as concrete as I can manage for how to do a decent (imo) job at it.WhyMore awesome friendshipsIn my opinion, the strongest reason for any random person to start a blog is that you will have more awesome friendships—both in the sense that you will meet new awesome people as a result of your blog, but also in the sense that writing will cause you to have more interesting ideas, which will make your existing friendships more awesome because you’ll have better stuff to talk about.Most other important things in life, like job opportunities and romantic relationships, are downstream of the quality of your friends, so this is pretty great.Examples from my own blog:Often when I’m talking to friends I’ll try to explain to them the post that I’m in the process of writing, or just published, and this leads to an interesting conversation about their take on the topic. I’ve had a lot of great conversations a...