IdeaWell

Project ideas from Hacker News discussions.

10 years of writing a blog nobody reads

Original Article

Hacker News Discussion

📝 Discussion Summary (Click to expand)

The three most prevalent themes in this Hacker News discussion regarding personal writing and blogging are:

  1. The Intrinsic Value of Writing for Self-Improvement and Personal Record: Many users emphasized that the primary benefit of writing, regardless of an audience, is the cognitive improvement and self-satisfaction derived, often comparing it to keeping a detailed diary or using writing to solidify complex thoughts.

    • Supporting Quote: According to ChrisMarshallNY, "I do it. I write[0], because it helps me to understand stuff better (tutorials), or because I work on "gut instinct," a lot, and writing it in a manner that explains it, forces me to "formalize" things."
    • Supporting Quote: JKCalhoun asserted this directly: "The act of writing itself is the payoff."

  2. Satisfaction from Tangential or Indirect Reader Impact: While readers may not be numerous, the rare instances of content being found unexpectedly or influencing others provide significant, unique satisfaction, often outweighing the desire for mass readership.

    • Supporting Quote: btreecat noted the satisfaction of helping someone specifically: "I had a friend message me saying they came across my blog googling how to run home assistant on k3s. And that's a satisfaction no money can buy."
    • Supporting Quote: josephg shared a similar experience: "Yeah I’ve occasionally mentioned things at work, and had someone say “I think I read a blog post about that once”. Only to discover they read about it on my blog! Incredibly satisfying."

  3. The Tension Between Audience Engagement and Artistic Integrity/Personal Expression: A significant portion of the discussion revolved around whether a writer should tailor their work for readers (learning what "works") or ignore audience feedback to maintain a pure, authentic voice, with a general consensus leaning toward balancing both.

    • Supporting Quote: josephg argued against completely subjective writing: "Both of these extreme positions will result in bad work. The answer is somewhere in the middle. We don't want a performer to be our slave or our master. We want you to be our friend. Our leader. Our teacher."
    • Supporting Quote: Conversely, d-lisp emphasized creative freedom, suggesting structure should be self-imposed: "Set your own dogma or not, but do what you feel you want to do, be it creating for others, for yourself (you abominable narcissus), for your cat, for the banana you just eaten, or for whatever supreme being you chose to believe in."

🚀 Project Ideas

Project 1: The "Anti-Apathy" Engagement Prompter

Summary

  • A browser extension and potential platform feature that actively identifies high-quality, thoughtful, or helpful comments/non-blog posts (like good HN submissions) and surfaces them in a curated feed or explicitly prompts the user to engage.
  • Solves the "hard to justify engaging" and "creeping apathy" problem by lowering the activation energy for meaningful interaction and reducing exposure to noise/dogmatism.

Details

Key Value
Target Audience Users who feel overwhelmed, anxious about reactions, or tired of low-signal internet discourse (e.g., Cthulhu_, troad, entuno).
Core Feature Quality-Weighted Engagement Feed: Leverages ML heuristics (sentence complexity, length, response quality to previous points using BERT/LLM analysis) or user-defined "quality signals" to prioritize showing only engaging, non-combative content, coupled with a "One Good Faith Response" prompt before allowing a typical reply.
Tech Stack Browser Extension (Javascript/React), Backend API (Python/FastAPI) for lightweight content analysis, potential integration with existing platform APIs (like HN via proxy/polling).
Difficulty Medium
Monetization Hobby

Notes

  • Why HN commenters would love it: It directly addresses Troad's difficulty in justifying engagement and Cthulhu_'s anxiety about reactions by curating a better environment: "I often find myself starting a reply... and then hitting delete... It's just hard to justify engaging."
  • Potential for discussion or practical utility: Could become a necessary "filter" against noise, perhaps spawning a niche platform that guarantees participation only from those intentionally seeking signal.

Project 2: Personal Knowledge Synthesis & Review Tool ("The Immortal Self")

Summary

  • A personal writing and knowledge management tool focused exclusively on the act of writing for self-reflection, understanding, and permanent capture, deliberately masking engagement metrics.
  • Addresses the value of writing for personal growth, understanding, and future memory capture (for self or hypothetical descendants/AI).

Details

Key Value
Target Audience Writers who value the process over readership (boznz, reactordev, wj, nunez) and those concerned about AI distilling their thoughts for posterity (xnx, NebulaStorm456, accidc).
Core Feature Process-Oriented Capture & Synthesis Modes: Features include "Formalize View" (ChrisMarshallNY's process of writing to understand gut instinct) and a "Memory Dump" feature. It generates a lightweight, personalized "Yearly Synthesis Report" (a K-summary) based on tracked entries, ensuring the personal knowledge is structured. Crucially, it removes or hides analytics, comments, and social counters by default.
Tech Stack Desktop/Web App (Electron/TypeScript), Local/Encrypted Storage (SQLite/IndexedDB), lightweight NLP processing for synthesis (e.g., NLTK/spaCy only running locally).
Difficulty Medium
Monetization Hobby

Notes

  • Why HN commenters would love it: It validates the core belief that "The act of writing itself is the payoff" (JKCalhoun) and treats writing as internal practice, aligning with the concept of leaving behind a "numerical distillation of our aggregated thoughts" (accidc).
  • Potential for discussion or practical utility: Excellent use case for testing internal LLM summarization applied to personal historical data, essentially creating a highly personalized AI based only on the user's validated thoughts.

Project 3: Code Comment/Documentation Engagement Optimizer

Summary

  • A developer tooling service that analyzes in-progress code reviews or commits against defined project style guides (or inferred communal standards) and suggests specific, high-signal modifications to clarify intent, rather than just style.
  • Solves the junior developer fear of sharing code due to fear of hostile feedback regarding style or naming conventions.

Details

Key Value
Target Audience Junior/Mid-level developers worried about exposing code (hiduck, zeroq) and teams needing better internal documentation/onboarding (nrhrjrjrjtntbt).
Core Feature Intent Clarification Engine: Integrates into IDE/Git hooks. Beyond linting, it flags areas where complex logic could be clarified with a small amount of prose, suggesting what purpose the next comment should serve ("Why this specific name choice?" or "Clarify the edge case being handled here."). It defaults to rewarding brevity/clarity (d-lisp, nunez).
Tech Stack IDE Plugin (VS Code/JetBrains Extension API), Static Code Analysis libraries (e.g., Tree-sitter), and a specialized, small LLM fine-tuned on high-quality internal documentation examples (e.g., from successful open-source projects) for contextual commentary suggestion.
Difficulty High
Monetization Hobby

Notes

  • Why HN commenters would love it: It tackles hiduck's fear directly: "I don't share the code at all, due to the fact of how many times I saw on the internet the 'Why did you do it that way...'". This tool shifts the focus from policing syntax errors to improving explanatory skill within the codebase.
  • Potential for discussion or practical utility: This is a direct application of Josephg's point about learning charisma/skill in a controlled environment: learning to write engaging explanations specifically tailored to the in-the-moment audience (the future maintainer/reviewer).