Is this intended as snark, or an actual helpful comment?
Assuming the latter, I have what I consider to be sound motives for maintaining a blog. Unfortunately, I don’t have sound habits for maintaining a blog, coupled with a bit of a cold-start problem. I doubt I am the only person in this position, and believe social commitment mechanisms may be a possible avenue for improvement.
I was going for actual helpful comment. I personally don’t have a blog because several attempts to have a blog failed. Afterwards, I was fairly sure that the reason why my blogs failed was because I like conversations too much and monologuing too little. I found that forums both had a reliable stream of content to react to, as well as a somewhat reliable stream of content to build off of. The incentive structure seemed a lot nicer in a number of ways.
More broadly, I think a good habit when plans fail is to ask the question “What information does this failure give me?”, rather than the limited question “why did this plan fail me?”. Sometimes you should revise the plan to avoid that failure mode; other times you should revise the plan to have entirely different goals.
My immediate practical suggestion is to create a LW draft editing circle. This won’t give you the benefits of a blog distinct from LW, but eliminates most of the cold-start problem. It also adds to the potential interest base people who have ideas for posts but who don’t have the confidence in their ability to write a post that is socially acceptable to LW (i.e. doesn’t break some hidden protocol).
If you have any old material, you could consider posting those to get initial readership, even if you don’t consider them especially high quality.
I have what I consider to be sound motives for maintaining a blog.
I’d interpret Vaniver’s comment more generally to mean that parts of your brain might disagree with this assessment, and you experience this as procrastination.
Are you sure the error is that you’re posting too little to the blog, rather than that you’re trying to have a blog in the first place?
Is this intended as snark, or an actual helpful comment?
Assuming the latter, I have what I consider to be sound motives for maintaining a blog. Unfortunately, I don’t have sound habits for maintaining a blog, coupled with a bit of a cold-start problem. I doubt I am the only person in this position, and believe social commitment mechanisms may be a possible avenue for improvement.
I was going for actual helpful comment. I personally don’t have a blog because several attempts to have a blog failed. Afterwards, I was fairly sure that the reason why my blogs failed was because I like conversations too much and monologuing too little. I found that forums both had a reliable stream of content to react to, as well as a somewhat reliable stream of content to build off of. The incentive structure seemed a lot nicer in a number of ways.
More broadly, I think a good habit when plans fail is to ask the question “What information does this failure give me?”, rather than the limited question “why did this plan fail me?”. Sometimes you should revise the plan to avoid that failure mode; other times you should revise the plan to have entirely different goals.
My immediate practical suggestion is to create a LW draft editing circle. This won’t give you the benefits of a blog distinct from LW, but eliminates most of the cold-start problem. It also adds to the potential interest base people who have ideas for posts but who don’t have the confidence in their ability to write a post that is socially acceptable to LW (i.e. doesn’t break some hidden protocol).
If you have any old material, you could consider posting those to get initial readership, even if you don’t consider them especially high quality.
I’d interpret Vaniver’s comment more generally to mean that parts of your brain might disagree with this assessment, and you experience this as procrastination.