"Search query" (advice on blogging to attract conversation on niche interests)

Notes about https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/search-query

• "A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox"
• TODO: apparently this is part 3 of a series of posts, starting at https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/first-we-shape-our-social-graph-then
  • "you can shape yourself by reshaping your relationships"
• "Writing for a general public, you need to be broad and a bit bland. I didn’t want a general public. I wanted a specific set of people, the people who could help me along as a human being obsessed with certain intellectual problems. I didn’t know who these people were. I only knew that they existed. Hence my writing was a search query. It needed to be phrased in such a way that it found these people and, if necessary, filtered others."
• The more niche of interests/knowledge that you explore, the more isolated you can feel because you won't know many people interested in those things.
  • examples that come to my mind are hypnosis and LDing. There are internet communities for those, but they are things I never really talk about in real life. (trying to change that, at least with LDing so far, on digital garden)
  • a solution is to write publicly online about the things, and to realize that there are other ppl online who are interested in them too.
  • Encourages to not think that you need to make your niche topics "accessible" i.e. simplify them or avoid jargon. Being true to the niche will get the right ppl engaging.
• "The people you will be able to have deep conversations with have, like you, already been surprised by the simple, clear things. They need more to get high. And this “more” will be wildly idiosyncratic. It cannot be summarized in a list of writing rules."
  • again, LDing -- (i guess this is one of my niches). I am bored by the basics, and crave the advanced discussions. Same with hypnosis.
    • idea is to write a blog post about my interpretation of the possible dangers of hypnosis e.g. 'can you get someone to do something they don't want to'^[1]
• "You ask yourself: What would have made me jump off my chair if I had read it six months ago (or a week ago, or however fast you write)? If you have figured out something that made you ecstatic, this is what you should write. And you do not dumb it down, because you were not stupid six months ago, you just knew less. You also write with as much useful detail and beauty as you can muster, because that is what you would have wanted."
  • The point here is to write about what you have learned. If you recently learned something that made you really excited, you can write about it and share it with other people to get them excited too.
    • So... for example, Henrik's Alice dating advice.? (so far I only have my private notes on it, and shared link to the article in dig garden, but haven't added any notes on it. but i feel it was a suuuper exciting article for me. TODO: Write more about it publicly.?)
  • "as much useful detail and beauty" <-- a lot of my notes on this digital garden are messy. And that's okay, because I'm not aiming to sell it as something else. But I would like to write more polished things too on here. (direct example, very soon after writing the previous sentence I wrote a more polished post, Rick and Morty's Vegan Propaganda).
• "I like it when people don’t just talk in the abstract but show you with examples, preferably many examples, and preferably taken from the real world so they are messy."
  • I'm definitely guilty of writing abstractly and without examples sometimes.
• "It is crazy-beautiful to have a stranger arrive in your inbox, and they are excited by exactly the same things as you! You start dropping the most obscure references, and they’re like, yeah, read that, love it. "
  • reminds me of the time i was on the subway and a group of girls was talking about acting in a production of Great Comet and I asked what part she played and then mentioned I was going to go see Black Swan
• I'm not sure the benefit he's talking about (of finding ppl who will then send me more interesting stuff) exactly resonates with me, but there could be something here
  • like i'm not sure an issue in my life is that i don't have enough ppl online helping me learn
  • then again... I do have some Big Questions and perhaps asking/presenting them online could be useful/interesting. like i would indeed love if i were presenting these Questions, and then random ppl started sending me relevant articles to them which are useful and could help me grow. (ok this advice is clicking now, whoa)
    • What are these Big Questions??
      • finding enough time in life to do all the things i want to do / stretching myself thin with so many activities+interests / making time for creative things
      • the paradoxes of relationships / the issues with dating (or at least in my own experience. e.g. the artificiality of "dates" versus organically getting to know someone (i mean, this is strongly related to the Alice topic, but it's also been on my mind, and even more on my mind since reading the Alice article.))
      • TODO: Think of more
    • But I feel like these Questions are less about what this article is talking about. The article is advising to post things you know, not that you want to know. But I still feel there is similar benefit. What I'm getting at with the Questions is more generically the Learn in Public thing and its benefits. Henrik is saying to also Teach in Public. But the teaching is just the evidence of the learning, so it's kind of the same thing. And even for my Questions, if I make any updates with potential Answers, then that does then count as Teach in Public and fits into Henrik's advice.
      • TODO: Read more about "Learn in Public" and make notes on it
    • The more I think of this, the more I am feeling like I could use this digital garden as a way to attract Answers+Discussion.
      • For example, I have certain ideas for personal projects which sometimes feel unrealistic and infeasible. If someone were to read my thoughts on those projects and have some kind of input about how to move forward with them, that would be phenomenal.
• Distribution
  • Suggests not being afraid to try to get the attention of bigger bloggers to your posts, because if they re-share it out (the article is pretty heavily using Twitter as an example), it will reach a lot of people.
  • "The way messages spread on the internet is by flowing up this order of streams, from people with smaller networks to those with larger, and then it spreads back down through the larger networks."
    • Kind of an unexpected parallel, but this is making me think of an aspect of social relationships/networking. Everybody who has social relationships is also one of these streams. Some people are large connectors -- they cultivate many relationships and know a lot of people and host a lot of events. They have a large reach. Someone who is new to a social sphere might encounter one of these large social connectors and start to enter that person's social river. By wading through this river (e.g. attending an event hosted by the social connector), they can meet other people, who each will have their own streams (some larger, some smaller), and the person can choose (if they are given the opportunity) to explore those tributaries too.
      • "Going over land, from one tributary to another, is harder than going up the stream order and then down again." --> And the parallel here is that when exploring a social network, the easiest thing to do is to keep meeting people through the people you already know, as opposed to just trying to meet people in the wild from scratch every time.
      • I am able to call out this parallel because this is how I developed my social life after moving to NYC. I am often expanding this network by meeting new people through existing social connections. Though, I also find it very fun to meet new people from scratch ("going over land"). I never know where those "streams" might lead, and what interesting people I meet through them, so it's very fun.
  • "Useful information will start to stream toward you, turning you into a small hub yourself."
    • Makes me thinks of the Makoism coffee posts where he aggregates interesting articles weekly. I wonder how much of the content he links is stuff he discovered himself or stuff that people have sent to him.
  • "You can also post to subreddits and forums, like LessWrong or the SlateStarCodex subreddit, that act like intellectual cafés on the internet. "
  • The advice doesn't really resonate with me right now, because I am not really in a state of trying to widely share this digital garden yet. Mostly it's something I'm sharing with friends I know in real life. But I definitely am writing with a broader audience in mind, so I will keep some of this advice in mind.
  • I do love how the incentive for following this advice is simply to be able to receive interesting articles/whatever from people, to learn more about interesting things, and to be able to share interesting things out to people. No profit or marketing. (Well... someone running a substack with paid private posts (e.g. the blog this article is on, Escaping Flatland) is definitely a profit-driven incentive for attracting interest in your blog. But it doesn't have to be.)