I don’t. As a 21 year old, 21 year olds are terrible at giving advice. There’s also the successful-bias problem, where you think you’re successful because of whatever you did, and that there aren’t other ways.

this is a generality. You omitted the next sentence where experience / results were presented. I would ignore most 21 year olds advice about snowboarding, but i would listen to everything Shaun White had to say at 15.

There’s also the successful-bias problem, where you think you’re successful because of whatever you did, and that there aren’t other ways

another generality (perhaps you're talking about survivor bias). in any case, these are general statements that may be true statistically but unless you tie them to the context of OP there is little relevance to this discussion

You missed the point. Young people, especially extremely talented ones, are terrible at giving advice. They don’t have nearly enough experience to recognize biases and will give out worthless platitudes like “always practice 6 hours a day” when the real key to their success is mastering some fundamental technique at a young age that they don’t even understand.

It’s like chefs that recite recipes with “a pinch of X”, “a splash of Y”, and “a sprinkling of Z”. This is completely useless to amateurs and is only marginally useful to professionals that might be able to deconstruct how the ingredients interact to get precise ratios.

Experience is experience.

An example: some people (like myself) really really care about blog design — it’s why I enjoyed looking at yours! I also like plaintext design and other stuff, but my point is I care. Your audience might not, considering how you defined it, but another audience might! Another example is the newsletter: you & your audience might like one, but Daring Fireball doesn’t have one and I like that aspect of the that blog.

So again, with all due respect, even your own points are contradictory. You didn’t look at blogging objectively — only what worked for you. Which is fine! Thanks for the advice. And please ignore mine — I’m 21. But hopefully you get my point.

I think that blogging is kind of like painting, coding, entrepreneurship or any other creative activity. Everybody that makes it starts giving contradictory advice on what worked for them, which is all good. As an individual your job is to make your own decisions. Having a lot of advices to pick from can help a lot in my opinion

BTW You seem like an interesting person, hit me up!

You're assuming equivalent intents. The OP's advice is good if your goal is maximize the size of your audience. Many people (and I suspect more likely in this crowd), the goal is to generate interesting and meaningful conversation. You do need some threshold of views for this, but beyond that threshold, a larger audience is not of benefit. And a really large audience becomes a liability - the conversation becomes less meaningful very quickly.

If you have a stackoverflow account with at least 500 points, click your user profile and check out the "people reached" metric in the top right corner. Prepare to be amazed.