As someone who would like to blog but doesn't, because I don't put in the effort:

> I am afraid to blog.

Don't be.

> I could write about my career and my hobby, but those do not seem to be interesting for others.

Says who? Let others be the judge.

> My opinion may be interesting, but it is risky because something I write may come back to offend others one day, or get me in trouble.

This one is tricky but its easy: be careful with humor as that tends to be a source of social faux pas. Steer clear from politics. Stay on topic.

example: I was reading a blog about Linux desktop critique which devolved into a stupid rant about RMS and woke politics. Hard fail on the authors part.

> One time ago I considered blogging anonymously about the economy but doing so anonymously felt disingenuous.

Many people throughout history have wrote many things under anonymous pen names. It's fine.

Anonymity isn't a guarantee. But with reasonable op sec e.g. don't use your nick elsewhere, don't tell people about your blog, don't promote under your name, you're pretty safe so long as you mostly stay away from politically controversial issues. (Which may be why some people want to blog of course, but I have no interest.) Frankly, you're pretty safe so long as you stay away from polarizing topics and kicking hornet nests in any case but anonymity does add another layer of protection. Of course, you don't get professional benefit either if that's a concern.

I think it's valuable to just blog for your own sake as well. It gets you into a habit of putting your thoughts into words, which in my experience helps my understanding of the topic.

About offending people - think of it as an opportunity to learn. You put your opinions out there, and if someone points out a flaw in your thought process, you try to see where you went wrong. If you were wrong, you get to make another blog post explaining your new understanding, and thanking the person who helped you get there. If you weren't wrong... well, there are trolls on the internet everywhere, you just learn to ignore them.

> If you weren't wrong... well, there are trolls on the internet everywhere, you just learn to ignore them.

Until you end up being the target of an internet mob bent on harassing you and everyone associated with you until someone breaks.

This is probably a lot rarer than headlines make it seem, but I share OP's anxiety about blogging about anything even tangentially related to politics.

I sympathize with all you say, I've been through all that myself. But why would blogging anonymously be disingenuous? Plenty of writers have opted for anonymity. If the ideas spur thought or discussion, they're still valuable.

I've had a blog for about 6 years, with over 300 entries. I don't advertise it, and try to disallow indexing by search engines. It's "anonymous" in the sense that my name isn't on it anywhere, and it doesn't contain personal details. There's no commenting, no integration with social media. It's just for friends, and if they want to talk to me about anything I write there, they know how to reach me.

I felt the same pressure as you, but so far it's been very rewarding: turns out I don't have to get famous to enjoy blogging, which was something I wanted to test when I started it. So far so good.

Your hobby (whatever it may be) is interesting to at least one person: you! I bet you find other folks on the Internet who are interested too. If it's not a common topic, they'll likely appreciate your blog all the more because of that.

Absolutely nothing wrong with anonymous/pseudonymous blogs/Twitter/etc.

When your blog is part of your in real life public presence, you obviously don't want to do that. And I started blogging before many of today's concerns became as big a deal. But, if I were starting a blog today that was divorced from my professional identity, I'd seriously consider not connecting it to real life me--especially if I regularly blogged about political issues (which I don't).

There's a long history of people writing under pseudonyms. If someone really cares they might be able to connect the dots (and many times so if they're a government) but that's not the attack scenario for most people.

Which is a dark side of "cancel culture". When people (or media entities) decide to connect the dots then reveal the identity to whatever twitter mob is relevant.

Hopefully this doesn't become a bigger trend. As you said, the government can connect the dots if they need/want to. There's no need to vigilantes to do it on their behalf.

Interesting, I came to post the same thing.

It's a shame, semi-permanent communication now represents an attack surface for randos hoping for their free-floating rage to find a surface upon which it might condense. In a sense, this provides little benefit to you except as an outlet and perhaps as a way to exercise writing skills, learning about a blogging platform, perhaps SEO (or not!), and so forth, but now the possible benefits are outweighed by the potential negatives.

The future looks like a lot of people performing the "grey rock" method. It's a pity, but that's the system as it punishes and rewards today.

They make a lot of headlines, but you really have to say something extremely boneheaded for anyone to care about your opinions enough to do something about it. Stick to topics you're knowledgeable about (this is how you avoid saying boneheaded things), and generally stay positive and constructive, and you won't have any trouble. The fear you're feeling is wildly out of whack with reality.

Or you can be some random Mexican guy fired for making an OK sign with your hand, by accident.

Because that is now the white power sign. That's reality now.

That doesn't seem very relevant to the topic of creating a personal blog.

In the sense that I was discussing, you know, just existing and expressing yourself at a bare minimum, and suddenly having strangers swoop in to get you cancelled, it's relevant enough to me.

My point is very simple, and it goes for blogs, Twitter, Facebook, or bumper stickers on your truck: there's a lot of people out there who looking for the barest thing to fixate upon to get you in trouble, right down to a simple knuckle-crack.

Yeah what I'm saying is that doesn't really happen in the real world, unless you go invite controversy by discussing controversial topics, especially if you aren't an expert on those topics. And even then it's honestly pretty rare and there's even whole industries dedicated to supporting people who are purposefully provocative.

I'll be blunt: I think it's very unlikely that your opinions on <insert current controversial topic> are going to revolutionize the status of the debate on that topic. The world has nothing to gain by you writing about that topic, and as you say, there's a chance you have something to lose. So just don't write about that. My advice if you want to maintain a blog is to write about something you care about and know about.

You can view my personal blog if you like, it's in my profile. I write about woodworking and video games and gardening. No one has tried to destroy my life for my experiences with growing grapevines. Sure, if I went off on a rant about <insert controversial topic> or wrote a bunch of hyper-negative invective about <insert group of people>, yeah that might come back to bite me. So I don't.

No one's going to come after you for a personal blog about playing guitar or whatever. Stay positive. Stay constructive. Stick to what you know. Don't invite controversy. You'll be fine, and maybe you'll even create something that touches someone else in a positive way.

Except a guy cracking his knuckles got fired, in the real world, so when you say that it doesn't happen, I know that is wrong. We both know it is wrong. I shall now post the link so you can stop saying "that doesn't happen."

https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdge-worker-fired-ove...

There. It happened. In the real world. So cracking your knuckles is there under "inviting controversy."

Yeah like I said, I'm having a hard time drawing an analogy from that to maintaining a personal blog about a hobby you like or whatever.

Okay, I'll break the analogy down for you, since you are having a hard time:

Part one: You, me, the writer (any human being)

Part two: Existing in a public space (to be found via Google or or noticed in Twitter or making stuff on Etsy or showing things on Instagram or just being photographed in person)

Part three: Self-expression of any form (writing something that will be found "colonial," or a blog, or making a hand gesture, cracking one's knuckles, or standing there with an uncomfortable smile, or even knitting (https://unherd.com/2020/01/cast-out-how-knitting-fell-into-a...) in that public space

Part four: Negative consequence for that self-expression ("cancelled," getting fired, the usual death threats, "screaming, hats first into the wood chipper") from ... people who have never even met you, who found that self-expression in the public space.

Cardinal Richelieu: "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged."

It's the revolutionary spirit of the times. These incidents occur. You may not be aware of them, but others are aware of them, and they have what is known as a chilling effect.

Haha, if websites like that that are where you're getting your news from, I can see why you're terrified all the time! I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree. I'll choose to take the risk and keep blogging about grapes :)

I'm sorry, are you suggesting that these things didn't happen? Because that is the only translation I have of "getting your news from."

Is the idea that the NBC San Diego branch just ... made this up? That the BBC (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000d70h) fabricated this wholesale? Let's just click through some of those hyperlinks in the Unherd thing. https://fringeassociation.com/2019/01/07/2019-my-year-of-col... sure seems to have happened; take care to note "I've offended many people with this post, and for that I am deeply sorry. Please read my comment here. And 01.12 Please read my follow-up about what’s wrong with this post here."

These are all things that have occurred in "reality" and the "real world," to use your diction. You can now ignore them -- feel free! -- but pretending that they didn't happen is, I don't know, a performance only for yourself, because I cannot unsee what has been seen.

I am not terrified; as above, I pointed out that the potential negatives outweigh the possible benefits at this point. It's a simple analysis. You have elected not to factor those real world events into your analysis.

I'm not saying they don't happen, what I'm saying is if you immerse yourself in a constant stream of "here's a bad thing that happened to one person out of the dozens of millions of people who created content on the Internet today", you'll get a really distorted view of what's actually happening. It's like never leaving your house because you see shootings and murder reports every day on local news. You're missing out on a whole lot because of the distorted view that kind of information diet gives you.

This is the sad part.

If your news diet is consumed by negative press and sad stories, they become more readily available[0] to you and can affect your decisions adversely by making you think that the base rate of such bad events are more common than they really are[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy

I think the biggest issue is that those who are most moderate, most interested in nuance, and the most correct are most likely to be grey rocks. True believers who are committed to their views are most likely to be outspoken, since they value that belief above other considerations. In short, we will breed a society dictated by extremes.

You can say anything you want, but only in the guise of anonymity (private). You can choose to reveal yourself, but then you cannot say anything substantially radical (public).

The more important thing that is happening isn't all the fuss about "cancel culture" or "free speech", it's that society is pushing towards the absolute division of the grey area between the public and the private, which is the area where politics actually take place. The real danger is that speech itself, in one mode entirely full of consequences and in another mode devoid of any, will become meaningless because of this distinction. What you say will no longer be related to what you actually do anymore, and speech will just be a floating signifier that no longer has any basis in reality and will lose the ability to change the world. The "freedom of speech" isn't the thing at stake, it's the value of speech itself that's being jeopardized.

I came to say similar. I ran a personal blog for a while and toy with the idea of revamping it occasionally. But my objections generally fall into two categories: * For tech-heavy programming/operations how-to or bugfix content, Stack Overflow killed those for me. As a consumer would rather find the bubbled-up "right" answer than wade through Google hits for forums/blogs that may or may not be right. As a writer, I no longer felt my personal blog was the best place for such content. * For opinions on current events, industry, etc. I don't feel I have something new or important to say.

I feel old and curmudgeonly now. Thanks.

Re: Stack Overflow

I think there is still quite a lot of value for solutions that you could devise because of experience.

For instance something you came up with where you had to piece together multiple SO answers for a particular use case.

For example, my blog has had thousands of hits on a page to set up Active directory login with rails even though that question is on SO because my use case was quite specific.

Or, things that you came up with because you have experience with reading the docs or the source code.

Or even where you were skilled enough to override part of existing library for a better solution.

And finally quirks that you discovered while using specific tools that might be documented but might have side effects that are a bit more arcane.

Every genius in all ages held some weird view all their lifetime, even by modern standards. But history forgets those, and remembers their contributions for the good.

History forgets most of the good ones too. We just remember some outliers.

I think his concern is it affecting job prospects, etc. Being recognized after one dies is not appealing to him :-)

(I often look at biographies, and being recognized only years after death is quite common).

Historically I think you’re mostly correct.

The question that I don’t think we have an answer to (but we see some worrisome trends) is: does this hold up in an era where those odd beliefs aren’t just a footnote somewhere but instead tightly bound to ones identity for the rest of eternity?

Basically, how does social media and “cancel culture” change things, or does it?

I got a site. Most of my visitors are bots. 30 visitors per month. 25 bots, remaining 5 times I visited knowing from analytics.

Don't overthink. You see there are many one post sites out there. If you can manage it regularly do it.

There is no opinion which is safe from others taking offense. You might as well blog.

Anonymity is not disingenuous. If you want to be super scrupulous about this, choose a pseudonym that is clearly not a real name.

You could consider adding the sentence to your blog post: “I have written the above based on my present understanding, experience and maturity. As these improve over time, hopefully my opinions would improve too!”

It would be harmful to add such a disclaimer. It would not assuage those who would take offense and it would hurt reader trust.

All writing is from a present understanding.

If all writing is from a present understanding, how could it hurt reader trust to acknowledge that explicitly?

I would expect the following kind of writers to use that that disclaimer:

* The writer expresses poorly considered opinions, loosely holds them. They won't bother defending them.

* The writer expresses anodyne opinions that might one day become controversial, they won't bother holding onto them when the rest of society moves on from them.

In both cases, I wouldn't bother reading what they had to say. I could open the opinion section of any newspaper to get the same content with twice the conviction.

Nothing wrong with hedging your opinions in-text. But if you're hedging everything you say before you've even bothered to say it, you either have nothing interesting to say or probably censor yourself enough already.

Interesting. It sounds like we value very different kinds of writing.

considering people pick tweets from 10 years ago out-of-context (and out of the thread they are part of), I don't see much benefit

That sounds like something from a struggle session, just written preemptively.

This is similar to the "managers don't want to talk to female employees".

The solution is simple. Treat all people as people. If you can't, don't talk about them.

Edit: Perhaps projecting my opinions I assumed you were talking about political correctness. However re-reading your post I am not so sure that's what you meant.

He's concerned that his views may become controversial in future. Someone with published centre-right views in Cambodia in 1965 would have felt fairly safe. Fifteen years later they would have been dead.

(Ah! I notice you've edited it. It's worth pointing out that 'Political Correctness' was originally a term to describe the 'correct' behaviour of people in totalitarian states.)

I respond to posts the same way I write code.

I write it first, then look for edge cases.

Perhaps I should add a new step, post after the edge cases have been considered.

> Perhaps I should add a new step, post after the edge cases have been considered

Or use the "delay" feature on your HN profile page: e.g. mine is set to 2, meaning after I post a comment, I have 2 minutes to edit, reconsider, proofread or delete before anyone sees it.

I guess we all have different edge cases to our worldviews!

"Treat all people as people."

Which also means taking into account that some people are, in fact, unfair assholes and that you may fail to recognize them in time.