Sorry for opening a sub discussion... but wouldn’t you say you’d be on your best, enjoying the most and being at the top of your creativity writing about what you want?

Don't apologize, these are the exact conversations I wanted to see! As for your question, obviously there is some stuff I write because I feel very passionately about it, but not every post can fall intro that category. There will always be a portion of my work that I just write because I enjoy it, don't worry about that.

Sometimes it correlates with the audience and many times it doesn’t.. I’ve been bashed on reddit more than once for stating an opinion or writing about something uninteresting to many.. but I loved it, and felt I was expressing myself rather than other people’s desires.

I agree, but it's a nuanced topic. It's almost always a bad idea to write something you don't care about, and instead write it based on the projected expectations of the audience. That doesn't mean you can't ask the "audience" and then factor that information into the decision about what you will write.

IMHO the magic happens when the two merge, and your creativity meets what people wants and enjoy reading.

Agree

I enjoy reading you and please keep writing, no matter what!

That's awesome to hear, thanks for taking the time to leave such a genuine and insightful response.

Great suggestion, I have a few topics like that already in the queue!

dev.to/taillogs/how-to-write-a-goo...

This is my take. Write whatever you enjoy, forget about hearts and unicorns lol.

I try to do this as much as is practical!

Good content will speak for itself. Just look at how many views this article got compared to your previous

book review article.

There are a lot of reasons this got less reviews. I didn't post this on Twitter or Reddit (Reddit brought nearly 28k of my 36k views on the book post). Also I don't think good content speaks for itself, unfortunately.

Imo dev.to is not like Twitter where you cater to your followers. Here you write, enjoy, and your followers enjoy it with you.

Agreed, it's much less toxic in that way.

Thanks for taking the time to give me feedback. I often see you participate in my posts and discussions and I always appreciate your words. Look forward to talking to you again in the future.

This is an amazing piece of feedback. Seriously, this is the most critical and honest response I think I've ever received on my content. I really really appreciate it.

My personal answer: Honestly _(and this isn't just you!) I am not a fan of the "noise" posts, like ones that are discussions that I would just to to sites like Twitter or Reddit (and avoid them there too), for example the _"What gets you out of bed" and similar. I come here to see new tech or new takes on things. This isn't a problem with you or your writing, but my expectation/desired outcomes of visiting. This could be solved by having better usage of tags perhaps, for example the above doesn't need to be in #webdev, but is there as that's the most popular tag I guess?

I completely agree with everything you've written here. Obviously, I have a different perspective on a few of the items. "Noise" posts are a mixed bag for example, some of them (such as get out of bed) were merely as you described "filler content" (as described in this post dev.to/taillogs/how-i-started-exis...) because I wanted to post something every day as a personal goal. It was also my 3-4th post ever, and I think if I had written it today, it wouldn't be recognizable as "filler" (because of how I've improved as a writer over the last month).

Unfortunately, I do see another type of value in the "filler posts". One of the most powerful mechanisms to create success is persistency. I started blogging only a month ago, so this is easy to discuss. I strongly believe that if my posts had been 10x higher quality, but 1/10 the volume (so 2-3 posts last month), we would not be having this conversation.

I try to quantify what set of metrics will allow me to write the most "visible" post with the time I have available. You may wonder, "why strive for visibility and not something more honorable like quality?". The simple answer is that I really believe I have a unique and substantial viewpoint on the world. As a repercussion of that belief, I want as many people to hear what I have to say as possible. If I had started with the quality over visibility route, I might have written some great articles, but you and nearly no one else would have read them. Obviously this is not the guaranteed outcome, but it's definitely probable.

Society has become centered around instant gratification, meme-driven sensationalism. High quality content can succeed in this new society, but almost never will, unless the brand associated with the content is well known. My choices are based on this fundamental observation, and my long term plan is to exclusively produce high quality content, once I have the audience.

For a direct example, I looked over some of your past posts. You wrote some posts such as dev.to/wabbbit/using-time-tracking..., which is a very nice post. If I had posted that exact same content it would be front page on Dev.to instead of sitting at 7 reactions. That is the power of visibility.

What I've considered recently is separating my content (on one account) into different "tracks" using the organization feature available on Dev.to. I would use it similar to how youtubers divide content across multiple channels to not mix up different audiences. This is related to the tags remark you made, I'll definitely try to be better about that too, but I honestly just copy-paste my tags a lot of the time and forget to change them.

I can definitely produce some content about my engine, great feedback!

The best advice I’ve ever heard in this regard was to write for you. Write what you’d want to read. This keeps you enjoying the process and the people that connect with you are like you. This makes it easier to connect with your readers and be authentic.

It's a tough one, a lot of the stuff I want to write doesn't do well here at all (for example the machine learning post that took me weeks and has ~1k views). Completely agree about being authentic.

A similar story I once heard was about an Author, I forget who, had a huge success And was going to write her next book. It was a huge success and was under a lot of personal pressure to do it again. She wrote many drafts and hated them. In frustration she thought about how she wrote that first book. She wrote it for herself and 10 of her closest friends. I forget what book followed, but it was another success.

That's a nice anecdote, but I'm not sure it's the "norm". Most of the time you're really only able to write what you "want" once you have the notoriety. There will always be exceptions, but that's the general rule I've observed.

I was really glad to see a comment from you pop up in this post, thanks for taking the time to give me feedback.