Writing into the Void
The probability of someone reading your post is incredibly low. The website visits that I see on the site are almost certainly all bot scrapers. Even if a human does land on your page, what is the probability that they would be interested in reading your thoughts?
It's almost a miracle when you find someone who avidly writes about things that you are interested in.
And people's preferences and interests change over time (both the reader AND the writer). What are the chances that a reader will find your post useful, and the reader's and writer's preferences change in the same direction over time?
Why I chose to write despite this
I think the reasons I began trying to write were:
1) Leaving a record
Something to show my descendants - I thought it would be neat for someone to say: "These are the kinds of things that your great-grandfather worked on and thought about"
They wouldn't even need to read it - perhaps they would just have their future LLM agent analogue consume all of the content, and distill it into something that would make sense for the great-grandchild
2) Marketing myself / resume supplement
Pointing to something that actually exists, and has existed for a while - here is something I've done, and I do, and you can just see it because it's there and it exists.
Even the recruiters wouldn't need to read the content of the posts - their LLM agent could distill the information into an answer for "what kind of person would write posts like this? Would they be a good fit for the company?"
3) Pushing myself to create more content
I've found writing quite challenging. It's so much easier to consume content (read, watch, listen to, etc) than to produce it.
When trying to make something to share publicly, you often feel unsure of yourself ("will other people take it the wrong way?", "Am I overgeneralizing? Providing too much detail?", "Does this make me sound naive or pretentious?").
It sometimes feels as though everyone can make it better than you, or everyone is smarter than you, or has thought about it more clearly than you have. Though in reality, that can't be true - people are so specialized in their own fields and interests - the things that you've written may be completely alien to them.
4) Practice writing and improve communication skills
With AI agents, now more than ever, communication skills are super important. If you want something built for you, it's much better to spend the effort writing out exactly what you want. The act of writing and editing a detailed prompt helps to both clarify your vision, and provide all of the context needed for the agent to create something that you actually want.
Conclusion
Maybe a blog post is as valuable to the writer as it is to the reader.