Notes on Meeting Successful Bloggers In Person
17 observations on habits, personalities, and worldviews
Meeting successful bloggers in person feels like watching characters from a childhood TV show step into real life, especially the pseudonymous ones.
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to meet numerous internet-famous bloggers in person. Approximately half of my discussions happened in small groups, while the other half occurred in a one-on-one setting. My conversations with these bloggers have ranged from how they generate ideas to the personality characteristics of their kids. If you’re reading this post, you’re the type of person who has read many of their posts as well.
While I think I can predict the success of a given post, I don’t think I can predict which bloggers will be successful. [1] Some of this can be attributed to the fact that a large component of blogger success is future post frequency, which is an unknown metric. That said, meeting them in person has left me with the beginnings of a pattern I can’t yet articulate.
The following are some of my assorted notes from my in-person interactions with successful bloggers.
They do at least one thing that is weird and makes you double-take.
Some anecdotes:
There’s a well-known blogger who insists on only browsing the internet on incognito mode while on a VPN and not using the trackpad. It’s not that the trackpad is broken, but they use some combination of the keyboard to move their cursor around.
One blogger uses a single monitor in vertical orientation.
Another blogger has a specific three-monitor setup: one horizontal monitor with one vertical monitor on each side.
They work extremely hard and love it.
I have been working physically adjacent and in the same room as a successful blogger. Every single day without fail, he leaves after I do at night and gets there before I do in the morning. And I’m not leaving that early. I leave at around 10:30 or 11 pm, and get in at 9 or 9:30 am. More importantly, it looks like he’s enjoying every single moment of being there.
I’m not very good at estimating ages, but if I had to guess, he’s somewhere around 50. I’m younger than 50, and I don’t have this level of stamina.
Most or all claim to write for themselves.
If I were to estimate, about 40% are saying this earnestly, 40% are saying this because the other 40% are saying it, and 20% are not telling the full truth.
They are overwhelmingly low-ego and interested in ideas.
They all have smarter friends than them and often wonder why they are popular bloggers.
They read every day. Then they read more.
They are better dressed on average than what I expected, and not in an eccentric sense.
When talking with them, you can hear the blog come out of them in real time.
In aggregate, they skew towards being introverted.
Many of them use Androids.
This could be a function of generational differences as successful bloggers are older, on average.
They are irrational in one weird way, at least from my perspective.
They all lead very interesting lifestyles or are ~interesting people.
They are spiritually children in at least one dimension.
For some, their blogs give off the impression that the blog is the best instantiation of their life’s work, for others it feels like a footnote.
They are comfortable with being wrong on the internet.
While some started their blogging career as being deeply uncomfortable with being wrong, many got over it by consistently publishing.
Many had a significant incident or feud that served as a canonical moment for them, demonstrating that there’s really nothing to worry about.
Many are able to contextually place their comment section in a segregated frame of mind.
With one notable exception.
They’ve met everyone. And I mean literally everyone.
Popularity prediction hash: 0e1f93ac058e1d0f88659fb55ac44b1a583e71474f3c0c311efdb41e9a1cf9b8
[1] Maybe bloggers are such an idiosyncratic bunch that there is no generalizable model. I’m fairly confident that this isn’t true though.
I assume "success" is counted via readership numbers? I wonder about this, because when I see the top substackers (https://imgur.com/a/h0WNMof), I'm not sure I'd want to be producing their blogs, even though they incontrovertibly get them in front of many eyes and theoretically have a bully pulpit to influence opinions in their preferred direction to a larger degree than less-viewed blogs.
I think the sweet spot is probably Scott at ACX or Zvi or something, where you have wide readership for your niche, and your ideas reliably percolate up to the top (with the top defined as some mishmash of billionaires, vice presidents, AI company executives, etc, the people most influential for the future light cone), but are still small in an absolute "readership or earnings" sense.
17. doesn’t mean much without more context. That seems like more of an effect of being a popular blogger rather than a cause, no?