Publishing your work increases your luck

Positive experiences with publishing and “luck”

• Many commenters report concrete benefits from blogging and open source: job offers, referrals, consulting work, and easier interviews because their public work acts as a “pre-screen.”
• Publishing is framed as increasing the “surface area” for serendipity: more chances for others to find you, especially if you explain complex topics clearly and consistently over years.
• Several note that results are slow and uneven: most posts disappear into the void, a few unexpectedly “hit,” and persistence over 3–5+ years matters more than any single piece.

Skepticism: corporate incentives, AI training, and free labor

• A strong thread criticizes the article’s origin on GitHub as self-serving: encouraging more public code and writing is seen as feeding unpaid training data into LLMs and megacorps.
• Some argue the message ignores how corporations extract value from OSS without giving back, which has already pushed maintainers toward more restrictive licenses or burnout.
• Others accept this asymmetry as the “rules on the field” and focus on maximizing personal gain (social capital, jobs) despite LLM scraping.

Open source “success” as a burden

• Multiple maintainers explicitly hope their projects never “take off” because popularity brings unpaid support, entitlement, and long-term maintenance pressure.
• There’s discussion of:
  • Being harassed to fix old code you no longer understand.
  • Ossifying “ownership” around whoever last touched a messy component.
  • Difficulty balancing a demanding job with serious OSS maintenance.
• Proposals include clearer maintenance-status badges, normalizing forks, self-hosted git, and deliberately releasing code as archives with no implied support.

Toxic feedback, platforms, and mental health

• Several recount early experiences where a single kind comment outweighed multiple cruel ones and kept them publishing.
• Others left Reddit/Twitter due to hostility and low-quality engagement, and now avoid comments entirely or publish where blocking/banning is easy.
• Some advocate blogging without comments, or interacting only in smaller, vetted communities.

Broader reflections on luck, content, and barriers

• Luck is seen as probability, not guarantee: publishing raises odds but doesn’t ensure payoff; many never recoup time invested.
• Attention fragmentation and “content slop” make it harder to be heard, but also increase the value of clear, grounded work.
• Regional laws (e.g., mandatory personal imprints) can make publishing risky by forcing doxxing.