--- title: Blogging Can Just Be Stating The Obvious | daily.dev description: Jim Nielsen reflects on the value of blogging about obvious things, inspired by John Gruber's piece on intrusive website popups. He argues that stating what... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/blogging-can-just-be-stating-the-obvious-h4rubnwdm twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Blogging Can Just Be Stating The Obvious | daily.dev og:description: Jim Nielsen reflects on the value of blogging about obvious things, inspired by John Gruber's piece on intrusive website popups. He argues that stating what... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/blogging-can-just-be-stating-the-obvious-h4rubnwdm og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/h4RuBNWdM.png og:image:alt: Blogging Can Just Be Stating The Obvious og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Blogging Can Just Be Stating The Obvious **[Lobsters](https://daily.dev/sources/lobsters)** · 2 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Jim Nielsen reflects on the value of blogging about obvious things, inspired by John Gruber's piece on intrusive website popups. He argues that stating what seems self-evident — like 'a webpage should show the webpage' — is often the most valuable kind of blogging, especially when real-world annoyances pile up and nobody else is calling them out. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 2 discussions and 266 comments across hackernews, lobsters (as of 2026-07-27). **TL;DR:** The HN community broadly agrees that blogging obvious things is valuable — because what's obvious to one person is new to another, every new cohort needs to learn, and a writer's unique voice adds value even to well-trodden ideas. A minority raises concerns about information redundancy and the demotivating effect of feeling like everything has been said better before. **Sentiment:** 72% positive · 20% mixed · 8% skeptical **The case for** - There is always a new cohort of people encountering an idea for the first time (Curse of Knowledge), so restating the obvious serves a real audience. - A writer's unique voice and perspective make even familiar ideas feel fresh and can reach people who wouldn't engage with other versions. - Writing the 'obvious' version of something often becomes the canonical reference, since most knowledge lives in an awkward middle ground where nobody has written a clean account. - Blogging about obvious things validates readers who already sensed something was true but hadn't seen it articulated, and can spark useful discussion. - Personal blogs serve as a record of the author's thinking over time, which has value independent of novelty. **The pushback** - Experienced readers grow fatigued seeing the same ideas recycled endlessly (e.g., the 200th post about Unix pipes on HN). - The 'attention marketplace' is already saturated with mediocre content, and adding more redundant posts may drown out genuinely valuable signals. - LLMs can now produce higher-quality, more tailored versions of common-knowledge content on demand, reducing the marginal value of such blog posts. - The credentialed or most capable explainers are often the least motivated to write, leaving the field to less rigorous voices. **By community** - hackernews (positive): Commenters enthusiastically support the idea, citing the Curse of Knowledge, xkcd 1053, and the value of personal voice, with only a small thread pushing back on redundancy and LLM displacement. - lobsters (mixed): No comments were present, so no signal beyond the single upvote. **Hottest debate:** Whether the proliferation of LLMs makes human blogging of obvious/common-knowledge content more or less worthwhile. **Open questions** - At what point does restating the obvious become net-negative noise rather than useful signal for new audiences? - How should bloggers balance writing for themselves versus optimizing for impact in an increasingly AI-saturated information environment? - Will AI-driven search summaries ultimately help or hurt independent personal blogs? **Highlights** > A couple other versions of this that have always stood out to me: 1) There's always a new cohort of people that don't know the things you know. You assume since you know it, everyone does. But kids coming up, or whoever, aren't you. They don't know this stuff yet. You can easily be the first time they've heard "make something people want" and where that comes from. The Curse of Knowledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge 2) There's always another tone/anecdote/verse that makes whatever idea more palatable to someone out there. They might not like the PG version, or the Wired version or the Daring Fireball version, whatever. There's probably some version of you in this lesson that someone out there vibes better with. > — [nate on hackernews · 5 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48667381) > The most useful blogs I read aren't the ones with novel ideas. They're the ones where someone took something I vaguely understood and wrote it down clearly enough that I could explain it to someone else. That's surprisingly rare and valuable. Most knowledge lives in this awkward middle ground where everyone sort of knows it but nobody has written a clean version. The person willing to write the obvious version usually ends up being the reference. > — [Ozzie-D on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48667656) > When I look back on the really helpful blog posts I have read, they have all been really basic. Whether they described a programming technique or a recipe for a new meal, it was a clear description that was important - not how esoteric the knowledge was. There is a place for complex blog posts on arcane subjects but posts on "common knowledge" are even more important. There is a 15 year old out there somewhere that needs to know how to use the different smart pointers in C++ or how to properly care for a cast iron pan. > — [AndrewStephens on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48667763) > Thank you for sharing this observation. I had a post on here this week that was briefly popular. There were numerous folks who posted that the material “wasn’t new.” I felt like it should be implicit that people who already know what I was writing about are not the target audience. But here they were, commenting. At the same time, the page got upvoted quite a lot and the comments were filled with folks who had lots of interesting reactions and additions. Despite the fact that this was “old news”, it seemed implicit that for many it was new news. Sometimes we should trigger conversation. I believe we shouldn’t index on novelty- we should index on impact. Your post is a nice defense of those who discover and share what they discover. > — [0o\_MrPatrick\_o0 on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48668060) > Something obvious to others may not be obvious to you - and to be fair it was a key ingredient in blogging. I find it extremely sad that blogging shifted from personal writing to a performative act - we can feel ashamed stating something obvious because the expectation is to get approvals and shares, rather than us writing something we find intriguing, interesting or worth writing down. > — [f4stjack on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48669504) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48666927) · 466 points · 266 comments - [lobsters](https://lobste.rs/s/yijxwe/blogging_can_just_be_stating_obvious) · 1 points · 0 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Saying the obvious thing](https://daily.dev/posts/saying-the-obvious-thing-azn1suyjp) · sean goedecke · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Blog about things you don't understand yet](https://daily.dev/posts/blog-about-things-you-don-t-understand-yet-aseoyfz7q) · sean goedecke · 14 upvotes · 2 comments - [Anti-Patterns in Software Blogging](https://daily.dev/posts/anti-patterns-in-software-blogging-y2osaiwiw) · Lobsters · 5 upvotes · 1 comments - [15 years of blogging](https://daily.dev/posts/15-years-of-blogging-ixnocnoma) · Read the Tea Leaves · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#career](https://daily.dev/tags/career) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/blogging-can-just-be-stating-the-obvious-h4rubnwdm) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Blogging Can Just Be Stating The Obvious","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/blogging-can-just-be-stating-the-obvious-h4rubnwdm","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/blogging-can-just-be-stating-the-obvious-h4rubnwdm"},"datePublished":"2026-07-27T15:58:44.150Z","dateModified":"2026-07-27T16:07:40.829Z","description":"Jim Nielsen reflects on the value of blogging about obvious things, inspired by John Gruber's piece on intrusive website popups. 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