Blogging can just be stating the obvious

Jim Nielsen published a short post on his blog on June 24 titled “Blogging Can Just Be Stating The Obvious”. The argument: writers hold back from publishing ideas that feel too self-evident, and they should not. The post reached the front page of Hacker News, where it collected 466 points and 132 comments — a sign that the feeling it describes is widely shared.

Starting from popups

Nielsen's starting point was a piece by John Gruber about the prompts that now sit between readers and the pages they are trying to read: newsletter sign-up boxes and cookie consent banners. Gruber's conclusion was blunt: “A webpage should show the webpage. An email should show the email.”

What interested Nielsen was less the complaint about popups than the way Gruber framed it — as something that should not need explaining at all. Nielsen compares that position to the child in “The Emperor's New Clothes”, who simply says out loud what everyone can already see.

Why obvious posts still matter

Nielsen admits that he often looks at his own drafts and wonders whether there is anything novel, important or deep in them. A post's point can seem so glaringly obvious to its author that writing it feels like a waste of time. His answer is that real-world annoyance keeps piling up while nobody talks about it, so eventually someone has to put it in a post and bring receipts.

From that he draws what he calls a key ingredient of blogging: the willingness to state something that seems obvious to you but that nobody else is saying. If someone else has already said it, he adds, the job is just as simple — link to them and say yes, this.

The takeaway

The post is a small argument about what makes writing on the web useful. The topics that feel too obvious to bother with are often the ones quietly costing everyone time, and Nielsen says the posts written from that impulse are very often the best ones he reads. Naming a shared friction clearly, he suggests, is worth more than novelty.