A blog is like a gillnet

The other night, I was watching Alone, that reality show where people try to survive in the remote wilderness, alone, for as long as possible. Contestants are dropped into the silence of nature, surrounded by cold lakes, tall trees, and the pressing need to eat.

One thing that stood out to me: the gillnets. Folks spend countless hours crafting these handmade nets, tying them to long poles, and setting them out into still water, desperately hoping for a fish. They check back later and celebrate if something’s caught. These small wins are intensely radiant; you can feel it through the screen. As I sip my beer from the comfort of my couch, I cheer with them: fish dinner tonight!

I’ve kept thinking about those gillnets, how they’re designed: the size of the openings tuned for different fish, for different waters, built from experience and instinct. Moving with that idea, it hit me: writing a blog is kind of like setting a gillnet.

You tie your thoughts together: raw strings of feeling, insight, curiosity and cast them into this vast lake we call the internet. You don’t know who or what might come across them. A stranger might stumble on your page at 4am and find something they didn’t know they needed. A friend might glimpse a side of you they’ve never seen. A bot finds your article and bakes it into the training data for some LLM. Maybe nothing happens at all.

Let me tell you a short story about a post I wrote that turned into something unexpected. One of the things I have been working on lately is ThreeKindWords.com. It’s a tiny website that lets you anonymously send someone three postcards over three weeks, each with a single kind word. The recipient finds out who you are on the last card. It’s a fun, slow, and sneaky way to send a message to someone you care about.

I launched it earlier this year and set a goal for myself: could I get 300 cards into the world in one year? I didn’t know if anyone would care. But then a blog post I wrote ended up on the front page of Hacker News, and things kind of exploded. Thousands of people visited. I got a ton of exposure and useful feedback. That single post was responsible for moving over 200 cards.

If we don’t write, and if we don’t share, it’s like sitting on the bank, watching the water, hoping for fish dinner… but with no net, no pole, no line. We can’t expect anything to come back if we don’t send something out. My little Hacker News boost from before never would have happened if I hadn’t of cast that net. I caught some fish, it was awesome. Makes me wanna try again.

So let’s write. Imperfectly. Write something for yourself to read. Don’t expect to catch a ton of fish at first. Instead, see what you pull up from the depths of your world. Some posts are empty nets. Others surprise us.

Let’s believe in the net. Let’s believe in the simple act of casting.