Posting on the Internet Frightens Me
Article URL: https://adayinthelifeof.nl/2026/04/16/posting-on-the-internet.html Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47796601 Points: 1 # Comments: 0
Article URL: https://adayinthelifeof.nl/2026/04/16/posting-on-the-internet.html
Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47796601
First of all, please understand that I’m someone who has a clear way of visualizing my thoughts, but struggles to communicate them verbally or through written text like posts. Being Dutch already brings a certain directness or bluntness into the mix, so when I try to be concise, it can sometimes come across as me being an a-hole. Sometimes that’s probably true, but most of the time, it’s not meant that way. It’s something I’ve been struggling with for about 48 trips around the sun. So I’m not trying to paint people in a bad light in this post.
What I’m trying to say is that — like anyone else — I have ideas, I have time, and I like to program. This usually results in mostly half-finished projects where interest has faded over time. I’m mostly a solo developer with — let’s be frank — no friends (or at least none in the programming world) who share my interests. That makes it hard when you get stuck or just want to know if your design ideas are actually good. With the rise of AI, I can discuss ideas with different LLMs at different levels, and ask for suggestions, corrections, or alternatives for what I want to do. I believe they are quite good at it, and considering the people I work with on a daily basis, I think they often outperform them when it comes to this kind of feedback.
So when I dive into a new idea, I tend to spend a lot of time on it — give it 110%, so to speak. Sometimes my wife has to stop me, and thankfully she takes better care of me than I do. But since I don’t have a large network of users, I struggle with reaching out to people and talking about my projects. I can try posting in some subreddits, maybe try Hacker News a couple of times in the hope it gets picked up. But beyond that… I just don’t know. It often results in just another project in the GitHub archive vault.
Six months ago, I had a problem I couldn’t solve the way I wanted, because the existing software was either too hard to set up and maintain, or didn’t provide all the features I needed. So I did what I do best: I coded. And like always, I showed it to some people who politely listened while being busy with other things, but I never got any real feedback. Of course, the odds of building a solution for someone who happens to have the exact same problem are low, so I understand that not everyone wants to spend more than five seconds looking at something they don’t care about.
And honestly, most — probably all — projects are doomed anyway. Even if you love it, most likely nobody else will. And I think that’s fine. Not all software is meant to become a big (open source) project, or something that can put food on the table if marketed correctly. It’s like the lottery: there’s a 100% guarantee that someone will win, but the odds that it will be you are tiny. The best I can do is buy many lottery tickets.
But still, like every other time, I get relatively little feedback. So I make a few posts on Hacker News, Reddit, and call it a day. But nowadays, I’m afraid to actually post things.