Cederic Demoulin

Start of a Blog

5 min read

One of my goals for the second half of 2025 was to start a Blog. I like the idea of self-hosting one's own content instead of just writing for a social media company. A few years ago I stumbled across Publish (on your) own site, syndicate everywhere (POSSE) when the whole Twitter/X drama started and users flocked to other platforms and realized how dependent they are on the people who run them.

In POSSE you publish your ideas on your own site, your own blog, and then share this content across social media or other channels. But POSSE is just how one publishes their ideas, it is not the reason why I want to start a blog.

To start a blog you need something to write about and I have come to believe that I am now in this position.

  1. I wrote my master thesis about Persuasive Technology and Narcos (called Habits Network for a while), a social journaling app I started building in October 2021 and I am continuously developing further. Not only is the field of persuasive technology (how to change a user's behavior without coercion) extremely interesting and gives a lot of good content. It also provides a reason why it is actually important that I start writing this blog.

  2. A system that demonstrates expertise is more persuasive. As I was doing research for my master thesis, I learned, that to make a system more credible to its users, it helps to incorporate expertise by providing information, showing knowledge, experience, and competence. In Influence, Cialdini describes Expertise as an important aspect of the Authority lever of influence and in oinas-kukkonenPersuasiveSystemsDesign2009 the authors define expertise as a principle of system credibility support.
    By writing about persuasive technology and behavior change and linking to it from Narcos, I demonstrate expertise which should, in theory, make the app more persuasive to its users.

  3. This blog is a form of content marketing. By writing about my app I increase my online surface area and I increase the discoverability of the app which will, in theory, lead to more users and therefore better experience for all users.

  4. The fourth reason that makes me start this blog is that I need a way to share how to best use Narcos and what I have learned from using it for more than 4 years now.

There is in fact no need to explain myself why I start this blog but I also learned about the power of public commitment during my research. There is a chance that this is the first and last blog post on this website but by transparently describing my motives and my intentions and by publicly committing to it I increase the odds of writing more blog posts in the future.

Since I also want to improve the quality of my writing, I publicly commit to not use LLMs and writing tools like Grammarly to polish my texts.

Over the course of a year now I created a list of 15 posts I want to write.

Here are the first 3 blog posts I have planned:

  1. The learnings and consequences on Narcos from my master thesis
  2. Why the granularity of tracking activities and people in Narcos is daily.
  3. Smart journaling and journaling in the 2025

Thank you for your time.

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