Ask HN: Is maintaining a personal blog still worth it?

The fact that so few people blog these days makes blogging even more influential than it used to be.

You can establish yourself as something of a global expert on some topic just by writing about it a few times a month over the course of a year!

Don't expect people to come to your blog. Practice https://indieweb.org/POSSE - Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere - post things on your blog and then tweet/toot/linkedin/submit-to-hacker-news/share-in-discord etc.

Also, don't worry too much about whether you get traffic at the time you write something. A lot of the reputational value comes from having written something that you can link people to in the future. "Here are my notes about that topic from last year: LINK" - that kind of thing.

There's a lot to be said for writing for its own sake, too. Just writing about a topic forces you to double-check your understanding and do a little bit more research. It's a fantastic way of learning more about the world even if nobody else ever reads it.

Define "worth it", but I've written a blog post about some printer driver issue two years ago and it now happened twice that someone (Older person, not very technical) reached out over email and asked for some further help and I could walk them step by step through using a Terminal, booting into macOS recovery mode and fixing the issue.

The Apple store and Epson told them to do a clean install so they were very grateful and it made me happy that I could help them. Worth it for me!

I write for myself. I don't track, I don't care if people read my blog.

I do mention my blog on my resume together with code repositories. It is some kind of portfolio, and it is a good learning experience for me.

I don't think that it is worth "building a brand", unless you want to specialize in building brands. It's not like someone at Google will ever read your blog and offer you a job; if you want to work at Google, learn how to pass their interview process. If you want to be visible on social media, probably you need to follow a ton of people, engage with them, produce a lot of content and the kind of content that people like or repost. This has nothing to do with a personal blog, though.

Another thing is that if you find it worth blogging about, it's probably niche in the first place. If it's common knowledge, it's probably already on Wikipedia, or StackOverflow, or now some LLM (and if you wait long enough, your blog will be part of the LLM, whether you want it or not).

I see it like FOSS: if you do it with the hope that many people will use it, then I think it's a bad idea. Because you work for free and people will never be happy. If you do it for yourself, it's great!

Well, I've been doing it for over 22... 23? years. I still get regular emails from readers every other week, and I just share the RSS feed (full text, by the way) and have a bot on Mastodon (previously on Twitter) that posts new links or major edits (controlled via post metadata).

I keep writing (https://taoofmac.com) because:

a) my wiki (looks like a blog, but it is a wiki, roughly 9500 pages of it these days - https://taoofmac.com/static/graph) is a public notepad of sorts, and I often do stuff that is either unique enough to not be documented anywhere or of interest to some technical fields (so many people found me because Google search used to work).

b) I refer to my notes frequently and share them, and it helps if they can be made public, especially when dealing with customers.

c) writing is sort of what I do. I like it, and it greatly benefits my ability to recall things. Every engineer on the planet should know how to write and communicate effectively, simply because explaining things always improves your ability to reason about problems.

That said, it's kind of weird to search for something I need to fix and come across my old self from 5-10 years ago.

I would go even further. Trying to develop a “brand” that stands above the noise isn’t worth it.

That’s not saying writing isn’t important. I don’t think I understand a subject unless I can teach it, explain it and argue both sides about why you should and shouldn’t use it.

If I were going to go into independent consulting as oppose to working for consulting companies, I might start a blog a year ahead of time. But it wouldn’t be for discovery. Leveraging and improving my network would be the first strategy and then direct people to it once they knew me.

Most of your questions revolve around acquiring readers and sharing content. I am not sure my reasons for blogging are the same as yours, but I will say that it has been beneficial for me, both personally and for my career. During job searches, it is helpful to have a collection of writing samples that show I am competent and indeed a real human rather than an LLM fabrication. On a personal level, it’s been very rewarding to get emails from people telling me my content helped them in unique ways.

If I had to start over, I would certainly do it again.

Shameless plug: http://rickcarlino.com

I'm not claiming this is true, only that it's how I think about it. All forms of public performance, including blogging, youtubing, singing, dancing, etc. are dominated by the Pareto principle (roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes) and Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is crap). Any success you see anyone having is solely due to survivorship bias. Unless you are already an amateur success, it's very unlikely you have the ability let alone the dedication to pay the price to be anything remotely close to a real success. It's always been this way. It's never been worth it to have a blog. That is, unless it's worth it to you. In that case go for it!

Seems like all of those points about the landscape are exactly why you'd want to work on a personal blog. You can write something that's representative of you.

As for the how: same as always, I think. Write content because you want to do it, then share it through places where you know potential readers are (HN, Bluesky, your friends, etc)

I know that people are also using Substack and similar platforms as they can help with both distribution and marketing, but I know less about that.

Molly White has written about why one should blog, but I can't find the exact piece of writing, so here's a podcast with her instead: https://about.flipboard.com/inside-flipboard/molly-white/

Yes.

I like _writing_ because it's an effective way of learning (at least for me), since explaining something is very different than "just" doing something. I don't track visitors/analytics on my blog, so I don't really care how many people read it, but it forces me to dive just a little bit deeper into topics than I usually would for side projects and experiments. I also have no problem admitting if I misunderstand something and/or that my way of describing something might not be 100% accurate, but at last it forces me to reason about it.

I find that I write a lot about my homelab these days, since a lot of the things I experiment with there are not things I would encounter at work, since they tend to be behind several layers of abstractions (think running bare metal hypervisors and messing around with ansible and zfs pools + hardware vs. getting a new EC2 instance via terraform).

I run my own forked blog template (ink-free for hugo) and have added fun little statistics - turns out, based on a pure word count, I wrote about 1.3x "The Hobbit" by Tolkien since 2016 (~128,000 words: https://chollinger.com/blog/tags/). My blog is decidedly a worse choice as far as literature goes, but writing all these articles taught me a lot.

I think it's absolutely worth it. I recently reflected on two decades of blogging[0], and -- as I elaborated there -- I feel the rise of static site generators has made it more worth it than ever. We talked about this further on a recent episode of Oxide and Friends[1], but I have found that SSGs encourage me to write more because they eliminate all of the WordPress dreck. I think that discussion will also answer many of your questions in terms of why it's so important to write, and why it's further important that your writing be truly yours and not sitting behind someone's proprietary platform. Finally, for more on this, I would recommend Writing for Developers[2], which is loaded with very concrete advice on what to write about.

[0] https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2024/11/16/blogging-through-the...

[1] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/technical-b...

[2] https://www.manning.com/books/writing-for-developers

It's worth it to me.

- I use it as a quick way to answer coworkers' questions ("Here, I already wrote about this problem at <link>, let me know if you have questions!")

- I frequently use my own previous posts for remembering how to do things

I'm not seeking out readers. I basically just need a public place to brain dump. The operating expenses are zero so the only cost is doing the actual writing. My posts are typically short though, so even that cost isn't high (and I can write them whenever I want).

1) I write a personal blog [0] whose posts I sometimes share here [1]. I write mainly to understand what I think and to have a "prepared statement" for conversations I am having with friends. If I develop a brand at some point, great, but it's not the point.

2) Looking at some blogs that routinely do well on HN (e.g. Dan Luu [2], Jake Seliger, [3] or Jeff Kaufman [4]), I don't see a lot of SEO-/algo-aware optimization. I see instead people who are writing persuasively about topics they're knowledgable about. Obviously that's easier said than done. But is there something you know a lot about where you have something burning to say?

3) Nate Silver, Matt Yglesias, and Noah Smith are all successful independent journalists who have written on blogging [5] [6] [7]. I'd probably start with those, but a common theme is they write a lot and they promote/talk shit on social media.

[0] https://setharielgreen.com/blog/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32911306

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fdanluu.com%2F

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=https%3A%2F%2Fjakeseliger.com

[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.jefftk.com%2F

[5] https://www.natesilver.net/p/always-be-blogging

[6] https://www.slowboring.com/p/how-to-get-slightly-better-at-t...

[7] https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/noah-smiths-writing-advice