Why blog if nobody reads it?
323 comments
·February 9, 2025simonw
scoofy
This is exactly why I started my blog about golf.
I was starting https://golfcourse.wiki and I read a bunch by Jimmy Wales, and he focused on his own credibility and openness being a linchpin to wikipedia.
I thought I might as well start a blog then, because in a world of golf media, with few exceptions is mostly a just corporate funded advertisement-as-entertainment slop. I figured I could at least stand out by openly talking about golf in a very different way, by just writing for me, with my target demo being my best golf friend, who sadly passed about the same time I started the blog.
I've got myself a small audience (a few hundred subscribers, and maybe a fourth of that read regularly. I'm more than happy with that. My ideas are almost diametrically opposed to much of the golf world, but I spend a ton of time on almost all of the articles, and I'm very proud of them. I think it lets people who might use the wiki know how serious I am about the wiki as something good for golf not as some way to get rich. I think it does a good job, and it's a good way to waste a few hours/days/weeks.
Agentlien
I noticed this quite well, recently.
The initial reason behind my blog was sharing fun solutions from my work. If I get it approved in a blog post then I can talk about it publicly. Working in game development that's a fairly rare opportunity. I usually share my posts on Reddit for just a handful of nods and a random question or two.
However, I recently had an interview where the interviewers had read my blog and used it as a basis to steer their questions. At that point having put such thought and effort into it felt well worth it. I do believe it's a part of what got me the job.
ghaff
I regularly have conversations with people that end up with some form of "Let's not belabor this over beers but I'll send you a link to something I wrote. It may be a little bit stale but let me know what you think and we can follow up."
Blogging has internal benefits of organizing thoughts or even just being a fun hobby. But it's external validation as well. Sure, writing a book is even more but that's probably 100s of times more work.
TeMPOraL
> "Let's not belabor this over beers but I'll send you a link to something I wrote. It may be a little bit stale but let me know what you think and we can follow up."
How is it being received by those people? I can't help but imagine the response being:
"Okay but then what's the point of us sitting here with beers?"
EDIT:
If I was hanging out talking with someone, and have them terminate an interesting conversation topic by plugging their blog article, I'd feel cut off, and might even start to wonder if they're really seeing me as a friend or colleague, or is this networking for them?
It's not the blog reference itself, but rather cutting off a conversation topic this way, that would irk me in such situation.
vishnugupta
I agree. Mentioning blog in the end is probably a better way. Finish the conversation, chain of thoughts and then before switching over to next topic or when saying byes or even a day or two later send them your post. But not in the middle of a conversation.
luckyandroid
Yeah I agree, someone saying they don't want to talk anymore because they've already written about something stops it being a discussion and makes it into some sort of lecture but without the notes. If you're insisting on telling someone you wrote about the current topic of conversation, you can just mention it and carry on with it. Like authors who go on podcasts, they'll say "Like I wrote in chapter X, I think that..." - the conversation shouldn't be killed off. Comes off as a bit arrogant.
n_ary
Agreed, after a year or two, blogs become your experience logs to prove experience and credibility once the landscape is killed by GenAI slops and SEO scams.
Anyone can generate a big portfolio of projects these days(be it graphics, video, software, writing etc) but blog posts from 2023 and before are proof and undeniable.
Aurornis
> Anyone can generate a big portfolio of projects these days(be it graphics, video, software, writing etc) but blog posts from 2023 and before are proof and undeniable.
I always read blogs if people include them in resumes.
It’s really cool when an applicant has a blog with unique and interesting content, but I can’t remember this happening without us already having been very impressed by the candidate’s resume.
More commonly, blog content was ambiguous about the applicant’s skills. For example, when someone applies to an embedded job but has a blog of beginner level Arduino projects, is that because they’re an expert creating tutorials for beginners, or because they are a beginner and these entry-level projects represent their skill level?
I also think people greatly overestimate the idea that someone will LLM their way into a great blog, and they greatly underestimate the difficulty of forging timestamps. Even git timestamps are easy to fake. Your interviewers aren’t going to scrutinize the Wayback machine for evidence, but not being indexed isn’t proof that it wasn’t there anyway.
Retr0id
> is that because they’re an expert creating tutorials for beginners, or because they are a beginner and these entry-level projects represent their skill level?
You can tell by reading one of them though, right? For a subject I'm an expert at, I can tell the difference between an expert talking about the basics, and a beginner doing the same.
jwagenet
Maybe it’s different in embedded, but as a mech e: any moderately complex hardware project will likely cost orders of magnitude more than a software project to prototype and manufacture. Off the self electronic parts have become much cheaper, but if you need more than some plastic, 3D parts it’s still expensive.
scinadier
I've been treating public Git repository commits in the same vein - a receipt of incremental changes that show that an individual can do some programming. Granted this is not fool-proof - like all things that are complex, it needs to be evaluated with a suite of other factors and conditions to be determined valid. A website written in a personal voice is one of these factors.
momento
I often wonder if work experience on your resume pre-2023 will become a hot commodity for employment in the coming years.
null
deadbabe
A dark pattern on your self hosted blogging website is to backdate blog posts and make yourself seem very good at predicting future trends.
There is no reason why you have to write a blog over a long period of time, you could quickly pump out several blog posts and link to them to establish credibility quickly.
vishnugupta
If some one is determined to find out the authenticity then it’s possible right? Like Waybackmachine or similar tools?
sebmellen
We need better timestamping services for this.
I tried to write out an initial spec here, but I haven’t been able to write any implementations yet: https://github.com/sebmellen/proof-of-origination.
cutemonster
Links submitted to Reddit or HN then a bit work as proofs of the publication date
since one cannot backdate timestamps on Reddit and HN. Hmm but you can still rewrite the content a bit
fragmede
if you're that popular, there should be some history in archive.org or archive.is
null
gbanis
[dead]
FpUser
>"Anyone can generate a big portfolio of projects these days"
LOL. I could easily do it "back in those days". The difference is that in my particular case (I specialize in developing new software products for clients) I also have long list of names with actual phone numbers, emails, addresses etc. So anyone can call and verify.
Never blogged. Have no time / desire
ProllyInfamous
I ran a personal blog ~2007-2013, retiring it after one-too-many'a THC-infused evening of personal expression.
Several of my posts received 100k+ views, one with 1M+, typically exploring minor technical hacks. A couple posts resulted in minor sales of bespoke hardware adapters, which was a nice "side hustle" for a few years. None of this would ever had made me rich, but it was a neat introduction to information sharing.
My resumé still lists several articles written about my blogposts, in publications including Wired, Hack-A-Day, &c... although the links obviously haven't worked for over a decade.
I've recently registered a new domain for my next blog attempt, which will mostly just be a record of things I find interesting on that particular day. If you ever read Whole Earth Catalogue, my hope is for my own modern-day version of the excellent WEC-inspired https://kk.org/cooltools/ [not me/mine].
7bit
> Several of my posts received 100k+ views, one with 1M+, typically exploring minor technical hacks.
1M+ is definitely no one
alphazard
Whether or not someone has written up or is willing to write up their opinion is a good way to determine how seriously to take that opinion.
Using that as a first pass has led to more time engaging with thoughtful people about well considered ideas, and less time listening to the noise that shows up when you solicit opinions.
MortyWaves
I could swear this post and your comment were something I already read word for word a few days ago
begueradj
Many people wrote about why it is important to blog, but I never heard of what you just stated about credibility. That's the best and most convincing thing I ever heard. Thank you very much for having shared it here.
afterburner
It's just self-marketing. Nothing new.
ghaff
That trivializes it, I think. A ton of what people do related to their jobs is marketing at some level. A lot of people here probably resent marketing and self-promotion (to a certain level) but that's the way the world works. If no one has any idea what you do, either directly or through your manager, guess who is getting the chop if the company cuts back even a little.
bawolff
I think the key is that its high effort self marketing. Its proving you are willing to put in work which is hard to fake.
layer8
If I smell self-marketing, it reduces your credibility to me.
iainctduncan
There is nothing "just" about marketing. Whether for you or a company.
wvh
Surface area. Networking. Openness to those that for whatever reason click and might become friends, business associates and romantic partners. Few will click, but those few will have shown at least some interest in you and what you do. It took divorce and loneliness for me to understand the concept of surface area, to exist, to not be invisible and anonymous, but create tiny opportunities for connection. It's pretty much all we can do as busy adults.
Wololooo
Is this a way to make me feel less bad about gaining a bit too much weight?
Joking apart this is a very valid point, often you can just fall onto something where people have taken the time to put something out there, you documented your thought or your little haven of work, whatever it is, for other to find eventually. It is nice and valuable.
In a day and age where everything needs to have meaning or be productive, it is healthy to make things that serve no other purpose but to be. It will be eventually lost to time and noise, but so is everyone existence on this earth.
tomjuggler
I blog because once a post of mine made the front page of HN and you guys crashed my VPS with traffic for 2 days straight - including my work site hosted on the same server. I will cherish that moment of excitement and terror for the rest of my days
beretguy
You're welcome!
BonitaPersona
It was our pleasure!
black_puppydog
Free DDoS red-teaming! <3
itskarad
i love this comment
RataNova
This is pure internet chaos at its finest!
benrutter
A lot of the comments here are about blogging to nobody (which I do) but I wanted to share how much I love reading people's personal blogs.
I follow a bunch of developers (surprise surprise) and read mostly technical blogs, I've found a lot of developers mix writing blog posts about their personal and family life alongside technical posts. As I've been reading I've found those are some of my favourite posts, as someone who balancing professional and open source development with parenting, I really love hearing about other people's experiences doing the same. It's not a side that I read much about elsewhere outside of personal blogs.
That's a long way of me saying, keep on blogging strangers, someone might be reading!
thibaultamartin
I concur! Several of us also subscribe to your blogs' RSS feeds. If you're one of the nice people who put the full content of their blog posts into their feed, you might not see me as a visitor, but I definitely read and enjoy your blog.
As an occasional blog writer myself, I also like to announce manually on my social platforms I use (Mastodon and LinkedIn) when I blogged, and send a link to those socials post. The [full rationale is here][1]. They make it feel less like shouting in the void, which helps me stay motivated. I would be lying if I said I didn't enjoy the occasional likes and boosts I get from these, too :)
Simon Willison also has [good advice on how to write more][2], that I must admit I'm struggling to follow myself.
[1]: https://ergaster.org/posts/2024/03/06-welcoming-feedback/
[2]: https://bsky.app/profile/simonwillison.net/post/3leuudyabks2...
DoingIsLearning
> I follow a bunch of developers (surprise surprise) and read mostly technical blogs
As a follow-up, how do you go about discovering the people you keep up with if they are not personal acquaintances?
benrutter
Big one for me is that I follow blogs of developers for open source projects I'm interested in. If I see someone is working on a cool project I'll check out their github profile, and that sometimes turns up a personal blog.
whereistejas
I often do this by reading the bio of different HN commenters or X (aka, stalking) and adding the RSS feed to my news reader app (or, bookmarking).
zoogeny
Totally tangential, but I was thinking this morning about my experience as a kid when my parents forced me to be an alter boy at our local church. There are these occasional observances where the church is obligated to put on a special service, part of a liturgical calendar. Sometimes these happen at like 11am on a Wednesday. It was nice to get out of school to go and burn some incense and follow the priest around while he mumble prayers, instead of sitting bored out of my mind memorizing times tables or whatever.
For the majority of these minor observances, almost no one showed up. Maybe you'd get a couple of old ladies but otherwise the church was completely empty. We'd be doing this elaborate stage show for no one.
It made me think of a history YouTube video I watched about some ancient religion. The priests had a complex daily ritual including setting out meals for the Gods, saying certain prayers including certain physical movements like bowing, prostrating, raising their hands. They would have to do certain cleaning rituals including incense and sweeping. Super elaborate stuff. But it was all in an inner chamber and no one would come and even watch them. They just did this ritual for no one.
I suppose I think it is interesting to see a parallel here. Like, us tech people are spiritual hermits, cargo-culting our own incantations. We're keeping a tradition alive that in only rare cases actually has an audience because we have a some faith in its utility.
guappa
Where was this? Because in Italy i've never heard of anyone allowed to miss school for that by their parents.
totallykvothe
I think your comment highlights a fundamental difference in how most modern people understand religion from how our ancestors did.
In the pre-1970 Catholic mass, the priest faced the altar and spoke in Latin. The mass was changed in 1970 so the priest faces the people and speaks in the vernacular. The shift in understanding is clear. Religion used to be about God, and about our obligations to and relationships with Him. This was true across all religions. Now, most people think of it as primarily a community building exercise. This modern mindset is the only context in which your comment makes sense. Premodern catholics would be baffled at it
zoogeny
I think it may be the case that your possession of a tidbit of trivia and your particular interpretation of changes/reforms that came after Vatican II is causing you to interpret my comment in a different light than it was meant.
I was actually envisioning something closer to the monastery that Alyosha was a part of in The Brothers Karamazov. It reminds me of the cliché admonishment of priests that pray in the streets (something that pops up in the Bhagavad Gita long before it does in the words of Jesus). It is worth pondering the lengths to which monks would go to prove their holiness was genuine and not the result of seeking attention.
It is true that at the time of my writing the comment, the top comment was a popular blogger extolling the benefits of clout that one might gain from writing a blog that gains some following. But in general, that is a feat most will never achieve. For the rest, they are more like the premodern adherents, doing the ritual for some other reason. The blog post we are discussing is literally about that kind of self-justification.
If you know you will not (or perhaps should not) blog to gain an audience, why should you do it?
p3rls
In the spirit of the tangent because you know contemporary success is vanity and you should aim at what's eternal. The western tradition is filled with admonitions since the Greeks about these things-- Seneca's letter 7 "on crowds", everything written by Epicurus, the entire life of Diogenes... Montaigne "on glory"
marcus_holmes
>If you know you will not (or perhaps should not) blog to gain an audience, why should you do it?
I'm an atheist, so (knowing there are no gods) should I perform a ritual?
Is the ritual for the gods' benefit, or for mine?
Is the ritual for its own sake, something we do because we have always done it?
qilthewise
I'm concerned about this one thing, if I write and share my thoughts on my blog (and the internet) wouldn't I become a source for AI training and modeling? Could AI end up resembling me by using my ideas and thought process? I wouldn't want my thoughts and ideas to be used in that way, creating a form of immortality.
ZeWaren
I document technical things on my blog and hardly anyone reads it. But later on when I need that thing again, I just go there and I have the perfect documentation available for the topic (it's perfect since I wrote it hahaha).
Sylamore
I used to do that, now I just keep a OneNote with the things that would have been blog entries once upon a time - it's available across all my devices and I can export it to PDF when I do need to share something with someone - and I don't have to worry about someone defacing or hacking the site hosting it.
jakub_g
I'm not a heavy blogger though I have a bunch of StackOverflow answers, gists etc.
It happened to me a few times that I forgot I wrote something down, only to find it via google search.
cheema33
I used to do that. Use OneNote. And then I discovered that OneNote really sucks when it comes to 1. Syncing across devices. 2. Large documents
I searched high and low and found Obsidian. Now the idea of using OneNote sends shivers down my spine.
ethanol-brain
In my experience, OneNote syncs more reliably than Obsidian. Although, I still prefer using Obsidian for other reasons.
tverbeure
This happens to me all the time. I could make notes about how I did something and lose them, or I could spend an hour or two extra and convert it into a blog post, and I'll be able to refer to it over and over again.
XCSme
Same, I created https://softuts.com exactly for this, to write fixes to technical issues I encounter, when I can't find another solution via a Google search.
There starts to be some traffic, I am happy to assume that any person visits my blog for a fix will probably save a good amount of debugging time.
jinushaun
That’s why I blog. It’s basically long-form GitHub gist, publicly available on the internet.
gitprolinux
I blog for own tech support. TopCoders.cloud
alok-g
Hopefully you are also contributing knowledge to AI so that it becomes more discoverable to others as well.
RataNova
It’s like building your own personal knowledge base
snozolli
Same. I keep a couple of blogs on different topics and try to write up any challenge I come across. Not only does it help to cement ideas in my head and expose areas I'm foggy about, but I've referred back to my previous experience this way countless times.
plufz
Do you get any traffic? Does it feel worth the extra time compared to just doing local notes?
snozolli
I don't know. I stopped bothering to look, since it's never going to drive income or anything. It's worth it to me because 1) I get to help others, which brings satisfaction and 2) I can read what I wrote from anywhere and send someone a link if necessary.
forinti
Over the years, my blog has become exactly that.
xenodium
I still believe in blogging. For anyone keen on getting started or switch providers, I recenly launched a no-nonsense service: https://LMNO.lol. The experience feels more like taking notes than blogging (low friction).
My blog is https://lmno.lol/alvaro (also at https://xenodium.com)
rambambram
Subscribed.
I like your 'fortune cookie' that provides a username for frictionless onboarding!
dwood_dev
I generally blog about things that took a week+ of research and I want to save some other poor bastard the pain of what I had to piece together.
This is especially useful because link-rot means that resources I was able to uncover might not be available in the future. A few years ago I did a massive amount of research into internals of old unixes for data recovery and maintenance of said systems in the modern era(machines attached to million dollar pieces of testing equipment go away when the machine does). I was maintaining and upgrading(mostly scsi2sd) and backing up systems that all predated y2k. Most of my research references are now dead links to nowhere. I now print to pdf as well as take archive.is links of all my referenced sources.
I'm generally terrible about blogging, but I'm changing that for 2025. I'm now in a position where I'm solutions architecting a lot of things as my primary day job. This makes easy blog post subjects that not only clarify my thoughts and understanding, but end up being the basis for the internal documentation on the subject.
A lot of what I now do is in terraform, cloudformation, golang, or Python. I make sure when I publish my blog post, I include a complete working example. For all my terraform, all one has to do is clone and run terraform apply, after satisfying the barebones prerequisites.
twistadias
Mind sharing a link to your blog?
genezeta
I write in the hope that nobody ever reads it. It's all sad and depressing stuff.
I could, as some have suggested, write but not publish it online. But... probably in some way it's the habit from older times when I wrote about programming. In any case I do delete most of the stuff without ever uploading it, and frequently delete a lot of the stuff I did upload.
I write because it helps me seeing it written down. I write because I don't speak much with anyone any more.
greazy
I've also started writing sad and depressing stuff just for me. It's helped my mental health tremendously.
I've only just started. How long have you been writing and do you publish it online?
genezeta
I'm glad it helps you :)
The things I write currently about, it's been a couple of years I guess. I do put it up on my blog, yes. Not all of it, and as I said I do delete some after a while. In general I do consider anything I write as temporary. Deleting things it's also part of the process or something.
minimaxir
Over a decade, I've learnt to blog as if no one will ever read my blog posts. With social referral traffic now completely dead, the only traffic I get to my blog is when my posts appear on Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=minimaxir.com), and even that is going down year-over-year.
However, the process of writing a blog post forces me to invent new workflows and is in itself very educational, so it's not a waste of time or a mistake even if no one reads it.
araes
> With social referral traffic now completely dead, the only traffic I get to my blog is when my posts appear on Hacker News
Not being a blog writer, that seems rather crazy to hear with how "social" the WWW has supposedly gotten. WP claims, there's 33 sites "with at least 100 million (monthly) active users". [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_platforms_with_...
Top sites are up at multi-1000 million / month. Sure, some of the top sites (Youtube, Instagram, TikTok) are very heavily video based. Yet, it still seems amazing that with that many users there's so little "sharing" in terms of long form written essays or blogs. That the situation was actually better in terms of referrals before there was all the sharing? Now there's actually less organic referral traffic, and Hacker News is apparently one of the best. Walled garden issues? Better fit of the subject matter to readers? Completely videos everywhere? Decline of reading in general?
Last stats I could find from dang have:
2022, Nov 3, 5M monthly unique, 10M page views a day, 1300 submissions a day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33454140
2015, Mar 17: 3-3.5M monthly unique, 2.6M page views a day, 300K uniques a day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9220098
Compared to somewhere like Facebook that supposedly have 3070M monthly uniques, yet apparently produce almost no referral traffic whatsoever, that's a wildly disproportionate ratio of effectiveness for the audience size.
Edit: Taken another way, in what seems like a pessimistic view. If only 1% of Facebook still read long form writing. And only 1% of those actually decided a post was worthy of clicking on. That would still amount to 300,000 views. That seems like a lot.
jaza
From my anecdotal experience, of what my close friends share with me via DM these days, sadly it is indeed 95% video, and it is indeed 95% Instagram / TikTok / Facebook / Twitter / YouTube (in descending order). I continue to share with them 75% long-form articles, and 75% personal web sites / mainstream media web sites.
kmmlng
I think we have seen a general trend towards centralized platforms on the internet. Where you had many individual niche sites before, now you have a few all-encompassing platforms. There are some exceptions, but I generally find that many of those platforms want to maximize your time on the platform itself. As a consequence, they do what they can to keep you from leaving the platform via a link to some other website.
atulatul
> I've learnt to blog as if no one will ever read
I agree with the detachment part but when I write about technology, books, ideas/ thoughts, etc. I generally find it 'easier' to imagine as if I am talking to someone in front of me and write in a conversational style. I liked that a couple of my favorite fiction writers used this style and sort of followed it.
jaza
About half my blog articles are technical in nature, and their purpose is primarily to serve as howto docs / "yay I built this thing" write-ups for future me, and for anyone else that's interested. I enjoy writing those articles a bit, although I usually enjoy the hacking that precipitated the writing more.
The other half are me deep-diving into random corners of history, geography, philosophy, economics, anthropology, politics, and the like. I REALLY enjoy writing those articles: both the actual writing of the words; and the hours upon hours spent lost in a smoky haze of Wikipedia, public datasets, Google Books, journal articles, other peoples' blogs, YouTube videos, and so on. AFAIK those articles get few hits, and that's fine with me, it's just my hobby.
Writing on a blog is a very inexpensive way to establish your credibility about different subjects. This pays off later down the line when you can link people to things you've written in the past.
Credibility is a very valuable commodity. It's worth investing in ways to build more of it.
Don't assume people will stumble across your content (though they will eventually via Google). Actively send links to people who you are already engaged in conversation with.
It's not the number of readers you have that matters: it's their quality. I'll take a dozen people reading my stuff who might engage with me usefully or lead to future opportunities over a thousand readers who don't match that criteria.