Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?
161 comments
·November 21, 2025simonw
Brajeshwar
I like Point No. 4. By now, I have enough articles to point to when people ask the same questions over and over. I have been asked, “Do you always have a blog post for these questions?”
Another advice or a deduction that I learnt from reading biographies and many historical books is — write as if you are writing for a stranger, even on your own personal blog/diaries/memoir — when you get older, your younger self will become a stranger and you will have forgotten a lot of things in that life you lived.
simonw
I really like that. It's absolutely true, I constantly find older stuff on my blog that I had entirely forgotten about and it's always interesting to get back in touch with past-me.
Brajeshwar
Oh, absolutely true about finding stuff, and I go like, “Ah! I wrote about that.” I got my search working (abandoned for a long time) and a list of all post archives just so I can find them easier.
Btw, I have had a to-do item for quite a while to copy your blog’s yearly archive link style in the footer. I haven’t figured out a way to make it simpler and I don’t have to deal with it for a long time. :-)
devsda
This is all true but I'm not sure about establishing credibility with a blog, especially when an LLM can help fudge the details.
I like your idea of blogging about TILs. There are shallow posts about TILs(plenty on medium) and then there are posts that mention TILs along with specific gotchas they faced and workarounds on the topic. Those saved me hours of searching/debugging on couple of occasions and I'm glad that they did that.
ghaff
Sites like this one really emphasize monetization. Natural I suppose since it's startup-focused. But people used to be fine with blogs not having a monetary element at all.
HeinzStuckeIt
I wonder how much of that mercenary approach to blogging today resulted ultimately from the 2008 crisis. It feels like there was less pressure to make ends meet, and consequently no pressure to hustle, before that. And maybe it is also the influencer self-branding culture of Instagram being seen as the default internet, so when people do alt-internet things they carry over those same values knowingly or unknowingly.
ksec
My biggest problem so far is with cost. I dont like recurring fees. I could pay a one-time fee for say 100 pages and last an eternality ( or 50 years or something ). I also dont like subscription, and it has nothing to do with subscription fatigue, it is just the way I manage my money since before Youtube or Netflix took off.
And so far I haven't seen any viable options. And right now I use HN comments as more like a blog post.
kukkeliskuu
I use GitHub pages for personal blogs. Connect it with your personal domain name.
al_borland
I recently setup a little blog on tilde.club. They had a built I blogging tool in the CLI, but I wasn’t a huge fan. It gives some hosting space as well and supports php, so I vibe coded a little something that lets me throw markdown files with a date as the file name into a folder. Once created, it posts to the blog. Right now it’s just one long running page (and individual posts can be viewed/linked). I’m debating between adding an archive or just only showing a certain number of posts and letting them age out (unless linking to the specific post). I also have php generating an RSS feed based on the markdown files, so they just works without any fuss.
Of course my biggest issue is that I have started and deleted more blogs than I can count, so I don’t have any useful history, like I would if I would have stuck with one thing for the last 20 years.
jszymborski
Codeberg or GitHub pages are free. For static website hosting, NearlyFreeSpeech.NET is... well... nearly free.
tinix
sdf is great! https://sdf.org/?faq?WEB
kistu_
You could publish it as an onion service! Apart from keeping your computer running and an active internet connection, there isn't any other recurring cost.
simonw
GitHub Pages gives you a neat URL - yourname.github.io - and is free forever and even lets you run GitHub Actions for free to operate a static site builder.
jjude
I blog using 11ty and host with netlify. No cost. There are gitlab pages, github pages and so many different options to blog for free.
ngcc_hk
Struggle quite a bit to share hobby interest via anything including instagram. Might try this. Back to date of html 1.0 and gopher …
I still sad about my favorite go to photography blog was gone dark because of the vendor is sort of gone I guess. Might be we have to live with Buddha worldview - nothing is permanent.
usrbinenv
[flagged]
simonw
It's not. I don't use LLMs to write for me.
I mainly use them as a thesaurus and proof reader, and occasionally let VS Code autocomplete finish a sentence for me when I'm writing longer form pieces.
topato
That's a pretty hefty accusation to level at one of the most prolific Ai/LLM bloggers on HN lol
jasonjmcghee
Spend more time with LLMs - it clearly isn't
notepad0x90
There are just not enough ways to discover personal blogs.
HN is a great source, but you'll notice over time there are always AskHN posts asking something like "What is a site like HN for..", and people trying to build HN clones.
Reddit was good for a while for this, but hasn't been for a long time.
I'm hoping people rediscover/reinvent slashdot.
simonw
If you blog I think it's really important to develop a habit of linking to other people's blogs. That's how blog discovery used to work back in the 200xs and it can still work effectively today.
HeinzStuckeIt
If you mean creating a blogroll to show other blogs you recommend, that is no longer so effective now that mobile phones are most of the world’s default interface to the internet. Themes for common blogging platforms like Wordpress generally hide the sidebar, blogrolls included, on mobile.
simonw
No not a blog roll - more a link blog or a habit of linking back to pieces you found relevant or interesting.
postalcoder
Try hcker.news' small web filter[0], which uses Kagi's small web list[1] to show a hacker news timeline that consists only of personal blogs.
It works really well if you're looking for a cozier timeline.
soiltype
This is really cool, thanks!
BruceEel
While we are here, may I ask what are some blogs you guys read regularly? (Regularly as in: going back to read new articles as opposed to a one-off link shared on some other platform.)
jasonjmcghee
There’s https://kagi.com/smallweb
raincole
The animated basketball makes me dislike this page instantly. Amazing how much attention a 30px height can rob from the main content.
lofaszvanitt
Noone uses Kagi.... compared to the big engines.
emschwartz
I built Scour to help me sift through noisy sources like HN Newest. For each article in my Scour feed, I can click the Show Feeds button to find what other sources that post shows up in. I’ve found that to be quite a nice way of discovering people’s blogs that I wouldn’t have found otherwise.
You can also scour all 14,000+ sources for posts that match your interests.
cosmicgadget
Marginalia is great. Also take a look at https://outerweb.org/explore
AlexAplin
Cloudhiker is pretty healthy as a StumbleUpon revival. I've found lots of great personal blogs and sites across a lot of categories through it. https://cloudhiker.net/
lenkite
I really wish someone came up with an reddit alternative - perhaps stick to STEM + lifestyle topics only to keep things free of national/international politics - and thus free of interference/censorship.
Venn1
Two years ago I started a niche blog and tech site focused on hardware and software guides for Linux creatives. Even set up a forum because I was fed up with digging through scattered mailing lists and Discord servers for information. I like to think it has helped some people and it gives me a chance to practice writing human-readable documentation.
ricardobeat
> But with the revival of personal blogs well underway
Is it? I haven't seen anyone in my circle return to blogging, nor kids of this generation.
Discoverability is going to be a massive problem, since search engines are dead. Maybe word-of-mouth through social media is enough?
JonChesterfield
The content will be discovered just fine. It'll get embedded in the LLMs on the next round of training. Won't be attributed to your blog of course, but an approximation to the information will still get out there.
bji9jhff
Knowing mega corps will suck my blood thanklessly is of no solace.
baconbrand
The way things are going, I’m not sure if the mega corps will ever truly turn a profit off the blood sucking. Maybe suck some USA tax money for a bailout…
In the meantime, there are lots of actual humans trying to do things who will benefit from your knowledge being repackaged and delivered by the blood suckers.
DrewADesign
I honestly can’t wrap my head around people getting excited about companies ingesting their work to munge up and sell without compensation or any attribution. I’m sure the feeling is mutual, but I really don’t get it.
Larrikin
Will an LLM purposefully change facts to incorrect information without fighting you the entire way? Seems like a blog platform could offer a feature where every posts has 3 or 4 factually wrong posts that would only be found by scrapers.
B1FF_PSUVM
> an approximation to the information
Playing telephone has now been automated ...
minimaxir
Social media referral traffic is also dead, mostly due to algorithms that really don’t want users to click out of their websites.
The only exception is Bluesky because it does not have algorithmic feeds, but technical content does not do well as most technical people did not migrate.
dogline
We'll have to get the old (webrings)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring] back in fashion.
VP2262
There's some here https://indieweb.org/webring
FrasiertheLion
I would argue personal blogs are back and Substack is the medium of choice this time around
chickensong
Those aren't the same. Substack has distinct smell.
ricardobeat
Substack to me seems to be 40% self-promotion or advertising a service, 40% long-form LinkedIn posts / AI slop, and the remaining 20% is behind a subscription with eventual freebies. Mostly professional writing. It’s far from being a new blogspot.
freddie_mercury
I agree. Substack feels more like Op Ed writers realised they could make more money by self publishing than by staying at a dying media company with multiple levels of editorial oversight.
To do well on Substack you need to publish pretty regularly, several times a week to keep and build an audience, and the only thing anyone can generate that fast are opinions. So Substack has really just become a decentralised Op Ed page.
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VP2262
Here's a starting point https://peopleandblogs.com/
jclarkcom
I restarted my blog after a 20 year break (https://jonathanclark.com) thanks to AI making taking out the drudgery.
stanmancan
You use AI to write your blog?
jclarkcom
yes, for example this article including charts and summaries were generated by AI. https://jonathanclark.com/posts/ai-coding-million-lines-2025... Typically I act as an editor rather than a direct writer with cursor now replacing word
AstroBen
I had Gemini copy a bunch of text from a personal blog yesterday to answer a query so the content will definitely get read
gerdesj
We could always resurrect WAIS and Gopher.
I sometimes compare Mediawiki vs SharePoint to Web x.0 vs WAIS n Gopher.
One is light on resources, storing just the information with some formatting hints, leaving presentation to standards and the other is SharePoint. The comparison is really about bloat, not functionality, but the two are intertwined.
throwaway5465
SharePoint was, as I remember it, one big unnormalised table. Everything else was views on that.
grahar64
My main advice for engineers is to write a blog. It isn't for anyone else it is to organize your thoughts. But should be presented in a way others can learn from. For a year I published every Tuesday morning, and that schedule made me learn so much so fast.
jjude
I have been blogging since 2003. My reasons,learning, and rewards and why I still blog:
- It is a personal blog = 1st audience is me. Best self-improvement investment I made - I blog for my present self: I blog about what I read, what I'm thinking about a topic, what I learned etc. But also I blog for my future self: the trends I'm noticing, how I should prepare and I am preparing - Since it is a personal blog, sometimes I blog about books I read, sermons I preach, technical notes. All mixed up. - This year got about 40k YTD traffic, which is not bad for a personal blog. Highest traffic came for my post on openwebui.
Benefits I've seen: - I am not selling anything or running ads. So there are no first order monetization - Since I blog about topics that matter to me (career, tech trends), I already have a clear thinking on those topics. So when they come up for discussions, I am able to speak clearly and with depth. That has landed me in promotions, faster career growth, coaching opportunities, and more - People share my blog post when certain topics come up for discussion. This has increased my influence and their respect towards me.
If you are interested to see how my blog has changed over time, I have kept a changelog: https://www.jjude.com/changelog/
ilamont
I have been blogging for decades, personal and work. I look at traffic patterns and see all the comments coming through.
I don't think personal blogs are back.
cosmicgadget
I've been indexing blogs and while I can't definitively say they are back, there are a lot of active bloggers. More than that, there are a lot of people wanting to have blogs to read since everything else has gone to shit.
mandeepj
> Personal blogs are back
They didn’t go anywhere! Ask the folks who have consistently maintained them regardless of current fad
akikoo
https://github.com/outcoldman/hackernews-personal-blogs
List of Public Blogs of Hacker News users
lightveil
the problem I always have with starting a personal blog is that-I want to write about my projects, but I also want to write about introspective life things. And I'm always fearful that introspective life things would detract (perhaps significantly, if they are too revealing) from employers/etc looking at me as a potential hire. This is not so much about politics (I don't find a strident need to blog about my political opinions (yet?)), but just writing about friends, life events, what I thinka bout those, etc.
I've thought about two potential ways of getting around this:
1. Maintain two separate blogs, one professional, one personal, make the personal blog pseudonymous, and put all the things I don't want employers to see over there. This seems fine, but also feels like too much work in practice? (perhaps the work is just of selecting where to put the post after I'm done writing it, though.) 2. Maintain one blog, and not care about market hire or anything like that. This...would work, but I'm not sure about potential bad effects because of this. I could just choose to write completely pseudonymously instead. I'm not sure.
peterspath
I have done the second way. I have split it up in categories, so people can subscribe to different categories rss feeds if they don't want the whole feed. I have ~1000 daily readers now. With all kinds of interests.
cube00
Start with two, you can always merge them later.
> This seems fine, but also feels like too much work in practice?
Once you've finished procrastinating on your perfect stack to run/generate the blog, it's easy to set up a second.
loktarogar
AI scrapes niche blogs, Google deranks or spam drowns them out. It's really not a good time to be starting niche blogs.
simonw
The most depressing thing about AI these days is seeing people cite it as a reason NOT to create useful content!
Feels very nihilistic.
chemotaxis
Bloggers write because in their value system, the result of this effort is a net positive. LLMs show up and, as far as some bloggers are concerned, turn that net positive into a negative. Bloggers stop blogging. That's rational behavior, not nihilism?
braza
Yes, it is. I've blogged since 2006, and after the content-oriented-to-SEO boom, I totally lost hope in writing online again. Part of me wants to write for the sake of sharing, but the other part thinks being a free content farm for AI is quite depressing.
On top of that, discoverability is dead, SEO indexing for attribution of original works does not exist, the culture of rehashing content for walled gardens like LinkedIn and Medium is out of control, and the substackzation of writing does not make things optimistic.
loktarogar
I agree!
There's certainly a difference between making useful content for the love of it and making content because you think there's an opportunity to get something out of that (that could be money, but it could also just be appreciation or someone reading your work).
It's demoralising to not get any views on your hard work, and in this economic environment it sometimes feels more worth your time to do any other activity.
You may be the counter-proof to that and I enjoy your blog! But, also a lot of what makes your content useful is timing with depth and that's something that AI can't beat yet
krater23
It's just, no one will read it, beside of some machines. Blogging was fun because you knows that someone is reading it. You had some comments under your articles. When this isn't there, you can just write your stuff in a paper book and put it in your drawer. And today, there is absolutely no one who will read it, or react to it. Only AI inhales the information and shows it without giving credit to people that never will hear about you. You just fill their database with useful data for free. Thats all.
bluefirebrand
Having everything you make stolen and fed into the AI machine absolutely is a good reason not to create anything useful. Or at least a good reason not to post it online
baconbrand
I don’t think it’s a good reason.
I think it’s a reason. It’s certainly demoralizing. Plagiarism sucks and feels bad. If I were to google something and see the AI overview parroting my blog post, sort of almost kind of paraphrasing my words and shoving the link to my actual blog off the phone screen entirely, I think I would personally travel to google headquarters and start swinging a baseball bat.
But… For starters, plagiarism has always been an issue. Even before the internet. Look at Tesla, or Rosalind Franklin. It was an issue on the internet before LLMs showed up. It’s always been trivially easy to copy and paste digital information, and with a little bit of programming to do so at scale. Those weird SEO wordpress blogs with their aggregated/stolen content have been around forever. The web was choked full of plagiarized garbage years before chatgpt was an option or even an idea.
Also consider that the AI machine takes a lot more than your stolen creative output to run. It needs tons of electricity poured into expensive equipment. It’s not clear whether the “stolen data + expensive scientists + expensive graphics cards + metric shittons of electricity” side of the equation is ever going to equal “monthly rate people will pay for access to sort of ok almost sometimes accurate information (a service which has been on offer for free for roughly 2 years and is easy to find for free depending on the company/model/use case)” let alone be lower than it. The plagiarism is not profitable and hopefully unsustainable.
And let’s sit on “access to sort of ok almost accurate information” for a second here. Because I’m pretty sure people looking for this and people looking for a blog written by a real human person who they can build a (parasocial perhaps but still) relationship with and send emails to and follow for more related content are entirely separate demographics. Blog traffic has dropped off because Facebook, Instagram, etc. It was those massive sites, not LLMs, that gutted that part of the internet.
Going back to sustainability, legal challenges to the plagiarism machines do still exist and have traction. The more creators, more bloggers and artists and programmers and more of anyone sharing their stuff online, the more people we have with a very vested stake in ending the plagiarism free for all.
I say get in there, get creating, and get up to some lobbying on the side for good measure. Don’t sit back and let a handful of spoiled nerds and obscenely wealthy old people ruin the joy of creating and sharing things. Maybe drop in more references to baseball bats to make your output less palatable to the monster. I don’t know.
anonnon
> AI scrapes niche blogs
And further, the LLMs will DDOS you in the process, completely disregarding robots.txt, so self-hosting is a pain-in-the-ass, forcing you to use (and trust) something like Cloudflare (or the Anubis, or Kiwiflare).
renegat0x0
I maintain list of personal domains, together with many other things in a database
Here are some reasons to start a personal blog:
1. It's a great way to learn. Teaching something to someone else has always been the best learning tool, and writing about something with an audience in mind is an effective way to capture some of that value.
2. It can be a big boost in job hunting. As a hiring manager two of the most important questions I have about a potential candidate are: Can they code? Can they communicate well? If a candidate has a blog with just two articles on it that hasn't been updated in five years that's still a big boost over candidates with nothing like that at all. In a competitive market that could be the boost you need to make it from the resume review to the first round.
3. If you blog more frequently than that it can be a really valuable resource for your future self. I love being able to look back on what I was thinking and writing about ten years ago. Having a good tagging system helps with this too - I can review my tag of "scaling" or "postgresql" and see a timeline of how my understanding developed.
4. It's a great way to help establish credibility. If someone asks you about X and you have a blog entry about X from five years ago you can point them to that.
5. Building a blog is really fun! It used to be one of the classic starter projects for new web developers, I think that needs to come back. It's a fun project and one that's great to keep on hacking on long into the future.
Notably none of the above reasons require your blog to attract readers! There's a ton of value to be had even if nobody actually reads the thing.
As a general rule, assume nobody will read your blog unless you actively encourage them to. That's fine. What matters isn't the quantity of readers, it's their quality. I'd rather have a piece read by just a single person that leads to a new opportunity for me than 1,000 people who read it and never interact with me ever again.
If you DO start to get readers things get even more valuable. I've been blogging since 2002 and most of the opportunities in my career came from people I met via blogging. Today I get invited to all sorts of interesting events because I have a prominent blog covering stuff relating to AI and LLMs.
But I do honestly think that a blog is a powerful professional tool even if nobody else is reading it at all.
If you want to give it a go I've written a few things that might be useful:
- What to blog about: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/6/what-to-blog-about/ - Today I learned and write about your projects
- My approach to running a link blog - https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/22/link-blog/ - aka write about stuff you've found