Ask HN: Is maintaining a personal blog still worth 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/

Writing should be for _you_ not for others. If it's not, then you won't be able to maintain it anyway. IMO yes it's still worth it if only to synthesize new thoughts, show potential employers you _think_, and to maintain a journal-like catalog of your past mindsets.

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'm curious, which personal blogs do you read and aspire to emulate?

There's a significant difference between 'personal' blogs, which are free and genuinely personal, and the 'creator community' of individuals aiming to launch revenue-generating paid newsletters.

It's important not to confuse these two groups, as I see many more people now in the latter category than the former.

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!

I've started like six blogs in my life. For each I write between two and five entries, then give up on it. Four of them have been tech-focused.

Part of my giving-up is admittedly just laziness on my end, but a lot of it is that I don't feel like I have enough interesting stuff to say about technology to warrant a whole blog. Most of my opinions on tech tend to be relatively vanilla, or at least "mainstream for the quasi-academic engineer".

I will probably start at least one more in the future, but I feel like I might enjoy it more if I decide to confine it more to personal anecdotes and heartfelt stuff.

As it stands, the closest thing I really have to a blog sharing my personal opinion on tech is my HN feed honestly.

> How do you find readers

I don't, that's what search engines are for. If people know what keywords to lookup, and are willing to go an extra mile (browse all pages of the Google search) they will eventually find your blog. If you have done a good job, it may land on the first page of search results.

> Where do you share your content?

Random short off-topic ramblings on X. Discussion oriented stuff on Reddit. Personal long-form opinion/perspectives on personal blog & knowledge base.

> why do you keep writing

For myself, I do not owe anyone anything, I don't plan to "build a brand" (or rather I have failed to do that), writing is a form of expression, that's it.

Whenever my gut says, this "thought" needs to get out of your head because you have been wasting a lot of time thinking about it, that's usually my cue to draft a post.

I wrote two blog posts about reverse-engineering a Gamecube video game that I'm quite proud of. I put links to those posts on my resume. I don't know whether it made an impact, but they hired me.

The primary reason I keep writing is that this, the plain written word, is The Platform to transport ideas in time and space. It has passed the test of time in ways that each of those platforms you mention have not (nor any other medium, e.g. video, etc. at least in our lifetimes).

I think of those platforms more as distribution / syndication mediums, using them for stuff like throwing it out there and reach others (which I somewhat care about because the topics I write about are those I like to exchange opinions about with others, but not obsess in terms of needing validation) and keep some degree of isolation from their policies, relative importance vs others, algorithms, UI/UX choices etc.

It is a difficult question. I personally no longer run anything close to a blog.

That said, in the few instances when I stumbled upon someone's writeup, even when I disagreed with what they wrote I took a moment to appreciate the medium used ( some are into minimalism, some like amusing retro feel enforced by very new framework ). I think I even once reached out to someone to ask what they used to generate such and such effect.

Still.. I am not certain if that qualifies as meaningful connection.

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.

Blogger for more than 20 years. I love writing and I can't stop. Last year I published 60 or 70 original posts on my two business-focused blogs, and maybe 10 on my personal blogs.

In terms of finding an audience, it starts with being a good writer and having very original outlooks or information to share. Sometimes, that entails stating something provocative or that goes against the hot takes spouted by everyone else.

I've found that using multiple platforms to market your blog posts - and also expanding into other types of creative content, such as videos or newsletters - is the best way to build awareness.

Repurposing content is important. Some great blog posts started out as my own HN comments that seemed to resonate or I thought deserved a wider audience. I'm currently working on a project to turn about 35 blog posts (which originally were published on my niche business newsletter) into a book.

Awareness also requires regular cross-promotion - video descriptions have a direct link to the blog, and social media accounts might mention a single post a half-dozen times over the course of a year.

I spend a lot of time and effort on it, but I like to do it and there are real benefits for my business.

Are you asking if maintaining a personal blog is worth it or if it's still relevant in building your personal brand, and if now, how to build it?

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

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).

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

Maybe not so much a blog, but I believe a developer should maintain their own website, whether that includes a blog or not.

It lets you define yourself and organise your own projects. And (I believe) most importantly, you learn how to maintain a project over many years, which informs you of the most important decisions that need to be made at the start of a new project.

Does this help you get work? Who knows?

In my case, I have been approached by people who saw my website after reading an on-topic comment on this one :)

If you’re worried your blog has to compete AI-generated content, I’m not sure that you should be writing it.

Writing (more than tweets or short comments) is exercise for the mind and a skill that, like most skills, requires practice and repetition to improve.

Writing is a good way to teach yourself how to organize information in a way that someone else finds useful.

Also, to be a good writer, you need to read. A lot. Some writers will resonate or connect with you more than others. Spend some time to figure out why. Maybe you want to adopt elements of their writing styles.

If you're primarily trying to "build your brand," hire a marketing consultant.

YES.

I run a tech blog, mainly about coding and the industry (links in my profile), and it did help me to secure speaking gigs (mainly repurposing popular blog posts into talks), as well as attracted job offers and valuable connections who liked my posts.

I don't promote it much except cross posting to all the short form social networks (x/twitter, mastodon, bsky) and to LinkedIn with some longer "bait" type of content.

IMO there was never a reason to blog other than because it's an activity you enjoyed doing. It's easy to think about the blogs that made it big, but that's because you're not thinking about the vast majority that never hit those numbers. It was always a challenge.

I'd say now is a good time to start a blog. Everyone's sick of the SEO-ridden, AI-ridden garbage out there today. When we return to a world where you can use search engines to find quality content, your investment will pay off.

As a data point I started a blog this past year. It’s very technical content, and it’s driven around 100k visits just sharing it in socials https://jeremymorrell.dev/blog/

My takeaway has been that I’ve dramatically underinvested in public writing in my career and will be doubling down on that. I don’t really care about audience size, but the feedback and engagement from people whose work I respect has been amazing.

It’s also resulted in multiple inquiries from companies, VCs, consulting requests, a podcast invite, etc. Having thoughts written down also helps work conversations where there’s too much context to convey in a meeting. It can establish your credibility and expertise. There are a lot of intangible benefits.

I also think in an age of AI slop, being able to write with a distinctively human voice and perspective is becoming something of a superpower

Success here is the sum of an equation that combines publishing and distribution.

The early days of blogging, the distribution came from RSS feed readers. The minute those fell out of fashion, the distribution loop of self-publishing disappeared.

Medium was clever because it kind of created that built-in but it never took off.

The distribution loop has always been social media which is now drowned out with other noise (you don't need me to explain that dire state of social media).

The nth conclusion becomes newsletters because email remains the lowest common denominator of distribution (other than maybe text message but that isn't appropriate here).

I am a founder of a publishing platform (WP Engine) and my entire SWE background is content management. But I'm the first to admit that distribution is everything.

I think maintaining a personal blog or site is important to be able to have a source of record of important stuff you write. But it's a backup. It's not a destination for distribution.

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!