This is a far less pleasant and high-variance process than you make it out to be.
- Posting on Twitter just begs the "get an audience" question. You can't just GET followers, it takes months or years of constant content creation, tagging, hashtagging, etc to get an audience.
- Subreddits are very hit-or-miss, and a lot of them will flat-out ban you for posting your own blog content, even if it's non-monetized OC (been there)
- Hacker News is a single-stream audience, and while occasionally you'll get onto the front page, more often content dies with a few dozen views. And it's not an especially differentiated audience.
For someone whose job is content creation, this might be realistic, but you're asking experts in a field -- whose primary job is research, and being an expert, not social media outreach -- to spend a huge portion of their time on audience generation and self-promotion. That's not realistic.
I hate Medium, for a ton of reasons, but it succeeds at making it easy for one-off or two-off writers to get a large audience without investing years of work on it. Sure, the audience isn't WORTH a lot to them (they can't monetize it, and it could get pulled from under them at the drop of a hat), but if the goal is to spread a message or get a post read, sorry, it's still a very viable outlet for doing that.
Sharing on those sites is pretty hit or miss. I posted a blog post I wrote here once, went pretty much ignored. Someone else posted it (big company engineering blog) same link and it was on the front page for awhile with some interesting discussion. I almost missed all of it too.
- Posting on Twitter just begs the "get an audience" question. You can't just GET followers, it takes months or years of constant content creation, tagging, hashtagging, etc to get an audience.
- Subreddits are very hit-or-miss, and a lot of them will flat-out ban you for posting your own blog content, even if it's non-monetized OC (been there)
- Hacker News is a single-stream audience, and while occasionally you'll get onto the front page, more often content dies with a few dozen views. And it's not an especially differentiated audience.
For someone whose job is content creation, this might be realistic, but you're asking experts in a field -- whose primary job is research, and being an expert, not social media outreach -- to spend a huge portion of their time on audience generation and self-promotion. That's not realistic.
I hate Medium, for a ton of reasons, but it succeeds at making it easy for one-off or two-off writers to get a large audience without investing years of work on it. Sure, the audience isn't WORTH a lot to them (they can't monetize it, and it could get pulled from under them at the drop of a hat), but if the goal is to spread a message or get a post read, sorry, it's still a very viable outlet for doing that.