[foob]

If you want to see more high quality blog posts, then I highly recommend taking actions to help promote and encourage them. Sign up for a mailing list or subscribe to an RSS feed when you find a blog that consistently produces quality material. Post new or old content on Hacker News, Reddit, Lobsters, Twitter, and other communities where you think they would be a good fit. Upvote and retweet quality content that you run across, and flag stuff that's blatantly marketing spam. Leave comments on the blog or reach out to the author over email. Even as a single individual, these sort of actions have a much bigger impact than you might expect.

I used to blog extensively, and I've spent a lot of time thinking about this. The content I would write was loosely for marketing purposes, but I put a lot of effort into generating high quality content that I would genuinely enjoy reading myself. An article that I spent 50+ hours on and felt very proud of might have a 30% chance of reaching the front page of Hacker News. A fluffy post with a decent title that I spent only an hour or two on would still have a 10-15% chance of front paging. The way the math works out, it's simply much lower ROI to generate quality content. It's also a bit heartbreaking to invest a lot of time making something for other people to enjoy only for nobody to ever see it.

The second chance queue on Hacker News is a major step in the right direction, and I'm grateful for all the times where my posts were given another chance. A lot of great content still slips through the cracks however, and relatively small actions by community members would go a long way towards helping incentives align towards generating quality content.

[netcan]

About 15 years ago I was following some small podcast on my new ipod nano. Nothing too grandiose. It was about beekeeping, worm farming... Probably dozens of listeners, hundreds at most

Anyway, the podcaster went dark for a week and then posted something about hiatus. I sent him a "thanks for the content, I'll be here when you get back" type message.

A week or two later an episode went online. He explained that he has periodic depression issues, read out my message and explained how it made him feel better. He'd been dwelling on "everyone knows and thinks I'm an idiot" thoughts that come with the territory. Just a friendly thanks (to someone providing me a show for free) meant something to him in that moment.

Since then I try make a point of little things like that, especially to little guys.

Let them know you enjoy a blog, if you do. Thank them. Be friendly. We all need encouragement, and I now feel that we also owe it.

And I definitely agree on the promotion too.

[gonehome]

I like to do this too.

It's fun to email an author when I really like their book with a short message that I enjoyed it. I do the same for little open source projects too.

Usually you get a small response back - I think it's one of the best things about the internet.

[saagarjha]

I put my email on the bottom of my blog posts and am invariably delighted whenever I receive mail from people.

[gonehome]

It would be neat to have an HN like place that restricted posts to only blog like content (where the rules are defined in some way to try and prevent marketing blogs/ad-farms).

A subreddit could be the place for this, but it might be tricky to kickstart a community with interesting content. Then if successful could move it to its own community somehow (similar to CMV).

I created one here: https://www.reddit.com/r/hnblogs/

There might be a way to set up rules that lead to interesting posts, if the content is restricted to bloggers posting their own content it could get more attention than competing for space on HN (as long as there are people there to comment).

Happy to open up wiki editing or make suggested changes. [Edit]: I made an announcement post there for suggestions.

Also if you have a personal blog and a favorite post - you can be the first one to submit something, though I might be the only one that ends up reading it :-). [Edit: Anyone reading this please do! There are a decent amount of people clicking the above link so it'd be neat if there were posts that got some traction).

It almost feels like needing to revert to the pre-search engine era when there were pages of curated links to interesting content.

One issue with HN is since it's general links of interesting content it can be hard for personal blogs to compete, maybe a focused community could make it easier.

Someone posted a first blog post, I added one too.

[hagy]

Like your idea! Posted my blog and looking forward to discovering new blogs.

I too miss the days of curated links on personal sites. Occasionally, I'll find a gem consisting of a simple, yet captivating personal sites with links to additional interesting information. The sites almost always appear to have been up for a decade or two, showing they came from those golden days.

If your new subreddit takes off, which I hope it does, it would be cool to start building an organized and curated list of blogs and individual posts on the wiki.

[gonehome]

Yeah I think that would be great.

I've added some guidelines to the sidebar and others have contributed some of their own blog posts, thanks!

[michaelbrooks]

Another place to check out is https://weirdwidewebring.net/ where you can submit your blogs via a GitHub PR. It was created by Jack McDade whose an all-round great guy.

[hopesthoughts]

Webrings were definitely something cool when I was first coming online. I'm glad they're coming back!

[marcus_holmes]

The irony of doing this on Reddit is striking ;)

[thomasahle]

Interesting, I didn't know about the second chance queue. This appears to be the best source of information: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380

Personally I was sad when my tiny python chess engine Sunfish [1] didn't make it past the two-three upvotes stage. However about half a year later somebody else submitted it and it got a lot of traction.

I wonder how accepted it is to resubmit the same, or a version of, your project or blog post, to try your luck again.

[1] https://github.com/thomasahle/sunfish

[alextheparrot]

The FAQ guidance seems to be that a few reposts a year iff the story didn’t already get transaction is fine — seems like a good barometer.

Personally, I’d prefer if someone reposted a good blog post or project rather than trying to develop new things just to have the ability to post something.

[muppetman]

Ha! I was just goggling furiously yesterday to remember the name of Sunfish. I had a .py called "chess.py" on a server. Not anywhere in the .py file is there a URL or a name or an email.

Anyway after cutting and pasting bits of code into Google I finally turned up the github page. You should put some (basic) info into each file you've got there.

Anyway Sunfish is cool, thanks.

[thomasahle]

But then the number of lines would increase :-D

[shams93]

Yeah being buried by the web is a major problem for all creatives not just bloggers. Amazing music for example that has only 20 followers on YouTube. It's so easy for very high quality work to get buried to death we don't think of the web as an engine for waste but it is.

[erikbye]

> Sign up for a mailing list

Which mailing lists? I subscribe to some dev stuff (LKML, etc.) and various OSS lists, but the rest, the ones I see referred to here and elsewhere, typically started by some no-code-wanna-be-entrepreneur trying to monetize and turn mailing lists into a business. Garbage. They are no different from the SEO-optimized ad farm websites polluting the web.

> Post new or old content on Hacker News, Reddit, Lobsters, Twitter,

Are you joking? Reddit and Twitter are the embodiment of almost everything wrong with the modern web. This is not where you look for quality content.

[PakG1]

What do you recommend as a good RSS reader these days? Can't say that I found one I like.

[jeremyperson]

Have you tried Feedly (https://feedly.com/)?

[3nf]

I got used to browser-based plugins early on, and have been stubbornly resisting change.

Sage was great on firefox (for me, at least) for a long time, but got abandoned, I have found "drop feeds" to be a good replacement.

[mhb]

BazQux: https://bazqux.com/

[muppetman]

TinyTinyRSS

I have an instance I host myself that I'm happy to create accounts on if you want to try before you host yourself.

[mjrbrennan]

Not OP, but I use Fiery Feeds on IOS and I'm happy with it.

[Zhyl]

Newsboat :)