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by BayesianDice 1860 days ago
I agree with comments saying that a key point is producing content. I'd spent a couple of years of considering starting a blog (with no commercial/monetisation, but somewhere to post thoughts on technology / games / books I find interesting) and trying out various platforms/solutions and producing very little. Then I finally got started with a simple Hugo/Github/Netlify setup, with the plan of adding more technology bells and whistles if readership or my inspiration to continue producing content justifies it.

A question on which I'd be interested in views: how important or otherwise do people consider the ability to sign up for a mailing list / newsletter to be informed of new content? I dislike the in-your-face modal pop-ups etc. - but am wondering if readers, if they like existing articles on a site, would appreciate a low-key, unobtrusive option of signing up for an email notification.
2 comments
Siira 1860 days ago
Give us RSS, and we’ll pull if we want to. Email pushes, which is user-hostile.
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exolymph 1860 days ago
Um, not if the user signed up for it? Believe it or not lots of people sign up for email lists — especially editorial ones but also commercial ones — on purpose. Not just normies either, I bet there are plenty of people on HN who've subscribed to a bunch of bloggers' lists. I certainly have.
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BayesianDice 1860 days ago
Thank you for the comment. The site already has RSS, and I'd agree there are good technical grounds for preferring it, but I get the impression that its use among users is declining, which is why I was considering other mechanisms. I find it an interesting point of view to consider a feature which alternatively allows users to opt-in to email notifications - but which doesn't disadvantage them at all if they don't - as "user-hostile". (But of course I've seen sites which want to coerce visitors to hand over an email address to be able to access the content they were expecting, and depending on context, I can see cases where that could be considered aggressive.)
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exolymph 1860 days ago
It's super important. Most people don't use RSS, and social media doesn't give you a direct relationship with your readers, you're at the whims of the algorithm, so even if they want to keep up with your content, it may not be surfaced to them.
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