[panorama]

As much as I enjoy writing and teaching, it feels like a fruitless endeavor when your content doesn't get any visibility. I've written on Twitter, Bluesky, and self-hosted my own blogs (I've even been front-paged on HN before), and each time I give up eventually because it's so hard to build a consistent readerbase.

Of course, I’m self-aware enough to recognize that it might be because my writing is terrible or because I’m covering topics no one cares about. But the point is, I don’t blame people for posting on Twitter instead of going through the effort of setting up a blog. The vast majority of written content gets little to no reach, so choosing the platform with the lowest barrier to entry makes the most sense.

[Chathamization]

> Of course, I’m self-aware enough to recognize that it might be because my writing is terrible or because I’m covering topics no one cares about.

I've hard similar issues with you, and actually think the opposite to be the case. When I was trying to build an audience, I actually found that it was the low effort nonsense that would get the most traction. At a certain point I was attempting to try to get followers by making a lot of those, and then trying to mix some quality posts in, and had some success. But I started asking myself, to what end? What kind of community am I building that's only interested in low quality junk?

And one thing I noticed about Blogging and Twitter is that they're extremely cliquish. From what I've seen, most people would rather interact with popular Bloggers/Twitter users that they hate or say are idiots than they would with users who have a low follow count/seldom read blog. Sure, there are ways you can juice your follower count so that you're large enough that the big guys will think you're worth enough to pay attention to. But again - what's the point? When you see the complete vapidity of many of these supposed thought leaders, is it really worth it? So what, you can get into the daily Twitter slap fights that they seem to love so much?

I mostly wish their were more places were thoughtful people to find and chat with each other, without having to get involved with petty blog/Twitter vanity games.

[panorama]

That's a good point, and I completely agree. It's not that I was seeking fame or attention, but rather I wanted to put out ideas and find like-minded people (in my case, saas founders/"indiehackers") to talk shop with. Even if it were just a couple people each time, that would be plenty, but I still felt that was beyond reach.

Even this HN reply thread alone is more engagement than I would normally get on social media ;). I'm not saying this to complain, I'm okay with it and it's just the nature of the internet with all its noise. But to get back on topic, I can totally see why people don't choose to maintain a blog as much anymore.

[ryandrake]

Maybe I'm just not a Real Artist, but I don't understand this focus on "engagement" and "visibility" for casual writers and other online publishers. Assuming they are not doing it for revenue, where their income depends on huge readership, why are they so concerned with how many readers they are getting? When I share some source code on GitHub, I don't care in the slightest whether anybody or nobody uses it. It doesn't really affect me. Same for comments on HN. I get no benefit if 10,000 people read a comment vs. 100.

Whenever you talk about blogging vs. more popular platforms, someone always chimes in with this "but I get so many more eyeballs on Twitter!" and I legitimately don't understand why that matters.

Sure, if you are doing it for a living and your income scales with the number of readers, then yea, of course, it's obvious why you want "engagement."

[johnnyanmac]

>Assuming they are not doing it for revenue, where their income depends on huge readership, why are they so concerned with how many readers they are getting?

Are you including indirect revenue in your assumption? There's lots of hopeful incentives that don't immedialy lead to money:

- you get a reputation and get professional gigs or invitations or whatnot. Fame, in a word.

- You get a reputation and that makes it easier to validate your next pitch for some dream idea you have. For better or worse, saying "a lot of people like this" is very effective pitch material.

- you want to meet other like minded people and organically network. These can lead to future opportunities you would have never considered.

- You have some larger societal mission, and that requires society. If you have some altruistic goal of say, teaching everyone to code (to pick a cliche idea), then you need people to participate to realize your goal. Something like Khan Academy still needs to advertise itself.

Your view only really applies to people who want to do Art for themselves. But we are still a social species, we have a natural urge to share our creations, for profit or not.

[Chathamization]

One of the things is wanting to be part of the discourse. For instance, this has happened to me several times - big players are talking about a particular topic. I dig through the primary sources, and see that many of the assumptions people are making about it are wrong. I try to bring it up, but - where? Blog/Tweet about it, and with no audience you're yelling into the void. Sometimes I try contacting the big players, but like I said, it's a pretty cliquish environment, and if you're a nobody you get ignored. Another option is to spit out a lot of garbage dopamine hits to build up a big enough audience to the point where someone might pay attention to your good points.

In the end I just gave up, because I realized the state of discourse in these spaces is terrible. It's a shame, though, because there are a lot of small, overlooked voices that do similar things, diving through primary source material and data and uncovering very important stuff that's gotten ignored. Occasionally, I've seen these people break stories that eventually get the attention of the national media - but it's hard, and this usually only happens for the really huge stories.

Meanwhile, the big players in these spaces are usually intellectually incurious and busy churning out vapid engagement bait.

[1oooqooq]

unless you're writing about current news, write and wait. even books backed by huge publishers don't sell well the first years.

[johnnyanmac]

>I mostly wish their were more places were thoughtful people to find and chat with each other, without having to get involved with petty blog/Twitter vanity games.

Sadly a lot of that moved to Discord. So, you can't really search it up. You have to simply follow a rabbit trail of people and forums until you find that community. It's tough.

But maybe that semi-elusiveness is a feature. You let anyone in and you may start to fall into that Eternal September where the low quality vapidness wins out

[Angostura]

Maybe pop your Bluesky profile id in your Hacker News profile?

[sph]

Write for yourself. I (rarely) write on my website because I am terrible at it and I want to improve, though most of my writing is on private journals. I don't check analytics and don't even have comments: I don't care to know what randos have to say. Sometimes a person directly contacts me via email to discuss a post, which I appreciate much more as it feels like talking to a fellow human.

As you started with "I enjoy writing and teaching", just do that. Not everything has to become a venture centred on growth and engagement.

(No offense, just being a bit cheeky here: your profile says you're into influencer marketing.. that might be the reason of your disappointment in your blog's performance. Fuck metrics and KPIs, man. Enjoy what you enjoy.)

[panorama]

Sure, I do journal for myself and do a lot of in-person teaching/coaching, but presumably the original article is geared towards those who still choose to write publicly, which I now rarely do.

No offense taken, but I had been blogging _way_ before my marketing tech startup (which itself is almost a decade old). It's not so much about the metrics, it's that there are far higher-leverage things I can do than publish articles that only a handful of people will ever see.

[sph]

In any case, advertise your personal blog in your HN profile. I find it's a better source of "organic engagement" than Google or social media, that don't like third-party links as they want to keep people within their walled gardens.

[black_puppydog]

Honestly, I find it quite simple to "blast out" a text that may not be the most concise it can be, but still is helpful for organize my thoughts.

But putting that into the format that fits a twitter thread (or mastodon, really) is just one more effort I need to make.

Compare that to the "effort" of using a hosted blog with ghost, wordpress, or sth else... I really don't see how twitter threads are lower effort.