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Hacker News Hacker News1. It's a great way to learn. Teaching something to someone else has always been the best learning tool, and writing about something with an audience in mind is an effective way to capture some of that value.
2. It can be a big boost in job hunting. As a hiring manager two of the most important questions I have about a potential candidate are: Can they code? Can they communicate well? If a candidate has a blog with just two articles on it that hasn't been updated in five years that's still a big boost over candidates with nothing like that at all. In a competitive market that could be the boost you need to make it from the resume review to the first round.
3. If you blog more frequently than that it can be a really valuable resource for your future self. I love being able to look back on what I was thinking and writing about ten years ago. Having a good tagging system helps with this too - I can review my tag of "scaling" or "postgresql" and see a timeline of how my understanding developed.
4. It's a great way to help establish credibility. If someone asks you about X and you have a blog entry about X from five years ago you can point them to that.
5. Building a blog is really fun! It used to be one of the classic starter projects for new web developers, I think that needs to come back. It's a fun project and one that's great to keep on hacking on long into the future.
Notably none of the above reasons require your blog to attract readers! There's a ton of value to be had even if nobody actually reads the thing.
As a general rule, assume nobody will read your blog unless you actively encourage them to. That's fine. What matters isn't the quantity of readers, it's their quality. I'd rather have a piece read by just a single person that leads to a new opportunity for me than 1,000 people who read it and never interact with me ever again.
If you DO start to get readers things get even more valuable. I've been blogging since 2002 and most of the opportunities in my career came from people I met via blogging. Today I get invited to all sorts of interesting events because I have a prominent blog covering stuff relating to AI and LLMs.
But I do honestly think that a blog is a powerful professional tool even if nobody else is reading it at all.
If you want to give it a go I've written a few things that might be useful:
- What to blog about: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/6/what-to-blog-about/ - Today I learned and write about your projects
- My approach to running a link blog - https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/22/link-blog/ - aka write about stuff you've found
HN is a great source, but you'll notice over time there are always AskHN posts asking something like "What is a site like HN for..", and people trying to build HN clones.
Reddit was good for a while for this, but hasn't been for a long time.
I'm hoping people rediscover/reinvent slashdot.
I started blogging about tech and security when I was 13/14 years old in my native language. Then, when I felt more mature, I switched to a new blog where English was the main language. I started improving my language skills, getting some donation from kind strangers for my blog posts and using it as a self-branding forever running-side project.
Now, 20 years later I still have my personal blog and I still write about tech, but only recently I created some "personal related" tabs, like the "/now" page, enriching it every month or having a more personal about page. Why? Because I like going to a blog a see that behind that address there is a real person with emotions and dreams, it's like entering in their home and have a look around.
1. Improve your language skills
2. Self-branding
3. Memorize better topics you care about
4. Share what you learned with others
About LLM, I don't care if they scrape my blog, I use LLMs every day, and if some stuff I write helps to enrich an LLM with a positive impact I would be more than happy to let it happens, the more we write, the less fake-news and low-quality content would ingest and used.
Is it? I haven't seen anyone in my circle return to blogging, nor kids of this generation.
Discoverability is going to be a massive problem, since search engines are dead. Maybe word-of-mouth through social media is enough?
Personal blogs are not "back". The article has zero evidence for this.
Ironically, Darren Rowse (the "problogger" person cited in the article) hasn't published a new blog post since 2024-07-24, more than a year ago.
I've thought about two potential ways of getting around this:
1. Maintain two separate blogs, one professional, one personal, make the personal blog pseudonymous, and put all the things I don't want employers to see over there. This seems fine, but also feels like too much work in practice? (perhaps the work is just of selecting where to put the post after I'm done writing it, though.) 2. Maintain one blog, and not care about market hire or anything like that. This...would work, but I'm not sure about potential bad effects because of this. I could just choose to write completely pseudonymously instead. I'm not sure.
Somehow there is a lot of truth in this fake quote: "Those who would give up essential liberty to decide whom to follow, for getting a little temporary convenience in exchange, deserve neither to chose what to read nor convenience"
I've released a new post every week for 10 years straight.
My traffic in the last 2 years is worse than the first 2 years. At the blog's peak I was getting around 180k unique visitors a month for years.
I was able to build a whole business around selling tech courses and doing contract work for the last 10 years but now traffic is so little that this is no longer feasible (not even close).
Just looking at the numbers, it's very likely related to Google not sending as much traffic as they used to because they either inline my content on their search engine results or AI results are used now instead of people visiting individual sites.
I still do it because I enjoy the process and my main motivator was never money but at the same time you need to be able to sustain yourself too. It's a bummer to be honest.
On that note, a ton of great non-money related opportunities came my way due to posts I've written in the past so I won't be stopping. I hope these continue.
I don't think personal blogs are back.
- It is a personal blog = 1st audience is me. Best self-improvement investment I made - I blog for my present self: I blog about what I read, what I'm thinking about a topic, what I learned etc. But also I blog for my future self: the trends I'm noticing, how I should prepare and I am preparing - Since it is a personal blog, sometimes I blog about books I read, sermons I preach, technical notes. All mixed up. - This year got about 40k YTD traffic, which is not bad for a personal blog. Highest traffic came for my post on openwebui.
Benefits I've seen: - I am not selling anything or running ads. So there are no first order monetization - Since I blog about topics that matter to me (career, tech trends), I already have a clear thinking on those topics. So when they come up for discussions, I am able to speak clearly and with depth. That has landed me in promotions, faster career growth, coaching opportunities, and more - People share my blog post when certain topics come up for discussion. This has increased my influence and their respect towards me.
If you are interested to see how my blog has changed over time, I have kept a changelog: https://www.jjude.com/changelog/
The ecosystem and interconnected-ness has completely vanished. If you look at the late 90s or early 2000s, people had RSS readers, and sites had feeds, blogrolls, trackbacks/pingbacks, a commenting system which worked, and social bookmarking sites (like del.icio.us) which were somewhat mainstream.
All of this is gone. Blogs are not going to survive in the current super-noisy consumption architecture.
For blogs to be back, you'd almost need a new internet.
I don't think anyone's really optimizing for SEO. (it's not even really clear to me that that's very important any more.)
Submissions welcome ofc :) https://arc.net/folder/4A220E67-674A-456D-AEDB-796B5BE82034
Kottke is one of the better known blogs that does not have a specific speciality.
I host both my gamedev tutorials and web game portal websites with cloudflare pages and so far they're pretty decent:
One thing I failed to notice was that RSS was still active. So this year, I started consistently contributing, over 150 so far, and I see RSS picking up right where it left off [0]. A lot of my blog post suck, but I write them as an observation and my current understanding of a subject. Readers have agency to skip what they don't like and only read what they like.
It seems like you'd get traffic from search engines a few years back, but now the only traffic I've had is from a HN post.
Everything points to optimizing for "AEO" for LLMs now
There was a time when searching for anything online, say best running shoes or how to install a WordPress plugin, gave you a healthy mix of personal websites, hobby blogs, and commercial sites.
Then Google rolled out EEAT or whatever and the spotlight shifted almost entirely to big commercial websites. These companies hire professional writers for every niche. People with degrees, credentials, and polished resumes that an individual blogger simply cannot compete with. Naturally, Google’s algorithm began pushing those sites to the top over individual bloggers assuming better information and content due to more impressive writer's resume.
So now, if you search for the same things like running shoes, WordPress tutorials, anything remotely informational, the top results are all from big commerical websites and strangely total "unrelated" garbage after the 3rd page.
Sometimes it reaches an absurd point like search results showing Forbes or similar outlets giving you medical or legal advice right in the first page if not the first suggestion.
Google seems to forget that these articles often come with an inherent bias, a subtle (or not so subtle) push to sell something, regardless of how qualified the writer is.
It’s got just the features you need, is built by a solo dev, and it’s got a very fair split between free and paid features. I used it to put up my personal site and have been very happy with the experience.
Just like Problogger, India has its own — Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal at https://www.labnol.org
In fact, a VC hinted to me that I should, or if I have the balls to convert my personal blog to the “Techcrunch of India” and become Michael Arrington. I wasn’t made for that and never wanted to be a blogger. My blog should be a very personal space. Well, my personal blog became a cheesy mess of personal ramblings with no aim or ambition. :-)
I think Kiruba Shankar attempted the closest to that one in India at https://www.kiruba.com and did succeed to a degree.
Fortunately, my website still enjoys direct links from a few Patents in the USA that reference my articles as a source of truth, as well as a few links from Wikipedia, WordPress.org, Adobe, and a few other well-established websites here and there. Quite a few of the articles were translated into other languages, and I keep getting referenced. Google still sends me quite a handful of visits daily.
I don’t think niche blogs are coming back, because the moment a “niche blog” becomes sustainable and “profitable”, it is no longer a niche blog. It becomes another commercial website or a publication.
Why do I host a website? - https://www.unsungnovelty.org/posts/11/2019/why-do-i-host-a-...
And state of blogging: https://www.unsungnovelty.org/posts/10/2024/life-of-a-blog-b...
I started this journey from scratch. Despite not pushing for numbers and regular schedule, my website still have 20k viewers since I added analytics (didn't have analytics for 2 years in the beginning). That might be a small number for most, but it means that there are people who want to read what I write. That is all that matters. Atleast to me.
Even if you wanted to go back to blogging, you'd have to do it on substack, medium or some such platform with social built in.
My money is blogging being mostly for SEO. I don't know who's on the other end of the clicks, but they aren't reading for readings sake..
I actually set up a blog on the 15th. No real content yet but I’ve almost written a first real post. Seeing this made me chuckle - I thought _I_ had an original thought around missing blogs but I’m obviously just a part of the hive mind. I truly hope this trend is here to stay.
I also want to share this video on the topic ”The reason no one has hobbies anymore”, it was shared by a podcast I was listening to the other day and I think it’s well worth watching. https://youtu.be/IUhGoNTF3FI
That's strange, because literally the only place I see blogs being back is on Substack. And the only way to get people to visit Substack is through social media; twitter, really. You start a Substack when you get good at twitter, then you start doing podcasts and cross-promotion after your Substack starts doing well.
I actually like this, except that the platforms are all pretty much monopolies in their spaces. But it's very commercial. 10000 people paying $2 a month, and you can make a nice living.
I have fond memories and miss profoundly the innocuous purity of 1994-2005 internet era. Back then, the content was created mostly by enthusiasts, not by attention seekers.
What is neat means different things to different people, for some it may be one nice narrow thing, for some it may be an erratic mix of topics tied together by the tiniest of strings. But what makes personal blogs different than marketing blogs for SEO is the wanton disregard for all things not-neat.
I would never return to personal blogging, though. That ship sailed around 2007, when social media appeared and trolls killed the last remaining personal blogs. The GeoCities safe haven vibe died then.
[0] Correction: I have had three visitors, not including myself.
nekoweb is another one: https://nekoweb.org/explore?page=1&sort=lastupd&by=tag&q=
Great to see blogging making a resurgence - RSS next!
I have written close to 3000 blog articles over the last 25 years (and many books) - primarily because I like writing, otherwise the top post here today nails it listing reasons to blog.
I’ve maintained my own domain since 2010 and know plenty of others that still do as well
My page is one of my favorite places on the internet cause it’s in my opinion the original purpose of the internet which is to share your personal research and places to document and share personal ideas with infinite distribution.
I started blogging 20+ years ago - and this was is still the number one go to reference after all.
He started as one of us, and started posting tipps - until... The story continues.
List of Public Blogs of Hacker News users
But honestly: without having an efficient way to fight them crawlers I'm not willed to write for it anymore.
Is there an efficient solution I can add? It lives on a Shared Web Hoster. For self-hosted stuff there's Anubis. Also willed not to use Cloudfare.
Not only because it sucks they do it, but because I host everything.
Here's mine (but barely incomplete drafts, I started it last week): blog.moralestapia.com
They didn’t go anywhere! Ask the folks who have consistently maintained them regardless of current fad
I am running my blog since 2018 and it has never been better :)
It always makes me happy to see more people bring back blogging. I hate that everything is on platforms like substack, and would much rather see a million wordpress or ghost installs.
Blogging kind of was better in the past.
I also remember geocities. It was kind of cool.
Neocities unfortunately does not really capture that old spirit. It's just ... different.
It's probably similar to the street-side musician. In old times, he may have been the only musician around you might hear. Nowadays, he's got to compete with a perfect recording of Hotel California by the Eagles.
Today, you’re talking to an audience that is online, willing to venture outside social media, and opting to actively read content rather than passively listen or watch. That’s far from everyone and that’s okay.