Ask HN: Has attracting a blog audience become harder? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Has attracting a blog audience become harder?

#101

Post by blowski » Mon, Mar 27, 2017, 4:12 PM UTC

savanaly wrote: post #93

AndrewStephens wrote: post #77

I've blogged ( https://sheep.horse/ ) for about 10 years now in a minor way and monitor my logs pretty carefully. This is what I have learnt: * Most of my post get single digit views - not daily, in total. Posting on Twitter or Facebook only helps a little. You can't force people to follow your writing. * I publish RSS and Atom feeds but almost nobody uses them. I ended up removing the social media buttons on my site…

>The best way to capture traffic from Reddit or Hackernews is to catch the eye of a star poster on these sites and have them post the link. Otherwise nobody will care. (Any star posters here? Feel free to post my stuff) Eh? I have been reading HN for years and never once have I looked at the username of the person who posted a link, unless someone in the comments makes a reference to them. Do other people do that? Wh…

You can use hnapp.com (or various other tools) to build an RSS feed of someone's submissions - e.g. http://hnapp.com/rss?q=author%3ADiabloD3%20%20type%3Astory.

Re: Ask HN: Has attracting a blog audience become harder?

#102

Post by AndrewStephens » Mon, Mar 27, 2017, 4:19 PM UTC

kutkloon7 wrote: post #100

AndrewStephens wrote: post #77

I've blogged ( https://sheep.horse/ ) for about 10 years now in a minor way and monitor my logs pretty carefully. This is what I have learnt: * Most of my post get single digit views - not daily, in total. Posting on Twitter or Facebook only helps a little. You can't force people to follow your writing. * I publish RSS and Atom feeds but almost nobody uses them. I ended up removing the social media buttons on my site…

About your blog, IMHO a little re-styling would help a lot. I do like minimal layouts, but the serif font doesn't quite work for me. Also, maybe add some structure? Your blogs seem to cover a broad range of topics. I am mostly interested in technical articles, but I have to actively filter out the stuff that I'm interested in (by reading the titles and guessing the topic; this takes quite some mental energy and might…

Thanks for your comments.

The styling is based on Tufte CSS, which I like quite a lot for longer works. I agree it looks out of place amongst modern sites but I am sticking with it for the moment.

I totally agree on the scattershot subject matter. Some days I like writing about C++ and Boost, and some days I just like ragging on a terrible film. Perhaps I should split the blog into different subject areas but judging from my logs it would make very little difference to the way people use my site.

Re: Ask HN: Has attracting a blog audience become harder?

#103

Post by ideonexus » Mon, Mar 27, 2017, 4:21 PM UTC

Udo wrote: post #72

I closed my blog last year, after more than ten years of creating admittedly uneven quality content. The impetus for me was that I was getting relatively good traffic but engagement was non-existent. I came to the conclusion I wasn't really getting anything out of it anymore, as far as I could tell neither was anyone else, and general IT blogs are a dime a dozen. Absolutely, attracting a blog audience has become hard…

I share your experience of blogging for 10 years before letting my blog go into neglect. I was a science blogger, and in 2007 we were a very small community of educators, PhDs, and science enthusiasts (I was an enthusiast). It was really exciting then because everyone knew each other and we had a yearly "Science Online" conference where just a few hundred people would show up and hang out. Then twitter, facebook, and the blogging world exploded. My traffic went up, but my engagement dropped to zero. I would gladly trade the traffic for thoughtful conversation.

It reminded me of the BBS days, where communities were small and local and we'd get together at the mall or house party to meet one another in person. Then everyone went to WWW, and suddenly I was just another post in a thread of hundreds.

I'm not sure how to get those small, close-communities full of engagement back. The best I have now is hanging out in-person at my local gaming shop and chatting with the locals on facebook.

Re: Ask HN: Has attracting a blog audience become harder?

#104

Post by superkuh » Mon, Mar 27, 2017, 4:27 PM UTC

adrianN wrote: post #15

superkuh wrote: post #5

Put your blog on on .onion address on the tor network. I get far more traffic from within tor to my hidden service than the exact same copy of the site on run on the clear web.

How much of that is humans? The Tor network is smaller, so I'd expect crawlers to make more passes.

Probably a fifth or so based on watching logs when I kept them (I do not keep logs now for the hidden service). But even accounting for that I get more human traffic to the tor hidden service. The list of public, interesting, tor sites is low. So if you get your site included in any of the curated lists it funnels a ton of both bot and human traffic your way from curious explorers.

Tor hidden service public websites are like how the web was in the mid 1990s. Web rings, curated lists and indexes, and people literally surfing the web. It's really refreshing and non-commercial.

Re: Ask HN: Has attracting a blog audience become harder?

#105

Post by throw159 » Mon, Mar 27, 2017, 4:49 PM UTC

qznc wrote: post #84

AndrewStephens wrote: post #77

I've blogged ( https://sheep.horse/ ) for about 10 years now in a minor way and monitor my logs pretty carefully. This is what I have learnt: * Most of my post get single digit views - not daily, in total. Posting on Twitter or Facebook only helps a little. You can't force people to follow your writing. * I publish RSS and Atom feeds but almost nobody uses them. I ended up removing the social media buttons on my site…

Nearly the same insights here ( http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/ ). My conclusions: If you want to get a big audience you have to hustle. Post every blog on every social channel and so on. This is not the game I want to play. My motivation to blog is to clarify and archive my thoughts. Sometimes it is useful to point someone to an old blog post instead writing a log comment. Going for a blog with a big audience only makes se…

dude, you're gorgeous

Re: Ask HN: Has attracting a blog audience become harder?

#106

Post by johnfn » Mon, Mar 27, 2017, 4:56 PM UTC

savanaly wrote: post #93

AndrewStephens wrote: post #77

I've blogged ( https://sheep.horse/ ) for about 10 years now in a minor way and monitor my logs pretty carefully. This is what I have learnt: * Most of my post get single digit views - not daily, in total. Posting on Twitter or Facebook only helps a little. You can't force people to follow your writing. * I publish RSS and Atom feeds but almost nobody uses them. I ended up removing the social media buttons on my site…

>The best way to capture traffic from Reddit or Hackernews is to catch the eye of a star poster on these sites and have them post the link. Otherwise nobody will care. (Any star posters here? Feel free to post my stuff) Eh? I have been reading HN for years and never once have I looked at the username of the person who posted a link, unless someone in the comments makes a reference to them. Do other people do that? Wh…

It only takes about 5 points for a post to make it onto the front page early on. You may not care, and I may not care, but if 4 people out there do care, that's enough to get that post promoted.

Re: Ask HN: Has attracting a blog audience become harder?

#107

Post by verisimilidude » Mon, Mar 27, 2017, 5:05 PM UTC

maxdemarzi wrote: post #51

Anecdote agreeing with the OP. I used to get 10k visitors a month in 2015, that dropped to 7.5k in 2016 and currently get about 5k a month even though the niche I talk about has gotten more and more popular (Neo4j). Nearly all my posts are technical and link to source code. Maybe there are just more bloggers about Neo4j. http://maxdemarzi.com

I remember reading your blog a few years ago when I started out with Neo4j. Great stuff!

Re: Ask HN: Has attracting a blog audience become harder?

#108

Post by mod » Mon, Mar 27, 2017, 5:07 PM UTC

AndrewStephens wrote: post #98

andreygrehov wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was the previous domain name? Why did you decide to change it to sheep.horse?

No big mystery - I used to own WordPress blog at sandfly.net.nz but when I moved countries I gave up blogging for so long that my domain lapsed. Once I finally decided to start up again using my own platform I needed a catchy name that would be sure to draw traffic. Naturally I couldn't think of anything so ended up with sheep.horse because I think .horse domains are hilariously stupid.

Maybe .horse is brilliant because everyone owning one thinks they're in on some kind of joke.

It's kind of like those giant sunglasses.

Not a terrible business plan.

Re: Ask HN: Has attracting a blog audience become harder?

#109

Post by jrochkind1 » Mon, Mar 27, 2017, 5:10 PM UTC

I think it has. But in contrast to some other people's reports, I continue to get regular hits to many of my posts on my largely ruby-language focused blog. Often (but I don't _think_ always) they come from links in Stack Overflow answers.

I am not trying to 'monetize' it any way, so not paying attention to that, or to 'engagement' or whatever. But happy my posts are helping people, and effecting the dialog and shared understanding of rubyists.

I do think it's gotten harder to get blog attention, everyone just looks at facebook pretty much.

The most popular posts on my blog, that continue to get ~10 hits a day, include:

* ActiveRecord Concurrency in Rails4: Avoid leaked connections!

* Non-digested asset names in Rails 4: Your Options

* Struggling Towards Reliable Capybara Javascript Testing

* You never want to call html_safe in a Rails template

(I guess the popular ones are all Rails, not just ruby. I do sometimes write about ruby not in the context of Rails).

Re: Ask HN: Has attracting a blog audience become harder?

#110

Post by lutusp » Mon, Mar 27, 2017, 5:33 PM UTC

> Has attracting a blog audience become harder?

I've been involved with the Internet virtually since it began, and we're now in its third phase. The phases:

1. Forum for technical discussions and data transfer.

2. Soapbox for social communication.

3. Virtual mall.

The "virtual mall" identity is now so strong and all-encompassing that if you're not selling something, people begin to distrust you -- the opposite of the instincts present in phases 1 and 2, where you were distrusted if you were selling something.

So my advice is to write blog posts that include links to relevant (or irrelevant) products. This strategy assures that, regardless of the blog's content, the fact that it links to products or services assures that someone, somewhere will reciprocally link to it for purely commercial reasons.

I know this sounds cynical, but it's true -- nothing assures an audience as reliably as linking to a product who cares about your link and who -- for self-serving reasons -- is willing to link back.

I get appeals almost daily from commercial interests to include links on my site to their products -- on a payment basis, of course -- or reciprocal links, but I've always turned such requests down. Consequently, my website is now located in a kind of purgatory reserved for sites that haven't caught a train to the present or exploited their content (and their audience) to the fullest.

The artifact under discussion: https://arachnoid.com