Ask HN: Is maintaining a personal blog still worth it?

If you’re worried your blog has to compete AI-generated content, I’m not sure that you should be writing it.

YES.

I run a tech blog, mainly about coding and the industry (links in my profile), and it did help me to secure speaking gigs (mainly repurposing popular blog posts into talks), as well as attracted job offers and valuable connections who liked my posts.

I don't promote it much except cross posting to all the short form social networks (x/twitter, mastodon, bsky) and to LinkedIn with some longer "bait" type of content.

IMO there was never a reason to blog other than because it's an activity you enjoyed doing. It's easy to think about the blogs that made it big, but that's because you're not thinking about the vast majority that never hit those numbers. It was always a challenge.

I'd say now is a good time to start a blog. Everyone's sick of the SEO-ridden, AI-ridden garbage out there today. When we return to a world where you can use search engines to find quality content, your investment will pay off.

As a data point I started a blog this past year. It’s very technical content, and it’s driven around 100k visits just sharing it in socials https://jeremymorrell.dev/blog/

My takeaway has been that I’ve dramatically underinvested in public writing in my career and will be doubling down on that. I don’t really care about audience size, but the feedback and engagement from people whose work I respect has been amazing.

It’s also resulted in multiple inquiries from companies, VCs, consulting requests, a podcast invite, etc. Having thoughts written down also helps work conversations where there’s too much context to convey in a meeting. It can establish your credibility and expertise. There are a lot of intangible benefits.

I also think in an age of AI slop, being able to write with a distinctively human voice and perspective is becoming something of a superpower

I write for myself. I don't track, I don't care if people read my blog.

I do mention my blog on my resume together with code repositories. It is some kind of portfolio, and it is a good learning experience for me.

I don't think that it is worth "building a brand", unless you want to specialize in building brands. It's not like someone at Google will ever read your blog and offer you a job; if you want to work at Google, learn how to pass their interview process. If you want to be visible on social media, probably you need to follow a ton of people, engage with them, produce a lot of content and the kind of content that people like or repost. This has nothing to do with a personal blog, though.

Another thing is that if you find it worth blogging about, it's probably niche in the first place. If it's common knowledge, it's probably already on Wikipedia, or StackOverflow, or now some LLM (and if you wait long enough, your blog will be part of the LLM, whether you want it or not).

I see it like FOSS: if you do it with the hope that many people will use it, then I think it's a bad idea. Because you work for free and people will never be happy. If you do it for yourself, it's great!