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Ask HN: Has attracting a blog audience become harder?

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

#21

My blog also doesn't get too much attention. And it was always like that. I was writing in a couple of places, a couple of my blogs, and on a corporate blog. My most successful blog post had about 10k of visitors across the first year. I also noticed that the average session time is about 2 minutes, sometimes is just too short to read through a blog post. So I assume that people come there just to get a solution to a…

> I also noticed that the average session time is about 2 minutes, sometimes is just too short to read through a blog post. So I assume that people come there just to get a solution to a problem they have, not to read through all the text.

Does your website actively ping back to the server to determine how long a visitor remains on a page?

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

#22

Have you considered video blogging instead of a text based blog? If you are anything like me you are reluctant to put yourself in front of a camera because let's face it, most of us visiting HN are probably not fashionistas with the best hairdos but I have considered it because I think this is increasingly a more popular way to blog. Video blogs offer greater accessibility and appeal to the laziness of human beings (…

I use to offer language tips via unrefined videos when YT was a baby, and those were "popular" but then I felt weird about having my face plastered online in such a public way and eventually took them down.

But you're right. The production quality and time investment for doing video blogging is steep these days. If I had the know how I'd definitely consider it.

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

#23
post #6

As another commenter has said, people don't bother with blogs anymore. Seems that Facebook pages are the way to go for engagement. Instagram too, if your content works for the medium. I think Twitter is good for some niches, but its popularity wildly varies by country. Dramatically sad as you can't get more walled garden than that, but that is the future we built.

Facebook is worthless, less than .1% reach in some cases unless you pay for ads to reach your own audience

Exactly. They hold your stuff hostage: that is the future. Not exactly 'net neutrality'!

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

#24
post #16

I've been wondering about this as well. I just started out blogging (just a personal blog with a ton of opinions and software stuff) and have no idea if it gets an audience or not . I don't really care if I do, besides the feeling that if I look at the stats, it equals talking to a wall sometimes.

But if I see that right, your Blog doesn't have comments (the one linked in your profile). How is that supposed to feel otherwise if those are not enabled?

Perhaps my "talking to a wall" metaphor was stupid. What I meant was that I'd like to see that people actually read whatever I have to say, instead of, well, not reading - in a way that a wall can't hear you - an actual response however isn't needed. It may also be because I don't have one exact subject, but regardless, too early to tell just yet.

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

#25
Concepts and names are kind. To give and example, in a recent post of jeremykun.com blog about math and computing the author explains a concrete case of conjugate prior without jargon. But in fact, if you know what that post is about, that is the magic word aka math jargon conjugate prior, you will find that en.wikipedia gives you many insights and links about that concept. Wikipedia is getting better and better and now there are an enormous quantity of good resources to learn form. Also informative comments, like those here in HN, are making blogging more and more difficult because your post is going to be only a drop in an ocean of knowledge where parts are interrelated. No post should reject math jargon, since those words, like conjugate priors, are the key to looking for rich and complete information about it. To give another example, if someone try to explain monads he/she should not try to avoid the term monad since monad importance relies on is capacity to model many rich and differences sceneries ranging from security to multiprocessing.

Openai or distill aim is to explain or visualize ml ideas, but I think that more than displaying animations or pretty graphics, we need clear concepts and definitions, and to inform the reader that there is no royal road to understanding, you must pay the prize to understand the main concepts, that the only real road to understanding.

To not be categorical, perhaps there should be some posts about explaining in very shallow terms what's the meaning of something, but in the end many times you end up without a real meaning of the concept and you can look hundred of same level posts and waste your time, because the concept required to be framed on its appropriate level.

Edit: Edited for clarify and grammar.

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

#26
I used to read literally hundreds of blogs via RSS, but I have stopped doing that completely for no particular reason I can think of. Today I read zero blogs. Of course I still read lots of random blog posts from google search results or on HN, but I won't become a regular reader anymore.

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

#27
There are a variety of reasons why I think blogging is no longer as visible as it used to:

- People don't read long form as much as they used to. Especially considering the content that gets popular on the Internet are now images, videos, short messages, there is less of an audience for long form writing and content producers are more focused on the lowest common denominator.

- Hyperlinks used to be a valuable social currency, not as much anymore. People are more inclined to use search engines or social media to find content, which is kind of lame because recommendations via links from the authors themselves are much more relevant than algorithms.

- Social media and large corporations have made it much harder to get people to leave their platforms. Instead of being an entry point, they want to be the destination for content.

- There is simply too much garbage out there, and curation/aggregation for quality content is nearly non-existent unless you already know the right places to look. Otherwise you get fed the same garbage as everyone else, or trapped inside an algorithmic filter bubble.

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

#28
post #26

I used to read literally hundreds of blogs via RSS, but I have stopped doing that completely for no particular reason I can think of. Today I read zero blogs. Of course I still read lots of random blog posts from google search results or on HN, but I won't become a regular reader anymore.

I used to have ~100 blogs I followed in Google Reader, then when Reader was killed I drifted away from many of them. I wonder how many authors lost large numbers of readers because of that sad event.

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

#29
post #12

there are three pillars of "editorial content traffic generation" - social - search - newsletter it does not really matter which with one you start a) first you need to get one of them right then b) "the strong feed the poor", convert them from one channel into the other. and yeah, if you do it baldy (i.e. newsletter popups, constant reminder to follow you on fb, ...) 99% will hate you, but you can iterate on the 1%.…

I wonder, is "social" not practically equivalent to "Facebook" these days and dwarfs all other (including search/newsletter)? Except for niche cases...

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

#30
post #26

I used to read literally hundreds of blogs via RSS, but I have stopped doing that completely for no particular reason I can think of. Today I read zero blogs. Of course I still read lots of random blog posts from google search results or on HN, but I won't become a regular reader anymore.

> but I have stopped doing that completely for no particular reason

Death of Google Reader and migration of corresponding contents to other medias (especially social media?)

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