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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?

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you may be on to something here. I bet it was a data based decision...

Reader didn't have enough active users to keep it running.

Reader's active users, though, tended to be influencers who read a lot and shared what they read with their friends on social media. So they still drove traffic, just by a different mechanism.

Many of the people I followed on Reader moved to Twitter after Google took it down and mimicked its social functions there. I'd wager they're still either using RSS readers or jury-rigging Twitter into being something like it.

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

#152
The only sub-area of blogging I know of that has reasonably healthy communities of regular readers (vs. only people coming in from search or Reddit) is for communities of bloggers based around some programming languages. Language-specific aggregators like http://www.juliabloggers.com/, http://www.planet-rust.com/, and http://planet.lisp.org/ have regular readers. Unlike Reddit and HN they don't depend on getting upvoted; if you blog regularly on the topic, you can ask for your blog to be included, and the aggregator then pulls your posts via RSS (if you sometimes blog on the topic and sometimes on others, you can make an RSS feed for just the on-topic tag, and ask for that to be included).

It's possible something similar exists in other areas, but these PLs "planet" aggregators are the only high-quality blogging communities of this type I know of that still exists.

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

#153
post #129

Well, my blog ( http://taoofmac.com ) has been around for 15 years now, and like many people have pointed out in other comments, people get their news and opinion pieces by social media these days -- so I've long had RSS-to-social services relaying new posts (sometimes with the odd glitch) and made an effort to add more images now and then. In the end, though, I'm doing it for myself. Readership and viewers tanked wh…

Keep writing for yourself, I certainly enjoy it ;-)

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

#154
Generalist audience maybe is vanishing but I can see more and more domain niches attracting interest for relevant content like a widespread academia, this being open courses legacy imho. Sure, many blogs would not survive a peer review, but there are more manners to publishing than academic papers only: industrial papers, letters to the community, tutorials, reviews of literature, industry news and conferences, etc. So the point is: find your industry for applications, grow a reputation and you will attract a like-minded audience.

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

#155
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I absolutely know of at least one group of friends/colleagues who are all active on HN and whenever they see each other's posts will upvote them. I've stayed away from them (other reasons) since before I found out, but when I heard it explained why I'd seen them frontpaged a few times.

Interesting that they are not triggering the voter ring detection.

It will probably trigger dang into looking into it now.

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

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 don't notice the poster and neither do I. But some posters carry enough cred (or have enough friends) that anything they post immediately get a bump out of the incoming links slush pile. That's not counting the people who use multiple accounts and bots to push up their content (probably not a problem on hacker news but rife on reddit).

> But some posters carry enough cred (or have enough friends)

Is that really true? Look at tptacek's submissions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=tptacek

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

#157

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…

Google has asks sites not to link to other sites or do so only with a nofollow tag. So finding a relevant site can largely only be done from Google who controls the ranking of sites.

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

#158
post #128

I get 3,000 visitors a day to my blog. Here are some of my tips: * The more content, the more opportunities people will have to find you * Quality content builds brand. When people search google and remember they got something good from your site last time, they may be happy to find you can help them again * Tons of optimization should be considered such as: Clean URLs, fast page load times, canonical URLs, A+ on you…

> Keep improving them. Can you explain it better now? Are there typos you missed before? Are you essentially saying to go back and rewrite/improve old blog posts? Just for clarification.

Yes. Example. I had a series of articles that I expected people to read in order, but found that the 3rd one was getting more traffic than all the rest combined. That's because people wanted to know something specific about that subject and found my page through Google. Well that page acted as a very poor entry point to the subject so I improved it by rewriting the article to look better as a standalone article instead of just making sense in a series.

The goal is to give quality content and make your readers satisfied. If they bounce off your page and go back to Google search results, Google takes note of that and thinks your site isn't serving its purpose.

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

#159
I used to subscribe and ready many blogs about a decade ago - all in Google Reader. When that died, so did my blog reading habits, and I never went back to reading a specific blog on a regular basis.

Nowadays, I only visit blog site when they come up as a Google search result. Even then, single visit to get the info I want (usually a programming or business related thing) then I close the tab and never go back to that site. I cannot remember ever bookmarking a blog home page for later reference in the past few years.

No slight against those blogs - usually brilliant content written by smart people. It is just that I don't have the time these days to stop and read article after article on one particular site. We are just so flooded with information these days that I see it akin to fishing in the ocean. It is no longer worth spending the energy to just try and catch particular sort of fish - I just throw the line in and see what comes up and make do with that.

As an aside, it will be interesting research to see if the death of Google Reader had an impact on visitor stickiness to blog sites. I know in my case, it completely changed the way I consume blog content altogether - I wonder if it was the same to others?

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

#160
post #149
post #110

> 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…

I just subscribed to your purgatory feed. :)

Thanks! If you were to read only one article, read this one:

https://arachnoid.com/psychology_and_alchemy/

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