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

Remember when maintaining a blog was THE way to build your developer brand?

When thoughtful technical writing could lead to speaking gigs, job offers, and meaningful connections?

But in 2025, the landscape has shifted dramatically:

- LinkedIn's algorithmic feed heavily favors short-form "broetry" over substantive technical content - Twitter/X has become a battleground of AI-generated hot takes - Medium is drowning in SEO-optimized tutorials that all say the same thing

Unless you're already established or willing to play the AI-SEO game, it feels impossible to build genuine readership for a technical blog in 2025.

Yet part of me wonders if I'm just being cynical. Maybe there's still value in writing for its own sake? Or perhaps there are distribution channels I haven't considered?

For those still maintaining personal blogs: How do you find readers? Where do you share your content? And most importantly - why do you keep writing?

Seems like all of those points about the landscape are exactly why you'd want to work on a personal blog. You can write something that's representative of you.

As for the how: same as always, I think. Write content because you want to do it, then share it through places where you know potential readers are (HN, Bluesky, your friends, etc)

I know that people are also using Substack and similar platforms as they can help with both distribution and marketing, but I know less about that.

Molly White has written about why one should blog, but I can't find the exact piece of writing, so here's a podcast with her instead: https://about.flipboard.com/inside-flipboard/molly-white/

Define "worth it", but I've written a blog post about some printer driver issue two years ago and it now happened twice that someone (Older person, not very technical) reached out over email and asked for some further help and I could walk them step by step through using a Terminal, booting into macOS recovery mode and fixing the issue.

The Apple store and Epson told them to do a clean install so they were very grateful and it made me happy that I could help them. Worth it for me!

I'm not claiming this is true, only that it's how I think about it. All forms of public performance, including blogging, youtubing, singing, dancing, etc. are dominated by the Pareto principle (roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes) and Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is crap). Any success you see anyone having is solely due to survivorship bias. Unless you are already an amateur success, it's very unlikely you have the ability let alone the dedication to pay the price to be anything remotely close to a real success. It's always been this way. It's never been worth it to have a blog. That is, unless it's worth it to you. In that case go for it!

> How do you find readers

I don't, that's what search engines are for. If people know what keywords to lookup, and are willing to go an extra mile (browse all pages of the Google search) they will eventually find your blog. If you have done a good job, it may land on the first page of search results.

> Where do you share your content?

Random short off-topic ramblings on X. Discussion oriented stuff on Reddit. Personal long-form opinion/perspectives on personal blog & knowledge base.

> why do you keep writing

For myself, I do not owe anyone anything, I don't plan to "build a brand" (or rather I have failed to do that), writing is a form of expression, that's it.

Whenever my gut says, this "thought" needs to get out of your head because you have been wasting a lot of time thinking about it, that's usually my cue to draft a post.