Ask HN: Has attracting a blog audience become harder?

This is more or less correct now a days.

People don't want to read opinions anymore, they like to read information unless they are looking for something specific.

But if they are looking for something specific they want opinions and in that case their readership ends there.

For example :

If I want to know about how to setup a water sprinkler and make optimum use of my gardening equipment, I would look for sites which provide that information and stick with that site seeing it is providing me information on my gardening needs. But if I want to buy a water sprinkler I might just google for people who bought it or have reviewed it and once I am done buying I will forget about that site.

Fans of long-form content won't agree, but if you want to be heard, try to engage at Twitter and Facebook. Most of the web readers in this day and age have very little engagement spans, and use diversified channels to consume content. So, in order to attract engaged audience to your blog - you either have to spend lots of efforts of content marketing, or you can simply shift to the medium of popular choice.

When I have to say something long enough to be a blog post, I do a Twitter thread.

Thus I only subscribe to blogs with at most one article per day. Most have an average of one article per week or month. For the use case of following rarely-posting very-techy blogs, RSS feeders are still great.

Yes. The days of people typing in a URL directly to go to the place they want are history, and Facebook/Twitter have entirely supplanted the feed readers of the aughts.

Normal people will only visit a small handful of web sites and follow outlinks from there, before immediately retreating back into their context: wherever a Google query takes them, an aggregator like HN/reddit/Facebook, and social media like Instagram/YouTube. It's nearly impossible to get people to regularly go to a domain to which they are unaccustomed.

The classic essay on this subject is by Clay Shirky: "Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality"

As he says:

"Freedom of Choice Makes Stars Inevitable

To see how freedom of choice could create such unequal distributions, consider a hypothetical population of a thousand people, each picking their 10 favorite blogs. One way to model such a system is simply to assume that each person has an equal chance of liking each blog. This distribution would be basically flat - most blogs will have the same number of people listing it as a favorite. A few blogs will be more popular than average and a few less, of course, but that will be statistical noise. The bulk of the blogs will be of average popularity, and the highs and lows will not be too far different from this average. In this model, neither the quality of the writing nor other people's choices have any effect; there are no shared tastes, no preferred genres, no effects from marketing or recommendations from friends.

But people's choices do affect one another. If we assume that any blog chosen by one user is more likely, by even a fractional amount, to be chosen by another user, the system changes dramatically. Alice, the first user, chooses her blogs unaffected by anyone else, but Bob has a slightly higher chance of liking Alice's blogs than the others. When Bob is done, any blog that both he and Alice like has a higher chance of being picked by Carmen, and so on, with a small number of blogs becoming increasingly likely to be chosen in the future because they were chosen in the past.

Think of this positive feedback as a preference premium. The system assumes that later users come into an environment shaped by earlier users; the thousand-and-first user will not be selecting blogs at random, but will rather be affected, even if unconsciously, by the preference premiums built up in the system previously.

Note that this model is absolutely mute as to why one blog might be preferred over another. Perhaps some writing is simply better than average (a preference for quality), perhaps people want the recommendations of others (a preference for marketing), perhaps there is value in reading the same blogs as your friends (a preference for "solidarity goods", things best enjoyed by a group). It could be all three, or some other effect entirely, and it could be different for different readers and different writers. What matters is that any tendency towards agreement in diverse and free systems, however small and for whatever reason, can create power law distributions.

Because it arises naturally, changing this distribution would mean forcing hundreds of thousands of bloggers to link to certain blogs and to de-link others, which would require both global oversight and the application of force. Reversing the star system would mean destroying the village in order to save it."

http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/powerlaw_o...