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

The fact that so few people blog these days makes blogging even more influential than it used to be.

You can establish yourself as something of a global expert on some topic just by writing about it a few times a month over the course of a year!

Don't expect people to come to your blog. Practice https://indieweb.org/POSSE - Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere - post things on your blog and then tweet/toot/linkedin/submit-to-hacker-news/share-in-discord etc.

Also, don't worry too much about whether you get traffic at the time you write something. A lot of the reputational value comes from having written something that you can link people to in the future. "Here are my notes about that topic from last year: LINK" - that kind of thing.

There's a lot to be said for writing for its own sake, too. Just writing about a topic forces you to double-check your understanding and do a little bit more research. It's a fantastic way of learning more about the world even if nobody else ever reads it.

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 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!

Well, I've been doing it for over 22... 23? years. I still get regular emails from readers every other week, and I just share the RSS feed (full text, by the way) and have a bot on Mastodon (previously on Twitter) that posts new links or major edits (controlled via post metadata).

I keep writing (https://taoofmac.com) because:

a) my wiki (looks like a blog, but it is a wiki, roughly 9500 pages of it these days - https://taoofmac.com/static/graph) is a public notepad of sorts, and I often do stuff that is either unique enough to not be documented anywhere or of interest to some technical fields (so many people found me because Google search used to work).

b) I refer to my notes frequently and share them, and it helps if they can be made public, especially when dealing with customers.

c) writing is sort of what I do. I like it, and it greatly benefits my ability to recall things. Every engineer on the planet should know how to write and communicate effectively, simply because explaining things always improves your ability to reason about problems.

That said, it's kind of weird to search for something I need to fix and come across my old self from 5-10 years ago.

I would go even further. Trying to develop a “brand” that stands above the noise isn’t worth it.

That’s not saying writing isn’t important. I don’t think I understand a subject unless I can teach it, explain it and argue both sides about why you should and shouldn’t use it.

If I were going to go into independent consulting as oppose to working for consulting companies, I might start a blog a year ahead of time. But it wouldn’t be for discovery. Leveraging and improving my network would be the first strategy and then direct people to it once they knew me.

Most of your questions revolve around acquiring readers and sharing content. I am not sure my reasons for blogging are the same as yours, but I will say that it has been beneficial for me, both personally and for my career. During job searches, it is helpful to have a collection of writing samples that show I am competent and indeed a real human rather than an LLM fabrication. On a personal level, it’s been very rewarding to get emails from people telling me my content helped them in unique ways.

If I had to start over, I would certainly do it again.

Shameless plug: http://rickcarlino.com

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!

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/

Yes.

I like _writing_ because it's an effective way of learning (at least for me), since explaining something is very different than "just" doing something. I don't track visitors/analytics on my blog, so I don't really care how many people read it, but it forces me to dive just a little bit deeper into topics than I usually would for side projects and experiments. I also have no problem admitting if I misunderstand something and/or that my way of describing something might not be 100% accurate, but at last it forces me to reason about it.

I find that I write a lot about my homelab these days, since a lot of the things I experiment with there are not things I would encounter at work, since they tend to be behind several layers of abstractions (think running bare metal hypervisors and messing around with ansible and zfs pools + hardware vs. getting a new EC2 instance via terraform).

I run my own forked blog template (ink-free for hugo) and have added fun little statistics - turns out, based on a pure word count, I wrote about 1.3x "The Hobbit" by Tolkien since 2016 (~128,000 words: https://chollinger.com/blog/tags/). My blog is decidedly a worse choice as far as literature goes, but writing all these articles taught me a lot.

It's worth it to me.

- I use it as a quick way to answer coworkers' questions ("Here, I already wrote about this problem at <link>, let me know if you have questions!")

- I frequently use my own previous posts for remembering how to do things

I'm not seeking out readers. I basically just need a public place to brain dump. The operating expenses are zero so the only cost is doing the actual writing. My posts are typically short though, so even that cost isn't high (and I can write them whenever I want).

1) I write a personal blog [0] whose posts I sometimes share here [1]. I write mainly to understand what I think and to have a "prepared statement" for conversations I am having with friends. If I develop a brand at some point, great, but it's not the point.

2) Looking at some blogs that routinely do well on HN (e.g. Dan Luu [2], Jake Seliger, [3] or Jeff Kaufman [4]), I don't see a lot of SEO-/algo-aware optimization. I see instead people who are writing persuasively about topics they're knowledgable about. Obviously that's easier said than done. But is there something you know a lot about where you have something burning to say?

3) Nate Silver, Matt Yglesias, and Noah Smith are all successful independent journalists who have written on blogging [5] [6] [7]. I'd probably start with those, but a common theme is they write a lot and they promote/talk shit on social media.

[0] https://setharielgreen.com/blog/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32911306

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fdanluu.com%2F

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=https%3A%2F%2Fjakeseliger.com

[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.jefftk.com%2F

[5] https://www.natesilver.net/p/always-be-blogging

[6] https://www.slowboring.com/p/how-to-get-slightly-better-at-t...

[7] https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/noah-smiths-writing-advice

I'm curious, which personal blogs do you read and aspire to emulate?

There's a significant difference between 'personal' blogs, which are free and genuinely personal, and the 'creator community' of individuals aiming to launch revenue-generating paid newsletters.

It's important not to confuse these two groups, as I see many more people now in the latter category than the former.

I think it's absolutely worth it. I recently reflected on two decades of blogging[0], and -- as I elaborated there -- I feel the rise of static site generators has made it more worth it than ever. We talked about this further on a recent episode of Oxide and Friends[1], but I have found that SSGs encourage me to write more because they eliminate all of the WordPress dreck. I think that discussion will also answer many of your questions in terms of why it's so important to write, and why it's further important that your writing be truly yours and not sitting behind someone's proprietary platform. Finally, for more on this, I would recommend Writing for Developers[2], which is loaded with very concrete advice on what to write about.

[0] https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2024/11/16/blogging-through-the...

[1] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/technical-b...

[2] https://www.manning.com/books/writing-for-developers

I dropped all the "branding" (what for me, I consider) non sense and when I killed off expectations and how I wanted to be perceived (online), I felt more liberated, my perfectionism quieted down (it's still lingering there), experienced less procrastination, and just starting writing again and more motivated to write for an audience of one: me.

Though I used to predominately write about tech, these days I write about my dance journey and that in itself has connected me with people all over the world, many people saying they found (house) dance classes in London via a Google Search and my tiny little blog sits at ranking #1. Totally unanticipated. Every time I have 1 person (IRL) come up to me at some event or class or workshop, I'm reminded that maintaining my blog is worth it.

Success here is the sum of an equation that combines publishing and distribution.

The early days of blogging, the distribution came from RSS feed readers. The minute those fell out of fashion, the distribution loop of self-publishing disappeared.

Medium was clever because it kind of created that built-in but it never took off.

The distribution loop has always been social media which is now drowned out with other noise (you don't need me to explain that dire state of social media).

The nth conclusion becomes newsletters because email remains the lowest common denominator of distribution (other than maybe text message but that isn't appropriate here).

I am a founder of a publishing platform (WP Engine) and my entire SWE background is content management. But I'm the first to admit that distribution is everything.

I think maintaining a personal blog or site is important to be able to have a source of record of important stuff you write. But it's a backup. It's not a destination for distribution.

To answer your question in the title, it is still worth it to me, as I get a lot of joy by writing. Pretty much as you put it, there's value to me for writing for it's own sake. Even if no one is reading. It's a cherry on top of someone stumbles upon my posts.

It just so happens two individuals have reached out to me in the past week, saying they enjoyed what I wrote and one of them cited that I saved them time. That just feels incredible.

To answer your questions I don't find my readers at all. I share my content when relevant on reddit or here. I keep writing because I enjoy it.

I'll link my blog post and will remove if asked to:

https://www.greghilston.com/

I do it for myself. I know that every platform downranks external links, and that Google is slowly strangling the independent web while everyone is also using it to train their AI.

But God dammit, I am still staking my claim on this tiny space on the internet. This is my little digital garden, and it still attracts the occasional friend. If not, at least it stays mine and won't disappear when some walled garden is incentivized to raise its walls.

I enjoy writing. I enjoy sharing recipes. I enjoy having a space that is representative of my interests.

I don't really know if anyone reads my blog because I don't use any analytics or care to know.

There are a handful of times that I've written a post about something and then when someone offline expresses interest in X thing by coincidence, I can say "Ah, I actually know a little bit and you're welcome to read what I know in your spare time!"

I also have a thing of writing about any thoughts and anxities I might have at various milestones (starting new jobs + 5 year increments).

That recently came in handy with a mentee who was a bit like "I don't know what I'm doing, is this normal?". Saying it's normal is one thing but even better is being able to point to a post where I blurted out my mental state 10 years ago :)

I also don't share posts anywhere but I have a hint that at least one person is subscribed to my RSS feed (I think they told me something broke once) but part of the fun is not really knowing who's out there I think

The other value too is that just like trying to explain something to another person, the act of putting together a coherent piece of writing forces you to sort through your own thoughts (even if you think you understand the topic) which is valuable even if no one elses reads your own writing.

I re-read one of my very first posts not too long ago that I had completely forgotten about and thought "This is good stuff! I wish I knew about it earlier" haha

I think more than anything, the sense of tweaking, writing and publishing my blog is unmatched!

I wrote a bit about it recently here: https://rishikeshs.com/blogging-friction/

Apart from the joy of it, my blog has helped me in my career. I had applied for a job in my niche area which required me to have some writing experience. But I never had anything other than my blog to showcase. This gave the interviewer bit of a confidence and eventually ended up giving me an offer.

On the dev side, I learnt hugo, the whole world of static generators and eventually had a slight programming because of my blog. When a client reached out to me out of the blue for a project, I asked him how he found me. He found me via blog and my online presence made him more confident in giving me work.

Other than this, my blog is a wiki of my life. As someone else said in comments, I don’t care if no one reads, I’ll still publish.

When I was a child, I read a Soviet book titled How the Steel Was Tempered. There is a line in this book that I will never forget: 'When he looks back on his life, he will not feel regret for having wasted his years, nor will he feel ashamed for having achieved nothing.' I think this is also the motivation behind my blogging—to record life, reflect on it, share it, and use it as a personal notebook of my own journey. That's all.

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.

It depends. I write because I genuinely enjoy the process of sharing my thoughts and documenting what I’ve learned. Another reason I’ve kept my blog going for over the last half decade[1] is that I find myself constantly referring back to it. Sometimes, it’s just easier to pull up my own notes than wrestle with a feisty LLM.

Over the years, the blog has picked up a modest audience—around 20–25k page views a month—and it’s opened up some cool opportunities. I’ve had job offers, invitations to speak at conferences, and even chances to write and review books. Now, I feel a natural pull to research and write about something every week. In hindsight, that habit has been massively beneficial over time.

Plus, I love the fact that I own my content. I’m a big believer in the POSSE (Publish on Your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) philosophy. There’s something deeply satisfying about having everything I’ve created over the years in one place. For me, that’s worth it—but YMMV.

[1]: https://rednafi.com

You don't need to "beat" the established authors (probably). You don't need to beat SEO-optimized tutorials garbage (probably). If you want speaking gigs, job offers and meaningful connections then for sure you don't need to beat the AI-generated garbage - nobody is inviting them to speak, and not yet for jobs.

What is it you are hoping for? What is the cost (in time) you can throw at it? Would this be fun or a major enterprise to you?

If you like to write then sure why not? Do you write fast?

If you do write, then participating in reddit, HN, twitter?, and the relevant discords or bulletin boards for your field is propably still a way to slowly send traffic to your writing.

For example: if you want support for your job applications, then you don't need to beat anyone, you only need a small boost. Will a few writings give you a boost? Only if you write and edit well. But beyond that, it probably doesn't matter if you get much traffic. If you write and edit poorly... this will not help you!

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 mainly for myself, but it has other benefits as well. The act of blogging forces me to actually follow through with pieces, as I'm putting them out there. If I'm just "taking notes", it won't be as well laid out (at least until later revisions) and is very utilitarian.

Blogging forces myself to write for others, which allows me to do things like research a subject more deeply and include supporting evidence. Aside from that, it's nice to have a resource that shows enthusiasm about a field, and there are things you can point to if writing samples are necessary for a job, grant, or publication.

I think there are a lot of other benefits I haven't covered. I will preface this saying all of my blogs are also first drafts about random things. Sometimes they align with my field, but a lot of the time they are edge-cases or in an adjacent field, and sometimes they're just ramblings about random topics. Finding your reason to blog is the best way to do it, because if you have no reason or motivation to, why do 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.

There is absolutely still value in writing for its own sake. Personal blogs should first and foremost be for yourself. Long-form writing is a great skill and compiling your thoughts in one location is a great idea.

Not to mention that while you may not host the blog yourself, you will own the content. You can transport it anywhere, regardless of the shape of your blog.

As far as brand, finding readers and sharing content goes, I think plugging your blog posts here and there to your communities and social media platforms of choice is sufficient. Being algorithmically savvy about the process can be good, but posting to your favorite Discord server, your favorite social media network, and even just emailing/texting/DMs people works well too. Also... HN is good for this too, of course.

Writing should be for _you_ not for others. If it's not, then you won't be able to maintain it anyway. IMO yes it's still worth it if only to synthesize new thoughts, show potential employers you _think_, and to maintain a journal-like catalog of your past mindsets.

The primary reason I keep writing is that this, the plain written word, is The Platform to transport ideas in time and space. It has passed the test of time in ways that each of those platforms you mention have not (nor any other medium, e.g. video, etc. at least in our lifetimes).

I think of those platforms more as distribution / syndication mediums, using them for stuff like throwing it out there and reach others (which I somewhat care about because the topics I write about are those I like to exchange opinions about with others, but not obsess in terms of needing validation) and keep some degree of isolation from their policies, relative importance vs others, algorithms, UI/UX choices etc.

Yes. I don't write for others though. I write because:

- It helps me gather my thoughts together and reflect on where I am.

- It helps me get better at writing and communicating.

- It helps me stay accountable for a few things. I like to write about success, failures, lessons learned etc and sometimes those things keep me accountable.

- It helps me learn better. Let's say you are writing about a technical topic. Now you will have to go and learn/relearn a few things related to it as you write about it.

If you write because you want to be found through SEO, that is hard in 2024 because Google search is now a shitfest with crappy ads first and real organic stuff doesn't even show until 6-7 entries.

I am still writing https://nts.strzibny.name

It's my own retrospection / notes / and now also marketing for my books Deployment from Scratch and Kamal Handbook.

I get around 6k/mo visits, it's not really growing but I also never wrote "for SEO", just whatever I am dealing with.

As for promotion I submit the better posts to Ruby subreddit and I am lucky my posts are often picked up by 2 Ruby newsletters.

Your post actually inspired me to want to start blogging so I will share what I'm thinking about.

Plain HTML only with a single page and hyperlinks into a specific article. Very basic styling and no JS, don't even necessarily want to have a css file, just inline in the header. Very likely just setting font family to sans and be done with it.

I sometimes play with esoteric stuff that might be fun to blog about.

Stuff I've recently played with and deployed on internal tools was a SPA built using just js. No react etc. Basic router which makes use of the history API and use the observer pattern with MVC for "components" but generally those are just entire pages.

And a "component" or "page" is just a function that takes a router (could extend it to include props I guess ala react) and returns a Promise<HTMLElement>.

All the router does is looks up the function in a map and calls it replacing the top level div on the page with the returned HTMLElement.

All external loading happens at the page level and not at component level and it's simple enough.

There's a point where you need a bigger framework like react but I find it a pain to include react and npm etc when all I need is some very simple pages with some dynamic content.

A writeup on the pros and cons etc might be fun.

The next thing I'm playing with is possibly something like a job system(well promises in JS would work fine) and using that for state updates. Think goroutines and channels. There are some existing articles on that but they reference very old libraries and I feel there might be no reason to use a library or even channels on the web for that concept.

I find it personally valuable because it’s how I think and reason about things. I like to write, think, delete, edit, write, think, repeat. I do it with work, and in private I do it with a journal. Almost everything I’ve written about has lead to major revelations and accomplishments, or accompanied them. It’s basically how I make sure I’m firing on all cylinders. It’s how I go from interested and tinkering to highly engaged and working deeply.

The result is that a lot of what I’ve written has come up in interviews, caused me to meet new people I’ve eventually worked with, and it has generally enriched my career.

The key is that (in my opinion) you have to write mostly for yourself. I don’t write as though I have an audience (I don’t, really) and I think it shows. I’m just building or talking about stuff that I care about, and I get into it however I want to. Sometimes it isn’t even technical.

When there’s a target audience, unless you’re trying to sell something you care a lot about, you’re going to burn out on the content and there’ll be no passion leaking through. Write if you want to, and write about what gets you excited.

Even if no one reads it, you’ll benefit a lot from time spent thinking, writing, and learning about yourself and your work.

Back in 2006 my blog got me a girlfriend. I think exposure in any way is beneficial.

Initially I sent out Mailchimp newsletters to my closest friends, but found the interface a bit clunky, so instead switched to Wordpress. What I do is write specifically for the audience of my friends, send them the newsletter, and post it on the Internet.

What I found kind of interesting, is when I would see some of my friends months later, they would cite something they found interesting from the blog. Occasionally, I peek at the metrics, and it is in the low single digits, but I'm okay with that as long as my friends have seen it.

My guess is with the inundation of shallow knowledge and posts people resonate with deeper writing.

I have been searching for the same answer myself. Blogs, or long form narrative consumption have morphed into newsletters and substack is the king there solving the problem for both consumer and publisher.

Note Scott Hanselman, Bryan Cantrill, Adam Leventhal, Cal Newport, Derek Sievers, Tim Ferris etc. - a lot of the OGs still maintain their own real estate on the internet. These are outside the walled garden pruned by algorithms of megalomaniacs. Whatever format you are producing content, there is an essay at the core of it. Personal blog could serve as an archive for that.

Recently Oxide and friends did an episode to address this topic - I'd highly recommend that episode and the podcast itself. This was in context of the book launch https://www.manning.com/books/writing-for-developers. I've just made through a few chapters of the book, it will give you a lot of good reasons and framework on how you should do it.

If your aim is building a readership, consider the following questions: - Why do you want to grow an audience? - What do you have to offer to that audience so that they'll come back? - Is long format prose their preferred medium for consuming the message?

I have a blog still, which I've maintained since 2001. But I have no interest in having "personal brand", whatever it is, I just enjoy it. I also read a number of technical blogs. Most of them I found by word of mouth - somebody referenced it somewhere, the content was good, I got interested, browsed the other entries and decided this is something I want to be reading on the ongoing basis.

It's hard to form a comprehensive opinion about a subject without writing about it. My blog helps me do that because it forces me to research the stuff that I believe to be true and write concisely about it.

If the blog helps you form your ideas, it is worth it.

If the end goal is to have a readership, be prepared to do more than just writing. You can easily easily fall in the trap of writing to please your audience. And they can steer you in unexpected directions.

So I run a personal blog, which I treat as my personal brand and take quite good care of the SEO and keywords. I write and treat it as ad copy, so there is some FOMO for people who are interested in ever wanting to work with me. And from 2017 and up, it has gotten me at least $250k in client work. So that's $30k from a blog per year. I'd attribute at least half of that to the blog, so lets say $15k. I do not post on Twitter or LinkedIn, these clients have only been finding me on either YC or through Google.

> Why do you keep writing

Because its so, so easy to stand out from the herd. So why wouldn't I? From my experience, even in this bad market, it makes you have clients to choose from. Got laid off? No worries, someone will inbox you within the next 2 months with some offer. Started working with a bad client? No worries, you have others to choose from. I haven't send out a resume in years as a result. I will be retiring the blog soon though, in favor of writing content for a small niche agency that I am hoping to start in 2025. But then the branding will continue there.

I blog for the (admittedly infrequent) pleasure of it; I have no expectations, and my page hits confirm that.

In the last 180 days there's been 2507 visitors to the home page, 2803 to the robots file, and 5965 to a page that shows some domains I might sell (but otherwise has no content at all).

The actual article pages averaged between 90 and 170 visitors total per page over those 180 days.

As a numbers thing it isn't worth it (for me). However I have had recruiters cold-contacting me based on my blog (and github), and a publisher wanting me to edit and peer review a technical book. So it can open up new possibilities regardless of the scale of the readership.

(Edit: I don't re-post anywhere else as whilst I have accounts on the socials they are unused placeholders)

I've maintained a domain and blog for nearly 20 years, but I find myself questioning why I want to write anymore. I don't know the answer, but it's interesting reading through others' perspectives. For me, it used to be because I enjoyed the tinkering aspect of maintaining the site and writing was an avenue towards that. Now, I just wonder who cares about my content, and more worried about writing something that gathers the wrong kind of attention - not because I'm worried about me, but because it's easy to just get internet-mad these days.

I work in tech, and it's probably good to have something out there, but I wouldn't assume it's a detriment not to. If nothing else, when I find some novel answer to a tech problem, maybe it'd be useful to document it for someone else. I don't think I'm doing anything esoteric or unique, but perhaps documenting is unique enough. But I'm not in it to growth hack or gain readers or anything. It'd be for me and anyone who happens to find what I have to say of interest.

> Maybe there’s still value in writing for its own sake?

I just finished Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird and it has a meaningful response to this.

“I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. The thing you had to force yourself to do—the actual act of writing—turns out to be the best part. It’s like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.”

For me, writing is like tidying up a messy room. When the clutter is gone, I can think more clearly and focus on new ideas, so I believe there is still a lot of value in writing without worrying about readers.

I have a site, where I do posting, on an irregular basis[0].

I hesitate to call it a "blog," though. I suspect that my greatest fan is Yours Truly. I basically write for myself.

I have no plans to stop, but quite some time can go, between postings.

[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany

I write a blog to share projects and to have a single place to point people to (that can be accessed without an account).

I share some of my posts on HN such as annual interesting books [0] and articles [1] lists. But my main source of new readers recently has been from chatbots. This has led to the interesting scenario where many posts more than six months old get regular traffic, while traffic on new posts depends on a link getting shared somewhere. I'm guessing it's due to how often my website is getting scraped for training data.

As for motivation, I still get a rush from receiving an email that someone enjoyed a book I recommended or some code I wrote helped them solve a problem.

[0] https://bcmullins.github.io/interesting-books-2024

[1] https://bcmullins.github.io/interesting-articles-2024

I have a personal project (a new kind of data management system) that is directly a product of my interests (storage devices, file systems, databases, parallel processing, distributed systems, etc.) and also a blog.

While I love it when someone reads one or more of my blog posts and learns something useful; that is just one of the reasons why I write them. They help me organize my thoughts. They are a 'paper trail' of why my architecture was designed they way it was. They help me understand why I decided to include a particular feature. They help me figure out where my roadmap is taking me.

The software is available for free download, so the blog of course encourages the readers to try it out for themselves; but it is not designed to necessarily 'build a brand' or 'drive sales'.

I tell people about my blog, but I do little to promote it (beyond mentioning it in forums like this one). I don't measure its success on how many people read it.

Yes — I set out to write a blogging platform to learn tools of the trade when I first was getting into the workforce in 2017. It’s been an on and off effort over years, and I don’t actually have that much writing to show.

Taking simonw’s advice (shout out since I see he also contributed to this thread), I’m trying to be less precious about my writing. I finally published a post that I’ve been wanting to see out in the world for years and it got to the front page of HN, which was of course immensely gratifying.

My motivation is partly “branding”, but also because I am a strong proponent of owning your own digital presence. Even if nothing ever came of it, there’s an artifact I can point to that’s a deep expression of my own sensibilities, and that’s what keeps me going.

I've been doing it for ~20 years off-and-on. Initially I thought I'd find an audience/community that resonated, but never did. So no.

My experience has been that I have to post to HN about 6 times to have a shot at making front-page, and even when I do I feel like from the comments that I didn't succeed at communicating what I was trying to.

I also don't get any organic interaction. (https://think-twice.me/)

Maintaining a blog in 2025 is worth it if you do not mind almost all of your readers being LLMs that ingest your work and repackage in ways that prevent you from being aware of your actual human readership, often without credit and for profit of their operators.

I personally blog for the same reason some people play the guitar: I don't care whether what I produce is good or not, or whether people like the articles I write or not.

It's just a hobby.

Even my girlfriend doesn't read my posts if I'm to be honest. But the act of writing soothes me, and as a non-native English speaker I feel it's been a great way to improve on my written English.

Also, writing your own static site generator is a pretty fun (and easy) thing to do.

Shameless plug as well: https://blanchardjulien.com/ Static site generator: https://github.com/julien-blanchard/Loulou

I just blog as personal tech notes to remember how to do something, or to share with coworkers. And I do reposts manually on Medium / Dev.to / X to attract more viewers. Medium actually pretty good with that.

I realized there’s more to lose personally and less to gain by putting my thoughts and writing and how to’s out there for free on the internet. Especially now that AI is stealing (that’s harsh, maybe ingesting?) anything that isn’t nailed down.

What really changed everything was all the Chinese web traffic around 2014 on the blog posts that included command by command instructions on how to mine Bitcoin headless under Ubuntu.

My paranoia is singular and began 10+ years ago but I do not see the benefit to blogging (for free) on the internet.

I’m also not job hunting or looking to network with anyone. I’m not interested in elevating my e-status and I have no wares to hawk. I understand though that other people do need to “sell themselves” for whatever reason on the internet.

I've restarted a blog one year ago. I think it's worth having a platform, but it's not necessarily worth spending much time on it.

In my case, I enjoy having a personal space. I had multiple posts I really wanted to write and share with my friends.

I don't want to spend time and energy promoting the blog and competing for attention. But I know some people enjoy following it. That said, I also shared a few posts on HackerNews and Reddit and some of them went viral (10k+ views).

But most posts get very few views. So it's worth it only if I do it for me and my friends, and don't have much expectations.

(https://laurent.le-brun.eu/blog/)

> build your developer brand

Brands are bad. If you value brands, I recommend you read No Logo by Naomi Klein. It will (all right, may) help you adjust your value system. It certainly did for me.

> why do you keep writing?

I'm going to share a drastically different perspective: I blog under a name that is totally disconnected from my professional name. I do not derive any obvious fringe benefits to my career for doing so, yet I persist.

I write because it forces me to become a more deliberate thinker and more effective communicator. This makes me a more valuable employee, and it shows in how I interact with the people I work with.

Dispense with all this branding and clout crap. Why play the rat race like everyone else?

Write for you, and for people who care about the same things you do. Who knows, maybe you'll find likeminded people and build a professional network organically?

I view my blog as a public diary. It tracks what I am thinking about at various times in my life/career.

Continue to write, because it helps me refine my ideas, practice my writing skills, and snapshots my mind.

Is maintaining a personal blog still worth it?

I keep an offline blog of sorts that is more or less only for the times when I want to reply with a long winded comment that is too much for an HN reply. If that occurs I fire up a VM, grab a LetsEncrypt cert and plonk down either a simple HTML or Text file created with vi to reply. There is no sense in my keeping the VM active given I block all the search engine, CDN networks and archive sites.

> For those still maintaining personal blogs:

Hey that's me!

> How do you find readers?

I don't! Sometimes they find me, sometimes they don't.

> Where do you share your content?

On my blog!

> And most importantly - why do you keep writing?

I write rarely. I do it because I enjoy it. To collect my thoughts. To be able to come back to it later and feel mildly embarrassed. To be able to tell people "hey I wrote a blog post about that".

I'm not exactly sure what I'd gain if I had more readers. I get stray people from Google for the same keywords for the past 15+ years. Other posts which I think more worthwhile have zero readers. There is no point to it. Just like anything else, really.

I blog the fun of it. Back in the day, random traffic would land on your site. That happens less nowadays. It was very straightforward for search engines to pick up on you with no effort. Nowadays you have to put some effort into it. And the more effort you put in, the more effort you put in. So I don't put in much effort and just write whatever I feel like writing. Sometimes it's a couple of lines and a photo. Sometimes it's long. And it's mostly not code and stuff.

I agree with the general feeling from other commenters that a blog should first and foremost be an activity you do for yourself. It's a great way to organize your thoughts and truly reflect on them.

I have been trying to start my own recently (https://nchagnet.pages.dev/blog), mostly because I used to write research articles and I miss that feeling at the end of a project to wrap it up with some piece of writing you are proud of. I am still looking for my voice, but it has definitely been fun!

Today's society is indeed very fragmented and restless. However, I believe there is always a demand for high-quality content. Last year, my friend started a personal business media platform, producing in-depth reports on business practices. This earned her over $50,000 in a year.

> But in 2025, the landscape has shifted dramatically

Despite that, I launched a blogging service just recently https://lmno.lol

The workflow is derived from my own, which I used for more than a decade (a single text file for my personal notes).

> why do you keep writing?

My blog is an extension of my notes. Blogging helps me write better notes I can later revisit.

Finding wholesome pockets on the internet is still awesome. Contributing to that is still a worthy effort IMO.

I wrote two blog posts about reverse-engineering a Gamecube video game that I'm quite proud of. I put links to those posts on my resume. I don't know whether it made an impact, but they hired me.

Writing (more than tweets or short comments) is exercise for the mind and a skill that, like most skills, requires practice and repetition to improve.

Writing is a good way to teach yourself how to organize information in a way that someone else finds useful.

Also, to be a good writer, you need to read. A lot. Some writers will resonate or connect with you more than others. Spend some time to figure out why. Maybe you want to adopt elements of their writing styles.

If you're primarily trying to "build your brand," hire a marketing consultant.

Just celebrated my 10 year anniversary https://www.philipzucker.com/ten_year_blog/ actually. It has not generated new jobs for me, but I haven't been looking really. Writing is good. It's a good way to learn more. It's good to do things and have tangible results. If you don't enjoy it on some level or feel satisfaction, there are more direct ways to seek what you want.

My 20 year old blog is private to myself. I have observed I keep having the same plans and ideas at different times. It has been very useful to pin those ideas down to a persistent plan or strategy.

I have also found it useful as I am an external thinker and over sharer. A day rarely passes that I don't send up a random thought to the blog, rather than it being an unnecessary whatsapp.

It's less about maintaining a personal blog than it is about regularly doing and writing about things that are "blog-worthy". There are many channels besides blogs - youtube, podcasts, social media, live feeds, github, huggingface - but they all require interesting content. I wouldn't get hung up on the medium, do interesting stuff and publish it.

> 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?

(1) Random search traffic.

(2) An RSS feed.

(3) Because I enjoy writing.

If you're looking for a way to turn text into money (a.k.a. "build your developer brand"), there are probably programs to do that, human beings talking about how to write such programs, other humans talking about how to write programs to simulate those humans, ... you get the picture.

Maybe not so much a blog, but I believe a developer should maintain their own website, whether that includes a blog or not.

It lets you define yourself and organise your own projects. And (I believe) most importantly, you learn how to maintain a project over many years, which informs you of the most important decisions that need to be made at the start of a new project.

Does this help you get work? Who knows?

In my case, I have been approached by people who saw my website after reading an on-topic comment on this one :)

It is a difficult question. I personally no longer run anything close to a blog.

That said, in the few instances when I stumbled upon someone's writeup, even when I disagreed with what they wrote I took a moment to appreciate the medium used ( some are into minimalism, some like amusing retro feel enforced by very new framework ). I think I even once reached out to someone to ask what they used to generate such and such effect.

Still.. I am not certain if that qualifies as meaningful connection.

I don’t blog. I do write for myself though.

I used to think I would blog but I came to realize that it takes a certain personality to believe that others want to read what you think, and ultimately that’s not me.

Which is freeing: I can just write without caring about what anyone except myself thinks.

I refer back to it quite often. And it helps me clarify my thoughts to write them down.

It’s hit or miss. Most of the blog posts I write get little to no attention.

But a couple I wrote got picked up by a bunch of media publications, and resulted in a few job/contracting offers (none of which I accepted but they were still offers).

So it’s a lottery, IMO. But when one breaks through, it could be potentially worth it

Definitely. Even if no one reads my blog, the act of articulating ideas in a format that others can understand helps me better understand those ideas and concepts myself.

I’m also bias, since I run the Bear blogging platform. There are thousands of very happy personal bloggers there with close to zero SEO goop (strict review process, and all that).

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.

As someone who has blogged on and off for decades and has literally no way of knowing whether people read my posts (no analytics or tracking at all on my site), I’d say it is worth it.

Blogging has been of a great help to see me through some of the more challenging periods of my life. Just being able to empty my thoughts onto a page and not worry about chasing fame or notoriety has huge benefits. For me, anyway.

> 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.

I think it depends what you want to achieve -- I keep a blog without playing any engagement games and get ~500 visitors per day, which is much more than I'd have imagined.

Write a blog for yourself like a journal if nothing else. Writing down thoughts forces you to think actively about them, and actively confront the contradictions you might have. You are forced to make decisions about your beliefs and what you want to present. How you want to present the ideas.

Yes.

I'd say that maintaining a personal blog is more about the long-term effect of building your content.

It's a way to express yourself in the way you want, having your own UI, your own styles, your own way to write things on it.

In the final sense, it's everything about you, having readers is more a consequence of it. And IMO you shouldn't care about if you have it or not.

At this stage, it is difficult to obtain traffic to maintain a personal blog website at this stage, so I mainly published related content on some technical forums. Although blogs often write for myself, it is also meaningful to help others by the way. Things, like open source

I write for myself, and maybe a core group of friends, not random Web person.

https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2024/05/16/just-code

But this authenticity tends to make some new friends along the way.

If it's ever been worth it, it's still worth it.

Because: no, I don't remember when maintaining a blog was the way to build your developer brand, nor that thoughtful technical writing alone would get you anything -- if no-one reads what you write, the result is the same as it's always been.

I at least write blog mostly for its own sake. I do not even bother checking statistics about page views or such, there are no ads, and I am doing it simply because it makes ( public part of ) my journal have sometimes bit more thoroughly written down notes about things I am doing anyway.

If your primary motivation is building a personal brand, then it’s probably not worth it to the readers.

I was in the same boat of thinking recently. I've decided that I'm going to blog for my own benefit first -- being a better thinker and writer. When I have something I feel worthy of sharing more widespread, I'll share it with my circle.

It helped me land my current position so I would say it is worth it. When someone is considering working with you, it is worth having something to point to that demonstrates your personality alongside your skills beyond what your resume can convey.

Blogger for more than 20 years. I love writing and I can't stop. Last year I published 60 or 70 original posts on my two business-focused blogs, and maybe 10 on my personal blogs.

In terms of finding an audience, it starts with being a good writer and having very original outlooks or information to share. Sometimes, that entails stating something provocative or that goes against the hot takes spouted by everyone else.

I've found that using multiple platforms to market your blog posts - and also expanding into other types of creative content, such as videos or newsletters - is the best way to build awareness.

Repurposing content is important. Some great blog posts started out as my own HN comments that seemed to resonate or I thought deserved a wider audience. I'm currently working on a project to turn about 35 blog posts (which originally were published on my niche business newsletter) into a book.

Awareness also requires regular cross-promotion - video descriptions have a direct link to the blog, and social media accounts might mention a single post a half-dozen times over the course of a year.

I spend a lot of time and effort on it, but I like to do it and there are real benefits for my business.

I have a blog, mostly in case I need to switch jobs, having unique research helps, but also in hopes someone continues one of my stupid sidequests :)

Is it worth having your own real estate to do what you want? Yes.

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

I don't think that the popularity of blogging overlapped meaningfully with the era in which the term 'developer brand' was a thing.

By and large, people blogged because they liked it, back when it was popular; the reasons that it became less popular are fairly complex. But I don't think many people were blogging to build a 'brand', back at the peak. I'm sure some were, but it wasn't a major motivation.

See also:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32137336 - Ask HN: Is having a personal blog/brand worth it for you? (2022-07-18, 309 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35164819 - Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you? (2023-03-17, 451 comments)

HN really like these personal blog threads because a lot of us have blogs, and we all appreciate people showing interest in our blogs.

I have a blog because a bit of reflection lets me get more out of whatever experience I just had, and I get a sense of joy if some other human shared my experience through those writings.

Can it be worth it? Yes. But you're likely better off making low-brow jokes on X/Twitter and clickbait on YouTube like Primeagen and Theo Browne.

> 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

I have recently come to change my views on writing. I don't write to build a brand, and I don't primarily write in order to achieve some financial goals. I write to think, and I write to learn. Building a brand and achieving financial goals can be secondary effects.

There's also another argument to be made here: you mention LinkedIn broetry, Xitter, Medium, etc. These are all very centralized, partly tech-bro focused, platforms smack-dab in the middle of their respective enshittification processes.

I challenge you to not only maintain your own personal blog, but do so on your own infra, or at least in some form on the fediverse. Have your own small part of the internet, just as an expression of yourself.

Are you asking if maintaining a personal blog is worth it or if it's still relevant in building your personal brand, and if now, how to build it?

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

I've started like six blogs in my life. For each I write between two and five entries, then give up on it. Four of them have been tech-focused.

Part of my giving-up is admittedly just laziness on my end, but a lot of it is that I don't feel like I have enough interesting stuff to say about technology to warrant a whole blog. Most of my opinions on tech tend to be relatively vanilla, or at least "mainstream for the quasi-academic engineer".

I will probably start at least one more in the future, but I feel like I might enjoy it more if I decide to confine it more to personal anecdotes and heartfelt stuff.

As it stands, the closest thing I really have to a blog sharing my personal opinion on tech is my HN feed honestly.

used to write a chinese blog that. I loved... the translate was so artisanal and used to love it. Now, I rather see it as an online personal journal rather than something to become famous

"Maybe there's still value in writing for its own sake?"

I hope this doesn't need an answer!

> Unless you're already established

The second-best time to become established is today.

I have a personal website exclusively so I can put it on my resume.

It could be argued (and I certainly believe so) that because of the spammy bs nature the internet has acquired, now is the most important time to create your own, genuine content. To fight back against aggressive globalisation and commodification of the internet, and in turn, socialisation. I believe we need much less of "generic SEO-maxxing Instagram influencer with 10M followers", and much more "average person who put genuine thought and effort into something cool for a handful of consumers". No better time than now to consider the choice of where we want out future to lead.

Do it for you, not for anyone else.

Yes, this is my blog - https://rxjourney.com.ng

It's not tech related, just a personal blog.

I find readers by just posting links on my social media when I make a new post.

I keep writing because I love writing and certain people love what I write, so it keeps me going. Also, I'm delusional and I believe my blog is going to be one of the biggest in my country one day. Also, I write because there's a donation link on it and I hope to get some money from it from people who like what they read.

It's worth it as long as you are distributing blog content onto Twitter.

more valuable than ever if you ask me

1) make blog

2) make moo card

3) profit

not really worth having a self-hosted blog. substack + twitter can work as well or better

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