1. It's a great way to learn. Teaching something to someone else has always been the best learning tool, and writing about something with an audience in mind is an effective way to capture some of that value.
2. It can be a big boost in job hunting. As a hiring manager two of the most important questions I have about a potential candidate are: Can they code? Can they communicate well? If a candidate has a blog with just two articles on it that hasn't been updated in five years that's still a big boost over candidates with nothing like that at all. In a competitive market that could be the boost you need to make it from the resume review to the first round.
3. If you blog more frequently than that it can be a really valuable resource for your future self. I love being able to look back on what I was thinking and writing about ten years ago. Having a good tagging system helps with this too - I can review my tag of "scaling" or "postgresql" and see a timeline of how my understanding developed.
4. It's a great way to help establish credibility. If someone asks you about X and you have a blog entry about X from five years ago you can point them to that.
5. Building a blog is really fun! It used to be one of the classic starter projects for new web developers, I think that needs to come back. It's a fun project and one that's great to keep on hacking on long into the future.
Notably none of the above reasons require your blog to attract readers! There's a ton of value to be had even if nobody actually reads the thing.
As a general rule, assume nobody will read your blog unless you actively encourage them to. That's fine. What matters isn't the quantity of readers, it's their quality. I'd rather have a piece read by just a single person that leads to a new opportunity for me than 1,000 people who read it and never interact with me ever again.
If you DO start to get readers things get even more valuable. I've been blogging since 2002 and most of the opportunities in my career came from people I met via blogging. Today I get invited to all sorts of interesting events because I have a prominent blog covering stuff relating to AI and LLMs.
But I do honestly think that a blog is a powerful professional tool even if nobody else is reading it at all.
If you want to give it a go I've written a few things that might be useful:
- What to blog about: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/6/what-to-blog-about/ - Today I learned and write about your projects
- My approach to running a link blog - https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/22/link-blog/ - aka write about stuff you've found
Another advice or a deduction that I learnt from reading biographies and many historical books is — write as if you are writing for a stranger, even on your own personal blog/diaries/memoir — when you get older, your younger self will become a stranger and you will have forgotten a lot of things in that life you lived.
How bizarre. Well, memory spaces are just that, I suppose. I write diaries and letters since before I entered school and my younger self does feel anything but a stranger to me; many of my memories are as lucid to me as they were all those decades ago, both life-changing as well as trivial ones.
Btw, I have had a to-do item for quite a while to copy your blog’s yearly archive link style in the footer. I haven’t figured out a way to make it simpler and I don’t have to deal with it for a long time. :-)
I like your idea of blogging about TILs. There are shallow posts about TILs(plenty on medium) and then there are posts that mention TILs along with specific gotchas they faced and workarounds on the topic. Those saved me hours of searching/debugging on couple of occasions and I'm glad that they did that.
I think a lot of what used to go onto blogs now goes elsewhere, but doesn't necessarily stay bottled up in the mind of the would-have-been blogger. Even while pseudo-blogging platforms like Substack are having something of an upswing of esoteric low-audience content.
And I can say from experience that it's tough keeping a blog going when you have near-zero readership, even if you still consider the act of writing something and putting it out in public to be instrinsically valuable to you.
Just as a simple example, I have a once-in-a-while newsletter+blog on a niche topic, and I could get way more eyeballs if I'd just rephrase things as a Reddit post, but I'm nostalgic about it living its own life on the Free-ish Web. Or, I suppose, this comment right here, which could just as well be on a personal blog with a "backlink" to yours.
I mean, I get it: the economic situation is tough for many people, and earning money matters. But the focus on creating something simply for the sake of sharing it seems to be disappearing more and more.
And so far I haven't seen any viable options. And right now I use HN comments as more like a blog post.
Of course my biggest issue is that I have started and deleted more blogs than I can count, so I don’t have any useful history, like I would if I would have stuck with one thing for the last 20 years.
Not a showstopper for me since I don't expect anyone to be interested anyway, but might be for some.
I still sad about my favorite go to photography blog was gone dark because of the vendor is sort of gone I guess. Might be we have to live with Buddha worldview - nothing is permanent.
I started blogging about tech and security when I was 13/14 years old in my native language. Then, when I felt more mature, I switched to a new blog where English was the main language. I started improving my language skills, getting some donation from kind strangers for my blog posts and using it as a self-branding forever running-side project.
Now, 20 years later I still have my personal blog and I still write about tech, but only recently I created some "personal related" tabs, like the "/now" page, enriching it every month or having a more personal about page. Why? Because I like going to a blog a see that behind that address there is a real person with emotions and dreams, it's like entering in their home and have a look around.
1. Improve your language skills
2. Self-branding
3. Memorize better topics you care about
4. Share what you learned with others
About LLM, I don't care if they scrape my blog, I use LLMs every day, and if some stuff I write helps to enrich an LLM with a positive impact I would be more than happy to let it happens, the more we write, the less fake-news and low-quality content would ingest and used.
I've released a new post every week for 10 years straight.
My traffic in the last 2 years is worse than the first 2 years. At the blog's peak I was getting around 180k unique visitors a month for years.
I was able to build a whole business around selling tech courses and doing contract work for the last 10 years but now traffic is so little that this is no longer feasible (not even close).
Just looking at the numbers, it's very likely related to Google not sending as much traffic as they used to because they either inline my content on their search engine results or AI results are used now instead of people visiting individual sites.
I still do it because I enjoy the process and my main motivator was never money but at the same time you need to be able to sustain yourself too. It's a bummer to be honest.
On that note, a ton of great non-money related opportunities came my way due to posts I've written in the past so I won't be stopping. I hope these continue.
HN is a great source, but you'll notice over time there are always AskHN posts asking something like "What is a site like HN for..", and people trying to build HN clones.
Reddit was good for a while for this, but hasn't been for a long time.
I'm hoping people rediscover/reinvent slashdot.
It works really well if you're looking for a cozier timeline.
It's just a list of hyperlinks to other sites with brief descriptions. I think it's a good idea and everyone should create one on their small website.
As a Kagi customer I have to say that's a disappointingly short list and static approach :/
Anyway, Kagi Small Web is not a list of websites but a list of RSS feeds.
You can also scour all 14,000+ sources for posts that match your interests.
I actually set up a blog on the 15th. No real content yet but I’ve almost written a first real post. Seeing this made me chuckle - I thought _I_ had an original thought around missing blogs but I’m obviously just a part of the hive mind. I truly hope this trend is here to stay.
I also want to share this video on the topic ”The reason no one has hobbies anymore”, it was shared by a podcast I was listening to the other day and I think it’s well worth watching. https://youtu.be/IUhGoNTF3FI
Personal blogs are not "back". The article has zero evidence for this.
Ironically, Darren Rowse (the "problogger" person cited in the article) hasn't published a new blog post since 2024-07-24, more than a year ago.
Is it? I haven't seen anyone in my circle return to blogging, nor kids of this generation.
Discoverability is going to be a massive problem, since search engines are dead. Maybe word-of-mouth through social media is enough?
The alternative would be to setup yourself a system that could serve those people.
In the meantime, there are lots of actual humans trying to do things who will benefit from your knowledge being repackaged and delivered by the blood suckers.
Playing telephone has now been automated ...
The only exception is Bluesky because it does not have algorithmic feeds, but technical content does not do well as most technical people did not migrate.
To do well on Substack you need to publish pretty regularly, several times a week to keep and build an audience, and the only thing anyone can generate that fast are opinions. So Substack has really just become a decentralised Op Ed page.
It does seem to work for a lot of people, though. Good for them.
(I fear) the blog of this generation's kids is called TikTok or whatever and the form is video instead of text.
It was about sharing bits of your daily life and personal thoughts and feelings, while building a small community. Having more than 50-100 readers was a major event (and not a thing people aimed for).
Why? YouTube pays creators, blogs don't.
I sometimes compare Mediawiki vs SharePoint to Web x.0 vs WAIS n Gopher.
One is light on resources, storing just the information with some formatting hints, leaving presentation to standards and the other is SharePoint. The comparison is really about bloat, not functionality, but the two are intertwined.
Similarly... what's the point of blogging if you're not writing it yourself? This post is very long, but seems to basically just be riffing on the title over and over, at least by the 3rd graph. If you're not explaining anything and readers aren't receiving anything - what's it for?
I really am asking with curiosity even though it's probably clear I have an opinion on this endeavor. There must be a reason you've paid money to do all this!
I've thought about two potential ways of getting around this:
1. Maintain two separate blogs, one professional, one personal, make the personal blog pseudonymous, and put all the things I don't want employers to see over there. This seems fine, but also feels like too much work in practice? (perhaps the work is just of selecting where to put the post after I'm done writing it, though.) 2. Maintain one blog, and not care about market hire or anything like that. This...would work, but I'm not sure about potential bad effects because of this. I could just choose to write completely pseudonymously instead. I'm not sure.
That's the route I decided to choose when I started my professional career. I already had a personal (pseudonymous) blog. And that's where I put the stuff around work.
I decided to go this way for many reasons.
First, because I don't want it to be a source of pressure. If I talk about work stuff and make a big mistake, then people can call me out on it and it would tarnish my reputation.
Second, because I want to share things for free and to help others first, not to help myself/my career.
Last and related, if I was using it as a self-promoting media, I would focus on things that would help my career, not on things that I find funny or that I think can help someone else. So it would BE work. And it would only take a few months before I would be tired of it.
Also since I've mostly worked on heavily regulated things, I'm quite limited about what I could publicly communicate.
Now, I have my own personal room on the Internet where I can discuss everything I want, without feeling any pressure about how or what or when I should write about anything.
After all, many of your readers are also human beings with lives, maybe even lives similar to yours based on your professional content. (The rest of your readers are LLMs.) Your readers might appreciate your perspectives on random life things or just getting to see what their favorite blogger is up to.
> This seems fine, but also feels like too much work in practice?
Once you've finished procrastinating on your perfect stack to run/generate the blog, it's easy to set up a second.
I started blogging 20+ years ago - and this was is still the number one go to reference after all.
He started as one of us, and started posting tipps - until... The story continues.
I don't think personal blogs are back.
- It is a personal blog = 1st audience is me. Best self-improvement investment I made - I blog for my present self: I blog about what I read, what I'm thinking about a topic, what I learned etc. But also I blog for my future self: the trends I'm noticing, how I should prepare and I am preparing - Since it is a personal blog, sometimes I blog about books I read, sermons I preach, technical notes. All mixed up. - This year got about 40k YTD traffic, which is not bad for a personal blog. Highest traffic came for my post on openwebui.
Benefits I've seen: - I am not selling anything or running ads. So there are no first order monetization - Since I blog about topics that matter to me (career, tech trends), I already have a clear thinking on those topics. So when they come up for discussions, I am able to speak clearly and with depth. That has landed me in promotions, faster career growth, coaching opportunities, and more - People share my blog post when certain topics come up for discussion. This has increased my influence and their respect towards me.
If you are interested to see how my blog has changed over time, I have kept a changelog: https://www.jjude.com/changelog/
Feels very nihilistic.
On top of that, discoverability is dead, SEO indexing for attribution of original works does not exist, the culture of rehashing content for walled gardens like LinkedIn and Medium is out of control, and the substackzation of writing does not make things optimistic.
There's certainly a difference between making useful content for the love of it and making content because you think there's an opportunity to get something out of that (that could be money, but it could also just be appreciation or someone reading your work).
It's demoralising to not get any views on your hard work, and in this economic environment it sometimes feels more worth your time to do any other activity.
You may be the counter-proof to that and I enjoy your blog! But, also a lot of what makes your content useful is timing with depth and that's something that AI can't beat yet
I think it’s a reason. It’s certainly demoralizing. Plagiarism sucks and feels bad. If I were to google something and see the AI overview parroting my blog post, sort of almost kind of paraphrasing my words and shoving the link to my actual blog off the phone screen entirely, I think I would personally travel to google headquarters and start swinging a baseball bat.
But… For starters, plagiarism has always been an issue. Even before the internet. Look at Tesla, or Rosalind Franklin. It was an issue on the internet before LLMs showed up. It’s always been trivially easy to copy and paste digital information, and with a little bit of programming to do so at scale. Those weird SEO wordpress blogs with their aggregated/stolen content have been around forever. The web was choked full of plagiarized garbage years before chatgpt was an option or even an idea.
Also consider that the AI machine takes a lot more than your stolen creative output to run. It needs tons of electricity poured into expensive equipment. It’s not clear whether the “stolen data + expensive scientists + expensive graphics cards + metric shittons of electricity” side of the equation is ever going to equal “monthly rate people will pay for access to sort of ok almost sometimes accurate information (a service which has been on offer for free for roughly 2 years and is easy to find for free depending on the company/model/use case)” let alone be lower than it. The plagiarism is not profitable and hopefully unsustainable.
And let’s sit on “access to sort of ok almost accurate information” for a second here. Because I’m pretty sure people looking for this and people looking for a blog written by a real human person who they can build a (parasocial perhaps but still) relationship with and send emails to and follow for more related content are entirely separate demographics. Blog traffic has dropped off because Facebook, Instagram, etc. It was those massive sites, not LLMs, that gutted that part of the internet.
Going back to sustainability, legal challenges to the plagiarism machines do still exist and have traction. The more creators, more bloggers and artists and programmers and more of anyone sharing their stuff online, the more people we have with a very vested stake in ending the plagiarism free for all.
I say get in there, get creating, and get up to some lobbying on the side for good measure. Don’t sit back and let a handful of spoiled nerds and obscenely wealthy old people ruin the joy of creating and sharing things. Maybe drop in more references to baseball bats to make your output less palatable to the monster. I don’t know.
This is the only sensible reaction to the abuses that huge tech companies are dumping onto society.
I do agree half heartedly with what you are saying. Making our own stuff and seeking out human-made stuff is more important than ever
It's just demoralizing because it is now also more difficult than ever. It should be the norm, not the exception imo and to me the future looks bleak and soulless.
And further, the LLMs will DDOS you in the process, completely disregarding robots.txt, so self-hosting is a pain-in-the-ass, forcing you to use (and trust) something like Cloudflare (or the Anubis, or Kiwiflare).
The ecosystem and interconnected-ness has completely vanished. If you look at the late 90s or early 2000s, people had RSS readers, and sites had feeds, blogrolls, trackbacks/pingbacks, a commenting system which worked, and social bookmarking sites (like del.icio.us) which were somewhat mainstream.
All of this is gone. Blogs are not going to survive in the current super-noisy consumption architecture.
For blogs to be back, you'd almost need a new internet.
I have written close to 3000 blog articles over the last 25 years (and many books) - primarily because I like writing, otherwise the top post here today nails it listing reasons to blog.
I don't think anyone's really optimizing for SEO. (it's not even really clear to me that that's very important any more.)
Submissions welcome ofc :) https://arc.net/folder/4A220E67-674A-456D-AEDB-796B5BE82034
One thing I failed to notice was that RSS was still active. So this year, I started consistently contributing, over 150 so far, and I see RSS picking up right where it left off [0]. A lot of my blog post suck, but I write them as an observation and my current understanding of a subject. Readers have agency to skip what they don't like and only read what they like.
I use my own server-side tracking to count them - I look out for the user-agent from feed software like Feedly and pull the number out of it:
Feedly/1.0 (+https://feedly.com/poller.html; 694 subscribers; )
Note this shows me how many RSS readers have accessed my RSS daily. I can't actually track each person, although I have a report I'm working on for the end of the year.
But honestly: without having an efficient way to fight them crawlers I'm not willed to write for it anymore.
Is there an efficient solution I can add? It lives on a Shared Web Hoster. For self-hosted stuff there's Anubis. Also willed not to use Cloudfare.
Why do I host a website? - https://www.unsungnovelty.org/posts/11/2019/why-do-i-host-a-...
And state of blogging: https://www.unsungnovelty.org/posts/10/2024/life-of-a-blog-b...
I started this journey from scratch. Despite not pushing for numbers and regular schedule, my website still have 20k viewers since I added analytics (didn't have analytics for 2 years in the beginning). That might be a small number for most, but it means that there are people who want to read what I write. That is all that matters. Atleast to me.
Just like Problogger, India has its own — Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal at https://www.labnol.org
In fact, a VC hinted to me that I should, or if I have the balls to convert my personal blog to the “Techcrunch of India” and become Michael Arrington. I wasn’t made for that and never wanted to be a blogger. My blog should be a very personal space. Well, my personal blog became a cheesy mess of personal ramblings with no aim or ambition. :-)
I think Kiruba Shankar attempted the closest to that one in India at https://www.kiruba.com and did succeed to a degree.
Fortunately, my website still enjoys direct links from a few Patents in the USA that reference my articles as a source of truth, as well as a few links from Wikipedia, WordPress.org, Adobe, and a few other well-established websites here and there. Quite a few of the articles were translated into other languages, and I keep getting referenced. Google still sends me quite a handful of visits daily.
I don’t think niche blogs are coming back, because the moment a “niche blog” becomes sustainable and “profitable”, it is no longer a niche blog. It becomes another commercial website or a publication.
It’s got just the features you need, is built by a solo dev, and it’s got a very fair split between free and paid features. I used it to put up my personal site and have been very happy with the experience.
Not only because it sucks they do it, but because I host everything.
It seems like you'd get traffic from search engines a few years back, but now the only traffic I've had is from a HN post.
Everything points to optimizing for "AEO" for LLMs now
Maybe it makes sense if you're selling a product or service, but I don't see the appeal of AEO as the new SEO. Maybe I'm missing something?
Kottke is one of the better known blogs that does not have a specific speciality.
nekoweb is another one: https://nekoweb.org/explore?page=1&sort=lastupd&by=tag&q=
List of Public Blogs of Hacker News users
There are lots of different RSS readers out there depending on whether you want a web based or local one. Personally I use Thunderbird.
They didn’t go anywhere! Ask the folks who have consistently maintained them regardless of current fad
Not sure if you're looking for a hosted solution, though. A lot of those would involve you running your own server.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Internet_forum_s...
Exploit ridden PHPNuke & e107 CMS too.
https://joeldare.com/why-im-writing-pure-html-and-css-in-202...
People out there are generally nice. People mostly don't care. And even if someone mocks your stuff in private - it says more about them than you.
It always makes me happy to see more people bring back blogging. I hate that everything is on platforms like substack, and would much rather see a million wordpress or ghost installs.
Here's mine (but barely incomplete drafts, I started it last week): blog.moralestapia.com
Blogging kind of was better in the past.
I also remember geocities. It was kind of cool.
Neocities unfortunately does not really capture that old spirit. It's just ... different.
Geocities was used by slightly nerdy average joes while from a brief glance Neocities looks to be a place for Mastodon techies to roleplay an internet they never participated in.
I’ve maintained my own domain since 2010 and know plenty of others that still do as well
My page is one of my favorite places on the internet cause it’s in my opinion the original purpose of the internet which is to share your personal research and places to document and share personal ideas with infinite distribution.
It's probably similar to the street-side musician. In old times, he may have been the only musician around you might hear. Nowadays, he's got to compete with a perfect recording of Hotel California by the Eagles.
Over time, a lot of companies figured out that if they start posting content-farmed articles on notionally non-commercial topics, this drives people to their website, so you ended up with billions of pages like this: thecleaningauthority . com/blog/how-to-clean/the-ultimate-guide-to-cleaning-pillows-and-pillo/ (remove spaces if you really want to).
And then LLMs brought down the marginal cost of cranking out content on any conceivable topic basically to zero, so you're all of sudden competing with 500 companies publishing spammy guitar maintenance advice. It's not that search engines want to show that stuff, but it's hard for them to tell.
(Perhaps also the browser, email, etc? ;)
I have an RSS feed of personal blogs which I really enjoy.
I also refuse to go to LiveNation type concerts. I only go to local musicians charging $10 at the door.
I don't even do it on principle. Corporate entertainment (including blogs) often feels formulaic to me. I find that Medium sucks the life out of good writers for some reason.
Am I supposed to advertise it with the icon explicitly or is it enough if the URL works? What do you generally look for?
If you like this sort of thing, find a blog you like and contact the author to tell them you enjoy their work.
I just checked in incognito on my cellular network and it seems to be working now. If you get the chance, I'd appreciate it if you'd let me know what went wrong when you visited it. Email in profile if you'd prefer that.
Also, I was just reading your blog and saw a reference to FutureMe.org. Man, that website really did survive. I searched my email for it and look at this!
> (The following is an e-mail from the past, composed on Wednesday, June 14, 2006, and sent via FutureMe.org)
And another where I say
> Hopefully, you have a child and everything is good and they are healthy. I wish you the best of luck, mate.
It worked out. Thanks for the good luck, past me! :)
Today, you’re talking to an audience that is online, willing to venture outside social media, and opting to actively read content rather than passively listen or watch. That’s far from everyone and that’s okay.
We had the time around when blogspot was a thing when everyone and their dog had a blog. It was mainstream enough for "Julie and Julia". It was a different time.
The previous poster might also consider all the high profile, independent, and influential publications across various subjects that grew out of blogging – e.g. HuffPo, Pitchfork, Jezebel, so many video gaming and entertainment sites... many of which were sadly bought up by rich idiots and/or existing media conglomerates.
Yes, but - there were lots of people who got online in other to blog. Livejournal, blogspot and others were the reason some of their mothers did get online. It was that mainstream!
The point should be connecting people to other people and their creativity, not just connecting people to content which may or may not be vomited out by generative AIs.
*You changed your post and now mine doesn't make sense anymore. I forgive you but don't do it again.
Content creation is indeed something a minority of society practices, but that can still be mainstream. In the first decade of the new millennium, the Movable Type and Wordpress ecosystem was active enough among ordinary people, not just nerds, that it led to things like local politicians being ousted, religious denominations’ leadership being shook up. All the drama now associated with Twitter/X happened on blogs before that.
Watch the last episode of The Onion’s series Sex House from 2012. A joke about everyone focusing on blogging is used multiple times. Even after the rise of Web 2.0 social media platforms, social media and blogs still coexisted for a time. It wasn’t until just after this that Google began deranking niche sites, and social media platforms sought to keep people on their sites for maximum engagement.