Ask HN: Where to Blog? I mean standard tech posts, "I did Y by doing X" not tied to a particular product. Medium seems to have lost its plot with all the paywall stuff, dev.to is blocked here, substack requires to already have a readership, same for a blog in my own domain. Any alternatives? |
Every day we see somebody on HN ask why their posts to their blog are being rejected. Usually (1) this person is ONLY posting links to their own blog and (2) the blog is beyond bad, like the engineering manager who wrote a blog post to the effect that "I used to have anxiety and then I started meditating two minutes a day"
If you don't have anything unique to say why do you expect to get an audience for free? Alternately, how hard does this guy have to work to promote his blog
You'd better believe people are reloading their RSS feed every minute hoping to be the first to submit the next post on that blog to HN for... 200+ instant karma like that.
When Ken got started he didn't have a big readership. He was doing run-of-the-mill Arduino projects but he did it consistently and did it with heart, then he taught himself to decode the secrets of microchips and took us all along for the ride.
It pains me to hear people who are impressed that they got 75 reads on their article on Medium. Back in the day it would have taken 75,000 reads to impress me. If you're going to make a deal with the devil you'd better get a good price.
His interest isn't in having a place to write, his interest is in forcing people to read what he writes. Read this...
"... substack requires to already have a readership, same for a blog in my own domain ..."
If it were for personal growth, showing employers, etc. he could blog on his own domain. He wants Medium to find viewers for his posts but doesn't want to give up anything or make the viewers give up anything.
Why are you dismissing Substack, by the way? There isn't a single platform on earth that will conjure up a readership from nothing, and Substack is no exception. It seems like it would be fine for your purposes, I don't see any reason to reject it either.
My advice: stop procrastinating and start writing. I used to be in the same place as you. GitHub Pages + Jekyll are your friends.
Personally, I prefer self-hosting. Then again, I have zero readership myself and mostly just rant into the ether for my own benefit, which doesn't sound like your aim judging by your post, so my advice may be completely irrelevant.
I assume your goal would be to post an article you wrote here and achieve some level of engagement (as you noted dev.to is blocked).
So, if you are planning to post on HN, the problem I assume you are trying to solve is finding an online url that carries some credibility in order to not turn off potential engagement.
Looking at https://hntrending.com/ and clicking “domains”, filtering to last week, I was surprised to see that 90% of the domains were well-known (GitHub, twitter, WhatsApp.com). Scrolling to less popular domains, we start to see some substack links and then I saw “interestingengineering.com”
Maybe I’m just a sucker for a good domain, but I would probably click a link to Christine.website or Christine.IO instead of christine.blogger.com.
Also, if a link isn’t to Bloomberg.com or nasa.gov, I’m going to assume the article is from someone’s personal, less journalistic-oriented position. So, an interesting domain like buildruntest.site or improving.code adds to my perception that I may hear an interesting perspective that isn’t covered in the news.
I recently switched companies, and having an interesting domain with some content on it was helpful to show employers. When I was hired at Apple, my manager noted he had glanced at my twitter feed and seemed to believe I was clued into the space I was hired for.
I assume you aren’t seeking monetization. The amount of work and advertising required to reach traffic needed for that level can be pretty massive (differing by topic, of course).
A lot has been said about writing as a way to self-reflect and also improve internal thought. So, if your goal is self-reflection or practicing the craft of writing, the “where” doesn’t matter as much.
One last thing: I was surprised at getting SOME engagement on a youtube video I posted about a server issue I figured out (HP DL360). I rarely ever post on youtube and haven’t blogged frequently in years…but I regularly get 100+ views each month. So, with all the talk about algorithms rarely helping small-fry content creators…perhaps my anecdote can encourage you that someone, somewhere may find value from what you post.
Let us know what you decide!
Wordpress, plain text/html, there are lots of ways to do it.
What exactly is the problem with your own blog on your own domain? I didn't quite get that part.
This just isn't a thing... You build the great content and naturally over time the readership follows. It's like asking to be an influencer without putting in the effort.
Personally it won't be my readership with headlines like "I did X by doing Y", "Best programming languages of 202X", "Why X is better than Y" blah blah blah. The internet is already polluted with enough of that.
That way you get decide how your content is presented.