Ask HN: Are technical blogs dead? I think the traffic for technical blogs has plummeted. Why would anyone searh for technical blog when they can just ask their agent about it? Also I am seeing less and less of them here on hacker news. |
Ask HN: Are technical blogs dead? I think the traffic for technical blogs has plummeted. Why would anyone searh for technical blog when they can just ask their agent about it? Also I am seeing less and less of them here on hacker news. |
If you write one to solidify your thinking, or for you to refer back to in the future, then they're just as useful as ever.
Also, if you write a good post people will drop into the comments to accuse you of generating it, which is pretty disheartening. You can't blame people for not sharing.
- To get the human perspective about something from an expert.
- To get the history of something, because there's still much to learn from there that LLMs can't really teach us.
Eg. "Why did you make those decisions way back when?"
This is why I enjoy Raymond Chen's blog[1] and folklore.org[2] so much. I don't think LLMs can replace that.
Now only if we could get more DEC, SGI and early Sun people blogging before they croak.
1. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/author/oldnewthin...
The thing about Tinkering is it's a place to pickup on people's passions.
It's still important to be able to think and write. You can really put yourself on the cutting edge of things. And then you can translate that into better prompts.
The more I think about it, many of the questions people ask here on HN are very much already answered through prompting. That's sort of weird. And if you want a blog post on something, just ask an AI and they'll be pulling from blog posts anyway.
The issue is "Model Collapse" and synthetic data as outlined here: https://share.gemini.google/izx1TAOuSZc5 - my questions there were actually posed here on HN beforehand https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49536605 I just went and asked C3PO about it afterward. The commenter could have done the same.
It's also hard to get people to visit regularly, let alone respect the time and effort that goes into writing for a site like this now. Again, people seem to have decided that influencers who make videos are just more 'valuable' than writers.
But I guess there are other reasons to run them. Writing helps you think by letting you explain your ideas more clearly, it provides a potential portfolio piece that may help things like job applications, and it's definitely possible to get attention from the right people by having a public presence like this.
It's just not really something that makes a lot of sense business wise anymore.
When LLMs gained popularity, I used them. Nonstop. My original intentions (explain things so I can understand them better) behind the blog were shattered. I wanted more readers.
(I did eventually remove or completely rewrite those LLM-generated articles).
Now, I don't know if the LLM-generated content did this, but the readership eventually dropped to single digit numbers. Granted, I did stop writing for like a year, but yeah... Why would anyone read anything on the blog when an LLM can generate the answer they're looking for in seconds? AND they can ask follow-up questions?
An agent may understand the underlying technology, but I spend a fair bit of time working out with agents the best framework for approaching a particular problem.
A technical post could lay out various approaches, possible SOPs, and their tradeoffs. That can be useful to an agent even if it doesn’t teach it any new technical facts.
The downside is that now bunch of llms will read it and spill my thoughts all over without any attribution. I might be even ok with that, but now some company is making money on it, and that doesn't sit well with me.
And now they're making money on it, and that sits really well with me.
now, it's like you are working for free for gen-AI companies.
I can only hope my years of writing and open source code projects are useful to OpenAI otherwise it was all for nothing.
I write mine all the time. Enough people seem to engage with it. Traffic seems fine.
I probably write less for capturing Google traffic, but instead as a signpost of something cool I worked on or learned. That I can send to people I meet as a reference. Impress my friends. Or refer to myself. Or show an agent (I often prefer writing blog articles to skills).
There’s a pretty massive competitive advantage to having your own voice that doesn’t sound like slop. IMO it’s never been a better time to be a messy, slightly unpolsihed human writing on the Web.
The money that funded those got sucked up by ad-tech companies like Google and Facebook.
Blogging, was a low to non-profit version of the same thing. You'd direct your RSS reader to your favorite feeds, read what your "friends" wrote, and reply in the comments, etc.
The thing that happened was the audience shifted from technical people happy to deal with RSS readers, and do the work of maintaining subscriptions found the process of getting a blog going to be burdensome, and moved into the easier walled gardens.
The effort of blogging to a stand alone platform wasn't horrible, nor was writing and editing something long enough to be worth the time and consideration of the reader. To make it worth it for a blogger though, you need an audience, and the feedback cycle was slow, through Google for anyone not using an RSS reader. It was really hard to get attention enough to feel the effort was worth it.
The social networks arrived, and they offered faster feedback, and more of it, with a single mechanism to handle replies, instead of each platform having a different system, and anti-spam mechanism. When Robert Scoble gave up on blogging, that signaled the end of it for me.
A technical blog is a teaching tool, and nobody is willing to pay the teachers enough in money, or attention, to make it worth it.
One area that has bloomed though, because that's where the incentives moved, is video blogging. Here are some YouTube channels that might be interesting to you:
https://www.youtube.com/@HuygensOptics -- if you want to learn about optics
https://www.youtube.com/@EEVblog -- an opinionated Australian with one of the oldest EE focused channels
https://www.youtube.com/@CuriousMarc -- deep technical/repair videos
https://www.youtube.com/@ThinkingandTinkering -- alas, Robert Murray-Smith is no longer with us, he had many interesting things to say
https://www.youtube.com/@ThisOldTony -- Machining videos with a sense of humor
https://www.youtube.com/@smartereveryday -- an engineer who used to field test missiles learns new things all the time
https://www.youtube.com/@Blondihacks -- Canadian machinist who teaches along the way doing projects
https://www.youtube.com/@TheAmpHour -- an audio blog about electronics design
https://www.youtube.com/@Computerphile -- various topics related to computers with staff mostly from the University of Nottingham
https://www.youtube.com/@primitivetechnology9550 -- John Plant teaches by showing, how to build the most basic technology ever, he started with a rock and a stick, and worked his way up from there. Turn on subtitles, he doesn't talk, he annotates on screen, it's wonderfully quiet
https://www.youtube.com/@OCPTAP -- if you're a time nut, this is the channel for you, it's about very, very precise timing
https://www.youtube.com/@NileRed -- crazy and almost safe chemistry experiments
https://www.youtube.com/@urituchmanpigeon -- an eclectic approach to building things
https://www.youtube.com/@CaseyJones-Engineer -- an actual engineer who picks apart various things gone wrong with various current events.
https://www.youtube.com/@mrpete222 -- Mr Pete, retired shop teacher with an attitude, and a lot of things to show you how to do.
https://www.youtube.com/@PracticalEngineeringChannel -- Grady, another actual engineer, shows how infrastructure works, with practical demonstrations built in his garage, and some on-site things as well
https://www.youtube.com/@DavesGarage -- Dave Plummer, the guy who wrote task manager, and the zip file handler for Windows, talks about various things computer related
https://www.youtube.com/@AnastasiInTech -- A chip designer talks about the latest trends in chip fabrication
https://www.youtube.com/@JeffGeerling -- Things related to radio broadcasting, raspberry pi, mini-racks, gps timing, etc. His dad is a broadcast engineer.
https://www.youtube.com/@RealEngineering -- What it says on the time, breakdowns of how things actually work
https://www.youtube.com/@wgowshipping -- Sal Mercogliano, an actual mariner and Professor, discusses current events in shipping on the high seas.
https://www.youtube.com/@MentourNow -- A pilot discusses current aviation events
https://www.youtube.com/@NDC -- NDC Conferences - Interesting programming talks
https://www.youtube.com/@ZackFreedman -- Wild and crazy, the inventor of GridFinity
https://www.youtube.com/@voiceofthunder9620 -- An actual scientist, a chemist, who really, really despises Elon Musk, and sometimes plays with NaK, a liquid metal at room temperature. He might be the one who gives us a work-around for global warming
https://www.youtube.com/@NoEngineerHere -- Interesting projects, but NOT an engineer
https://www.youtube.com/@StefanGotteswinter -- a proper German doing machining projects
https://www.youtube.com/@dgelbart - Dan invented the first practical stepper, which gets used in the manufacturing of every chip ever. You really should watch his "how to make things" tutorial
https://www.youtube.com/@3blue1brown -- Grant Sanderson talks about Math, beautifully illustrated and story-told
https://www.youtube.com/@Kathy_Loves_Physics -- The real history of how physics got to where it is
https://www.youtube.com/@oxtoolco -- Recently retired from Berkeley's University machine shop, lots of practical tips related to machining very precisely
https://www.youtube.com/@TITANSofCNC -- CNC manufacturing, they offer free education in the trade
https://www.youtube.com/@Clough42 -- Machining and CNC related projects
https://www.youtube.com/@arduinoversusevil2025 -- Arduino vs Evil, an opinionated Canadian who swears a bit does various things related to machining, with a lot of tear downs of tools.
https://www.youtube.com/@WardCarroll -- Former Navy Aviator talks about current events, sometimes with Sal from What's up with Shipping (see above)
https://www.youtube.com/@tested -- Adam Savage, of Mythbusters does various builds
https://www.youtube.com/@w2aew -- Radio theory and projects
https://www.youtube.com/@AppliedScience -- Some of the coolest science projects, including things like spin coating, supercritical CO2, etc.
https://www.youtube.com/@RexKrueger -- Traditional Woodworking
https://www.youtube.com/@DylanBeattie -- Dylan is great at breaking down things that you think are simple... like "Plain Text" formatting
https://www.youtube.com/@ShakeTheFuture -- Melting metal in a microwave, so you can do home casting
https://www.youtube.com/@joepie221 -- A machinist in Austin Texas, with a lot to teach
https://www.youtube.com/@KevlinHenney -- Talks about programming
https://www.youtube.com/@GOTO- -- GOTO Conferences, programming talks
https://www.youtube.com/@essentialcraftsman -- Practical construction and blacksmithing
I was working for free already, when I posted the things.