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Comment by whsheet | Hacker News Reader

> hit the casual crowd

Forget the casual crowd. First reason: It’s always good to start with one demography and fulfilling their requirements. Second and TBH, the casual crowd sucks steel when creating short-form blog content.

Go to the Linkedin blogs, all non-tech Medium blogs, TED talks, Facebook: 99% is useless, already seen, self-help-type advice covered with click-baity titles.

Every Reddit post has more substance and authenticity than the mentioned above.

Edit: To the pro downvoters, instead of downvoting just reply and link to one eg. single useful non-tech Linkedin blog.

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> all non-tech Medium blogs

> link to one eg. single useful non-tech Linkedin blog

I agree with the first part of your comment. Narrowing the focus to a specific demo makes it far easier to provide exactly what your target audience needs, thus a higher quality product/service.

But I have doubts about the second part. You're classifying everything in 2 categories, "tech" and "non-tech" (I assume non-IT here) so this particular thing or absolutely everything else all in one bag. How qualified are you to judge the dozens of non-tech fields out there, say psychology, economics, marine biology, or agriculture? Is this a bit of (reverse?) Gell-Mann amnesia effect where you can accurately judge a tech blog on LinkedIn as being good but when it comes to something outside of your field of expertise you assume low quality?

If we expand "tech" to mean "technical" rather than "technology", those statements become much more likely to be true. People who have skills in some sort of technical background seem much more likely to have interesting insights than people who do not. HN loves to post Slate Star Codex, for example, and I doubt most here have the skills in psych to effectively evaluate his writings as correct.

> much more likely

Maybe but when you go from a very low likelihood to begin with increasing it even 10 fold might not make a practical difference.

The point was any one of us here can accurately judge content on a handful of topics in our areas of expertise and to a lesser extent in connecting fields. But we can say next to nothing outside of that. Let alone generalize to "all" platforms and "99%" of content. It's not "tech"/"non-tech" but "what I know"/"what I don't know".

> interesting insights

How would one even realize this if they're an expert web developer reading a blog on astronomy? Every single article on a platform could be either gold or shiny manure and most of us wouldn't really tell the difference unless they solidly overlap with those topics mentioned above.

You are def right that I should not pack everything in a non-tech cluster and call it crap. However I'd still keep my initial statement, it's a simplicatiom but it's true.

Of course there are and must be great blogs in non-tech areas but they are not that many. Writing high quality blogs for free seems not be common in other fields. Often people rather publish the findings in a protected space, call it academic paper and I can read just a lousy abstract. Actually most academic non-tech fields fall in this category.

Your second statement might more accurately be formulated as "I tend to find the insights of people with a technical background more interesting", or even "I am more capable of understanding what is interesting about the insights of people with some sort of technical background even if it is not my own." Otherwise, you're claiming that there's something objectively "uninteresting" about, like, the majority of human insights that civilizations have ever had and found valuable.

Are there any marine biology blogs on LinkedIn?

Focus is great, but fluff exists everywhere. Tech and non-tech alike (although there are far more sub divisions...). Even tech.

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