Ask HN: Why don't you have a blog?
Many Hacker News readers and contributors have the technical skills to run their own blog and post their opinions. But instead they prefer to use Twitter or other social networks. Why is this so? Is it the effort?
Some of my wife's friends wanted to read it, so one of them imported the RSS feed into Livejournal and I discovered it one day. Surprise, there were lots of comments on "my" LJ account and people upset I wasn't answering their questions.
That was a lesson to me that owning the place I publish content isn't as important as being where my audience is, at least if I want people to read it. At the time¸ it was Livejournal. Today, it's social media.
Sometimes I think I'd like to start one up again but, you know, people expect blogs to be put out by experts now - I just did it because I enjoy writing but there's no point if no one is reading, and the people who do expect more from you than you're willing or able to give.
If -who- you reach is more important than -how many- you reach, then blogs might be the right route. I'd bet that Socrates was seldom surrounded by a crowd. Blogging doesn't require many technical skills, but it does demand that what we say is valued by those we can only hope will be back ... and that they have a way to contribute.
I expect it to change in the futur, Medium or Quora seem to do a really good job to understand concept but in my opinion there is something meeting ?
I had a blog back in the day, I create it to mostly for free lead, but it take too much time to have effect and when you got it you can decrease in rank, losing all the work you made
OTOH a blog is more SEO friendly, and a better signpost to leave for others on the broader Internet whereas these comments are temporal.
The blog is suited for longer form content with visuals, headers, and structure. The hacker news comment is suited for short and sweet insights
Discovery. Go to where your audience is.
It is much much easier on platforms such as Twitter, Medium, (Substack?) etc, not so much on your own site and blog.
You can "get to market", garner an audience and submit a post quicker on these platforms.
In the beginning the effort was fine because it was fun. I even developed it from scratch in Rails, it was the time of these "write a blog with rails in 5 minutes" articles (it took me more time to have something I liked). Blogs were also very popular and you had communities of bloggers. But when social networks replaced blogs, people stopped using RSS feeds or simply visiting blogs.
Now I post to a personal GitBook site which is more of a personal wiki than a blog. I like the output. I wish I'd started this way from early in my online-era career. Each post aims to either be in story form, or a to-the-point how-to which I know I'll be referring to and trust.
• I don't understand what does it mean “to own a domain name”, what kind of ID is it tied to.
• I'd have to write a spam-resilient js-free https-free comments system. It'd take time, it'd have to be based on PGP, and in the end nobody would use it.
So I just worship my Fediverse Instance Admin Deity instead, for now.
This is why I like HN/Twitter/etc.