Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

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> it's a lot harder for things to get seen.

Here's something I've always wondered: I don't really get this obsession with maximizing the number of people who go to one's web page. If you're just a regular person who's not profiting from ads or something, it shouldn't matter.

If I post something to the internet, I maybe send it to a few people who might want to see it and that's it. I don't care about collecting pageviews, or likes, or follows, or upvotes, or any of these vanity metrics. It doesn't really matter to me if something I wrote was viewed by 10 people, 1000 people, or 100,000 people. Who cares? What difference does it make? My life is not richer because thousands of random people read some blog post or forum comment.

The only reason I can see to promote some creative work is if you're making a profit off of it. In that case, it's an investment. Spend $X on discovery and make $Y in revenue from ads or conversions or whatever. But just to put up some web site about your stamp collection? Who cares how many people visit?

Since I do currently earn money from my programming tutorials, let me tell you about my blog in the late aughts.

I wrote hundreds of pieces about language learning, teaching and elementary school-aged education. One benefit from that work was that it helped me grow as a teacher and later as a curriculum designer. But that wasn't the whole thing. I made friends from that blog.

I also got emails from teachers living all over the world, asking questions and thanking me for the topic. Cambridge University Press contacted me and purchased rights to some of my writing and distributed it far further than I ever could have.

Given the assumption that the content really was useful, more people seeing it meant better educational outcomes for many, many young students that I'll never meet.

The reach of media is a multiplier for its impact.

It sounds like you made something beneficial for the web in which your peers agreed.

How about in 2020, would you agree that the amount of visibility your site gets is dependent on FB and G algos? Even if the content is evergreen? Of course that disregards other sites making new things but I'd say your value is not diminished either way.

Social media was a major source of blog traffic 10-15 years ago and now it's negligible (see Rand Fishkin's talks for more on this).

Google has also been keeping more and more traffic within its ecosystem, but it's still by far the largest remaining source for most independent sites.

The landscape for independents to get even traffic, let alone comments is very, very different than it was. As fb and reddit grew, my site comments reduced by over 80% while traffic was flat. Readers who had been around for years continued but newer visitors stopped.

For a while social media shares made up the difference, but over time social media traffic dropped to less than 5% of its original level. I started seeing less and less value in what I'd once thought was evergreen content.

Then, I changed careers to software. It wasn't because of the drop in RSS readers, blog commenters, etc, but those changes did decrease my enthusiasm about blogging as a social activity.

That’s great, thanks. But do I need to slaughter and sacrifice my privacy to Facebook and the public space to trolls and fake news optimized for virality?

Reach out?

Find presence on a specialized platform rather than generic portal containers steered by proprietary algorithms.

Almost anyone who publishes something wants people to read it. The ones who don’t care how many people read their ideas don’t publish — they keep it to themselves or just discuss it with friends.

Sounds somewhere in between Plato: 'Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something'

Note that you learn to generate valuable things to say by saying things.

People will read it if you link to it contextually. I made a throwaway video demonstrating the 125mhz Ethernet carrier for that etherify HN post a month or so ago. I posted the link in a mid-level comment. 200 people watched the video.

Today we view that number as approximately zero. But that's past Dunbar's number. That's more people than I will have any kind of meaningful relationship with simultaneously. Most people would get a little nervous standing up in front of 200 people and saying anything.

Our sense of scale has been mutated.

It is astonishing that you have to state this manifestly evident fact.

It wasn’t about views, it was about feeling that you’re part of a community. If nobody can get to your pages then no comunity.

There used to be a time when websites were linking eachother and the information sharing formed a wonderful community. At first, search engines were indexing these webpages but those times are unfortunately over. Now the community turned into walled gardens.

I think you're seeing it out of context.

I'd agree, it's not about volume.

I'd disagree about your supposition of an 'maximizing the number of people who go to one's web page', which the rest of your post alludes to. Most smart online marketers are concerned with conversions rates, not volume of visitors. ROI as you mention with $X and $Y

The point is about how people discover new information. As an end user, on which platform, how that platform allows me to discover the new information, are there platform or result alternatives etc etc.

IF we're reducing my online information discovery to "how advertisers can effectively make an ROI out of me", especially from one or two portals, I suspect the outcome is I'm being duped or at the very least, shortchanged of all the other sources that should be available to me.

Indeed. Why publish your journal at all?

Why post it at all if you don't care?

Why not? I put all sorts of notes, random thoughts, and guides to the web. It’s nice if someone else benefits from it, but the goal is really to keep notes for myself or that I can directly share with someone else. It’s great to have it easily accessible from any device with a web browser from anywhere.

Kind of what blogging was about (and still can be).

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