- Don't form voting cabals on hacker news / reddit. There's a lot of sophistication in detecting it. Let the natural popularity of a post be an indicator of what the audience likes. I'd further be paranoid if these sites detect a voting cabal, it could hurt the posts from the domain (to be clear, I don't know this for certain).
- Make it casual, interesting, and authentic.
- Don't put too many barriers between the author's authentic techie voice and the reader
- Find a way to give your great writers more autonomy on the blog. For example, instead of an upfront review process, give them permission to directly publish, but not share for 24 hours to allow a quick review for legal/PR reasons
- Give authors clear, consistent guidelines with what they can feel free to talk about / what they shouldn't talk about in public
- Create support for your newer writers. They're the ones who need encouragement and a writing coach. But don't take away their authentic voices, help them discover them.
- Don't get too cute with protecting IP. The in-the-weeds tech details are almost never the thing that makes a great organization or product.
- Understand the goals of your tech blog. Is it for recruiting? To get consulting clients?
- Focus on the long-game, strong community engagement, relationships, and domain authority, not short-term conversions (https://moz.com/learn/seo/domain-authority)