> In contrast, some of the work I put weeks or months into essentially lost the SEO game and gets nearly zero traffic ... Even though I don’t write for money, there is an immense pressure to produce clickbait — even if simply to add “hey, since you’re here, check out this serious thing”.
This will be different for different people, but I've noticed a moderately strong negative correlation between how much effort I put into something and how much engagement it gets (this seems likely to be different for people who apply their effort to generating engagement). The highest engagement content content of mine tends to be thoughtless social media comments I make without thinking. Something like https://danluu.com/ftc-google-antitrust/, which summarizes 300+ pages of FTC memos and is lucky to get 10% of the traffic of a throwaway comment and is more likely to get < 0.1% of the traffic of a high-engagement throwaway comment. Of course there's a direct effect, in that a thoughtless joke has appeal to a larger number of people than a deep dive into anything, but algorithmic feeds really magnify this effect because they'll cause the thoughtless joke to be shown to orders of magnitude more people so something with a 10x difference in appeal will end up with, say, a 1000x difference in traffic on average and even more in the tail.
I don't think this is unique to tech content either. For example, I see this with YouTube channels as well — in every genre or niche that I follow, the most informative content doesn't has fairly low reach and the highest engagement content leans heavily on entertainment value and isn't very informative.