Not being a blog writer, that seems rather crazy to hear with how "social" the WWW has supposedly gotten. WP claims, there's 33 sites "with at least 100 million (monthly) active users". [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_platforms_with_...
Top sites are up at multi-1000 million / month. Sure, some of the top sites (Youtube, Instagram, TikTok) are very heavily video based. Yet, it still seems amazing that with that many users there's so little "sharing" in terms of long form written essays or blogs. That the situation was actually better in terms of referrals before there was all the sharing? Now there's actually less organic referral traffic, and Hacker News is apparently one of the best. Walled garden issues? Better fit of the subject matter to readers? Completely videos everywhere? Decline of reading in general?
Last stats I could find from dang have:
2022, Nov 3, 5M monthly unique, 10M page views a day, 1300 submissions a day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33454140
2015, Mar 17: 3-3.5M monthly unique, 2.6M page views a day, 300K uniques a day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9220098
Compared to somewhere like Facebook that supposedly have 3070M monthly uniques, yet apparently produce almost no referral traffic whatsoever, that's a wildly disproportionate ratio of effectiveness for the audience size.
Edit: Taken another way, in what seems like a pessimistic view. If only 1% of Facebook still read long form writing. And only 1% of those actually decided a post was worthy of clicking on. That would still amount to 300,000 views. That seems like a lot.