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First advice if you want to be read is to write about something that (many) people are interested in, that's mostly popular and trendy technologies for a tech blog. A good old rant on javascript or kubernetes is likely to do well and take over HN/reddit/twitter, whereas an article on clojure not so much.

I've got some nice articles about obscure tools that are doing really well, or really bad depending on perspective. First google results in their respective keywords. They get a whole 10 viewers a day sometimes! I thought this was disappointing but I came to accept that is everybody on the planet who cared about that subject.




As a writer, I think you also need to decide: are you writing to be read, or to help people? They're not the same thing. If you're writing to be read, you'll go for low-hanging fruit, say things most people would agree with, and show a passion that matches whatever the popular passion already is. If you're writing to help people, you may have various messages that are unpopular or don't appeal to the average coder.

Unstated here, but also important, is that fame brings fame. There are a lot of folks writing schlock but are quite popular because they're the people that everybody thinks are supposed to be popular.


To be able to help people we also need to attract readers that our writing might be helpful for. I'm not sure how to solve for that. Should one try to share our writing mostly in niche communities?

I think feedback is good for improvement, in that sense it feels like a chicken and egg problem.




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