Ask HN: Has attracting a blog audience become harder?
I&#x27;ve blogged (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sheep.horse&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sheep.horse&#x2F;</a>) for about 10 years now in a minor way and monitor my logs pretty carefully. This is what I have learnt:<p>* Most of my post get single digit views - not daily, in total. Posting on Twitter or Facebook only helps a little. You can&#x27;t force people to follow your writing.<p>* I publish RSS and Atom feeds but almost nobody uses them. I ended up removing the social media buttons on my site because they sat unused. The only posts that go viral are the short, simple posts with inflammatory headlines. I don&#x27;t want to go down that route.<p>* Occasionally a post will be linked on Reddit or Hacker News. Then the post will get thousands of hits but this tails off quickly. After a couple of days the traffic will go back to normal - I see almost no retention. It is actually quite hard to predict what will be take off and my attempts to promote my work to these sites myself have been completely unsuccessful.<p>* The best way to capture traffic from Reddit or Hackernews is to catch the eye of a star poster on these sites and have them post the link. Otherwise nobody will care. (Any star posters here? Feel free to post my stuff)<p>Blogging (and running a website in general) is not popular these days because so much of the oxygen is taken up by social media or sites like Reddit where people can make their points easily in a controlled environment. Time has moved on and unless Facebook collapses I don&#x27;t see blogging coming back in a big way.