Ask HN: Is maintaining a personal blog still worth it?
Jan 13, 2025 - news.ycombinator.com
The article questions the current value of maintaining a personal blog, particularly for developers, in 2025. It reflects on how blogging was once a key method for building a developer brand, leading to opportunities like speaking engagements and job offers. However, the landscape has changed, with platforms like LinkedIn favoring short-form content, Twitter/X filled with AI-generated opinions, and Medium overwhelmed with repetitive SEO-driven tutorials. This shift makes it challenging to attract a genuine readership for technical blogs unless one is already established or adept at navigating the AI-SEO environment.
Despite these challenges, the author contemplates whether there is still intrinsic value in writing for personal satisfaction or if there are unexplored distribution channels that could help reach an audience. The article seeks insights from those who continue to maintain personal blogs, asking how they find readers, where they share their content, and their motivations for continuing to write.
Key takeaways:
The landscape for maintaining a personal blog has shifted dramatically by 2025, with platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter/X favoring short-form content over substantive technical writing.
Medium is saturated with SEO-optimized tutorials, making it difficult to build a genuine readership for technical blogs.
The author questions whether there is still value in writing for its own sake despite the challenges in gaining readership.
They seek advice from those still maintaining personal blogs on how to find readers, share content, and their motivations for continuing to write.
