Comment by TheEdonian
7 months ago
It's just impossible to get your content out there at the moment. 10 years ago, you would just post on twitter or reddit, and people would catch it. Now, twitter and bluesky are wastelands, and Reddit works if you're in the right subreddit (I say that as my main read/post subreddit just went private this morning without warning).
There are also blogroll communities, but I don't think they are all that popular (if they even let you in).
I heard getting on mailing lists works, but I have no way to even know how you get to that stage.
If I had infinite time and energy I would try to reboot an RSS-inspired Internet UX/community. Unfortunately I'm not able to do that yet, but one thing I have just started working on is one-click deployments of configurable static sites with the goal of making them entirely modifiable and self-hostable if desired, but easily used for most non-technical users.
I recently became old enough to be a part of a couple of mailing lists but I just do not find email to be a good medium for articles or discussion.
But it turns out you can buy 1 septillion ipv6 addresses for $500, it's not that hard to register domains and serve static sites for people, and it's not that hard to build a static site generator that packages in standard functionality like RSS and deployments. And AI is generally pretty good at modifying tailwind configs or adding funny UI widgets. So I'm interested in seeing if people might want to participate in a "myspace if it came out in 2025" or "distributed cozyverse", or if regular people would make websites more often if it were truly as easy as clicking a button and paying a few dollars.
There are some really interesting things we can do with social media on the open web with creative application of existing tools. Free idea for the taking: you can use JWT/JWKS and proxy auth providers to implement a "private site" only authorized for access by friends you personally invited.
It’s no longer about catching attention—it’s about earning trust. Distribution didn’t vanish, it moved to where trust lives.
How do you earn trust without people getting to the content in the first place?
On HN, it’s not about going viral. It’s about whether someone really gets what you’re saying. You don’t need thousands—just real resonance. Trust starts there. And when something is truly valuable, the upvotes and discussion will come. That kind of discussion always leads to meaningful insight.
With the informal web of. If you post your thing here on HN and people like it, more people will click it.
If it works for you, you can always write with the expectation that the authentic web discovery crisis will be fixed. The Marginalia guy is working on it, myself and my colleague are workign on it.
> It's just impossible to get your content out there at the moment.
Not sure what you mean.
Create a blog. Write a post. It's out there.
Everything else you wrote in your comment seems almost the antithesis of the submission: Do things that you like, and sometimes the world will agree.
I've read so many posts that say: Just write because you like to write, do it cause it's fun.
To me that's only part of the truth. I write because I like it sure, but it's also very unmotivating to just "scream in the void". I want to share idea because I want to hear other opinions on my ideas. I want conversations, not monologues.
But that's the point of a blog, it's not a forum. If you confuse both, it can indeed easily feel like "screaming into the void", when it should be "talking to yourself and maybe the occasional passerby into the void".
Perhaps it would be useful for you to shift your perspective. Consider your writing to be just notes, a journal, a scratchpad, etc... Its just a place for you to identify, refine and articulate your ideas. It doesn't have to be for anyone else but you.
I have literally millions of words of writing that no one else has seen. Some of it is a rambling mess, some of it is fairly polished. But having done this has served me extremely well in many areas of life - I am more self-aware, articulate, etc... THAT is the motivation, not whether people have seen the ideas. Perhaps someday I'll refine it further and share it publicly.
Though, I'm regularly drawing upon it all when I have conversations - be it in real life, or in places like this. Why does the "conversation" have to be in the comments section of your own site?