HACKER Q&A
📣 namanyayg

How to Improve My Blog?


I'm a solo dev working on an AI code generation tool. Two of my recent blog posts hit the HN front page, generating great technical discussions and helping me refine my thinking.

What I've learned: technical depth + personal experience resonates, controversial takes spark meaningful debates, and honest writing about failures draws thoughtful responses.

For those who write technical content: How do you balance technical depth with accessibility? What separates consistent writers from one-hit wonders? How do you choose topics worth deep exploration vs trending discussions?

Curious to hear from both writers and readers—what makes you return to a technical blog? What makes you close the tab?

  👤 aarthi_d25 Accepted Answer ✓
It depends on what your goal is and how you define "improving your blog". So if by improving you mean you want the quality of the content in it to go up or the value that your readers get out of it to increase, then, that's one metric. Or if you want more readers, more clicks on contextual CTAs to a product or service you're selling, and more money coming in through your blog immediately, then that's a different metric.

Usually in the tech marketing circles, we follow content marketing as part of our overall demand generation strategy. IE We just educate our target audiences about things we know, that happen to also be things they would like to know. We only deliver value and do not pitch or try to sell anything (which is why I asked you what your definition of "improve" was). It is only after we have successfully generated demand and established ourselves as a credible source of information on this subject that we move on to phase 2 IE Lead Generation wherein we try to sell them stuff, show them ads, get direct contact information and pitch the products, etc.,

If you want, I can help you with a content marketing strategy and how to leverage blogging as a channel for you to achieve your goals. On the house!

Let me know if you'd like that.

👤 bediger4000
Reader of technical blogs here.

What makes me turn away? Blog entries that are too verbose, or seem unpolished or chatty. Anything obviously AI generated - that too wordy, 5-paragraph middle school essay type of thing. I'm beginning to just turn away if I think a blog entry is AI generated at all, because there's always something wrong in the technical part if it's AI generated. An AI-generated image at the top, complete with weird misspellings or dripping kind-of-corporate logos is also a marker.

What makes me come back? Tight, informative prose. Diagrams that make difficult to understand text more understandable. Some non-standard, non-hackneyed humor. Treating a topic in a new way. References to related work, both other blogs, or academic PDFs. Code samples, with a description, like those in "Programming Pearls".

In a more abstract vein, posts that talk about "generating business value", or are filled with corporate verbiage are a turn off. I'm interested in what we, as sentient beings in this universe can figure out. Extremely technical topics are interesting, even if writing corporate code that way would be a disaster.