Ask HN: Where do you promote your writing in 2026?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47988711

by rickcarlino • 3 months ago

2 3 3 months ago

news.ycombinator.com

When I write an article, I promote it exclusively on HN and to a lesser extent, Lobste.rs.

Where do you post your articles in 2026?

vunderba2• 3 months ago

I don’t, personally. I’ll sometimes attach articles I’ve written if they’re apropos to a specific discussion (usu. in the context of a longer reply), but I prefer to let that happen organically rather than force it.

downbad_• 3 months ago

This is the way.

Have you found it a successful method in growing your subscription count?

vunderba2• 3 months ago

So I see pretty modest traffic to my site. Discounting bots/scrapers, it's about a thousand visits a month, so it's not a lot. I also don't have a newsletter, which definitely doesn't help.

Honestly, you really should focus on a niche. For example, Simon Willison [1] keeps his blog super consistent, he's the AI journalist. Josh Comeau [2] is another good example from Hacker News: probably 99% of his content is front-end design and development. Becoming (or establishing oneself) as an expert in some space goes a long way toward increasing your subscriber count.

My articles are mostly satirical in nature and have all determinism of a literary brownian motion machine (writing on algorithms, thought experiments, fiction, etc.) so there’s not a particularly cohesive identity to the site.

Another thing that is often mentioned is that you need to publish regularly and often. I tend to be a perfectionist, and spend a lot of time crafting each article with custom illustrations, animations, and interactive elements. This works for people like Bartosz Ciechanowski [3], but I'm not sure it helps drive traffic for me personally.

[1] https://simonwillison.net

[2] https://www.joshwcomeau.com/svg/interactive-guide-to-paths

[3] https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch

Ask HN: Where do you promote your writing in 2026?

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