"Jeff started out as a blogger, and he still treats his blog readers as first-class citizens. He structures his articles to fit the text medium rather than just lazily scraping dialog from his videos. You can read his post about upgrading storage on his Mac mini and not even realize it’s adapted from a video."
For most of my favorite projects, I write the blog post _first_, then adapt that to a YouTube script. I still consider the written word to be vastly superior to video form.
But the videos earn an income (about 1/2 what I earned as a software dev, but it's sustainable and lets me do whatever projects I like), whereas the blog has earned maybe a few thousand dollars with Amazon Affiliate links each year (it covers the hosting, at least, and gives a little extra cash, but I try to keep the blog as "old school web" as possible.
Just finished upgrading it to Hugo today! (After being on Drupal for 16 years)
Text is random-access, searchable, and respects the reader's time (I can skim a blog post in 2 minutes to find the one command I need). Video is linear and demands a fixed time commitment.
It is somewhat tragic that the format which is often technically superior for documentation and reference (text) relies on the format that is optimized for engagement/retention (video) to subsidize it. Kudos to you for maintaining the blog-first workflow despite the incentives pulling the other way.
Because people like video. I'd rather watch a video where the narrator shows me exactly what's happening and where, over text that I have to read. Many on HN like the opposite but don't seem to have the charity to understand the point of view of people like me.
The official ComfyUI tutorials are great — they give you the workflow, they tell you what to download, and they have screenshots of each step of the process, and take maybe 15 mins to follow.
So I think it depends. I don't know why HN is hostile against people who prefer video, it seems like a strange hill to die on, but as with most things in life, there's nuance.
Do I know what I'm looking for? Do I know what I know and what I don't know about this subject? If yes, I prefer text so I can jump to whichever part I need. If not, I prefer a video walkthrough where I might learn about pitfalls, what to do and not to do. I'm open to sitting through a video if I'm learning something new.
It also means that if YouTube displays an ad while I’m washing the dishes, I’m not stopping to press the skip button (unless it’s one of those silly ads that last an hour) which probably inflates the stats quite a bit.
When I'm in exploration mode, time is plentiful. This makes linear mediums like videos excellent primary sources of information.
When I'm in exploitation mode, time is short making videos a bad fit for the time I have to spend. I'd rather prefer text-based primary sources that will allow non-linear consumption.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration%E2%80%93exploitati...
I recently saw that YouTube allows you to “chat” with videos through AI and can surface random content from the middle of the video if you ask it to.
Thanks for the work you do, really inspirational honestly.
The blog no doubt makes the videos better.
I did this exact thing back in 2020 It was the smartest move I ever made.
Thanks for this context! I've re-worded that sentence to remove the assumption that the Mac Mini post was adapted from the video.
>blog has earned maybe a few thousand dollars with Amazon Affiliate links each year (it covers the hosting, at least, and gives a little extra cash, but I try to keep the blog as "old school web" as possible.
Wow, I'm surprised it's that little. I assumed all the popular homelab creators were making much more from affiliate links because I'd assume it's $500-5k in referred purchases per day ($12.5-125/day @ 2.5% commission), so I'd expect $10-20k/yr.
If it's an insignificant amount of your income, why bother? Affiliate links create a bias that goes against the interests of readers.[0] I get it when it's the only way to be sustainable, but if it's a pretty small percentage of annual earnings, it seems not worthwhile.
[0] https://www.fastcompany.com/3065928/sleepopolis-casper-blogg...
The blog is about 10% of total affiliate revenue. (Actually probably closer to 5-7%).
In any case I’m truly grateful for this site as a whole, the good and the bad.
There is a rule specifically forbidding this, but it's been made quite clear that certain users are above this rule, to the point that the moderators themselves will show up to tell people off if they bring it up.
"Why does he do that?" has a fairly charitable interpretation, if you choose to answer it that way.
In fact, here you go, I wrote about it and will quote myself...
From my "about" page https://www.evalapply.org/about.html
> Learn generously directs what I teach, speak, organise, code.
and the first blog post I published:
In the beginning, was the domain name https://www.evalapply.org/posts/hello-world/index.html#main
---
May I suggest the mantra "Take what is useful, discard the rest."?
I'm horrible at sales, selling myself, etc. Even if I believe that a product is genuinely useful, the act of selling feels like it undermines everything else.
Do not be like me if you want to make money lol
In the aughts, I had a blog, which I hated re-reading. With the benefit of time and experience (growing up, they call it), I understood that cringe to be the consequence of trying to look smart and/or play to a gallery.
Your instinct is probably right, if you feel some comment of yours is "sleazy" or "obnoxiously self-serving". The jedi mind trick is to not stop there, but to use that cringe moment as a signal for some introspection.
Think about what sort of a share would make you happy to share? What would you like to see more of in the world? Try to be that person. Do you need to share it publicly right away? Or just bang something out in a markdown file and rant to a pal or two?
Only by doing it, did I properly grasp the fact that I just want to share stuff. And now, I tend to like what past-me shared. Even if he was dead wrong. Besides, I've caught myself re-reading a post from some years ago, because of course, I forgot what I was thinking back then. Or needed a reference from one of the copious footnotes / endnotes I habitually slap in there.
Appropriate framing---combined with action (speech, sharing, conversation) that flows from said framing---makes all the difference. For me, that framing is "learn generously": https://www.recurse.com/self-directives#learn-generously
Publishing one's mind can be a pretty vulnerable act.
It often feels like a confession of ignorance. Often it is a confession of ignorance. However, now I don't really care if I look stupid or am wrong on the Internet. Because being wrong, and then making it right is part of the deal! Thus it is, that my website's entire purpose is to help me live that value. To be available to anybody who might find use for it; including the source code.
In practice that materialises as this:
- Paradox! Above all, be entirely self-serving from an "audience" perspective... The posts are mainly long-form explanations written by me for me, while I tried to figure something out that was not obvious to me. No gallery involved. No analytics, in fact. I have no idea which pages are being read (or not).
- Not infrequently, it applies to so many other people facing the same questions / obstacles I grappled with. And here's the plot twist... Now when I see someone struggle, it behooves me to share my PoV. Not sharing is the "bad" act!
- Technologically, I try to remove all friction from the reader. The site is served as plain HTML and CSS, with excellent lighthouse scores, pleasant reading experience, anonymous RSS feed. Content is CC-licensed, site builder is MIT-licensed. (Screen reader accessibility can definitely use work, but the markup is definitely not a "soup of divs" abomination).
- Certainly not "make money", whatever that means. According to Cloudflare, my site consistently gets ~20K monthly unique visitors (supposedly human / non-bot). I don't even know what that means. It's just "internet number go up".
My real joy is getting the occasional email from some kindred spirit. Once a month someone lights up my life with a delightful conversation. Why? Because I openly welcome it! You can write me too :) https://www.evalapply.org/about.html#standing-invitation
(See, yet another self-share... which I feel fine about, even in a somewhat contentious sub-thread, because I really want to have a proper letter exchange, should you feel up for it!)
(edit: typos, clarification, formatting)
HN is great for diversity of topics, tech news, random discussions with tech-celebs etc., but e.g. Simon's blog is the best content there is on what the latest LLM gizmo is and how well it works.
[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/en-us/three-chapters-at-cloudfla...
I've updated the blog post and the dataset.[0] The blog updates instantly, but the dataset needs a few minutes for my pipeline to re-run and push to the CDN.
[0] https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/pull/8...
But thanks for the correction, and even more thanks for choosing me as your example!
"Who counts as a blogger?
I explain more in my methodology page, but it’s basically anyone who blogs as an individual rather than as part of a company or a team. As an example, John Graham-Cumming is the CTO of Cloudflare, so I count his personal blog but not his posts to the Cloudflare company blog."
Here's a SQL query run against this data using Datasette Lite (SQLite and Python in WebAssembly via Pyodide): https://lite.datasette.io/?csv=https://hn-popularity.cdn.ref...
I find this is a surprisingly valuable thing. The AI space is moving fast, and a lot of the interesting, imaginative experimental stuff is happening on Twitter, Reddit, and other platforms I really don't want to engage with - but I do want to keep roughly up-to-speed with what's happening there.
For TikTok I usually run them through yt-dlp to extract the audio and then use MacWhisper for an initial transcript which I can then hand-edit to get to the most interesting portion. https://simonwillison.net/tags/tiktok/
We are seeing a massive amount of domain knowledge being locked inside "un-indexable" video containers or walled gardens like Discord and TikTok. Ten years from now, a search query won't find that brilliant explanation on a niche topic unless someone like you pulled it out and put it on the open web.
It's effectively acting as a bridge between the ephemeral algorithmic feed and the permanent archival web.
(I’m not sure why the data from my old domain, cyhsu.xyz, hasn’t been aggregated to the new hsu.cy, despite the methodology page saying it should. Must I return the canonical header in addition to a 301 code?)
It was also during the past year that I came to realize how powerful and versatile Hugo is. I had used Hugo for many years, touching only the most basic feature set. Last year, I decided to be done with Twitter and Instagram and make my own timelines of text and photo posts with similar layouts. Initially, I thought it might require separate instances of GoToSocial and Pixelfed. It turned out that Hugo could do it all with a few tweaks, and now they are live at hsu.cy/notes and hsu.cy/gallery, respectively. I highly recommend it to everyone who wants to start their own blog.
It's a manual process, so I have to do it by hand when I notice a domain has moved. I've just added yours and kicked off a reprocessing job so that your old domain counts toward hsu.cy.
Here's what my data looks like:
| Year | Rank | Domain | Score | Stories | Avg. Score |
|------+------+-----------+-------+---------+------------|
| 2025 | 41 | susam.net | 2544 | 16 | 159 |
| 2024 | 98 | susam.net | 1530 | 13 | 118 |
| 2023 | 236 | susam.net | 1026 | 11 | 93 |
| 2022 | 96 | susam.net | 1652 | 21 | 79 |
It includes the 92 of those blogs that have RSS/Atom feeds.
[0] https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/domain/?d...
[1] https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/domain/?d...
And I get it. It is a sense of community, belonging, and so on.
But at the same time it's groupism and means that often mediocre, lazy content[^1] has an easy path to the front page, and if you dare counter or question it, the crowd will defensively strike out. It's like sharing the karaoke of a family member and crowing about it.
It's more kuro5hin than Hacker News, and honestly it's something I wish this community didn't do as it often makes the front page more noisy than signal.
[^1]: In no way am I saying all content from those regulars fits that bill, but there are many cases where this stuff is #1 and if it was from any random other blogger it would have rolled off of new without a single upvote.
I realize this sounds like a humblebrag but it is not a positive thing for me to have every single thing I write submitted to HN whether it’s relevant to a broad audience or not.
But it's also muted a bit by the fact there are no icons, no large flashy attention-grabbing bits, and everyone gets the same muted colors for domain and submitter username.
I like that a lot, and contrast it often, in my mind, with Reddit, which now has user avatars, little flashy icons, an annoying habbit of pushing 'full' posts and ads everywhere...
Get dozens of people watching the hot blogs for content, each running to submit it, and in an instant it's to the front page and the reinforcement redoubles.
Unfortunately he doesn't show in the top 100. Also unfortunately, there is no blogger described in the top 100 as having a geospatial interest/focus.
Made it to #369 in 2025 with morling.dev; let's see what's in stock this year :)
year total_score rank days_mentioned
2025 903 369 8
2024 604 581 2
2023 547 861 3
2022 450 1165 4
2021 188 2308 2There are also a number of other blogs I read that are semi-regularly on HN and aren't on the list that I expected to be. Maybe just didn't quite make the top 100, and I'm over-indexing on my personal preferences. eg. Matt Levine's Money Stuff crops up semi-often, and Bret Devereaux of ACOUP gets most of his posts on HN.
A lot: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=todsacerdoti
Not that I have anything against the top bloggers, but I do hope the 2026 list will differ from the 2025 list. I'm here to read about varied tech content!
Whenever I listen to one of his podcasts, I notice audio quality being worse than appropriate for someone who has been making a chunk of their living from podcasts for years.
I've found unsubscribing to be a remedy.
https://github.com/paprikka/heed
The repo contains links to: OPML (bulk import into RSS readers), Markdown (clickable links), and CSV/JSON
It's not perfect, some feeds are not being captured, then some sites publish multiple feeds whereas I pull just one atm. I'll share a writeup once I clean it up a bit, but I hope it's useful / entertaining in the meantime.
I keep a separate list of people I know, or met via HN in my RSS reader, so I'll needs to review/clean it up anyway. ok I'm late for a gig, bye!
| Year | Rank | Domain | Total Score | Stories | Avg. Score |
|------+--------+---------------+-------------+---------+------------|
| 2025 | 719 | evalapply.org | 661 | 5 | 132 |
| 2024 | 2138 | evalapply.org | 154 | 1 | 154 |
| 2023 | 1674 | evalapply.org | 296 | 2 | 148 |
| 2022 | > 5000 | NPC | NPC | NPC | NPC |
(edit: fix missing column header)
There's some data issues in the full dataset, expectedly. My blog got around 200 points this year, which should be enough to hit #2077, but the blog does not appear at all.
Also baseten.co is not a personal blog.
1. https://x.com/jonobelotti_IO/status/2005737476069933272?s=20
> I aggregate scores across all submissions that received a score of at least 20 and are not dead or deleted.
https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/methodolo...
Yeah, the minimum for inclusion is 500 upvotes across all front page stories.[0]
>Also baseten.co is not a personal blog.
Thanks, I've updated the dataset to exclude baseten.[1] It should disappear in the next hour or so.
Which view did they appear in? I don't see them anywhere in the top 100.
[0] https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/methodolo...
[1] https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/pull/8...
In an era where search results are flooded with SEO-optimized slop, these blogs have become trusted nodes primarily because they verify their own reality. Whether it's Jeff physically plugging in a PCIe card or Rachel debugging a weird server issue, the value proposition is "I actually did this thing, and here is what happened."
It seems the best SEO strategy for 2025 is simply proving you are a human doing actual work.
https://devguide.dev/blog/teaching-ai-to-distrust-itself 9 idiallo.com 5,539 17 326 Ibrahim Diallo Software developer and bloggerI don't see how and why I wouldn't fall into the dataset, does anybody know please?
You won't show up unless your site is listed in this manually curated CSV file: https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/blob/m...
Correction: you'll show up even if you're not in the CSV. The CSV just populates metadata for your entry.
There are lots of not-blogs still in the dataset, but I just exclude them when I come across them in popular views. But I'm sure if you dig through positions 101-5000 you'll find lots of domains that don't match my official criteria for a blog.
https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/blob/m...
The minimum threshold for inclusion is 500 upvotes across all posts that reached the front page.[0] It looks like your domain currently has 176 total upvotes, so it misses the threshold.[1]
I have the minimum because I precompute all the data so that I can serve it on a static site, but it means everyone downloads the full dataset when they visit the site. I make the threshold 500 upvotes so the CSV doesn't grow too large.
[0] https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/methodolo...
Actually I wonder if the dreaded profanity filter has caught me out again. I've had a couple of posts do well, and it's a .github.io subdomain, so it should have showed up.
It is the same with blogging. I'd rather spend time writing than I would watching YouTube, mowing the lawn, or whatever.
Although, since starting an adult gap year 12 months ago, I've actually been blogging less as I find more interesting things to do than work :-)
I guess what they're really have in their mind when they ask is "where do you find the extra hours to go so far down my priority list", but what they don't realize is that my priority list is simply different.
I've been writing about building tools for bookkeepers (not exactly a glamorous niche) and the compound effect is real. Posts from 2 years ago still bring in readers who then find newer stuff. No algorithm decides to bury you if you take a month off.
The POSSE approach someone mentioned is interesting too. Own your content, syndicate to platforms. Too many people build their entire presence on rented land and then wonder why they're invisible when the algorithm changes.
scattered-thoughts.net author is Jamie Brandon. :)
https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/pull/9...
I had a blog that used to fare well on HN and it was carried 100% by a single HN regular. When that person went on a hiatus, my stuff stopped appearing on the front page. That's really all it takes.
Links to: CSS, OPML (so you can import into your RSS reader in bulk), CSV, and JSON
Times, they are a changin'...