How to find readers for a new blog

Different countries have their own local blogging platforms. You write an article there, and if it gets a good rating, it makes it to the daily top list and can garner tens of thousands of views. The number of views depends heavily on the country and the platform.

But there are no global English-language equivalents. There are only individual blogging platforms and link aggregators with rankings.

In this article, I’ll talk about DevTo, Hacker News, Substack, and other platforms.

I’ll offer tips for readers on where to find interesting articles with the least amount of AI slop.

And I’ll give advice to authors on how to start blogging in English, find readers, and build a subscriber base.

DevTo, Substack, HackerNoon

All of these platforms are only useful if you’re writing SEO articles or already have subscribers. If you publish content for people rather than for search engines, you’ll get zero views.

HackerNoon

On HackerNoon, all articles are moderated and edited. You’d think the quality of the articles would be high. But the typography and layout of the articles depend heavily on the authors. Articles may have random indentations in lists and between paragraphs, and code is presented as plain text without being set off in a separate block. There are no well-formatted articles on HackerNoon because all the articles there are primarily for search engines, not for people. Although AI-generated content is prohibited by the rules, this rule is very easy to circumvent.

The HackerNoon editorial team changed the titles of all the articles I posted. For some reason, they decided that their title suggestions were a better fit for my articles. According to the rules, every article must have a preview image. And if there isn’t one, they’ll add it themselves. If you want to experience a bit of cringe, take a look at the image they chose for my article. It’s two screens tall and has absolutely nothing to do with the article’s topic. I wrote to support, and their Senior Editor replied that he didn’t see any problem with it.

If you include a link to your blog at the end of an article, they’ll remove it. They believe you should write articles for their platform without being able to mention your blog. Any edits to an article go through the moderation process again.

You can go to the HackerNoon front page, pick any article from the top list, click on the author’s profile, and see how many views that article has. Articles get 2–5k views per month if they’re trending. But if you don’t have any followers, no one will read your article, and it won’t make it onto the trending list. There are no comments on the top articles.

By the way, you may notice that every article on HackerNoon has between 19 and 25 likes. This is a trick. Immediately after publication, 5 likes are added to the article; then the site posts a link to the article on social media and other platforms, and counts each of these links as a like.

DevTo

DevTo has no moderation or invitations. You can sign up and start publishing articles right away. Guess how many AI-generated articles there are?

I opened 20 recent articles by different authors. AI-detection tools showed that every single one was 100% written by AI. You’d never want to read something like that.

My articles, which were popular on other platforms, only got 10–20 views on DevTo. There’s absolutely no reach there. People just don’t open the “Latest Articles” section and don’t read them.

This site, like HackerNoon, is only useful for SEO articles. These sites rank at the top of Google for key search terms. And there’s no karma or rating system. But unlike HackerNoon, you don’t need to have every article moderated. You can sign up, create an AI-generated article promoting your app, and publish it.

Substack

Substack is a blogging platform. It’s like Medium, only better. But it also pushes you to subscribe to authors and install a reading app. When you visit someone’s blog, the first thing you’ll see is a full-page banner asking you to subscribe to their email newsletter.

This platform is very popular among authors. It’s been heavily promoted, and now every AI will recommend it specifically for creating a blog. However, it’s better to use a popular open-source blogging solution and host it on your own server.

There are categories, but within these categories you can only see author rankings — not the rankings of articles by day or week. You’ll need to visit each author’s profile to see if their articles interest you or not.

Substack won’t provide any reach for your posts. If you don’t have subscribers, then after you publish an article, 0 people will read it. It’s simply a blogging platform, like Medium or WordPress.

It has a notes system, similar to Twitter. A post might go viral, and you’ll gain followers. But the difference between followers and subscribers is that followers won’t receive notifications about your new articles. These are followers like on Twitter, where everything depends on the algorithm. It will show them your posts (tweets), but not your articles.

Of course, someone might see your post, go to your profile, and read your articles. But you might as well just run a Twitter account and include a link to your blog in your profile description.

Hacker News, Lobsters, Bubbles

These are link aggregators, not blogging platforms. But you can definitely find useful and interesting articles there.

You can post a link to an article from your blog there or upvote other links.

We’re used to the idea that the higher the rating, the higher an item appears in the rankings. But on these sites, it works a little differently. The more time that has passed since a link was posted, the more upvotes it needs to stay at the top. Over time, it will slowly start to drop down the list, even if it has a higher rating than other links.

For authors who don’t have any subscribers, these aggregators are the only way to gain reach and readers. If your article makes it to the front page of Hacker News, you can get tens of thousands of visits to your site. From the Lobsters front page, you can get thousands of visits, while Bubbles typically brings just a few hundred.

These aggregators operate on the same principle but differ slightly.

Hacker News offers free registration, but new accounts are placed in a sandbox and cannot post links. Lobsters requires registration by invitation, and topics are limited to programming and technology.

On Bubbles, you can add any blog, and the service will automatically fetch new posts from your blog. You won’t have to post a link to each new post every time. This site was a revelation for me because you can find articles by different bloggers on a variety of topics, not just IT.

For readers, the downside of these aggregators is that you always have to open different websites to read the articles. All of these sites have different layouts, font sizes, text widths, and fonts.

Tips for authors

Don’t use popular blogging platforms like Medium or Substack. Choose an open-source blogging solution that works for you and set it up on your own server. This way, you’ll have full control over the site’s design and functionality. Make sure to include options to subscribe to an RSS feed and an email newsletter right away.

After publishing a few articles, submit a link to your RSS feed to Bubbles. A moderator will review your blog within a few days, and once approved, your articles will appear on that platform immediately after publication.

Submit links to each article to Hacker News. If a link receives 4–6 upvotes within 30 minutes, it will make it to the front page. Depending on its ranking, 1k–5k people will visit your site every hour.

New users cannot post links. You’ll need to wait a few months or contact support to have your account approved. Or you can send the links to me, and I’ll post them.

HN has a rule: only 10% of your links should lead to your own blog. If you consistently post links only to your own blog, your account will soon be shadowbanned. To get out of it, send 30 links to other people’s blogs.

Registration on Lobsters is by invitation only. It has an open user graph, so your toxic behavior will reflect poorly on the user who invited you. But unlike HN, only links related to programming and technology are allowed here. I don’t have an account on Lobsters, but when my articles made it to the HN front page and got a lot of upvotes, they also appeared on Lobsters.

Editors of major email newsletters may notice your article. Half of my articles that made it to the HN front page were added to the TLDR newsletter. Once, an article was included in the Stack Overflow newsletter. Other bloggers mentioned them in their articles. People shared links to them on social media.

A few more platforms

Lemmy. Once your registration is approved, you can post links in any community. If a post gets upvotes or downvotes, or if people leave comments, it appears at the top of that community, and 100–1,000 people will visit the site. If it gets a lot of upvotes, it appears at the top of all communities.

GeekNews. A South Korean equivalent of Hacker News. You can submit links 7 days after registering. Each post generates 1–3k visits to the site, even if it doesn’t make it to the front page. But if you always submit links only to your own blog, you’ll get a shadow ban, just like on HN.

Menéame. A Spanish-language equivalent of Reddit. But, unlike Reddit, it features links rather than text-based posts. I don’t have an account there, but someone posted a link to my article; it made it to the front page, and 7k people visited the site.

Reddit. It’s well-suited for native advertising of services, but absolutely unsuitable for articles. I asked the moderators of 10 major communities if I could post the full text of an article and add a link to my blog at the bottom. They all said no.