I wanted to share my open-source solution on Reddit. I created an account, found a community where people post links to their projects, and posted a link to my GitHub project there. The post was immediately deleted, and my account was banned.

It turns out you first need to write normal comments and posts without links to make it seem like you’re a regular user who isn’t trying to promote anything. Only then can you post a link.

Okay, so I registered a new account from a different IP address and immediately wrote three comments. The account was banned.

It turns out that before posting comments, you need to wait a few days, and then post 1–2 comments per day.

That’s exactly what I did. I created a new account, gradually posted comments, and everything was fine. I made a post that had been popular on other platforms, without any links. A minute later, someone wrote that it was AI slop. The post was deleted, and the account was banned.

It turns out that if your post is longer than two paragraphs, is well-formatted, and contains no errors, the moderators or algorithms will determine that it’s AI-generated. And generated text leads to account bans.

Lesson learned. I create a new account, write comments, then short posts, adding mistakes to the text. I try to write them in the first person, rather than as an article or essay. Everything’s fine — the posts aren’t being deleted. I publish a post with a link to the project, and the account gets banned.

Hmm, what if, instead of posting in someone else’s community, I just create my own community? I create a new account, set up a community, and publish a post with a link there. The community gets deleted, and my account gets banned.

But how come other people can post links to their GitHub projects without any problems, and their accounts don’t get banned?

I talked to moderators from various communities and other Reddit users. They all advised me to first earn 1k karma and only then post links. I was also advised to sign up through the mobile app, as that would make my account seem more trustworthy.

So that’s what I did. I installed the app on my phone, created an account, and made posts and left comments. Within a month, I reached 1k karma. I created a post with a link to another one of my GitHub projects. The post was sent for manual review. I waited several hours, but the community moderators hadn’t reviewed the post yet. An hour later, my account was banned.

I didn’t try to create any new accounts. Reddit users never got to learn about my projects, which might have interested them.

There are many questions that come up throughout the day, and we quickly find answers to them. Sometimes we don’t even think about them; we simply act on instinct, based on our desires and habits.

Other questions require several days of thought. For example, you want to spend your vacation in another country. You need to think about which country to choose, whether to stay in a hotel or an apartment, how much to pack, whether you’ll travel alone or with someone, and how you’ll spend your time there.

But there are other, more existential questions that you might ponder for a long time — and you can’t always find the right answer to them. And these answers often change over the course of your life.

What do I want to be doing in 10 years?
What does success mean to me?
What is most important to me in life?

Or they might be difficult decisions that will have a major impact on your life. Maybe you want to quit your job and change careers. You might spend several months or even years thinking about this decision.

If you try to think about these questions in a deliberate, focused way, you won’t find the answer. The answer comes together bit by bit, every day, as you go about your daily routine. Thoughts simply come to you, and you begin to sense the answer.

I have a separate file for these kinds of questions.

When a new thought comes to mind about a particular issue, I simply open that file and write it down. This really takes the pressure off my brain, because once a thought is written down, my brain stops going over it again and again.

You can create this document in any app you usually use for taking notes. The main thing is to be able to collapse all the answers. That way, you’ll only see the list of questions and can quickly find the one you need when it’s time to update the answer.

I don’t write down a new question right away, because it might not be that important to me and I might not think about it again. I only write it down if it comes up multiple times in a short period.

If you like to write by hand, set aside a separate notebook for this, where every four pages are reserved for a new question. That way, you’ll have enough space to write out your thoughts, and when a question is no longer relevant to you, just tear out two pages from the notebook and burn them.

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.

When I started programming, my whole day revolved around development. I’d wake up, write code, and go to sleep. And that’s how it was day in and day out. My entire social circle consisted of people who also wrote code. I studied frameworks, libraries, and various programming languages.

I got into development because I was fascinated by the idea that by writing code, I could create new programs. All I needed to do was learn how to program, and I’d be able to create anything. If I learned PHP, I could build back-end applications. If I learned HTML and CSS, I could build websites.

I could choose what I wanted to create, learn the necessary technologies for it, and start building. You open an IDE, create a new project, and build it from scratch. You choose patterns, libraries, and frameworks; you read the documentation and dive into the source code. You get so immersed in the process that you don’t even notice how the days fly by. Over time, you develop your own coding style.

I wrote code, and I enjoyed writing code, but it wasn’t the kind of work I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I preferred creating something new to the actual process of writing code. I liked starting from scratch — with nothing but an idea — to create a product that people actually use. That’s why I’ve always worked exclusively at startups and never at large companies.

I’ve always dreamed of advancing my career — to become a team lead, a manager, or to take on another role that didn’t involve writing code. And whenever someone else could write the code, I’d shift away from coding toward managerial tasks. Whether I wrote the code myself or delegated it to others didn’t matter to me.

Although I got into development out of an interest in creating things, later on I did it solely because I was getting paid for it. For me, it was just a job. Even though I wrote code in my free time, I still used that approach to build my own startups, which I planned to make money from. Writing code and making money were inseparable. Over time, income from projects became the main focus, rather than simply the desire to create projects.

But there’s another type of person. These are true programmers who write code regardless of income. They write code simply because they can’t help but write it. It doesn’t matter to them how much money they make from it. They might work on open-source projects that will never generate any income for them.

They enjoy writing code, solving development challenges, designing, figuring out the logic, fixing bugs, and understanding the entire system as a whole. They enjoy the process itself. And they’ll never hand that over to AI agents.

I love building startups, and they love writing code. For me, building projects is a way to make money. For them, programming is art.

That’s why all my arguments about how AI helps me build projects are completely irrelevant to true artists. They don’t need AI to help them with anything.

And that’s why there’s often a negative reaction to the claim that AI will soon replace all programmers. For artists, this claim itself is illogical. Even if some technological breakthrough occurs and AI can truly work autonomously and solve problems hundreds of times faster than humans, people will still continue to write code by hand, line by line. AI will never be able to take away their ability and desire to write code.

I don’t use AI when writing. It produces soulless, bland text. AI slop that no one wants to read. I want to come up with the wording myself, proofread and edit the text, come up with a title, and delete unnecessary sentences and entire paragraphs. I like it when new ideas for the text come to me as I’m writing. The writing process itself — the thinking that goes on in the moment — is important to me, not just the result. If I asked an AI to write a text on the topic “Programming is art”, that thought process wouldn’t happen. I wouldn’t experience the same emotions that come with writing it myself. For me, writing is art that I pursue regardless of money. I think people who enjoy writing code feel the same way.

The article "Why do developers continue to write code by hand?" was poorly received by the audience. It received only negative comments across all platforms. Everyone was convinced that all code should be written by hand, every single line of code.

I’m surprised by this because I really thought that many developers used AI agents to write code. The reality turned out to be different.

Programmers aren’t ready to lose their identity. For them, writing code is, to some extent, an art.