I’m all about improving my writing to be useful to others. However, diversifying my content to attract a broader audience usually results in the most vapid, formulaic, clickbaity articles. No matter how many eyeballs they get, I don’t get any pleasure reading or writing them. And writing is how I slow down and shape my thinking. I like doing it for myself, not for the audience. But I deeply appreciate however many readers I get.
Hacker News has a pattern of articles it favors: Zig, Rust, why Go isn’t for the “smart” developers, arcane PL theories, nostalgia about some Lisp variant, why you should blog, small internet, and so on. Ninety percent of the time, they’re forgettable. I usually learn more from the comments than the articles themselves. I also don’t want to write just to capture a certain kind of audience.
I mostly write about things I’m currently working with or interested in. I tend to write something I think past me would find useful—and future me might, too. That’s very different from shaping your writeups for the audience. My stats aren’t impressive as the author, but I do get a few thousand monthly visitors to my blog[1]. I’ve had job offers because a recruiter came across one of my posts somewhere. It’s a different way of thinking about writing, but I’m immensely happy with the result.
[1]: https://rednafi.com/