Item — HN Reader

> They say "the API that we are building" and assume I know who they are and what they're working on, all the way until the very bottom.

This is a common and rather tiresome critique of all kinds of blog posts. I think it is fair to assume the reader has a bit of contextual awareness when you publish on your personal blog. Yes, you were linked to it from a place without that context, but it’s readily available on the page, not a secret.

1 comments

Well that's... certainly a take. But I have to disagree. Most traffic coming to blog posts is not from people who know you and are personally following your posts, they're from people who clicked a link to the article someone shared or found it while googling something.

It's not hard to add one line of context so readers aren't lost. Here, take this for example, combining a couple parts of the GitHub readme:

> For those who are unfamiliar, the Sanitizer API is a proposed new browser API being incubated in the Sanitizer API WICG, with the goal of bringing this to the WHATWG.

Easy. Can fit that in right after "this blog post will explain why", and now everyone is on the same page.

> Most traffic coming to blog posts is not from people who know you and are personally following your posts

Do we have data to back that up? Anecdotally the blogs I have operated over the years tend to mostly sustain on repeat traffic from followers (with occasional bursts of external traffic if something trends on social media)

Your data sounds a bit anecdotal. :-P

Here's my anecdotal data. Number of blogs that I personally follow: zero. And yet, somehow, I end up reading a lot of blog posts (mostly linked from HN, but also from other places in my webosphere).

(More than a bit irritated by the "Do you have data to back that up" thing, given that you don't really have data to back up your position).

> (More than a bit irritated by the "Do you have data to back that up" thing, given that you don't really have data to back up your position).

It wasn't necessarily a request for you personally to provide data. I'm curious if any larger blog operators have insight here.

"person who only reads the 0.001% of blog posts that reach the HN front page" is not terribly interesting as an anecdotal source on blog traffic patterns

> It's not hard

It’s also not hard to look around for a few seconds to find that information, is my point.

What's hard in this case is that you end up making it 80% of the way through the article before you start to wonder what the heck this guy is talking about. So you have to click away to another page to figure out who the heck this guy is, then start again at the top of the article, reading it with that context in mind.

One word would have fixed the problem. "Why does the Mozilla API blah blah blah.". Perhaps "The Mozilla implementation used to...". Something like that.

THAT is not hard.