When Good Technical Writing Isn't Enough

Last week, I came across Don’t Build an Audience. It’s a fascinating post and has been occupying a lot of my “free thinking” time. I strongly suggest reading it as it’s well written and excellently argued.

To summarise what it tries to say:

• The market for written content on the web (blog posts, articles etc) is “efficient”: in other words, great work will find its audience without you needing to build a “following” first.
• “Liquidity providers” (influencers, curators, algorithms) are incentivized to share good content because it benefits them. They maintain credibility and engagement by surfacing quality work. Specifically called out are Substack, Alexey Guzey and Tyler Cowen.
• You can speed up “distribution” of what you write with minimal effort. Just 30 minutes to email a few key people and posts on the “right” platforms.
• Therefore, focus on creating excellent work rather than “building an audience”. If it’s truly good, the market will ensure it reaches “everyone who matters”.

I’m a very strong believer in the core message of “make cool things rather than chase followers”. It’s something I’ve done throughout my life and I have zero interest in changing that going forward.

But I don’t agree with the argument that the market is efficient for all types of written content. I think the author is over-indexing on what they write about: topics accessible for a wide audience and do not require background knowledge (e.g. philosophical musings, economic theory, social dynamics).

I write about technical topics. Sometimes this can be so deeply in the weeds that at most a few thousand people in the world would care about it. But it might totally change how these people work: it might teach about how to debug performance in their code, let them know about a new approach to analysing data or even inspires them build an entirely new program.

For technical content, the foundations of the “efficient market” as proposed break down:

• There are very few influencers or curators for technical niches. There’s no “Tyler Cowen of performance” or “Alexey Guzey of databases”. The people who would most benefit from these posts are engineers who are heads-down solving problems. They’re probably not sharing content for an audience. There are exceptions (e.g. Simon Willison) but, while technical, they still skew to the “accessible” side. They’re also few and far between.
• Substack is not good for “niche” content. Unlike TikTok or YouTube which are incredibly good at matching niche interests to the right people, Substack’s discovery still feels like it significantly prioritises content with wide appeal.
• In-depth technical writing is “high-attention”. You can accidentally watch a 10 TikTok videos about woodworking while procrastinating. You can read a blog post about how prediction markets work on a daily commute. You probably wouldn’t accidentally read 5,000 words about database query optimization if you were not already interested.

The obvious rebuttal though is that, while Substack or curators may not work for technical writing, there are alternative “liquidity providers”, namely a) link-aggregators like Hacker News and Lobste.rs and b) technical subreddits and forums c) roundup newsletters like TLDR and Programming Digest.

However, there is a very powerful effect working against you in all of these: if you post lots of content on the same topic, you are punished by all of them. Specifically, there is always a feeling from readers of “didn’t I already see a post on this last week?”. And this comes from the value both the readers and platforms place on novelty. For example, Perfetto: Swiss Army Knife for Linux Client Tracing reached the front page of Hacker News but I think it’s very unlikely that another post mentioning Perfetto will do so within next several months.

This is very weird because, as an expert in an area, you want to write more about what you know about. But all of these technical “liquidity providers” want you to do the opposite: they incentivise you to “broaden out” and write about different topics constantly. Or at the very least, they prefer you “space out” posts so you’re not writing too much on the same topic in a compressed timeframe.

To me, this means you have to be slightly more strategic when thinking about how to get your technical writing out there:

1. Do build an audience: just not in the the way the original post means. It assumes “audience building” means chasing followers and optimizing for engagement. But for technical writers, it’s instead connecting with a small group who value your specific expertise. When I write my n-th post about Perfetto, I’m writing for the people who are are interested enough in performance tooling to care. They follow precisely because I keep going deep on the similar topics.

2. Rotate through different platforms when promoting articles. Hacker News for some articles, lobste.rs for others, LinkedIn for yet others. The choice depends on topic (different platforms prefer different “types” of content) but also time since you last promoted something similar on that platform.

3. Accept that this is a long game. The market might not be efficient in the short term, but over years, good articles will naturally bubble up and become “de-facto references” for people. So instead of virality, measure in terms of “mind-share” over the course of years.

   • Of course, this is much easier said than done because you have to write “in the dark” hoping that what you write will have value in the long term without getting any immediate feedback!

So yes, build cool things. That remains the most important guiding principle as without that, there’s little point to the type of technical blog posts I like to write. But I think a little bit of strategic investment can go a long way to increase the chance of the right people seeing them.