I blogged, and I haven't gotten much out of it even though I have over 500 rss subscribers and showed up multiple times on the front page of HN and Reddit.
1. I have not become a better reader. In fact, it made me more impatient because of #2.
2. Writing blog posts did not make me smarter. It made me realize that a blog post's success is a balancing act between being controversial and saying what people want to believe.
I also learned that the average time spent reading even my longest technical articles was around 20 seconds. Yes, even programmers have the attention span of a peanut. And true enough, I often saw comments where someone says "but you didn't do X" when I wrote I did X in the 2nd sentence. So my articles have gotten shorter and shorter, and so has my patience for reading other articles.
3. Anything else that came out of it has not really been a benefit so far. I am not even a quarter of the way through the minimum payout for Google Adsense. Needless to say, it is not even feasible to pay hosting costs this way.
Perhaps the problem is that you are focusing too much on what people want. For sure to have your audience in mind when writing is important, but to have your audience be your master leaves you aiming for the lowest common dominator.
Maybe you should take less care of your readers and be your own harshest critic. Do you like your post, do you think it is great, might it need something added or taken away.
There are many people out there all with their opinions and moods of the day and prejudices and.... you can't please everyone. Please yourself first and foremost, then perhaps you will find a readership you love :)
If I was writing for the lowest common denominator, I would be writing about lolcats and celebrities.
The problem is that even the high-brow audience coming from Hacker News and the programming subreddit (where most of my audience is from) have tiny attention spans unless they are reading what they want to believe. People won't even spend 20 seconds to read your post unless you are a celebrity like Paul Graham.
If you like the idea of a personal diary that no one reads, put it in a text file. Put it online, and you'll have to deal with spammers, hackers, and critics that don't even bother to read the article and insult you. If you want to see what I mean by this, take a look at the comments of my most commented posts. It is really discouraging.
1. I have not become a better reader. In fact, it made me more impatient because of #2.
2. Writing blog posts did not make me smarter. It made me realize that a blog post's success is a balancing act between being controversial and saying what people want to believe.
I also learned that the average time spent reading even my longest technical articles was around 20 seconds. Yes, even programmers have the attention span of a peanut. And true enough, I often saw comments where someone says "but you didn't do X" when I wrote I did X in the 2nd sentence. So my articles have gotten shorter and shorter, and so has my patience for reading other articles.
3. Anything else that came out of it has not really been a benefit so far. I am not even a quarter of the way through the minimum payout for Google Adsense. Needless to say, it is not even feasible to pay hosting costs this way.