I have to admit, I have never really understood this need to be found and this focus on discoverability. Unless you are monetizing your audience, why does it matter whether 10, 1000 or 100,000 people read your blog? If I write something on the Internet, or release some open source program, or post a video, I’m not making any money off of views: I’m doing it for myself. So I don’t really ultimately care how many people read it or view it.

I firmly believe the best content on the Internet is not necessarily the stuff optimized for search engines and audience-building. We shouldn’t really care about that.

Hacker news is how I find things worth reading these days. If this place didn't exist my internet consumption would be cut in half (at least).

You could try Marginalia's small web / blogosphere modes at https://search.marginalia.nu/

It was hard to get your blog discovered 15 years ago, too. Recall "blogrolls", where blogs would link to other blogs — networking to securing such links would be the analogue to making yourself visible on social media today.

I wonder — in absolute terms, is the number of people you can reach smaller today? It's surely proportionally smaller because the internet is much bigger.