The only sub-area of blogging I know of that has reasonably healthy communities of regular readers (vs. only people coming in from search or Reddit) is for comm

The only sub-area of blogging I know of that has reasonably healthy communities of regular readers (vs. only people coming in from search or Reddit) is for communities of bloggers based around some programming languages. Language-specific aggregators like http://www.juliabloggers.com/ http://www.juliabloggers.com/, http://www.planet-rust.com/ http://www.planet-rust.com/, and http://planet.lisp.org/ http://planet.lisp.org/ have regular readers. Unlike Reddit and HN they don't depend on getting upvoted; if you blog regularly on the topic, you can ask for your blog to be included, and the aggregator then pulls your posts via RSS (if you sometimes blog on the topic and sometimes on others, you can make an RSS feed for just the on-topic tag, and ask for that to be included). It's possible something similar exists in other areas, but these PLs "planet" aggregators are the only high-quality blogging communities of this type I know of that still exists.