I think part of it is to remove ego from the equation. The likelihood that anyone will be followed by name/blog alone is minuscule. However, if you treat writi

I think part of it is to remove ego from the equation. The likelihood that anyone will be followed by name/blog alone is minuscule. However, if you treat writing as a personal exercise, and understand that "marketing" (for want of a better word) a post of yours you particularly like, it's definitely useful. Submit high signal posts to here/Reddit/Digg/communities you are part of and you think will enjoy it. I've had two blog posts hit the HN front page; both garnered about 4000 views. One of them also hit Reddit's /r/programming, pushing the view count to 20000. However, the Reddit commentary was essentially useless, whereas the HN commentary was awesome. In fact, the Reddit commentary was quite scathing, and that bruised my pride for a good couple of days afterwards. Sometimes obscurity is better. However, I don't regret writing. The writing is the most important bit. The reading... less so.