My tiny Bear Blog hit #2 on Hacker News

2025-08-21

Last week I wrote a blog post that got 100x more reads than any of my other posts.

It hit the top of Bear Blog Discovery, my boss shared it with our company, and it reached #2 on Hacker News.

A couple friends have asked me what my goal was with the post and how I got it to the top of Hacker News. The answers aren't that sexy, but I wanted to share the story because I enjoy reading things like this.

Idea for the blog

I have a note in Obsidian called "things that I like" where I keep a running list of sorts of things that I enjoy¹.

It has entries for my favorite cut of steak, movies and books, it has screenshots from Van Neistat videos, and entries like "I love listening to baseball on the radio (the best was listening to John & Suzyn on WFAN)".

One item on the list is I really like simple text-only websites.

Once I wrote it down, I started thinking more about why I liked text-only websites and kept thinking of more reasons over the next few weeks.

Writing the blog

James Somers has a post called "Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems" and his thesis is that "If you work quickly, the cost of doing something new will seem lower in your mind. So you’ll be inclined to do more."

Writing online, especially on a personal blog, has always felt like a huge task.

It felt like I'd need to spend weeks on a post like Henrik Karlsson or Wendell Berry to write anything good, so I never wrote anything.

Sometimes I'd get a few thousand words into a draft before abandoning it or get distracted setting up a new CMS.

But since reading Speed matters, I've been trying to do things faster so they don't seem so daunting which has gotten me to write a few more posts.

Last Thursday night, my wife was preoccupied, my daughter was playing video games, and I thought "okay, I should go write a blog post" and went upstairs without being sure what I'd write.

I brain-dumped a lot of ideas about why I liked text-only webpages and ended up with a lot of new ideas I hadn't thought of before. The blog expanded a bit to include why I like working with text and the downside of vertical video.

Then I reorganized it, edited it while reading it out loud, and cut ~30% of the weakest points. I took out a cuss word that felt forced and decided to leave in my em-dashes even though people would think I used ChatGPT.²

Then I rewrote portions so that it read a bit more like poetry.

In total, it took an hour and six minutes to write 239 words.

Publishing

I copy/pasted the blog from Obsidian into Bear. Changed the title from "Why I like text-only websites" to "The beauty of a text-only webpage" on a whim, and hit publish.

My blog doesn't have any readers, but it got a couple reads from the Bear Discovery page.

I saw it get its first toast before I went to bed.

Hitting #2 on Hacker News

The next day, I pulled up my Bear stats at lunch and it had been read ~1,200 times.

Before this my posts would rarely get more than 20 reads so I was legitimately shocked.

Most of the traffic was from Hacker News and when I pulled it up, my blog post was at #2. Then I flipped to the Bear Discovery page and it was at the top of the page!

I was legitimately giddy. It felt like such a kind gift from the internet. I'd taken James Somers's advice to work faster, published something fast, and over 1,000 people had read it.

The Hacker News comments were full of people sharing their favorite text-only webpages, most of which I'd never seen. It's a great reminder that A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox.

A few comments were roasting me because my post about the beauty of text was so ugly. Apparently, I had a bug in the CSS so the blog had terrible contrast when browsers were set to dark mode.

I screenshotted the comments, found the conversations where ChatGPT wrote the CSS, and used it to help me fix the contrast issues.

The views kept going up 1,200 ... 2,000... 3,000 and I had some CSS I thought would work.

I didn't know how to see what the CSS would look like, without publishing it, so I deployed the CSS straight to production. There were ~267 reading the blog when I hit Publish.

Over the next week, my bear blog had over 22,000 page-views. Most of them were to the one post, but a few thousand read other post or pages.

I felt embarrassed by how little else was on the site. My "Projects" page had a total of two tiny projects. Most of the posts lacked polish and had obvious typos.

I wanted to respond on Hacker News and explain that the entire blog had fewer than 1,000 page-views in the previous two years. That up to this point it had felt like a pubic scratchpad. It was something I never expected people to read.

Two takeaways

After writing this post, I have two takeaways.

The first, is that I should write more blog posts! Even if I only have a few hours, I should write a blog post. Writing helps me clarify my ideas. It was so much fun to see people resonate with post and see it get shared online.

The second, was that I should email my favorite bloggers. The post was read 15,186 times and the only call-to-action was to send me an email. But while I got a few Twitter followers, I didn't get any emails.

Sometimes I read something great online, think about emailing the author, but decide not to since I'm sure they're being bombarded with email. But if the conversion rate from read to email is so low, I should email my favorite bloggers to let them know I like their work!

Thank you to everybody who read the blog—especially the Bear Blog readers who found and toasted it first! Thank you to speckx for posting it to Hacker News and to coder543 who figured out what was wrong with my CSS.

I really appreciate it!

— Alban