Why Nobody Reads Your Tech Blog
There's a quiet problem in tech that nobody talks about.
Hundreds of developers write genuinely useful blog posts every week — deep dives into framework internals, library walkthroughs, performance tips, architecture decisions. Real knowledge from people doing real work.
Almost nobody reads them.
Why? Because these authors don't have massive Twitter followings. They don't land on Hacker News. They publish on their personal blog, share a link once, and the post disappears into the void. Meanwhile, the same 15 well-known names dominate every aggregator.
I know this because I was one of those readers who kept missing great stuff. I'd stumble across a blog post from three months ago and think where was this when I needed it? Why did nobody tell me about this person? They clearly know what they're talking about.
The discovery problem is real. We have Ruby Weekly, we have Hacker News, we have Reddit. And they all surface the same voices. Not because other people aren't writing — they are. But the distribution is broken. If you don't already have an audience, your writing goes nowhere.
Take Ruby Weekly — a popular newsletter, but there's no way to submit an article to them. You either get noticed or you don't. That's not curation, that's a lottery.
Meet the Crow
RubyCrow is a curated weekly newsletter that watches 100+ community blogs, collects everything new, and delivers the best stuff to your inbox. One email a week. Zero filler.
The idea is dead simple: you add your blog to our open registry (one GitHub PR), and from that moment on, every article you publish reaches all of our subscribers. The crow watches your RSS feed every couple of hours, collects new posts, and the best ones get curated into a weekly newsletter.
Three sections, zero filler:
Crow's Pick — The most impactful article of the week
Shiny Objects — New gems, tools, and libraries worth your attention
Crow Call — Community voices and conversations worth joining
That's the whole pitch. Open Source. No paywall. Just good writing from real developers, delivered weekly.
Why This Matters
Every tech community has its quiet builders, people who solve hard problems, figure things out, and then write about it so others don't have to struggle the same way. They're maintaining gems used by thousands of apps. They're running production systems at scale. They're finding edge cases and documenting the fix.
And most of them have 47 followers on Twitter.
RubyCrow exists to close that gap. When a new blog joins the registry, and their first article appears in the newsletter, it gets a "First Flight" label. That's not just a cute badge — it's a statement. This is a voice you haven't heard yet. Pay attention.
Some of the best articles I've featured came from blogs I'd never seen before. People who write one post every few months, but that one post is absolute gold. The kind of thing you bookmark and come back to six times. Those are the posts that deserve an audience — and now they get one.
How It Works (The Short Version)
The whole platform is open source, built with Rails 8, Ruby 4, PostgreSQL, Sidekiq, and Hotwire. Deployed with Kamal. If you want to look under the hood or contribute — it's all there.
If you blog about Ruby or Rails — add your feed. It takes 2 minutes and one PR. Your next cool article goes to every subscriber.
If you read about Ruby or Rails — subscribe. One email a week, only the good stuff, from voices you haven't heard yet.
The Bigger Picture
I don't think tech blogging has a content problem. It has a distribution problem. There's more good writing happening right now than at any point I can remember. What's missing is the connective tissue — something that takes all those scattered voices and brings them together in one place.
RubyCrow is my attempt at that connective tissue. It's small, it's simple, and it's built on a belief that the best content shouldn't require a marketing budget to find an audience.
The crow collects the shiny bits. That's the whole job.
Links:
Subscribe: https://rubycrow.dev
Add your blog: https://github.com/k0va1/rubycrow/blob/master/data/blogs.yml
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