Tech Bloggers – what's more important – consistency or quality?

Question

Hey Tech bloggers of HN!I'm trying to focus more on my technical blog about software engineering, and I was wondering, what is more important - consistency or quality?Based on my observations, if I produce quality content, this necessarily means that consistency suffers. On the other hand, I've heard that consistency is rewarded regardless of quality (assuming quality is not trash and occasional high quality content is published).What is your experience? And what are some other ways to reach a wider audience?Thanks![Edit] - Just to clarify 2 things:1. I'm primarily interested in opinions of people who own their content (i.e. publish on their own website) and not trying to beat some platform algorithm.and2. When I say consistency - I still mean quality, but obviously when you post once a week, the quality will suffer as opposed to posting once a month for example.

sourcecodeplz · Accepted Answer

Consistency is more about the algorithms, as someone else mentioned already. But when you think about, algorithms were built around human behavior/expectations.In my opinion you should aim for quality of course. A quality article/blogpost will most likely gather backlinks naturally and thus give you more credibility in the eyes of Google et al.

nicbou · Answer

Quality by far. There are a few domain names that I blindly trust. There are a few authors whose articles I blindly queue in my reading list.I don't care how often they post. When they do, I'm reading it. I can't say as much of consistent content creators with inconsistent quality.

suramya_tomar · Answer

Quality is a must. It doesn't matter how frequently/consistently you post if the posts are not of good quality. There are a few blogs I follow where the author don't post very frequently but when they do the posts are extremely high quality so I keep checking them frequently even when they don't update regularly.The quote you are talking about about consistency being awarded is more geared towards appeasing the algorithms to get more followers/visibility etc

otras · Answer

What are your goals for writing? You say both that you don't want to beat a platform algorithm, but you mention consistency being rewarded and wanting to reach a wider audience.You can absolutely make up for infrequency with consistently high quality posts. The best example there is Bartosz Ciechanowski's blog: https://ciechanow.ski/archives

dimmke · Answer

I have been blogging for 5 years. Like, 2-3 posts a year. I personally prefer to only write a post when I really feel like I have something to say. Very few people read my blog posts until last week when two of them frontpage'd here. Then tens of thousands of people read them. Life is weird.