I’d say you have to know your audience but it seems to work fine here. Plenty of self hosted blog posts make it to the front page of HN. I don’t see anyone writing for the broader masses and maybe that’s more the type of writing you think will be quashed, but writing for a niche seems to proliferate to the specialty sites just fine.
" writing for a niche seems to proliferate to the specialty sites just fine."
Does it, though? I'd actually like to see a thorough study done on this. My hypothesis is different from yours: the proliferation of "specialty sites" is a product and symptom of the walled garden phenomenon, and further serves to sequester and censor undesirable content from the wider audience.
I'm pretty happy that i havent had to read celebrity news sites because i have an algorthmically light diet, especially in the last few weeks with Will Smith etc. Do you really think this nichemaking is bad inherently bad? The natural course is that good niches fill and grow until they become the mainstream and the folks who are nudged out go make new niches. this even happens with Big Media... It even happened here.
What are you suggesting is better, though? really, that we all just publish one of 10000 articles to dev.to and hope their search and popularity algorithm puts your article in front of peoples' eyes? That everyone should upload video to a single time-ordered feed that you have to scroll through until you find something you like without algorithmic involvement? Im seriously confused, how do you do content selection or personal curation in a world without niches
