Do you actually write a changelog, or just hope people notice?

Been thinking about this a lot lately. Every time we ship something, there's a brief debate internally: do we actually write it up somewhere, or just let it live in the product and assume people will stumble onto it eventually?

Do you think every product needs a visible changelog even a tiny one? Or does that only matter once you have enough users actively asking "wait, when did this change?"

Should it live on a dedicated page? Get emailed out? Posted somewhere like Twitter or here on launch updates? Or is in app notification enough and anything beyond that is just noise nobody reads?

In our case, we've started treating the changelog almost like a mini product in itself, short, honest, sometimes even admitting what we broke along the way. It's surprisingly built more trust than most of our actual feature announcements.

There's also a bigger question behind this. I know some companies hire entire teams just to manage changelogs and release communication for other products. Feels almost unnecessary on the surface, but maybe it's not, if users genuinely don't read what ships unless it's presented well.

So, curious how others handle this. Do you treat changelogs as a real communication channel, or more of an afterthought nobody actually checks?