It's just, no one will read it, beside of some machines. Blogging was fun because you knows that someone is reading it. You had some comments under your articles. When this isn't there, you can just write your stuff in a paper book and put it in your drawer.
And today, there is absolutely no one who will read it, or react to it. Only AI inhales the information and shows it without giving credit to people that never will hear about you. You just fill their database with useful data for free. Thats all.
Yes, it is. I've blogged since 2006, and after the content-oriented-to-SEO boom, I totally lost hope in writing online again. Part of me wants to write for the sake of sharing, but the other part thinks being a free content farm for AI is quite depressing.
On top of that, discoverability is dead, SEO indexing for attribution of original works does not exist, the culture of rehashing content for walled gardens like LinkedIn and Medium is out of control, and the substackzation of writing does not make things optimistic.
Bloggers write because in their value system, the result of this effort is a net positive. LLMs show up and, as far as some bloggers are concerned, turn that net positive into a negative. Bloggers stop blogging. That's rational behavior, not nihilism?
Having everything you make stolen and fed into the AI machine absolutely is a good reason not to create anything useful. Or at least a good reason not to post it online
There's certainly a difference between making useful content for the love of it and making content because you think there's an opportunity to get something out of that (that could be money, but it could also just be appreciation or someone reading your work).
It's demoralising to not get any views on your hard work, and in this economic environment it sometimes feels more worth your time to do any other activity.
You may be the counter-proof to that and I enjoy your blog! But, also a lot of what makes your content useful is timing with depth and that's something that AI can't beat yet
More depressing than the realization how few people are able to evaluate the quality of something?
More depressing than the number of people who proudly advocate for having pride in plagiarism?
More depressing than the number of people who unwittingly use genai as an excuse to DoS sites, individuals, organic content ranking? (Each being their own completely diff method)
No shade: you're very, very bullish on AI though, so naturally you wouldn't think AI should or could be a hinderence to well, anything? People creating content feeds the AI machine too, another reason to encourage blogging
I'm not sure of your age, but I'm old enough to remember the days of copyright protection. The argument was that without copyright protection, there would be insufficient incentive to create content.
And further, the LLMs will DDOS you in the process, completely disregarding robots.txt, so self-hosting is a pain-in-the-ass, forcing you to use (and trust) something like Cloudflare (or the Anubis, or Kiwiflare).
simonw|3 months ago
Feels very nihilistic.
krater23|3 months ago
braza|3 months ago
On top of that, discoverability is dead, SEO indexing for attribution of original works does not exist, the culture of rehashing content for walled gardens like LinkedIn and Medium is out of control, and the substackzation of writing does not make things optimistic.
chemotaxis|3 months ago
bluefirebrand|3 months ago
loktarogar|3 months ago
There's certainly a difference between making useful content for the love of it and making content because you think there's an opportunity to get something out of that (that could be money, but it could also just be appreciation or someone reading your work).
It's demoralising to not get any views on your hard work, and in this economic environment it sometimes feels more worth your time to do any other activity.
You may be the counter-proof to that and I enjoy your blog! But, also a lot of what makes your content useful is timing with depth and that's something that AI can't beat yet
grayhatter|3 months ago
More depressing than the realization how few people are able to evaluate the quality of something?
More depressing than the number of people who proudly advocate for having pride in plagiarism?
More depressing than the number of people who unwittingly use genai as an excuse to DoS sites, individuals, organic content ranking? (Each being their own completely diff method)
hexbin010|3 months ago
bachmeier|3 months ago
anonnon|3 months ago
And further, the LLMs will DDOS you in the process, completely disregarding robots.txt, so self-hosting is a pain-in-the-ass, forcing you to use (and trust) something like Cloudflare (or the Anubis, or Kiwiflare).
tjpnz|3 months ago