alt Hacker NewsI am a former blogger, people have regarded me as a entertaining writer with a knack for words, and yet I have zero interest in going back to writing things on the internet. The world has changed in key ways.
Firstly, the vast majority of people interested in topics and hobbies I’d like to write about no longer read longform text: the general public, and even many nerdier people, now prefer short videos, podcasts, or Instagram image posts. Younger people are unlikely to visit any third-party website at all outside of social-media walled gardens or phone apps. So, one simply cannot build much of an audience any more, except for bots.
Secondly, those bots can scrape the content that authentic human beings produce, then pass it through an LLM to rewrite, and repost it on a site laden with advertisements in order to generate profit. This is happening a lot now.
Have you looked into Gemini (the protocol)? Lots of people are expressing themselves there through text alone. And there’s a great culture of response-by-email that’s very reminiscent of the early (pre-blog) web.
Regardless, not all writers will write forever, not all writers have previously considered themselves as such. It’s good to reinvent yourself.
As for AI, the fear of bot scraping is something people are going to have to move past. AI training is ingesting almost all art regardless of medium. What are you going to do, abandon art to become an accountant? I suppose there is always live performance art. Cat’s out of the bag for everything else, though. Slop is slop, and it’s going to be around until we can’t make enough energy to churn it out anymore.