what is the point of blogging?

there’s been a lot of discussion lately about “ai slop” and how language models are filling the internet with bland text that wastes everyone’s time. one of my unpopular opinions is that most human writing, including content from many substack writers who try pretty hard like myself, is not actually meaningfully better than ai slop

two common counterarguments:

• but i’m your friend and i care about things you write!

• when i try to write with ai the result is generic / deficient in a specific way / i don’t like it!

to which i’d reply:

• yes, my friends like my writing more than they like ai slop because of the Power Of Friendship. i’m mostly talking about content written by strangers

• have you tried prompting the ai better? of course generic prompts result in generic results. also you should edit the results afterwards instead of just taking what the model gives you verbatim (though to be fair editing is a skill that requires development, so maybe ai-assisted writers are bottlenecked by ordinary writing ability anyway)

the single most desensitizing thing i’ve encountered over the last few months has been the new substack feed feature. the feed algorithm excels at recommending post after post, all of which have compelling titles and a healthy number of likes but feel deeply uninteresting when i actually read them. it’s difficult to scroll through a feed like that and not wonder if strangers view your own output in the same light. funny how a platform that was supposed to showcase human creativity has instead convinced me we’re not far from the machines

i’ve been trying to figure out what the future of this blog should be. by traditional metrics 2024 was a good year - lots of new subscribers, two posts got lots of likes, etc. unfortunately i also realized traditional metrics are not worth optimizing for, especially as i don’t care about monetizing. it seems pretty clear that the easiest path to growth on substack is to write self-help / advice, which i don’t enjoy doing (and also i don’t think it’s actually an effective way of helping people)

here are the main benefits i’ve gotten from blogging, ranked roughly from most to least important:

• update friends on my life

• new people read content they like and want to become friends with me

• writing helps me work through thoughts and solve problems

• i sometimes produce content i’m happy with and also get better at the process

• once in a while someone tells me a blog post was genuinely helpful for them

• (this has only happened once) i was about to make a mistake similar to a mistake i’d previously made, and rereading something i wrote after the last time i made the mistake convinced me to not do it again. sometimes you really do learn!! also memory capsules in general, but i already get that from journaling

a couple years ago i read ben kuhn’s outliers post, which argues that blogging, like various other activities, samples from heavy-tailed distributions so you should sample much more than you think is necessary. i think that’s an important point, and it convinced me to prioritize consistency - put stuff out frequently, even if there are no good ideas, even if i think it sucks, even if i’m sure it’ll be unpopular. i think most of my friends who want to write regularly fail because they try to build habits from inspiration alone, which in my experience is almost impossible

anyway the flip side of consistency is that things can become so natural that you do them without having clear motivations. at some point i lost sight of my goals for writing on the internet, which is fine because i still enjoy doing it, but lack of goals does make it more difficult to prioritize between different directions and longer-term projects

lately i’ve been thinking about the right format for various ideas. for instance: some ideas are worth expressing and too short to be a good blog post, but they might be better as visual art (more coming soon?). other ideas demand more interaction from users, so a game or website may be a better fit. some ideas deserve to be teased out more slowly, in longer-form content. there’s a very real sense in which blogging too much biases you towards only thinking about ideas that fit in blog posts, and i’ve been doing that for 5-10 years depending on how you count so maybe i want to think about other kinds of ideas now?