4 Comments
User's avatar
Kai's avatar

oh interesting. i agree that a lot of substack content is really bland and could often plausibly be generated by either human or ai (lol). i guess when my friend (or even a writer i vaguely know as a person) writes something i can have fun thinking about how it slots into their life and all the other thoughts they might be having around it. when an ai writes something of the same (or even higher) level there's no further thought to be had

also ++ on blog post structure being sort of limiting if it's the ~only thing you do over time - i've only been blogging for a couple years but i realized when trying to write different things over the past few months that i am really bad at writing *not* 500-2k word blogs! like handling pacing and structure in longer form writing is ridiculously hard and feels like it requires almost a separate kind of thought from the question of just writing a nice 500 word chunk. would be excited to see more explorations from you in other mediums :>

Expand full comment
Andrew Wu's avatar

it’s not just pacing / structure - it’s also rigor of thought. blog posts simply don’t carry the same expectations regarding rigor as, say, academic papers, books, etc, which means that a lot of really popular bloggers don’t bother, bluntly speaking (ACX comes to mind). ofc it’s not like the median academic paper / book is SO rigorous / SO well thought out but at least you can be convinced there was a (team of) editor(s).

and bc they’re blog posts imo they’re not taken as seriously by the median reader too - a lot of ppl just skim or read without much depth, and if they like it at first pass that’s all or smth. if you put things into book / paper form ppl r more likely to more deeply engage with the work

Expand full comment
CJ Quines's avatar

you're right, i should just stop blogging

Expand full comment
Ashish Kolli's avatar

If a piece of your writing ever feels like slop or too bland initially, do you feel the urge to go back? if so, do you edit it to get closer to your voice or some other metric? curious because your voice comes out fairly consistent throughout.

Expand full comment