That said I have also found myself writing less, but not because I think it’s less worthwhile than it was 15 years ago when I started, it’s that the internet feels like it has become less deep. Probably not because the internet has changed but because I’ve learned more so fewer and fewer things tickle that curious part of the brain and feel worth writing about. The things that do feel worth it are so off the deep end that there are fewer and fewer readers who are interested.
There's this Spider Man quote I like: "If you help someone, you help everyone". I think it's not comic canon but just from the PS4 game. So getting meta here, that random line a writer for a random video game came up with had a big impression on me.
It's a typical programmer fallacy to avoid redundancy. If somebody else already wrote about something, why would you? Yet in communication, redundancy and repetition is actually quite key. We need to hear ideas multiple times and from different angles before they land.
But after the last few years with the proliferation of “AI” tools and the increasing amount of noise on every level I just don’t like feeding the “grey goo of information”. It might be unreasonable but I’ve felt it for over a year now and it’s not going away. Instead I value interpersonal conversations a lot more again. I hang out in discord voice chats with a few people at a time. Text communication feels soulless and low signal to noise in general now.
Anecdotally almost every text chat server I’m on has less active users writing than I’ve ever seen in 25+ years of using the internet. Might be a coincidence but I wouldn’t be surprised if people’s behaviours are changing. Just like knowing you’re being watched changes your behaviour, knowing text content may or may not be fed to or generated by a slop machine algorithm probably changes how you view text as well.
If your voice isn't spoken then it will go unheard. It is of course up to you but I think that blogs and websites run by real people are invaluable (and I'd love to see what AI makes of that word!)
This is the bigger issue at the moment: https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1008897/bbe01d846ec5e9cd/
Where I think that post failed is poisoning the well of anyone ignoring Robots.txt is arguably a moral imperative. That post was concerned with wasting kWh, but ensuring that bad actors don’t profit discourages people from being bad actors.
You wrote your comment in English but used French style quotation marks and made a few minor grammatical errors in your first sentence (won't instead of isn't, by instead of from). Your second sentence beautifully paints a gloomy image with just nine words and your final flourish has just the right level of "fuck it".
If you can deliver that amount of character in a single line in a second language then please do feed the beast. We are all the product of what we eat. The beast needs to eat its greens and suck up some vitamins.
I don't feel like giving free inputs to an AI company. They will use it and once they have domination they will abuse their position.
* To be fair, nostalgia around many off these communities can be misleading. Many were never designed to sustain realistic growth nor the inevitable pressures to monetize them. They were naive and ignored human nature, a product of the mentality of their creators or perhaps their participants or both. We know better now. Community building is tricky and worthwhile, rarely a matter of formulaic scaling.