Blogging in 2025: Screaming into the Void(askmike.org) |
Blogging in 2025: Screaming into the Void(askmike.org) |
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> If the answer was on a forum, blog or any other website the AI will fetch it behind the scenes and summarize it for you.
Because of exactly this(AI stealing people's traffic and exposure, becoming de facto gateway into the internet and keeping the real users away from actual content creators, controlling the narrative or getting paid for other people's work), I have become convinced that in order to preserve humanity and freedom on the internet and avoid being totally controlled by social networks and these AI information manipulators, there is great need to paywall all content. It is horribly sad that it came to this, because internet was not made to become like this, but I see no other way to preserve its essence. One of the reasons I have created Gethly.com was because paywalls will become necessity.
In the past, search engines were helpful because they guided users to your content and for that functionality, they got paid money from showing some ads on their own search result page. But with AI bots, they are literally stealing all the information out there, all the traffic the websites would otherwise generate, and are stealing people's money because these AI bots/agents have paid versions, which only turns their theft into profitable crime. These AI tools bring no value to the content creators whose content they are stealing and preventing real users from discovering and connecting with the authors. Only their users see value in them as it allows them to avoid doing the manual work of searching the information themselves. But this comfort comes at an astronomical cost because in time, this will completely kill content itself as people will stop creating it due to lack of traffic and interest from real users when AI bots will come in once, steal the content and then sell it to the end-users for ever and the content creators will not get one more page hit.
These are dark times, people just don't get it yet how bad thins will get.
1. Consistent theme - A diverse set of interests and a lethal dose of ADD make this virtually impossible
2. Consistent updates - My articles tend to be rather unusual, and I'll often combine them with customized interactive layouts. Even a monthly post would be pretty ambitious for me.
On a slightly related note, I'm hoping that zines [1] see a resurgence in popularity as I could see it being a good point of entry towards possibly gaining readership for those whose sites are inadvertently running in stealth mode.
[1] - Such as Paged Out (https://pagedout.institute)
I just skimmed but looks like exactly the content I love. It's a shame search engines are so narrow minded and such content so hard to discover.
- https://lainzine.org/archive
- https://inteltechniques.com/magazine.html
- https://increment.com/issues/
Not all of them are active though.
One thing I've wondered though (and am mentally composing a post about) is whether there's more good in ai digesting ones writing that we might first feel.
Here's a thought experiment: Would you feel good if someone read your blog and learned something from it? Probably yes. Would you feel good if they passed along something they learned to others, likely in their own words? Probably yes. What if they couldn't recall, or didn't choose to reference where they saw it? Probably still yes, although (speaking personally) my ego would probably prefer they did credit. What if the reader who passed the learning along was the ai?
In a sense we're still contributing to the public discourse and culture when we write, just mediated by models. If a model gives someone a slightly different answer in part because of something you wrote, you've still had an impact on the ultimate human reader.
Just to lay my cards on the table I'm no AI booster, nor doomer. In general I think it's over hyped and may well have a net negative effect if steered by those current at the wheel and consumed without due care, but it has its place where it can be useful.
This is definitely an interesting way of looking at it. If your blog ends up in pre-training data, it will become part of the AI. Or if not, an AI might still fetch it when a user asks something specific. It reminds me of voting in a democracy, which many people consider a right and a duty - but in reality a single vote is hardly going to swing any election.
Getting thoughts out of my head and into writing is very therapeutic, as even though I know it will probably get zero views, the fact it might get views makes me think carefully about how to word and structure it all and how to turn the jumble of chaos in my head into something the general public could comprehend.
I to still do blog because it's good to write. Who knows, someone might benefit from it.
Human attention and processing breaks down. Filters will be used, to cut the volume down to human levels. Automation becomes an indispensable layer between human-to-human interactions. Humans become cells served by the filtered feeds from automation, with no direct to other humans.
I think the real issue is that people now consume much more than they contribute or comment (even if I did get rid of comments years ago due to automated spam, I do get one or two e-mails a week plus a bit of feedback on social networks). And, of course, people have unrealistic expectations about publishing online making you more visible/reachable (there is just too much out there).
Of course, I like the fact that sites such as Adobe, Wikipedia, WordPress, IBM, the US Patent (mostly via Google), Russian and Chinese Websites, and quite a few other prominent websites maintains their links that points to some of my articles.
I love having people with “old” blogs on to hear their stories. Thank you for writing for so long, I’ll definitely get in touch.
- Hosting a website is not so easy for the average person, even the tech savvy person, specially if you try to learn it now using the way large websites are developed.
- Static site blogs lack interactivity: people can't comment on your blog. You have to post a link to Twitter or HN (here!) and interact with people over there.
- Static site blogs also don't usually let people "subscribe" by email or whatnot, so unless people bookmark your website or follow you on Twitter, they are not going to find your content.
P.S. this is a problem area I'm trying to work on, at least on the technical front.
- there are now literally thousands of ways to host personal websites, even if we’re not in the LiveJournal age anymore
- there are also several services out there to host comments (many of which I tried over the years before I realized the absence of comments was a feature, not a bug)
- RSS is still a thing. Very much so. My site publishes a full RSS feed, and I have at least as many individual RSS GET requests as for the rest of my site, bar the homepage.
No comments are normal if no one can comment.
Personally I've learnt that anxiety removal leads to a healthy life.
At peak, every third post I wrote went viral. But then I stopped because I had no return from it.
I recently started writing on my blog again: https://shivekkhurana.com
The main reason was to get back into the habit of writing, and by extension thinking. ChatGPT has weakened my thinking capacity.
I can definitely relate, and find this true as well. While a (monetary) return has never a big focus for me. It's still hard to keep going over time with motivations around self improvement, accountability, etc.
The return from the startup was experience, friendships, skill-development and money.
I chose to trade my time for tangible returns.
I have two niche blogs( civilwhiz.com and mes100.com). Those bot traffics increase my visitor count in Google analytics by more than 100%. It's super annoying when the analytics are distorted by bots traffic.
Also, how are AIs going to train for new languages and business rules in the future? People may start to get defensive. It must be worth something.. enter x402.
AIs are dumb - they can't really make sense of anything new without a human first to put it into context.. right? Remember that!
For me probably very few if any :) It does not help I moved to my site Gemini (the real gemini, not google's thing) a year or 2 ago. Not that I blog much anyway.
But I hope some future digital archeologist may find our blogs and get a view into what non-corporate controlled people thought :)
Note, I find Gemini and Gopher far easier to maintain then anything on the WEB. FWIW, I mirror my items on gopher.
https://www.jvt.me/site-in-review/
But I very much still enjoy that some of my posts are "screaming into the void", giving me an outlet
(RSS feed is how you -used to- follow blogs you thought were interesting)
This is not really an issue at all, more like a feature. Posts that provoke discussion or are otherwise interesting get HN discussions. Posts that don't get traction also don't require a comment field. Free moderation and signal boosting.
I'd also recommend putting an email address on the website (but not your main address). That also tends to promote high-quality engagement with readers directly.
It's easier then ever. Shared hosting with cPanel has enabled anyone including my mother to host a website, blog or whatever.
A blog doesn't need to be an abstraction of JavaScript libraries and frameworks tucked behind Cloudflare. Just make a CRUD application and you have a blog. It yes requires knowledge but it's not hard. With LLMs now running the internet it's even easier than before.
https://web.archive.org/web/20051231031003/http://www.lordse...
My even cooler self php made blog from 2013. Want cringe? Just visit.
https://web.archive.org/web/20130816005929/http://www.paw-fo...
My blog was dead before dead blogs were cool.
[1]: https://giscus.app/
- You help the LLM by putting something up for free and pinging it upon publishing
- The LLM helps back by linking to you (hopefully)
- The user helps by paying you when they visit the paid version
- You help the LLM by splitting that payment back to it
optional: your free page can have reference links.. so other pages that helped you reach your final version can get a split of the payment as well. Perhaps the LLM can handle that part in "upstream distributions."
In fact, your reference links can lead to even more reference links further upstream when stepping back through the totality of references: the pyramid slice. Perhaps it should be capped at say 3 steps back.. that can be decided somewhere or the payments can be diluted the further back the focus.
So here's the crux - there should be a way for the user to decide how much they want/can pay you. A tipping culture can work. If you're broke, just don't tip anything or put it on hold. Big Business can be transparent on their payments and build up social capital by disclosing their "giving." There can be a level of transparency and privacy that can be tweaked for each situation.
Maybe, but in a recent comment of mine I alluded to a "long-tail" of AIs popping up. So there's a possibility in one of those. But if no one has any money to invent or create, or they feel there is a risk in sharing, it won't really work too well.
I bet to get to AGI, humans will have to actively help: it can't be a parasitic relationship. People are pessimistic about AI, but why can't it lead to free energy, patent obsolescence (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNR_6aBQyDk), supernatural abilities and utopia instead? Wait those things will come, they will just remain with the special people in the "breakaway civilization," perhaps.