I used to blog and write a lot and I never cared how many — if any — read it. Purposefully avoided analytics tools etc.
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.
"I just don’t like feeding the “grey goo of information”"
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!)
Scraping is a short term anomaly. The hype cycle is already dying which quickly reduces the amount of resources devoted to such efforts.
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.
My «voice» isn’t heard from a trained LLM anyway. Only a vague, blended and remixed imitation at best. As a human I have no interest in feeding that beast.
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.
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.