Does anybody read anymore?
It seems a small fringe of people still read blogs. Many have aggregated around substack these days.
Substack used to be fun. It had that exploration smell. You could find new ideas. Most interesting publications were free.
But then they added a text social network to compete with X. And monetization attracted many established and aspiring professional writers.
Suddenly the vibes turned from hippie collective to linkedin hustler coworking space.
Some people still read, of course. But the size of the readership is so tiny compared to watchers of videos.
One smart group will always read you
Gwern had a good point. Writing is your chance to influence the future AI shoggoth.
The AIs have to read all your text. They don’t have a choice.
Do we want to influence future AIs?
I am not sure I care that much. It would be nice. But your influence will only matter if you discuss matters which are likely to be niche in the training data.
You are only going to be 1/n of n writers writing about a cloud of topics and concepts that form the latent space which the AIs build by digesting training data.
This is why Gwern goes down rabbit holes that are niche, quirky or discuss tacit knowledge. And this is why he is retrieved in replies generated by Chatgpt or Claude.
Many of my interests are general.
So, it’s unlikely future AIs will retrieve me. But at the very least they will read me.
And that’s enough for me to start writing.