"This is not a good sign for those of us who enjoy reading blog posts! A new great blogger once per year is absolutely abysmal, considering (as we're about to learn) many of them stop posting, never to return. Scott thinks so too, but doesn't have a great explanation why, despite the size of the internet, this isn't far more common."
It is abysmal but I think thats to be expected. For example this seems similar to the rate of "new top chess player"
Perhaps this falls under courage, but anyone wishing to put a serious amount of content into the world just has to have the stomach to deal with all the haters.
I read (and commented) on this back on the reddit, and had it in mind spurring me to comment more. Alas, what I realised is that I just don't enjoy having posted an article (or even a reddit comment). My own short lived blog was predominantly an exercise in use of LLMs (which mostly boiled down to me writing an article in full, then having it re-written one paragraph at a time by an LLM) and that was fun for a bit as is learning any new tool, but once I got a handle on the quirks of the models, the joy was gone and all that was left was the feeling of exposure and anticipation of being called an idiot. (Side note: there were a couple of posts I didn't use LLMs on at all, and Pangram is pretty good at picking them out, which was also fun to experiment with).
For my most recent reddit post I went so far as to get an LLM to snidely critique me before I posted it, as a mechanism of steeling myself. I guess this is all to say: I tried courage and it wasn't enough. I needed some feeling of reward to motivate me.
A potential reason for many interesting people not wanting to start blogs is because they don't see the point in expressing their ideas and organizing their knowledge in a formal way. In person they're exciting to talk to, they might be great friends, they might be renowned among their entourage for their encyclopedic knowledge of x, y and z – but this magnetism flows out in conversation, not oratorically. They're not interested in writing a big fat post and sending it to everyone they know, instead they're interested in the back and forth they have with people they know/have already "vetted" (ie "ok I've met you a couple of times and you seem interesting enough, I'll let my guard down and show you my quirks"). For these people, commenting on X, Substack, YouTube, LessWrong or any other platform is a way to extend this back and forth, but their great writing comes as a response. It wouldn't come out as a fully formed "post", because that's now how they think.
Another potential reason could be that people who have very interesting things to say tend to be highly specialized in whatever it is that they do, which increases the likelihood that their writing could identify them among their peers, which increases the pressure of writing stuff that cannot come back to haunt you in the future. I think cancel culture has something to do with it, but we've kind of moved past cancel culture and into a broader "careful culture", where a lot of people might have knowledge abound but no headspace for being sincere and honest in a public way, even behind a pseudonym.
When Scott mentions (half in jest, I'm sure) that you'd have to be a shallow person to not have interesting ideas every day, I strongly disagree. Of course I have ideas everyday, but most people with interesting things to say have work and other obligations that take time away from the (very unnatural at first) exercise of organizing thoughts into a digestible piece of writing. Now, everyone sits on a spectrum; some people could write their article in a matter of minutes, writing at the speed of thought as No Boilerplate would put it, but others like me take literal hours to write our articles. Some of my drafts were written during egregiously long nights, destroying my sleep patterns for that week. It's not sustainable, and while I appreciate Scott's insistence that practice makes perfect, I have certain standards for myself that prevent me from knowingly writing what I would consider to be slop, and not writing slop would take me three to five hours a day at this point.
I found interesting the description of people who seem very smart on X only to seem like utter morons in real life. I haven't had the pleasure of meeting any blogger/prolific X poster from the online world in real life yet, but I'm willing to bet the incentives for becoming excellent at Tweeting are sufficiently different from the incentives to become a smart, grounded and empathetic person that the overlap is smaller than most might think. In short form content, it's much harder to realize whether someone truly knows their shit. Say you're writing a script for a 60sec YouTube short; whether you have 1000 or 150000 words worth of knowledge on the topic, your final result is going to be in the order of 200 to 300 words anyway, and with the help of AI the less knowledgeable guy can still write something decent. However, the switch to a blog post or even a real life conversation should weed out the former. In that sense, I'm not surprised Scott has met people who were even more intriguing in person than their blog posts suggested.
One last thought I had while reading your post was about the discoverability of good bloggers on this platform. I've written elsewhere about how terrible the "Feed" experience is on Substack. In typical recommendation algorithm fashion, it rewards numerous lazy tropes: the alt girl who writes everything in small caps and goes viral for a trauma dump post, the vitality-obsessed alt right dude's post on how men should be men, the incredibly amateur investing blogger who swears that they "only look at under-researched companies, not at shiny trendy names", the random post with a very exciting title that turns out to be mostly AI-generated, etcetera etcetera. The platform necessarily caters to the tastes of the "average reader", which while not being a bad word is not really where one likes to see themselves, and in so doing serves sensationalist slop on a platter. The only way I've been able to find truly interesting bloggers on Substack has been through comment sections: that's where the sharpest minds seem to shine the brightest, either disagreeing with the article with substance or adding their own unique insights into the fold. I find that comment quality is well correlated with blog post quality, and so far this has been my "discoverability hack" for finding new interesting folks to follow.
Re: discoverability, I don't know if it's possible to have a good Feed experience--at least until we get much closer to AGI (if we do).
On the one hand, it's a difficult task. Simple clustering algorithms simply aren't up to snuff because there's are many more dimensions to your taste than what the Substack engineers have configured the algorithm for. If they did a good job, you might get the equivalent of Starbucks coffee: decent, even enjoyable, but not great. That's basically the quality limit of what a top-down bureaucratic machine can achieve in terms of coffee delivery. For amazing coffee, you need to find either a great coffee shop or go at it yourself because these approaches factor in more of your personal preference dimensions.
On the other hand, it's an important task. The information bath you choose to put your brain in determines what you think about the world and what you do in it. I think of it as an extension of Sapir-Whorf, because reading great bloggers is like running their software on your wetware. I don't think that by reading Scott Alexander you'll become as smart or great at writing as he is, but having his voice in your head probably changes the way you think--for the better.
Given that, manually curating your blog feed seems like the most responsible thing to do with healthy ROI.
I agree about the back-and-forth aspect of writing. I love typing out long screeds on reddit or arguing with people on Twitter. But if I wanted to copy+paste that same argument into a standalone post, it feels... weird. Awkward. Cut off from the larger discourse. Also, if I argue with someone on a big account, I get way more eyeballs on my writing. My own follower count is tiny.
"This is not a good sign for those of us who enjoy reading blog posts! A new great blogger once per year is absolutely abysmal, considering (as we're about to learn) many of them stop posting, never to return. Scott thinks so too, but doesn't have a great explanation why, despite the size of the internet, this isn't far more common."
It is abysmal but I think thats to be expected. For example this seems similar to the rate of "new top chess player"
Perhaps this falls under courage, but anyone wishing to put a serious amount of content into the world just has to have the stomach to deal with all the haters.
I read (and commented) on this back on the reddit, and had it in mind spurring me to comment more. Alas, what I realised is that I just don't enjoy having posted an article (or even a reddit comment). My own short lived blog was predominantly an exercise in use of LLMs (which mostly boiled down to me writing an article in full, then having it re-written one paragraph at a time by an LLM) and that was fun for a bit as is learning any new tool, but once I got a handle on the quirks of the models, the joy was gone and all that was left was the feeling of exposure and anticipation of being called an idiot. (Side note: there were a couple of posts I didn't use LLMs on at all, and Pangram is pretty good at picking them out, which was also fun to experiment with).
For my most recent reddit post I went so far as to get an LLM to snidely critique me before I posted it, as a mechanism of steeling myself. I guess this is all to say: I tried courage and it wasn't enough. I needed some feeling of reward to motivate me.
Great post, I have some thoughts.
A potential reason for many interesting people not wanting to start blogs is because they don't see the point in expressing their ideas and organizing their knowledge in a formal way. In person they're exciting to talk to, they might be great friends, they might be renowned among their entourage for their encyclopedic knowledge of x, y and z – but this magnetism flows out in conversation, not oratorically. They're not interested in writing a big fat post and sending it to everyone they know, instead they're interested in the back and forth they have with people they know/have already "vetted" (ie "ok I've met you a couple of times and you seem interesting enough, I'll let my guard down and show you my quirks"). For these people, commenting on X, Substack, YouTube, LessWrong or any other platform is a way to extend this back and forth, but their great writing comes as a response. It wouldn't come out as a fully formed "post", because that's now how they think.
Another potential reason could be that people who have very interesting things to say tend to be highly specialized in whatever it is that they do, which increases the likelihood that their writing could identify them among their peers, which increases the pressure of writing stuff that cannot come back to haunt you in the future. I think cancel culture has something to do with it, but we've kind of moved past cancel culture and into a broader "careful culture", where a lot of people might have knowledge abound but no headspace for being sincere and honest in a public way, even behind a pseudonym.
When Scott mentions (half in jest, I'm sure) that you'd have to be a shallow person to not have interesting ideas every day, I strongly disagree. Of course I have ideas everyday, but most people with interesting things to say have work and other obligations that take time away from the (very unnatural at first) exercise of organizing thoughts into a digestible piece of writing. Now, everyone sits on a spectrum; some people could write their article in a matter of minutes, writing at the speed of thought as No Boilerplate would put it, but others like me take literal hours to write our articles. Some of my drafts were written during egregiously long nights, destroying my sleep patterns for that week. It's not sustainable, and while I appreciate Scott's insistence that practice makes perfect, I have certain standards for myself that prevent me from knowingly writing what I would consider to be slop, and not writing slop would take me three to five hours a day at this point.
I found interesting the description of people who seem very smart on X only to seem like utter morons in real life. I haven't had the pleasure of meeting any blogger/prolific X poster from the online world in real life yet, but I'm willing to bet the incentives for becoming excellent at Tweeting are sufficiently different from the incentives to become a smart, grounded and empathetic person that the overlap is smaller than most might think. In short form content, it's much harder to realize whether someone truly knows their shit. Say you're writing a script for a 60sec YouTube short; whether you have 1000 or 150000 words worth of knowledge on the topic, your final result is going to be in the order of 200 to 300 words anyway, and with the help of AI the less knowledgeable guy can still write something decent. However, the switch to a blog post or even a real life conversation should weed out the former. In that sense, I'm not surprised Scott has met people who were even more intriguing in person than their blog posts suggested.
One last thought I had while reading your post was about the discoverability of good bloggers on this platform. I've written elsewhere about how terrible the "Feed" experience is on Substack. In typical recommendation algorithm fashion, it rewards numerous lazy tropes: the alt girl who writes everything in small caps and goes viral for a trauma dump post, the vitality-obsessed alt right dude's post on how men should be men, the incredibly amateur investing blogger who swears that they "only look at under-researched companies, not at shiny trendy names", the random post with a very exciting title that turns out to be mostly AI-generated, etcetera etcetera. The platform necessarily caters to the tastes of the "average reader", which while not being a bad word is not really where one likes to see themselves, and in so doing serves sensationalist slop on a platter. The only way I've been able to find truly interesting bloggers on Substack has been through comment sections: that's where the sharpest minds seem to shine the brightest, either disagreeing with the article with substance or adding their own unique insights into the fold. I find that comment quality is well correlated with blog post quality, and so far this has been my "discoverability hack" for finding new interesting folks to follow.
Re: discoverability, I don't know if it's possible to have a good Feed experience--at least until we get much closer to AGI (if we do).
On the one hand, it's a difficult task. Simple clustering algorithms simply aren't up to snuff because there's are many more dimensions to your taste than what the Substack engineers have configured the algorithm for. If they did a good job, you might get the equivalent of Starbucks coffee: decent, even enjoyable, but not great. That's basically the quality limit of what a top-down bureaucratic machine can achieve in terms of coffee delivery. For amazing coffee, you need to find either a great coffee shop or go at it yourself because these approaches factor in more of your personal preference dimensions.
On the other hand, it's an important task. The information bath you choose to put your brain in determines what you think about the world and what you do in it. I think of it as an extension of Sapir-Whorf, because reading great bloggers is like running their software on your wetware. I don't think that by reading Scott Alexander you'll become as smart or great at writing as he is, but having his voice in your head probably changes the way you think--for the better.
Given that, manually curating your blog feed seems like the most responsible thing to do with healthy ROI.
I agree about the back-and-forth aspect of writing. I love typing out long screeds on reddit or arguing with people on Twitter. But if I wanted to copy+paste that same argument into a standalone post, it feels... weird. Awkward. Cut off from the larger discourse. Also, if I argue with someone on a big account, I get way more eyeballs on my writing. My own follower count is tiny.