What may have even more impact on HN readers is the possibility that we are seeing "The end of the bloviating blog." I say this as someone who—under the pen nam

What may have even more impact on HN readers is the possibility that we are seeing "The end of the bloviating blog." I say this as someone who—under the pen name raganwald—built much of my public reputation writing blog posts. But looking back, many of my blog posts were low-effort and superficial. The ones I'm really proud of in hind sight are few and far between, and they were the ones where I had something to say, and put some work into both researching and saying it. The rest could easily have been written by AI, if not now, soon. And just as the author says is the case with high school essays, the correlation between blog posts I'm proud of today and the payoff at the time (marks for high school essays, online popularity for blog posts) is tenuous at best. Popularity is driven by a bunch of factors, and a decade ago, a lot of those factors involved cosplaying an insufferably overconfident techno-priest. (I am not saying I wrote great stuff that nobody liked. The ones I'm proud of also touched people in some way. But looking back, social media was not set up to reward putting a lot of work and thought into writing, not even HN.) I'm kind of happy that AI is able to automate and industrialize relatively shallow and low-effort writing. The sooner we recognize that it is not a signal of either hard work or deep thought, the better IMO. That is... If we as a species recognize it. If not, we are on our way to a really boring dystopia where public sentiment is driven entirely by deep-pockets gaming every form of social media we create.