blogging

Thanks to the Readers

James BaileyLeave a comment

Bryan Caplan explains why blogging is his favorite way to write, even as someone who has published many articles and books. It’s because of the readers:

The blog posts, finally, are the most fun. Why? Because I can quickly make an original point. When I blog, I assume that readers already understand the basics of economics, philosophy, political science, and history. Or to be more precise, I assume either that (a) readers already understand the basics, or (b) are motivated enough to self-remediate any critical gaps in their knowledge. I also assume that readers already know the basics of my outlook, so I don’t have to constantly repeat repeat repeat myself. Finally, I assume that readers already appreciate me, at least to the extent of, “You’re often wrong, but reliably interesting.” So rather than spend precious time convincing readers that I’m worth reading, I can immediately try to convince them that the thesis of my latest post is important and correct….

In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I’d like to say that I owe almost all of this to you, my dear readers. You’re the people I wake up thinking about. You’re the people I hope to excite on a daily basis. You’re my sounding board, and my confidants. I owe you, big time.

I couldn’t say it better myself, so I’ll just leave it to Bryan.

Thanks to you all and happy Thanksgiving.

The Open Internet Is Dead; Long Live The Open Internet

James Bailey1 Comment

Information on the internet was born free, but now lives everywhere in walled gardens. Blogging sometimes feels like a throwback to an earlier era. So many newer platforms have eclipsed blogs in popularity, almost all of which are harder to search and discover. Facebook was walled off from the beginning, Twitter is becoming more so. Podcasts and video tend to be open in theory, but hard to search as most lack transcripts. Longer-form writing is increasingly hidden behind paywalls on news sites and Substack. People have complained for years that Google search is getting worse; there are many reasons for this, like a complacent company culture and the cat-and-mouse game with SEO companies, but one is this rising tide of content that is harder to search and link.

To me part of the value of blogging is precisely that it remains open in an increasingly closed world. Its influence relative to the rest of the internet has waned since its heydey in ~2009, but most of this is due to how the rest of the internet has grown explosively at the expense of the real world; in absolute terms the influence of blogging remains high, and perhaps rising.

The closing internet of late 2023 will not last forever. Like so much else, AI is transforming it, for better and worse. AI is making it cheap and easy to produce transcripts of podcasts and videos, making them more searchable. Because AI needs large amounts of text to train models, text becomes more valuable. Open blogs become more influential because they become part of the training data for AI; because of what we have written here, AI will think and sound a little bit more like us. I think this is great, but others have the opposite reaction. The New York Times is suing to exclude their data from training AIs, and to delete any models trained with it. Twitter is becoming more closed partly in an attempt to limit scraping by AIs.

So AI leads to human material being easier for search engines to index, and some harder; it also means there will be a flood of AI-produced material, mostly low-quality, clogging up search results. The perpetual challenge of search engines putting relevant, high-quality results first will become much harder, a challenge which AI will of course be set to solve. Search engines already have surprisingly big problems with not indexing writing at all; searching for a post on my old blog with exact quotes and not finding it made me realize Google was missing some posts there, and Bing and DuckDuckGo were missing all of them. While we’re waiting for AI to solve and/or worsen this problem, Gwern has a great page of tips on searching for hard-to-find documents and information, both the kind that is buried deep down in Google and the kind that is not there at all.

Always Be Posting

James Bailey6 Comments

The key lesson, the thing I would impart to any aspiring bloggers, content creators, or newsletter proprietors, is that the cornerstone of internet success is not intelligence or novelty or outrageousness or even speed, but regularity. There are all kinds of things you can do to develop and retain an audience — break news, loudly talk about your own independence, make your Twitter avatar a photo of a cute girl — but the single most important thing you can do is post regularly and never stop.

Granted, “work hard and keep doing the thing you’re doing” is probably above-replacement advice for any kind of entrepreneurial activity. But it’s particularly true for online content creation. As Yglesias suggests, the internet and feed-based social platforms have constructed an insatiable demand for content, so if you can produce content mechanically, without requiring expensive resources (such as time, wit, or subject-specific knowledge), you’re in an excellent position to take advantage. But most importantly, this demand is so insatiable that there is currently no real economic punishment for content overproduction. You will almost never lose money, followers, attention, or reach simply from posting too much.

That is from an excellent post by Max Read. It is fairly short and has some good examples, so I recommend reading the whole thing. Tyler Cowen made a similar point back in 2019:

There’s a certain way in which on the internet you can’t be overexposed. There’s just a steady stream of you, it feels like being overexposed compared to the standards of 1987 or whenever, but in fact it’s not and people are picking and choosing. And you end up just dominating a particular space in a particular kind of way. And I think most older people have not made that transition mentally to understanding how you should exist intellectually on the internet.

Of course, this is also part of Joy’s idea with this site and why we write every day:

It’s just time to start writing more. This is a model that I have learned from Tyler Cowen, and most writers I admire write every day whether or not they have time for it. David Perell has tweeted that writing and thinking are the same thing. Thus, if you are a thinker, writing is not a waste of time. Writing is the thing you are doing anyway in your muddled head.

Thus: Always Be Posting.

2021: Our Most Popular Posts

Jeremy HorpedahlLeave a comment

While the blog got its start with Joy Buchanan in mid-2020, we are now just finishing up our first full year and now have a full weekly slate of bloggers. This seems like a good opportunity to reflect on our most popular posts from each of our regular bloggers. We hope you enjoy looking back at these popular posts.

Monday: Mike Makowsky

Makowsky‘s most popular post was from May 2021, titled “Academic Publishing: How I think we got here.” This post generated a significant amount of discussion on Twitter among economists and other academics, and is the second most widely read post on this blog with almost 10,000 views. Makowsky outlined the history and incentives of “how we got here” in terms of the problems with academic publishing, and he is skeptical that there is any easy fix. It seems there is nothing economists love arguing about more than our profession itself. (Follow Makowsky on Twitter)

Tuesday: Scott Buchanan

Scott Buchanan‘s most popular post is “Money as a Social Construct” is from September 2020. It discusses the very basic definition of what we mean by money, and the importance of social trust for both the functioning of money and general social order. The related theme of cryptocurrencies is something he has written a lot about in the last few months of 2020. (He is not yet on Twitter!)

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