The internet has changed. Years ago, this blog had several hundred visitors a day. Five to ten of whom, each day, would leave comments. Over the years, that ebb and flowed. Both the traffic and the engagement. In recent months, traffic has slowed to a crawl. And it sure looks like most of it isn’t real humans doing real reading. As an example, Indonesia seems to be the country where most of my visitors have hailed from recently. And while I can certainly imagine that there might be a few loyal Indonesian readers of this blog, it seems unlikely to me that over any given period of time there might be more Indonesians reading it than Americans. So, one thing that’s changed is that fewer real people are finding their way here.
Surely some of that is on me. I haven’t been writing as much. What I have been writing isn’t as hot as some of what I wrote years ago. The narrative that I’ve been telling just isn’t as compelling in recent months and years.
But there’s something else going on. I know this both because of my gut instincts, as it relates to this blog, and because of other websites that I maintain and whose traffic I am familiar with. The internet is just becoming a different place. Between Google’s complete insidification, enshittification, and its ridiculous and useless AI mode, and the ascendance of ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, websurfing – the kind of reading people used to do where they would go down a rabbit hole of seemingly random sites curated by Google on a subject of momentary interest – that just doesn’t exist anymore.
Now what seems to happen is something very different.
People engage in what feel like parasocial or even social relationships with chatbots about subjects of interest. And the chatbots feed them content that’s been created by humans. Or, I suppose, by AI.
I don’t know if any people are reading my words any more. I suspect they probably are. But I imagine that to the extent that they are, they’re reading them within a wrapper provided by a large language model. Or that they’re reading them on a website that isn’t mine.
This blog has never been a commercial endeavor for me. I’ve never made a penny from it. So I’m not complaining about theft or loss of income.
But it is nonetheless a loss to me.
I miss the narcissistic gratification I got from seeing spikes in my readership or from real engagement with readers. It makes me sad not to have that anymore. And I note that while I’ve always said I write for myself and not for a particular audience, my impulse to write is surely diminished in the current configuration. I don’t know that I’m saying I think this is a bad turn of events. I think it’s a little early to say. But it is a turn of events. A change. And I’m not sure how I feel about it. Or how or whether I will or can adapt to it.
If you have suggestions, I’m all ears.