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When you look for something online, and you get a result, in a perfect world and on a perfect Internet you'd get an authoritative piece of writing or information created by someone familiar with the subject.
Searching for "best writing apps" should reveal personal blogs or even social media posts by actual writers sharing their personal opinions on the subject.
But that's not how it is.
What you will find is something like this: "12 Best Apps for Writers 2022" and instead of thoughtful comment, it's short paragraphs without insight topped by insipid pro and con lists.
This type of "writing," if it can even be called such, comes from various content farms who fight to rank up on Google, steal your clicks, and get you to buy some shit so they'd get affiliate money. Or it's some 5th-tier company in some bullshit space trying to establish itself as a "thought leader."
Originality, creativity, and expertise - nowhere to be found.
Instead, these content farms employ low-paid ESL speakers from Eastern Europe. People like me.
For the past 4 years I've written on more subjects than I can count. Gambling, health, tech, blockchain, politics...
And yet I don't know shit about any of this. Not any shit I haven't read on some other website.
A key skill when you want to market yourself as a content writer is "authoritativeness." This means: can you write bullshit but pass it off as insight? It's essentially lying and it's something that we're very good at. Another thing we're good at is paraphrasing (plagiarism, not in the strict sense but ethically) although these days there are AI tools such as ChatGPT that can do it automatically.
With these two skills we create content that looks valid at first glance, but it's anything but.
You will find no new information in a content writer article. This is because we have neither the time nor the skills to do any amount of proper research into a subject. And remember, we're neither experts nor subject enthusiasts. We do a Google search, find open the top five hits and crib from there.
You should never read anything written by a content writer, it's a waste of time.
This endless content glut has killed the Internet. Or at least a vision of the Internet that the naive and Utopian among us hoped would materialize.
I started using the Internet very late, in 2005 or so, on dial-up, the only thing available in my rural Serbian village.
Back then, there was no Facebook, no Instagram, and social media was just a twinkle in our friend Tom MySpace's eye.
Instead, the people with something to say gathered on messageboards and places like LiveJournal and other blogging sites. These blogs were written by authors who actually knew something about and cared about the subjects they were covering.
Content marketing as we know it today was in its infancy, the best a successful blogger could have hoped for is her blog getting a book version.
I am under the illusion that the Internet of 15 years ago was perfect, but it was better. More fun, freer, more earnest and honest.
And this is the Internet that people like me are killing.
Even more importantly, this type of writing is killing text itself. When writing is subservient to external goals, ranking, keywords, SEO, then writing becomes stilted and homogenized.
When you read ads for content writing jobs you will notice: must write error-free, must be perfect grammar, etc. A lot is lost in this, any interesting effects of having ESLs write for a native audience is lost.
By now you've heard of the "dead Internet hypothesis." It goes like this: there's no more organic Internet and most content online is created and posted by bots. This is true and easy to examine with tools that detect these bots.
Content writing is a part of this equation, even when it is done by real people.
The requirements and regimentation of content writing essentially turn real people into bots. The writing is mechanic and soulless.
I wrote the above a year ago when I started a new job at a new company as a content writer. Today I'm a "team lead" at that same company and my feelings have only been confirmed.
Of course, now we also have ChatGPT, so maybe the age of content marketing will come to an end? But I don't think the effects of content marketing will end any time soon. Writing online has become worse, lacking in anything human.
Perhaps things like Gemini or the idea of the small web can bring some of the magic back. I really hope they will.
In this blog I want to write down my thoughts on things, away from the web, away from social media, and away from the context in which most of my writing was done so far.
I want to say some things that are my own and not cobbled together from the pages that Ahrefs says are "ranking well."