The Death of the Tech Blog, Written by an AI
The sites that taught a generation to code are being buried under generated listicles. A small eulogy, with footnotes.
My favorite blogs in 2014 were written by one person who clearly had opinions and a cat. They are gone now, or they publish once a year, or they became a content farm.
What replaced them is efficient. SEO-optimized, technically accurate, emotionally absent. You learn the thing and feel nothing. That is a loss even if the information arrives.
AI accelerated it but did not start it. The economics of independent writing were already broken by ad rates and aggregator feeds. The machine just finished the job.
I still find the good ones. They are smaller, often behind a newsletter, often not trying to rank for anything. The human web did not die. It moved to where the algorithms can't easily grade it.
If you write, write like a person. The robots will out-rank you and they will never out-matter you. That is the only consolation and it is enough.