I joined Alex Hilleary on the Superpath podcast a few weeks to talk about (what else?) my thoughts on blogging and how we can make it better. The following is an excerpted transcription of our conversation, lightly edited for concision and readability.
If you’re into these ideas, go listen to the whole thing!
Alex: Your piece begins with a provocative question, “When’s the last time you read something that was longer than 1,500 words online without skimming?” I’ll admit, I’ve had a much harder time lately reading long-form online. And I’ve been thinking about why that is. One, I think I’ve kind of lost trust in long form content, but I’m also bad at staying focused online. Is it the content that’s changing? Is it my focus? Is it the context of the Internet that’s changing? Or are we sitting here in the age of AI pretending that there was a golden age when we used to actually read deeply online?
Rachel: I think all of those things play a factor. I’m not a huge believer in the idea that no one can focus anymore and we just need everything in six-second TikToks. I — many of us — have no problem sitting down to read an hour before bed, or watch a 2-hour, 3-hour movie in theaters, or listen to a podcast, or whatever. Of course, we can do things to strengthen or weaken that focus muscle, but overall, we can focus when we want to. So I don’t know that that’s actually the biggest problem.
I think what you said about losing trust in long-form in general is a huge piece of the puzzle. I don’t know that there was necessarily a golden age, but there was a time where I read a half-dozen or more blogs every day. But I think over time, for many factors, our expectations of what we would receive from long-form content has degraded, so we’re also bringing a degraded focus and effort to it because we’re not getting a good payoff. Or, at least, we’re expecting that we won’t get a good payoff for our cognitive effort.
I think over time our expectations of what we would receive from long-form content has degraded, so we’re also bringing a degraded focus and effort to it, because we’re expecting that we won’t get a good payoff for our cognitive effort.
I think that has been a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy and like, loop of doom. The shallower content gets, the more we skim; and then we’re like “Well people only skim online” so then we make the content really skimmable and then it just like.. continues to degrade.
But I also think that contributes to, and is caused by, the broader context of the Internet. The Internet, maybe always, but definitely now has become a place that is not for critical thinking and creating memory structures and diving into a really deep topic and so on. That’s what the format of like, a book, is for. And I think maybe we thought at one point, like “Oh maybe the Internet will become that!” But then it didn’t.
And so we can bring that energy to a book, but somehow it’s really hard to bring that energy to the Internet, even if we want to. Because intuitively we know that’s not what Internet content does. And so our brains just automatically calibrate for this format or context that we’re in and it’s really hard to override that.
Alex: I really like how you think about that. It’s so important to think about the context that a piece of content fits within. Like, newsletters in my inbox for example. My inbox is not a place of focus, it’s a place of bouncing around…
Rachel: And like, complete chaos and disarray. Or at least for me.
Alex: But I can focus on the NYT, though, like on their website. Although there is some trust built in, I may know a particular author or something and I can get into that focused mindset more. But turning more to the format of the blog in particular, I think there are some interesting transitions from blogging being about sharing thoughts to companies sharing thoughts and eventually becoming a marketing function and over time, the role that SEO and AI played in eroding trust in that format. How do you see some of those key moments?
Rachel: I didn’t get into content marketing until 20181, which was pretty much peak “skyscraper-content”2 era. But I think of early blogging as connection. Someone had ideas they really cared about or things they really wanted to share, and the Internet was a place where they could find other people who also cared about those, often very niche, things. And so blogs were kind of the channel where you would put out yourself and your ideas and other people could find you.
And then in time companies started doing that and it started being monetizable and we got Google and search and the blue links and so on. The skyscraper technique was a bit of an inflection point where the goal transitioned from having something interesting to say to getting people onto your website.
And, to be clear, there was a period of time where this actually worked! Like, the technique became popular because it was effective. So there was an idea that this was how you made content that “worked” from a business angle. In turn, that created blog posts that got longer and longer and longer, but they usually didn’t have the depth of idea or structure to back up that length. And I think that started (or expedited?) the process of eroding the trust and connection that we had previously been able to expect from blogs.
Blog posts got longer and longer and longer, but they usually didn’t have the depth of ideas to back up that length. And I think that started the process of eroding the trust and connection that we had previously been able to expect from blogs.
I think a lot of times we look back on this and we say “Oh, the problem is the length, blogs should be short.”
But that’s not quite it, because we do read long things, right? Some of the most popular book series right now are these enormous 500-page, 8-volume book series, and everyone’s reading them. So it’s not just about the length. But the content has to fulfill the demand that this length asks of us, especially within the context of the Internet, or else no one’s going to read it.
Alex: Yeah, and I think I’m also thinking of this like, a lot of these foundational issues happened before AI and AI is just making it worse, right? As soon as we put CTAs and stuff on blogs, you’re not really optimizing for the reader and it creates this gamified side of things. But there’s another big moment with AI, at least in the way I think about it, where it feels like AI has played a role in my own mistrust.
Before, no matter what I was reading, I knew that someone wrote it — maybe it was good or bad, but someone put some thought into the words on the page. And now, I just… don’t trust that anymore in most contexts, unless it’s really someone I know or who I know is really committed to not using AI. I find myself disengaging more because I don’t know, like, “Did anyone actually think about this or did they just put in a prompt and then post these paragraphs and haven’t even considered what they’re actually saying?” What role do you think AI plays in all of this?
Rachel: That’s such a huge question, but I think you’re spot-on that we used to have a kind of implicit social contract that words were (generally) written by someone who had something to say. Of course, sloppy content has been a problem long before AI came on the scene. You could always hire a ghostwriter or just slop out a bunch of bad ideas and not really care about how you communicated them. That’s always been a problem.
But I think before, there was this distinction of sloppy content vs. good content, but that social contract was mostly in place. And now that we’ve brought AI into this process, we’ve broken the implicit trust that someone wanted to communicate something and not just use some content as a means to an end. That trust has probably been eroding for a long time, but AI is accelerating it and making the loss of that social contract even more visible.
Even when we see something that might look interesting or look good on the surface, there’s a piece of us inside that’s asking like, “Can I trust this?” Like it looks like someone wrote it and it seems like someone cared about it, but did someone care about it? Or am I being duped? Am I just reading a fancy ad right now and thinking like, “oh me and this other person both care about this” and on the other end is just a robot that’s writing this because the person wants to optimize my attention? That feels gross!
And even if we’re not consciously thinking about that, I think many of us feel it a little bit and it makes us pull away. It’s subconscious, but it’s almost like a form of self-preservation. And maybe that sounds a little psychological, but content is psychological, marketing is psychological.
Alex: Yeah, because ultimately all of this is about trust-building, right? That’s actually the really important piece of how you get someone coming back over and over. So, to bring it back to the blog: do you old-school blogging can make a comeback? Maybe as an art form? What are your hopes for your collective content blog, The Art of Content?
Rachel: I’ve launched several micro-blogs in the last year or so, so I think yes, of course. I at least hope that we can bring blogging back. But I think it will require us being ok with some of the drawbacks or “downsides” of the form.
Like, a drawback of writing books, for example, is that they take a really long time, right? A downside of writing a really honest, thoughtful, authentic micro-blog is that you can’t outsource it to AI and it’s not always going to be “a profitable channel” and so on. I think culturally, we’re really obsessed with making all of our hobbies, side hustles, and everything in our life profitable and productive. We live in a very capitalist culture, which can have some benefits and it also has some drawbacks, too.
But I hope this blog — and myself — can be something and someone who’s saying “Hey, this kind of content matters and more of us should do it, and I’m gonna do it, and other people should too.”
And I think sometimes we just need someone else to go first.
Thanks again to the Superpath crew for having me! Have a listen to our whole convo (~25 mins) if you enjoyed this recap!
- I mistakenly said 2017 in the podcast, whoops! ↩︎
- If you’re unfamiliar with this term, I go into it more on the podcast. Basically, it’s the idea of looking at what articles and pages are ranking highest in search results, and then writing something similar but adding more context, content, advice, etc. to your article to make it outrank. You’re essentially creating a taller (longer) “skyscraper” that builds on what’s already ranking. There are better and worse ways to do this, but that’s the general idea. ↩︎
Rachel on the Web 
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