“In today’s ever-evolving lands-” Shut it.
“In the realm of-” Nope.
“In an era where-” I refuse.
I can’t stand it. I can’t digest one more AI intro without bile rising up my throat, scraping my esophagus like sandpaper.
Nowadays, searching for anything on Google seems futile. Every query I use to try and reach human writing is a treacherous endeavor. All I get is AI drivel: soulless intros, meaningless jargon (“supercharge” anyone?), and sentence structures that make me think the writer was held at gunpoint by a university professor.
Even platforms such as Medium, once my go-to for human stories, are no longer safe.
Before jumping on Substack, I used to frequent Medium a lot. The people were great. It was a community of writers who spoke from their hearts about anything and everything. Sure, writers could get paid if their articles gathered a lot of views, but that never seemed like their primary focus. It was more of an afterthought as the pay was laughable.
Simply put, Medium was a place where people came to connect over words, to bond over their love for the craft.
But the platform soon turned to horseshit when algorithms became king and AI reared its fugly, (I presume) bulbous head.
Writers seemingly no longer wrote for the sake of writing. They used AI to churn out garbage, overloading the platform with content meant to trick the algorithms into funneling them some cash. It was either that or complete rage bait meant to get clicks.
I tried to keep up for a bit, writing incendiary content to get people’s attention. Mind you, I’m naturally quite good at that. I love getting a rise out of people; it’s a hobby I’ve cultivated since my early blogging days.
I’m not going to lie, it was fun at first, pondering over what I could write to make people’s blood boil. But it soon started feeling like a performance, a carefully curated act where I’d dig deep to find the ugliest parts of myself to show the world, hoping it’d trigger someone into leaving a hate comment.
Which subculture should I bully? What hot take can I claim as a personal viewpoint? Who can I target?
Some of my articles stirred the algorithm, gaining me some notoriety and a few hundred dollars. But other than that, it felt rather empty.
I felt like I couldn’t get personal without divulging my darkest traumas, as those were the only personal stories people seemed to care about.
Do I have to tell people how my heartbreaks shattered me to pieces, unable to eat or trust again? Can’t I just talk about my love for cats and how petting stray ones serves as a channel for my maternal instincts?
Recently, I read a Verge article titled “Bring back personal blogging.” It spoke to me, taking me back to the good old days of blogging.
“In the beginning, there were blogs, and they were the original social web. We built community. We found our people. We wrote personally. We wrote frequently. We self-policed, and we linked to each other so that newbies could discover new and good blogs.”
– Monique Judge
I desperately crave human writing again—person to person, heart to heart.
What I want to see in the writing sphere is what I see under girl’s Instagram posts. Why can’t we create an echo chamber of “Omg loveeee” and “Soo beautiful” in the comment sections under our blog posts? Build a community of creative writers who share their thoughts without worrying about metrics and money-making algorithms?
My dream is to be able to read what was prevalent in the early 2000s when SEO and algorithms weren’t as potent.
Tell me, Sandra, what did you eat today? How’s your love life going? Talk me through your mundane. Y’know what, throw in a typo here and there. Give me the odd off-putting, weirdly structured sentence so I know you’re real.
This is why I chose Substack. I think I’ve found what I’m looking for: a place where people write for the sake of writing, as an outlet or a hobby.
From what I’ve noticed, you can’t “hack the algorithm” or “optimize” your way into people’s wallets on this platform. If you want eyes on your work, be a good writer or write things people care about. And if people love your work so much that they become paid subscribers, that’s great. But don’t expect it or use that as a motivator.
Personally, I don’t plan on making Substack my main source of income. I’m not ready to starve just yet; it’s cold outside. Maybe I’ll give it a go in the summer when my appetite’s smaller, calling it intermittent fasting instead of poverty-driven malnutrition.
I’m here, really, to practice what I preach: cultivate a space for reading and writing personal thoughts. I can almost guarantee you’ll find errors and odd phrasings in my writing. I think it’s part of my allure. But at least it’ll be authentically me.