January 20, 2023

"There are all kinds of things you can do to develop and retain [a blog] audience... but the single most important thing you can do is post regularly and never stop...."

"[The demand for content] is so insatiable that there is currently no real economic punishment for content overproduction. You will almost never lose money, followers, attention, or reach simply from posting too much. It’s this last part that is often most difficult for writers to accept.... Before they post, therefore, many writers mentally calculate: Is this post 'good enough,' or does it dilute the overall quality of my work, alienate my audience, etc.? But [WaPo's Matt] Yglesias profile’s very existence reminds us of an important rule of thumb for navigating the content economy in the 21st century: Under the present regime, there is no real downside risk to posting.... Even the most anodyne, mediocre writing fulfills the requirement of regularity. (What is the 'Wayne Gretzky' quote? 'You miss 100 percent of the audience conversion opportunities you don’t take'?)... What do the top text-based content-creation entrepreneurs of our time have in common? Logorrhea.... It’s easy to see why writers reared in the hothouse reputational marketplace of Twitter are desperate to avoid the shame of negative attention. But... people forget, or move on, or don’t really care.... Feeling shame that prevents you from doing or saying inappropriate things is maybe a useful way to navigate complex moral-social arrangements, but fearing shame that prevents you from adhering to the first commandment of blogging ('post frequently and regularly') is counterproductive. As Yglesias says, it's the best time there’s ever been to be somebody who can write something coherent quickly. Put things out. Let people yell at you. Write again the next day."

Writes Max Read in "Matt Yglesias and the secret of blogging/How to be a successful content entrepreneur" (Substack)(riffing on the WaPo profile of Yglesias).

Max Read doesn't mention artificial intelligence, but if his idea of successful blogging is right, then bloggers can set their blogs to automatically generate endless posts. And that's why he can't be right. But by his own terms, he doesn't need to be right. He just needs to load in more words words words. 

I looked up "logorrhea" to see if it fits the writing of ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence. The OED says it's "Excessive volubility accompanying some forms of mental illness; also gen., an excessive flow of words, prolixity."

That is, the original and narrow meaning is an actual illness. The oldest historical example, from a psychology reference book, calls it "a common symptom in cases of mania." A 1907 newspaper article calls it a form of "insanity" in which "the ideas come rapidly tumbling over each other."

By 1970, the broader meaning had taken hold and non-insane people got accused of it: "We are left with a tedious tale of complicated intrigues written by an author suffering from acute logorrhoea." Yeah, but non-insane people get accused of insanity too. It's hyperbole to say you're crazy, unless you're speaking about a person who is literally crazy, but in that case, you probably wouldn't say it. 

You only say "logorrhea" when you mean to insult. I'm sure ChatGPT deserves to be insulted, but "logorrhea" is not the right insult. "Logorrhea" aims at the emotional structure of a human individual, and the machine has no emotion. It can sound like a needy, anxious person who can't stop blabbering, but it can just as well imitate a stuffy, endlessly thoughtful sage. But it's serving no emotional needs of its own. 

The etymology of "logorrhea" — according to the OED — is "< Greek λόγος word + ῥοία flow, stream (probably after diarrhoea n.)." I think most people who use the insult "logorrhea" are intending and enjoying the association with diarrhea. That's another reason why it doesn't fit what the AI is doing when/if it bests the human blogger. 

44 comments:

Enigma said...

What's the right word for all the many, many, many blogs that repost old stories as new ones? These blogs remix sentences so the story is technically "new," but with 99% of the content from a story one week ago, two weeks ago, three weeks ago, etc.

See Reddit.

Clone-o-rrhea?

tim maguire said...

That's the reason I never succeeded as a blogger. I liked to write big essays once a week (I didn't have enough good ideas to post every day, let alone several times a day). It's the same reason I am a failure at Twitter--I comment on other's tweets daily, but I'll go months at a time without making my own original tweet.

tim in vermont said...

"Hundreds of thousands of paid subscribers at $6 a month."

Ho-lee-shit. No wonder journalists trapped in corporate outlets hate Substack.

Dave Begley said...

“You miss one hundred percent of the shots you don’t take.” Michael Jordan.

tim in vermont said...

"It's the same reason I am a failure at Twitter"

I gave up on trying to gain a following when I noticed that some weeks I would gain many followers and get lots of likes and retweets, and then my engagement would fall through the floor. I realized that they could and would keep people from seeing my tweets, still, even under Elon.

Now I use Twitter as the needed counter to our MSM, even though it's depressing to see so clearly that the country I love has a media that largely exists to promulgate lies.

Leland said...

By his logic, every newspaper and magazine in the US would be a roaring success.

Scott Patton said...

"bloggers can set their blogs to automatically generate endless posts."
Haven't read the article (yet?), but there are diminishing returns. Overall quality of the posts do matter.

Birches said...

I don't think ChatGPT could work really well for most bloggers because people have to be interested in the new words. Cooking blogs already do a version of Chat GPT with their three pages of crap words to maximize SEO and blog traffic. However, most of them now have a "skip to the recipe" at the top of the post. If there's nothing to skip to, will anyone read?

re Pete said...

"Cultivate their flowers to be

Nothing more than something they invest in"

rehajm said...

tim in vermont said...
"Hundreds of thousands of paid subscribers at $6 a month."

Ho-lee-shit. No wonder journalists trapped in corporate outlets hate Substack.


At first it sounds impressive but when you consider most of those subscribers are the tech platforms, the FBI and other government staffers using tax dollars to search for people to censor, then not so much…0

rhhardin said...

Anything worthwhile can be fit in a comment.

Quayle said...

Seems to me that artificial intelligence has been around and on display for a long, long time. It just wasn't automated. It took training and effort.

tim in vermont said...

I have been monkeying around with AI for a couple of weeks now. I am done, it gets boring. No, it's not true that putting out any nonsense on a daily basis will lead to blogging success, there is still something missing in AI. I know that there are people who argue, by analogy, that AI will one day be able to not only make interesting insights, but to be able to predict with some reliability which of these insights will interest human beings, but I kind of doubt it. At best you might see a "red meat" bot, that can regurgitate stuff that is shown elsewhere on the web to garner... err engender engagement.

Maybe some talent will arise who is very good at asking AI interesting questions. IDK.

Carol said...

Geeze it's not just lots of words or the fake blogs all the newspapers set up would have amounted to more.

You need to have something different to say, or at least notice.

The paid reporters of the media are too constrained by advertisers and politics to say anything interesting.

Baceseras said...

The word "blog"is short for "web-log." It used to be a common experience to see a blogger say he liked everything about blogging except the word "blog" -- I don't know why they didn't just use the longer form of the name (never asked them; thought of it but didn't). "Web-log" isn't ugly-sounding or whatever their complaint was about "blog"; and it has the advantage of reminding us of the original purpose of blogging: to make a shareable record of one's finds in this otherwise unmanageable complexity of information.

Adding annotations to the items logged makes the list more useful, and it seems natural that some notes would grow into mini-essays. Then not so mini.

And then, also naturally, the essays became the point of entry for many readers, and the whole point.

Whatever the author of the article thinks, I don't believe blogging for money will work for everyone who follows the recipe to the letter. There will be hundreds of failures for every success story. And someone will write an article about what the successful ones did differently: that will be the new formula -- and it won't work either.

MadisonMan said...

I think following an AI-generated blog would be interesting, if only to see what the algorithm would think is blog-worthy. After some time, I think you'd be able to untangle the algorithm from the blog posts.
Of course, I don't have time to do that.

Daniel12 said...

I think this misses the entire second part of what makes Yglesias successful. It's the combination of firehose-like quantity and stuff surgically designed to piss people off. This is the magic of social media (and talk radio before it), and Matt, who's been in bed with the tech folks for decades (very very much including SBF), simply applied it to his trade.

Mr. Forward said...

"What's the right word for all the many, many, many blogs that repost old stories as new ones?"

Journalism.

Christopher B said...

'Regularly' doesn't necessarily equate to either daily or a torrent of content. It just means that once you establish a pattern you need to stick to it unless you have a really good reason to change. People affiliated with the RR museum often raise the question of opening on Holiday Mondays, and my usual argument is that we are closed all other Mondays, and the resulting confusion (you were open on X day, why aren't you open on Y day? which is bad enough already) is unlikely to be a net benefit. On the flip side, I am adamant that we run every train we schedule, barring catastrophic issues, regardless if one or one hundred people show up. As soon as we get a reputation for randomly canceling excursions we'll be in a PR hole that will take a long time to climb out.

Temujin said...

There's a difference between a Matt Yglesias and an Ann Althouse. Yglesias does seem to just go after the keyboard with little information at times. Like he's just doing it because he feels strongly about something. Or he's just got to attack someone who holds a different opinion from his. He's like a commenter on a blog, only he names the space for himself and considers it 'blogging'. And, unbelievably, he's become famous for it- even after years of embarrassingly wrong or bad posts. I guess volume does have it's benefits.

Althouse, on the other hand and as we all know- gets up everyday at 3 or 4 am- reads through a litany of publications, news outlets, and who knows what else, and comes up with a wide range of topics that interest her, and she thinks, will interest us enough to think- or react via comments. She looks over, not only the content of the articles, but the very language, grammar of the article. Sheesh. Can you imagine a Matt Yglesias doing that? He could not. Not even if he were given a week to do just one entry.

I don't know the traffic on the Althouse blog over the years, nor do I have any idea how many people actually read Matt Yglesias, but I understand the difference in their creative efforts and the quality difference in their results.

And yes, prolixity has always been a problem for me- since I was a young man.

MikeR said...

"then bloggers can set their blogs to automatically generate endless posts. And that's why he can't be right." No, that's why his comment that "it's the best time there’s ever been to be somebody who can write something coherent quickly" might have been true till now, but soon will pass.

MikeR said...

@tim in vermont "I know that there are people who argue, by analogy, that AI will one day be able to not only make interesting insights, but to be able to predict with some reliability which of these insights will interest human beings, but I kind of doubt it." See chess. People "kind of doubted it" until it beat the world champion. By now, no chess player can come close.

Kate said...

The WaPo wrote an article about successful blogging and content creation and didn't mention you? Pfft. They wanted to discuss substack, and this was their entrance point. I used to subscribe to Taibbi; he didn't post daily. I do subscribe to Sully, who posts weekly. Mostly I like his View From Your Window contest, so gimmicks also work in successful blogging. None of these writers (including you) meet the definition of logorrhea. What a false quantifier (and insult).

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

I’ve heard “diarrhea of the mouth” for some talkative people and one time in the 80s at a mall, I was with some of my cousins and we heard a Cuban lady (accent) saying somebody had “cerebral diarrhea” and it sounded like the funniest cleverest thing anybody had ever said, we started incorporating it into our own vocabulary. Cubans are notorious talkers, it wasn’t just Fidel. Talking is in the Cuban DNA.

Kate said...

I should stipulate that I'm on substack. A friendly and useful place. I post weekly and have 3 readers, one of whom is my husband.

rehajm said...

History doesn’t repeat itself but it sure does rhyme

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

I guess volume is the closest we can get to the mind of God, insofar as “knowing everything” would moot a need to make certain kinds of demands.

Watch a “know it all” in action

Robert Cook said...

"By his logic, every newspaper and magazine in the US would be a roaring success."

You misunderstand the significance of the differences between newspapers/magazines and blogs. Readers are abandoning the print format for online content. Given that newspapers and magazines are published on a regular schedule, they acquire the feeling of being "events," updates on news and other features you can look forward to daily or monthly, etc. They are not perpetually renewing their content throughout each day. They're produced by committee, many editors and writers being involved. They are "information/opinion products." They cost money. Aside from letter columns, readers have little to no interaction with their newspapers or magazines. They are impersonal.

A blog, being online, is beholden to no particular schedule. It is produced (usually) by one person with a distinct personality and point of view. Blogs are usually free to access. Many blogs update and add new content throughout each day, every day. To readers at home, the blogger becomes a sort of best buddy or confidant or interesting acquaintance, always there to talk to you, and always there to listen to your feedback. Blogs are very personal, (or feel that way). Blog readers have (in most cases) ample ability to quickly answer back to the blogger and to the other blog commenters. It is a communal activity.

In short, regular bloggers are hosts to an ongoing cocktail(less) party to which one always has open entree, (unless one becomes too much of a boor).

Ann Althouse said...

"The WaPo wrote an article about successful blogging and content creation and didn't mention you? Pfft. They wanted to discuss substack, and this was their entrance point...."

It's about the money and therefore I don't feel left out of the article. I am left out of the money. I'm blogging for the intrinsic reward of blogging, and if an article was about that I might feel left out, but this is about money-making strategy, and there I'm notable only as a fabulous loser.

Wa St Blogger said...

I have to agree with the main point. Prolific content keeps me coming every day. There are blogs that are on my favorites bar and I go to them every day because they have lots of content. I don't read everything, but I know that there will be enough choices that I have a high probability of finding something to read. Most of them I read about 25% of the entries. Althouse I read 90% (I usually skip the things related to currently famous personalities, but not all of them). Other blogs I only visit sporadically and then scroll through the previous week's postings for interesting content.

Another note about Althouse. I read almost all the comments on every post I read. I almost never read the comments at other blogs, and, of course, I post at Althouse, where I post virtually never anywhere else. Althouse is like my morning coffee, if I drank coffee.

Aggie said...

All I can say is that you are doing a magnificent job distilling all of this varied and interesting content into your blogspace and I, for one, and immensely grateful for it. It's a fresh read, every single day. Thank you!

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

The Wapo profile (behind a paywall) could read like a motivational talk to their own Wapo stable of content creators… formerly known as writers. Matt’s use of the Citizen Kane photo reads like ‘look at what Wapo chose to loose’ Me.

rcocean said...

The problem with Leftwing bloggers is they just repeat the narrative. So, they say nothing new, and nothing of interest.

planetgeo said...

I'd like to add to what Temujin mentioned about what factors differentiate the Althouse blog from others, as well as confirming that it takes more than regularity and prolific content to make a successful blog.

To begin with, Althouse, simply, is an interesting person. Her areas of interest are wide-ranging and eclectic. Photography, etymology, politics (the nuclear center of the blog), hiking/exploring, artificial intelligence, musicology, etc. And she's developed a format (sunrise photos, day's topical subjects, night cafes -my favorite) that weave all her interests seamlessly and keep the tone and substance from getting stale.

As for the politics, while she claims "cruel neutrality," I'm not sure she's really there any more. More like one of the Last Classic Liberal Mohicans forced to reluctantly side occasionally with the Meade Libertarian/Conservative Pathfinders due to the increasing insanity of the remaining Liberal-Leftist Tribes. Being intelligent, rational, and fair has done that to a lot of us, so don't fight it Ann.

And lastly, the quality of the commenters. It's a big deal for me. Somehow, some way, you've attracted and retained a core group of some of the most interesting, rational, and similarly eclectic (surprise!) commenters anywhere. Honestly, I left for a while when you discontinued comments, and I returned when you reinstated the comments. There is a lot of "acquired wisdom" here and it adds greatly to what you (and Meade) personally offer. I do wish that the left was more represented here, but frankly is that even possible anymore? I mean seriously who (and how the heck) can anyone possibly present a rational argument for men who can get pregnant, blatant woke racism, and similar current leftist dogma?

Ann, you've built an extraordinary blog. Blessings to you and Meade. It's been great getting to know you and having your blog a part of my life.

JK Brown said...

Seems to follow the old seafaring principle for landlubbers. If you can't tie a knot, tie a lot.

Sebastian said...

"She looks over, not only the content of the articles, but the very language, grammar of the article."

Yes. This sometimes irritates those of us focused on the latest prog depredations and the fall of western civ, but Althouse's esthetic impulse also makes the blog distinctive--and, from one angle, is itself a positive move in the culture war. There ought to be Higher Standards.

Wa St Blogger said...

@planetgeo

Upvoted

Mark said...

Of course, there is a sense of freedom in writing when you don't care if you have "an audience" or not.

Daniel12 said...

planetgeo said...
"I do wish that the left was more represented here, but frankly is that even possible anymore?"

As a member of the left: The comments section on this blog has always been a bit like why I sometimes read Yglesias. It pisses me off! (For instance, planetgeo's next sentence after the one I quoted, which I find hilariously obtuse and navel-gazing.) Eventually I always ask myself why I voluntarily go and get pissed off, then I stop engaging for a while.

But I always read the blog!

Daniel12 said...

+1 Temujin on Yglesias having professionalized the blog commenter role.

Ira Glass on This American Life once came up with the concept of "Modern Jackass Magazine". It's the place where people who've read one article about an issue go to write longform pieces about it. Yglesias lives there. Ann DOES NOT. Regardless of the number of posts.

planetgeo said...

Daniel12, welcome. I was being sincere in expressing the desire to see more leftist commenters here. And I look forward to your rational arguments in support of your views, as opposed to simply saying you're pissed off at my following comment.

Leora said...

Personally I unsubscribed from Yglesias' substack because he posted too much.

Saint Croix said...

This post inspired me to start up my own substack. We'll see how long that lasts. I am not optimistic. Feels like work work that doesn't pay work. Damn if I know why this is fun and that is work. I guess it's the difference between throwing a party and crashing a party.

Unknown said...

"And I look forward to your rational arguments in support of your views, as opposed to simply saying you're pissed off at my following comment"

They don't need to use any sort of rational argument. It's a religious cult. Would you ask a Christian or a Jew or a Muslim to provide rational arguments to support their views. That's why they hate media which reports facts and opinions that are contrary
to what they believe.