The Tyranny of the Op-Ed

If you follow me on social media, you probably know that I occasionally vent about the comically lopsided incentives for authors who publish content on the internet. I try to keep these rants off the blog, spare for a short piece back in 2024 — but it’s been bugging me long enough that I should probably state the complaint more coherently.

It’s not too insightful to say that online discourse has a strong bias toward ephemeral, low-effort content. Complaints about this sound a lot like saltiness: it’s akin to getting upset that the rubes out there don’t appreciate the operatic voice of Angela Gheorghiu. Sucks, but the market has spoken; most people prefer to listen to Taylor Swift.

We could end it here, but my thesis is that the rebuttal is too reductionist: on the internet, Angela and Taylor are closer to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

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To illustrate, let me offer a personal anecdote: from 2010 to 2018, I ran a reasonably popular, infosec-centric blog. On that blog, I would often have opinions about current events. The opinions came to me effortlessly and resonated with the crowd: I could summon an army of tens of thousands of willing readers with a mere flick of my wrist.

I stopped writing in 2018 for work-related reasons. When I looked back at my grand opus in 2020, I realized that most of it was utterly worthless: the articles offered half-assed takes on long-forgotten vulnerabilities and incidents of the ancient past. I wasn’t changing minds or making friends. I was just padding other people’s social media feeds, the human equivalent of AI slop.

In a moment of anguish, I deleted most of it and decided to start anew. The articles I publish here take much longer to write and are meant to stand the test of time. But even on the new site, I can’t quite escape the specter of vacuous punditry. Some of my most top-ranking pieces on this site are spur-of-the-moment articles about a real supply-chain hack in 2024 and another imagined incident in 2025. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have published them. The content stayed relevant for about five minutes; this week’s best-selling punditry product is the Ledger supply chain attack. Still, the original view counts are there. They whisper in my ear, “you know what, good things come to those who post hot takes about AI”.

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With this, I’m not trying to whine for attention: I don’t think I’m entitled to high view counts when I publish esoteric articles on philosophy or circuit dynamics. In fact, knowing that ten readers made it to the finish line of such a post feels more rewarding than having 10,000 people skim an essay about the Ledger incident, then promptly forget ever having been here.

What I worry about is the immediacy and the clarity of the feedback signal that writers get. It’s not a hypothetical: I know that I can easily get more views, more attention, more acclaim. I don’t need to break through, I don’t need to hone my style. Heck, I could probably ask an LLM to write the Ledger article — it’s not like Hacker News, LinkedIn, or Twitter will care. In other words: why be Dr. Jekyll when you can be Mr. Hyde?

I’ll grant that the emphasis on view counts is myopic, but writing is an inherently social endeavor; it exists in large part to pressure-test ideas and share them with the world. On the internet, engagement stats are what replaces a more meaningful connection with an audience. Getting an email from a website visitor is a 1-in-a-100,000 happenstance. Whether authors admit it or not, everyone peeks.

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So, what do we do about it? In theory, it’s easy to pinpoint the habit we ought to quit: doom scrolling fills up our time to the detriment of most other forms of human interaction, and the feed can only accommodate bite-sized thoughts. Even if you click to read the actual article — maybe one in a hundred? — you still only give it a minute or five before navigating away. The best the author can do is pander to your priors or get you angry about the misdeeds of the out-group.

I’m old-school, so I’m more used to treating the internet as a research resource. I come up with an idea I want to understand through-and-through, and then stay on its trail for days or even weeks; I move from one website to another, maybe even go on a walk to think it through. When you’re in that mode, distractions can wait: in a month, we’ll be still arguing about the same things (you guessed it: AI and politics).

But even among people with the same mindset, I think this usage pattern is on its way out: no matter how profound the inquiry, we increasingly lean toward ELI5 truths. We ask a chatbot, or we pull up a YouTube video that explains it with superficial analogies and pretty visuals.

Anyway — you kids need to get off my lawn, etcetera.

I write original, in-depth slop-free articles about mathematics, electronics, geek culture, philosophy, and more. If you like the content, and want to make the number go up, please subscribe.