Article
How to Find Blogs by Real People
For years I mostly read books. I found blogs and single articles by chance: I either came across something on social media, or I went looking for something on Google. Lately that has stopped working. A large share of the text that reaches me now was written by a machine. Good writing by real people is getting harder to find.
The first thing to understand is that the internet is not one place. It has layers. And a part of the population has moved to a different layer than the one where most of us look.
The first layer: the open web
The open web is what most people think of as the whole internet. Google, public pages, the feed on social media. Everything that can be searched and is open to anyone.
This layer has changed. It is flooded with content written by a machine. People call it the dead internet: a place where much of the text, the images and the answers are no longer made by people. I have written about this before.
It is also called the dark forest. That metaphor comes from the science fiction writer Liu Cixin; Yancey Strickler applied it to the internet in 2019: public spaces going quiet as people retreat into private channels. The writer Maggie Appleton later applied it to the age of artificial intelligence: an open web so flooded with generated content that real people are leaving it.
The second layer: the cozy web
Where did they go? To a layer called the cozy web. These are smaller, trusted spaces: newsletters, small personal blogs, private chats, closed communities. The term comes from Venkatesh Rao.
In this layer people still write for people. The problem is that you very rarely reach it through Google or any other algorithm. You have to get there another way. One way is a list kept by a person, not an algorithm. That is why I made the Human filter.
On some sites the layers can also be felt visually, in how a site looks and behaves. I show what this looks like on my own blog on a separate page, cozy web. Although, knowing what the people who own the algorithms and apply AI are capable of, I would not be surprised if even the specific style of community sites and personal blogs starts being imitated.
How to reach that layer
The tools that make it possible have existed for years. They are old and simple. For a long time they meant nothing to me either, until I needed them. I started paying attention to them about a year ago, when I decided to develop my blog further in terms of its features. That is how I came to RSS. What is it?
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Sources
Venkatesh Rao: The Extended Internet Universe (2019), the essay that introduced the cozy web.
Maggie Appleton: The Dark Forest and the Cozy Web, who popularised both terms with a well-known illustration.
Summary
Common questions on this article's topic
What is RSS?
What is an RSS feed?
What is an RSS reader?
What is an OPML file?
What is the cozy web?
How can I find blogs written by real people?
What is the dark forest of the internet?
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