When Everyone Is Making Content, I Find Myself Wanting to See a Person

2026-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

An article can get everything right and still leave me with no desire to read that writer again.

The title is clear. The opening identifies a problem, the middle explains it, and the ending leaves us with a carefully judged question. There are no obvious errors. It is not even difficult to read.

But cover up the byline and replace it with another account, and it seems to make little difference.

After reading, I remember what was said, but I have no sense of who was speaking. Why did this person notice this particular thing? What did they once believe, and what changed their mind? Did they write these words because something genuinely moved them, or because they knew the topic would make a suitable post?

I find myself caring more and more about these questions.

That does not mean every article needs a moving personal story. When I am looking up instructions, I want an accurate, direct answer. I do not need the writer to begin with the story of their upbringing. A good tutorial has a dignity of its own: it explains something clearly and saves someone else unnecessary trouble.

But reading is not always about getting something done.

Sometimes I already know what happened and how it came about, yet I still want to see how another person understands it. I want to know where they paused, which detail made them uneasy, and why they did not immediately accept a conclusion everyone else seemed to take for granted.

What I want is not another answer, but another pair of eyes.

Information travels onward; its author may never be encountered

Search for a question today, and it is increasingly easy to receive an answer already organized for you.

There are real benefits to this. Information that once required opening several pages and checking them against one another may now reveal its outline in a single interface. Not every search needs to become an extended reading journey. Sometimes people really do just want to know one thing.

But the other side deserves attention too: having your content used and becoming known as the person who wrote it are increasingly different things.

In its 2025 observation of Google search behavior in the United States, Pew Research Center found that users clicked traditional search results less often on visits where an AI summary appeared than on visits without one. This was an observational study; it cannot, on its own, establish that summaries caused the entire difference. The search questions themselves may also have differed. But it does make one change tangible: readers may feel their question has been answered before they ever reach the original article.

That is not necessarily the reader's fault. Often, once the problem is solved, leaving is the natural thing to do.

For people who spend time checking facts, organizing experience, and forming a view, though, the situation is becoming delicate. Their words may be seen, quoted, or folded into an answer without bringing them into contact with readers.

We tend to imagine writing as “the author writes, and the reader reads.” Today, between those two acts stand search, recommendations, summaries, reposts, and the ways different platforms decide to distribute attention.

Whether someone gets read does not depend only on how well they write.

The writer Cory Doctorow has discussed this unstable relationship between creators and audiences through the distribution of benefits on platforms. A platform can help strangers find one another, then change the terms on which they can reach each other once both have become dependent on it. His analysis is an interpretation with a clear point of view, not a universal law of how every platform develops. But it reminds me that creating has never been a matter of just one person and a blank page.

So I am reluctant to say, “As long as you have a distinctive perspective, you will eventually be seen.” It sounds encouraging, but it hands all the difficulties created by the distribution environment back to the writer.

Even while acknowledging those conditions, though, we can still ask another question:

When I can find something out so quickly, why am I still willing to spend time reading a particular person?

The same fact draws different people's eyes to different places

In “The influencer is dead. The Age of Experience is here.”, Dan Koe wrote:

People don’t follow information, they follow perspectives.

That is too absolute. People certainly do follow sources for information: weather forecasts, specialist resources, and news updates all have an irreplaceable value of their own.

But the sentence does capture another kind of reading.

We can know the same thing and find ourselves asking entirely different questions because of it.

Take the falling barrier to making a small tool.

One person first sees this: software that once only a company could develop might now be something an individual can make for themselves. A household's way of keeping accounts, or a small team's habits for organizing information, might find a tool that fits them more closely.

Someone else sees the other side: once that tool starts holding important information, who will maintain it? What happens if a service it depends on runs into trouble? Are “being able to build it” and “being able to keep using it with confidence” two different things?

Those ways of looking do not have to cancel each other out. Together, they make the same change more complete: one person sees the opportunity to create; another sees the responsibility that follows creation.

The writers I like are often not the ones who always agree with me. They might share my excitement about a new tool, yet ask, while I am busy looking ahead, “What happens to what was there before?” Or, when all I can see is risk, they might help me see the possibilities again.

Gradually, I become familiar with how they distribute their attention.

Some are particularly alert to power, asking who provides a convenience and who bears its cost. Some are good at noticing small incongruities in everyday life, turning something everyone else laughed off into a fascinating account. Others are willing to stay a little longer between two seemingly contradictory positions, without rushing to take a side.

They do not necessarily possess more facts than anyone else. But through their observation, relationships emerge between facts that had seemed scattered.

That is what I mean by “seeing a person.”

Not seeing their whole life, but seeing where their attention has rested. Not demanding that they reach the right conclusion every time, but knowing that they are willing to take responsibility for their judgments.

Sounding like a person does not mean a person is doing the judging

Imitating a voice is much easier now than it used to be.

Collect a writer's past articles, and we can identify the words they often use, the length of their sentences, how they like to begin, and which expressions sound “unlike them.” A note about AI writing in OB records a similar attempt: combining a personal corpus, rules for voice, and the author's editing feedback to bring generated writing closer to an existing style.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that.

Many people have ideas in their heads but struggle to find the right sentences. Others need tools to help them express themselves clearly because of constraints of language, time, or expressive ability. Helping more people express themselves is something to welcome.

Research, too, gives us no reason to declare simply that “AI only makes writing worse.” In an experiment published in Science Advances, researchers asked participants to write short stories with ideas supplied by AI. Evaluators rated some of the work more highly for creativity and usefulness, but the works also showed greater similarity overall.

The experiment concerned only short English-language stories written under fixed conditions. It cannot be generalized directly to all writing, much less prove that a particular writer will lose their voice. But it offers an interesting tension: a tool that helps an individual may, when its effects accumulate, also change the shape of the wider content environment.

Tools can help us express ourselves more smoothly. They cannot decide for us what is worth expressing.

There is a subtler question as well: if a system gets better and better at reproducing “the person I used to be,” might it also become more likely to keep me in the past?

A writer once liked a certain tone, then stopped liking it. They once believed something, then encountered a counterexample. They once cared deeply about being seen by more people, then discovered that what they wanted more was to make certain things clear.

These changes may make their expression less “consistent,” perhaps even less recognizable. Yet it is precisely that inconsistency that shows they are still experiencing new things, still capable of being changed by reality.

A voice is not a set of sentences that never changes. Revising one's judgments is part of a person's voice too.

Of course, words written by hand are not automatically more sincere than words written with tools. Someone can avoid AI and still keep repeating things they no longer believe. Someone else can use AI to organize material and then carefully examine every fact and judgment.

The real distinction is not where the sentences came from, but this: after publication, is there still a person willing to stand behind them?

If a quotation is wrong, will they correct it? If someone offers a counterexample, are they willing to reconsider? If their view changes, can they acknowledge that they previously saw only part of the picture?

These acts may not be conspicuous, and they may not attract more attention. But they tell readers that the words did not end at the moment of publication.

“Authenticity” can become a performance too

The wish to “see a person” can easily lead to the opposite extreme: as though writers must continually display their lives and lay themselves bare to prove that their expression is authentic enough.

I do not think so.

Someone can share a great many private details and still produce nothing more than a carefully constructed persona. Someone else can say little about their personal life, yet show honesty, sensitivity, and self-doubt while explaining a point of view.

Details of a life do not automatically amount to authenticity. Just as a friendly tone does not automatically make a relationship intimate.

Researchers Alice Marwick and danah boyd have studied “context collapse” on social media: friends, colleagues, family, and strangers may all see the same public expression. The person speaking cannot easily adjust their boundaries as naturally as they would in different settings. Instead, they express themselves while trying to imagine who is reading and how those readers will understand them.

Their research concerned early Twitter users; it cannot directly represent every platform today. But the situation is not difficult to imagine. The same words carry a different weight when sent to a familiar friend than when posted in a public square where anyone might see them.

So holding something back is not the same as being false. Writers have a right to protect their lives, and to decide which feelings belong only with the people close to them.

Readers, likewise, do not owe writers intimacy.

I can enjoy someone's articles and be grateful that they helped me see something new without that meaning I truly know them. Nor must a writer, simply because they are read, continually supply personal details, emotional companionship, or a consistent “persona.”

The connection formed through words can be real, but it has boundaries of its own. It is not the same as a relationship built by experiencing life together.

What I want is not for writers to throw every door open. I would rather they leave an entrance into their thinking: let me understand why they judge as they do, and give me a chance to agree, disagree, or keep thinking in light of my own experience.

A good article does not have to persuade the reader. It can simply offer a serious invitation: come and see how I came to see things this way.

Not every act of expression has to become a solution

This is also where I both agree with Dan Koe's article and have reservations about it.

He distinguishes influencers pursuing attention, personal brands pursuing conversion, and creators treating social media as a home for a lasting body of work. It is an illuminating distinction, but the boundaries in real life are not so neat. A person can sell products and also write seriously. An article designed with distribution in mind does not thereby lose its value.

More interestingly, the second half of the article returns to researching popular content, building products, and arranging the next steps. It also promotes his own products.

I do not think that invalidates the earlier arguments. Creators need to live, need income, and have a right to introduce their products. But that tension between the two parts helps me see a question more clearly:

When we discover a form of expression worth cherishing, must we always hurry to turn it into a strategy?

“Having a perspective of your own” can mean looking at the world with care. It can also quickly become “how to build an irreplaceable competitive advantage.”

“Building a relationship with readers” can mean a long-term exchange between equals. It can also be reduced to “how to improve user retention.”

“Sharing experience” can happen because something deserves to be said. It can also become a demand that every experience lead to a product that can be sold.

These shifts are not necessarily all bad. The question is whether, when the latter kind of language becomes the only language, we gradually forget why we wanted to write in the first place.

I especially do not want to turn every article into a “problem-solving post.”

Writing about reading does not have to mean teaching people to read more efficiently. Writing about distance between people does not have to end with methods for improving relationships. Writing about excitement and unease around technology does not have to deliver a decision checklist at the end.

Sometimes the most important work is first to recognize a feeling clearly.

Why does an article that seems so considerate of its readers leave me feeling empty? Why am I willing to listen longer when the same news is told by a different person? Why, when other people's opinions are so easy to obtain, are we still delighted to stumble upon a genuinely different way of seeing?

These questions may not need to be solved immediately. But they deserve to be expressed with care.

This is not to say that personal feelings can replace facts, or that having no conclusion is inherently more profound. Writers still need to distinguish observation from speculation, take quotations seriously, and clarify ambiguity as far as they can.

It is simply that an article's value need not always be compressed into actions we can take after reading it.

Some writing helps us pause. It does not tell us what to do next, but lets us discover that we have been confusing two different things all along; that a vague discomfort can, after all, be put into precise words.

Understanding can sometimes be a gain in itself.

The person I want to keep reading

I do not know whether the future internet will become a collection of smaller circles, as some people predict.

Small circles may help us find one another, but they may also leave us hearing only familiar voices. Platform recommendations may wear expression into sameness, but they may also bring us a writer we would otherwise have had no way of knowing. No form automatically guarantees sincerity, and no tool is destined to destroy it.

Rather than announce the end of an era, I would prefer to notice the small encounters that are still happening.

I read an article and find that its author paused somewhere I did not. Instead of rushing to a beautiful conclusion, they acknowledged that something still did not make sense. Some time later, they wrote another article, revising a judgment they had once held with certainty.

I may not agree with them every time.

But I know they are still looking, still thinking.

To me, that is already precious.

Because when I choose to keep reading a person, I do not only want to know what they know. I also want to see, as the world keeps changing, what they will continue to notice, and what they will be willing to change themselves for.

Unfold Noir · 未尽