There are online writers I’ve followed for over a decade who, as they became high-profile, had their spikiness understandably “sanded off”, which made me sad. Lydia Nottingham’s Inkhaven essay The cost of getting good: the lure of amateurism reminded me of this, specifically this part:
A larger audience amplifies impact, which increases the cost of mistakes, which pressures the mind to regularize what it produces. …
The deeper danger: thought-space collapse. Public thinking creates an internal critic that optimizes for legibility. Gavin once warned me: “public intellectuals can become hostages to their audience.” It’s easy to end up with tamer thoughts, prematurely rounded edges, a mind optimizing for scrutiny instead of exploration.
Scott Alexander somewhat addressed this in “Why Do I Suck?”:
If you have a small blog, and you have a cool thought or insight, you can post your cool thought or insight. People will say “interesting, I never thought of that before” and have vaguely positive feelings about you. If you have a big blog, people will get angry. They’ll feel it’s insulting for you to have opinions about a field when there are hundreds of experts who have written thousands of books about the field which you haven’t read. Unless you cite a dozen sources, it will be “armchair speculation” and you’ll be “speaking over real academics”. If anyone has ever had the same thought before, you’re plagiarizing them, or “reinventing the wheel”, or acting like a “guru”, or claiming that all knowledge springs Athena-like from your head with no prior influences.
There are online writers I’ve followed for over a decade who, as they became high-profile, had their spikiness understandably “sanded off”, which made me sad. Lydia Nottingham’s Inkhaven essay The cost of getting good: the lure of amateurism reminded me of this, specifically this part:
Scott Alexander somewhat addressed this in “Why Do I Suck?”:
“Audience Capture” is the standard term I’ve heard for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audience_capture