Thoughts on newsletters
The newsletter is dead.
At least that's what (relatively) smart people on Twitter are saying. I wanted to think about it. So I'm writing.
What is a newsletter? It's a bunch of content that reaches people. The OG newsletter was probably a newspaper. Difficult to create, print and distribute. The difficulty at every stage created enough friction to ensure that only things worth reading would be printed. For the most part, at least.
The internet changed that.
Setting up a blog and sharing it with the world has become easier than ever. A frictionless distribution mechanism. No printing setup needed. No pedaling delivery boy either.
2020 (or was it 2021?) was the year of the newsletter. Everybody became a writer online. It was a great time.The tools to build an audience became freely available, but building an audience was still difficult, because creating quality content was still difficult.
But then, AI entered the picture.
Now, it takes less time to create a piece of content than it does to consume it. And that devalues most content we see online.
Why should you spend time reading something that someone didn't write? And how do you determine if something is human created or not? But also, why should it matter how a piece of content was created? All that should matter is if what you are consuming is good or not.
For now, we don't have the bandwidth to determine what is good, because there's too much being thrown at us.
Perhaps AI based curation is the natural next step.
AI (or humans) create -> AI consumes -> AI curates -> Humans consume