Wes on Syntax:

I write content. That content is consumed by people. But a lot of it has been used to train AIs for people to get a very quick answer. You can see the amount of bots visiting websites has been going up significantly. You ask a question about JavaScript and they go suck in 40 pages and it distills it down. From a user perspective I love it. I don’t want to read your life story, I want to get straight to the answer. How often do you just read the Google Summary and just close the tab?

For those people that [create content] for money, that business is going to be significantly disrupted. What happens to the people that rely on that money? There’s no shortage of people putting content on the internet right now. Will that stop? I don’t know.

It’ll stop when there is no longer any incentive to do so. Those incentives are various! Money is one. That was a partial motivator for me. Being able to support myself and my family partially through advertising on content was important. But I also found it to be fun and mentally rewarding, like it gave my life purpose. Even if the money wanes, those incentives may endure for many.

Promoting other things can be another incentive. If you can still manage to get eyes on you, the value doesn’t have to come from traditional advertising. It could be because you’re working for a company, and there is value in the DevRel. You could be taking pre-orders for your next book. You could offer a training course for sale. Your superfans can pay for superchats and supermemberships on your Twitch or whatever.

As long as there are incentives left to create technical content, people will. And AIs will continue to train on it. That does frame it as an adversarial relationship, which is a bummer (something something capitalism).

Wes specifically wondered about me!

He spent a good chunk of his life. His legacy was putting out very helpful information. CSS-Tricks is a huge swath of information. He was able to that because he was able to make money. The next CSS-Tricks isn’t going to be able to make that much money. The AIs are just going to gobble it up and contribute to our brain rot.

I certainly wrote a lot of content for that site. And so did a ton of other authors, who still do to this day. And AIs have slurped and increasing reslurp it up. My main concerns with the AI-slurp-age are:

1. It’s rude. Nobody asked me (or the other authors) if that’s OK. Now that’s the bar and they never will.
2. The business model is akin to stealing pennies.
3. AI interfaces are incentivized to not credit sources or link out. They want you to think that they are the brain, and you need not go anywhere else.

I’m slightly less concerned that AI slurpage will disincentivize all content creation. Humans love other humans, and we’ll always want to connect with each other. We want to learn together and laugh together and play together, and, as weird as it is, sharing technical content with each other is a niche in there.

Wes wondered if I “got out” at the right time. I sorta think I did. It was not premeditated, though. At the time, I was much more focused on advertising. For years leading up to the sale, I invested more and more money into the site with the goal of growth, only to see traffic stay flat. It wasn’t perfectly correlated, but flat traffic doesn’t help advertising revenue. Ramping up the amount of work for the same traffic and same money wasn’t feeling great. At the time, I assumed it was just a temporary slump, but now with enough distance, it kinda wasn’t. Fortunately, Digital Ocean didn’t really need the advertising, which is why I thought it was a perfect buyer. They had other incentives. I have no idea what they think of the purchase now, but I would hope it’s quite positive. There was a weird slump, but with Geoff still over there, I think they are doing awesome.

I feel compelled to mention that my content creation career is far from over and takes many forms:

• This site has loads of blog posts.
• The CodePen blog has loads of blog posts, and the PODCAST IS BACK! Not to mention: THE ENTIRE CODEPEN is a massive trove of content, by far the biggest I’ve been a part of building. I’ve written a ton of public code there, which is like 0.000001% of what is there.
• CSS-Tricks had lots of writing, but also video content.
• I’ve guest-posted all over the place.
• I’ve got GitHub repos.
• I write at Frontend Masters, which is my CSS-Tricks energy replacement, and whose business model around content is perfect.
• ShopTalk Show has over 10 years of weekly podcasts.
• I’ve always been at least moderately active on the most appropriate social media platforms throughout my entire career.

So. Much. Content.

I still think it’s fun and has value and plan to continue doing it, even if the incentives around doing it are constantly being battered down. I’ll need to continue to evolve how I get value out of it. I do enjoy it so much I’ll probably be explaining border-radius tricks into the dirt with a stick after the apocalypse.

Wes also said of AI:

As a user, I love it.

I feel that, too.

AI companies do slimy shit, and they know it. But I don’t wanna just take my ball and go home.

There is some real user benefit coming out of AI products right now. It’s fun to be a part of. I’m experiencing genuine productivity boosts from using AI for coding work. The evolution of user interfaces around it is fascinating.

Perhaps ironically, there is an awful lot of user content about AI — lolz.