If It Can Be Gamed, It Will Be
In a way it was good for me to have started out blogging on Bearblog. It was simple enough, maybe a little too simple, but exactly what I needed to learn how to customize my experience with CSS and HTML – things I should’ve learned in school, but they kinda didn’t stick around in my head. Doing stuff like a DIY book section and trying to bootstrap a microblogging solution on top of Bearblog taught me a lot of things about rudimentary code logic and I’m eternally grateful for that. But I really needed something more powerful, and most importantly an escape from the Bearblog Discover page.
When I started out in mid 2024 on the platform, the Discover page was a great landing page for discovering high quality writing. There was a diverse range of writing styles and the topics weren’t a constant. It was a very hope-infusing place – a very refreshing change from the AI riddled elsewhere on the web. I actually didn’t really check the page for a very long time; not until November of last year. So I used the platform for four months before really engaging with the community which is my bad, obvi. Should’ve done better. What good is a social space without socializing, right?
But eventually I did and it was great until the bots also discovered that Bearblog exists, had a gamifiable Discover page, and a decent amount of people using it in addition to the ability to blog for free (with some restrictions). This began around February of this year1 and it’s only gotten worse since then. Same clickbait-y trash that is so obviously AI generated is always in the top 20. I have examples at hand, but I’d rather not single out anyone and risk mistakenly accusing them of being a bot in disguise. You can tell that they’re using GenAI because the texts are overly dramatic, formulaic, and use way too many rhetorical devices. I mean all of this could be legit, but it rarely is, and I’m seeing this at way too many places for it all to be a coincidence, not just on Bearblog. Worst of all, the writing is not necessarily good because of the over-the-top use of rhetorical devices.
But all of this brings me to Bearblog’s weakness and what makes it susceptible to such attacks on online communities: the existence of an algorithm. Anyone can upvote, anything can be upvoted, and the platform has no barriers to entry whatsoever. One person is running it and there’s only so much he can do. There is no filtering by topic/interest, and using the reverse chronological “Most Recent” page as an alternative is not pleasant since pages are discoverable by default and many don’t realize that. Moreover, it’s a fire hose of posts that even with non-discoverable pages cluttering it up would be hard to digest. So the Discover page is the only manageable place to check out new, supposedly good (if popularity says anything about quality) bloggers.
That’s all beside the point, though. We have to agree – at least on the IndieWeb – that algorithms will eventually be gamed by those with enough persistence. No matter how simple or complex that algorithm is, it will eventually lead to shit, even unintentionally. It was truly demotivating to write with discoverability set to default on there because it was a choice between either making my posts undiscoverable by the algorithm (and thus only being read by those already checking the website/following the RSS feed) or risk my post landing somewhere next to obviously AI generated and sensationalist trash. No offense intended, but that’s why I took a hiatus for two months from posting stuff even though I was very much still writing in the meantime.
It truly saddens me because I loved Bearblog’s no bullshit attitude towards the web. It’s so lightweight and simple, and yet for some reason includes one of the worst things ever introduced to human sociality. And this is not a “I saw the light and switched to x platform” kinda post. I was this close to giving up on blogging altogether because the AI shit really made me question whether any of this was worth it. Why blog if it will be drowned out by meaningless trash?
I eventually overcame that because writing is essential to my functioning. And if I’m already writing, I’d rather share it with others. Micro.blog’s discover page is hand-curated, unless I’m misunderstanding something, and this drew me in. It’s attempt at doing something about the issue with algorithms, at the very least. I would still like to discover and be discovered, just prefer it’s a human on the other end. I guess, the pay-to-post model has its perks. While one can use the essentials for a buck a month, plus taxes and possibly banking fees, it makes astroturfing unscalable (as long as the platform remains a niche). Furthermore, it possibly acts as a deterrent to passive AI grifters that have to pay to share their slop. Although, judging by Twitter Blue’s “success” at that, that’s probably not that big of a deterrent… it probably all comes down to the existence of an algorithm to be gamed – or the lack thereof.
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It all started with the Andy drama who left Bearblog for Ghost after he got the slightest pushback from the community. ↩︎