Legibility of Effort and The Social Contract of Writing

Nolan Royalty (@eieio.games), writing without the assistance of generative AI, in a post entitled "Legibility of Effort":

What software (and writing, to an extent) is missing now is legibility of effort - the ability to tell at a glance whether something took a human meaningful work.

First of all I cannot emphasize enough how much I appreciate that this was a blog post and not a tweet. The dense hypertextual writing in itself suggests some greater degree of effort. But as Nolan points out, even that isn't a trustworthy signal:

I wrote this blog post in my text editor. It took me a while.

Until recently, “someone cared enough to write this” was an ok heuristic. Plenty of writing on the internet was bad, but you could convince me that you cared about something just by writing it down.

Of course, generating plausible-looking text - or a plausible-looking website - is trivial now.

This reminded me of a post I bookmarked last week by Johanna Larsson (@jola.dev), entitled "The Social Contract of Writing", and the @oxide.computer Request For Discussion document RFD 576 that Johanna linked to:

LLM-generated writing undermines the authenticity of not just one’s writing but of the thinking behind it as well. If the prose is automatically generated, might the ideas be too? The reader can’t be sure — and increasingly, the hallmarks of LLM generation cause readers to turn off (or worse).

Finally, LLM-generated prose undermines a social contract of sorts: absent LLMs, it is presumed that of the reader and the writer, it is the writer that has undertaken the greater intellectual exertion. (That is, it is more work to write than to read!)

I love this "social contract" framing. I've been think about this in terms of the difference between writing for a social media platform versus writing for a website (e.g. a blog post). When content is written for social media, I automatically assume that less effort was put into the writing because less care was put into the longevity and accessibility of the writing. When is the last time you read a month-old tweet? If you did I bet it was embedded in or linked from a blog post, where writing is generally meant to last. And if someone doesn't care about their writing enough to put it somewhere durable, then why should I take the time to read it? Was it posted on social media primarily for the engagement? The likes and retweets and hot takes from people who only read skim the introduction, or who are replying in the comments to try and steal some of the fleeting attention the original post is getting? Conversely, the only way to reply to most of the serious effort writing I read is via email. Writing that can only be replied to by email says something. A writer who wants to avoid effort doesn't knowingly invite the general public to fill their inbox.

Back to Nolan's post, where he concludes:

For me, this means it’s harder to find good stuff worth engaging with online. And on a larger scale, systems built on easily gauging effort at a glance are falling apart.

I think there's more good stuff worth engaging with online than there ever has been. Good stuff that people worked hard to create¹. I don't think that content is harder to find than it was before, I just think you're not going to find it in on social media platforms where the algorithms don't care about effort.

Social media platforms are enormous systems full of mixed effort content. Gauging that effort at a glance has always been necessary to find the good stuff. Social media will probably never fall apart, but I do think the value proposition of social media has a crack in the foundation. Fortunately, I think the path to (re)discovering the good stuff is just a hyperlink away, via the destination internet.