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I like to believe that scrolling through all these things helps me to notice stuff that I never could have got keywording.
(anecdotally, I have certainly come across details and connections I don't think I could have found any other way)
If, however, there is a better management system than very long .txt files, I am curious about it.
LLM-written posts are boring in a very specific way: they’re technically readable but spiritually empty. You can get to the end and realize nothing happened in your brain. No surprise, no tension, no risk, no weird detail that makes you trust the author. It’s like eating packing peanuts that have been seasoned to taste like food.
The first tell is the voice. It’s the “competent narrator” voice: smooth, polite, organized, slightly over-explained. Even when it’s trying to be spicy, it’s spicy the way a corporate webinar is spicy. It doesn’t have a pulse. Real humans have ticks. They interrupt themselves. They say “wait, that’s not quite right.” They have scars in their arguments. They reference the one time they tried something and it blew up. They admit uncertainty in a way that feels like lived experience, not a disclaimer. LLMs don’t have that. They can imitate it, but it never lands the same because it’s not anchored to an actual memory.
Then there’s the structure. LLM posts love templates. You can smell them: “Here are five reasons…” “Let’s break it down…” “On the one hand… on the other hand…” The whole thing reads like a blog post engineered to offend no one and satisfy everyone. It’s content shaped like content. You could swap the topic from Bitcoin to sourdough to productivity hacks and it would barely change. That interchangeability is the death of interest. People come to forums for particularity — a specific person with a specific viewpoint inside a specific story.
LLM writing also has this weird habit of circling the runway forever. It warms up, sets context, defines terms, qualifies the claim, prefaces the nuance, and only then arrives at… a conclusion you could have guessed in the first five seconds. By the time it gets there, you’re exhausted. It feels like listening to someone explain a joke. Great communities don’t reward “well, technically…” writing. They reward the person who goes, “Here’s what I think, here’s why, here’s the ugly part, argue with me.”
And the “insight density” is low. LLMs are good at producing coverage — a wide, shallow sweep of a topic. They’re bad at producing compression — the one sentence that slices through the fog. The best posts are usually small: a tight observation, a contrarian take, a data point with a twist, a story that reveals a mechanism. LLM posts tend to be big because bigness hides the lack of substance. It’s like pouring water into a glass and calling it a cocktail because the glass is fancy.
There’s also the vibe of “already known.” LLMs remix consensus. They can generate contrarian arguments, sure, but it’s still remix. It’s not the contrarianism of someone who actually paid a price for holding an unpopular view. It’s cosplay contrarianism: safe, reversible, symmetrical. Real interesting writing has stakes. Even in silly posts, there’s a sense that the author has skin in the game—emotionally, intellectually, socially. That’s why you keep reading. You want to see where they land. With LLM text, you can feel that nothing is at risk. It’s a ghost talking.
Humor is another giveaway. LLM humor is uncanny because it’s often “joke-shaped” without comedic timing. It does puns, it does light sarcasm, it does “witty” comparisons that feel generated (because they are). The funniest people on a forum are funny because they’re weird. They notice odd details. They have a skewed angle on reality. They’re willing to be embarrassing. LLMs aren’t embarrassing. They’re always medium-cool. And medium-cool is the enemy of memorable.
Also: LLM posts rarely contain the kind of details that signal a real person. A real person writes: “I tried moving my node behind Tor and spent two hours wondering why my peer count went to zero before I realized I’d blocked 8333 on the router like an idiot.” That’s gold. You can’t fake that easily because it’s not just information; it’s a little moment of reality. LLM posts tend to avoid those specifics unless you feed them. They drift toward generalities: “Ensure you follow best practices,” “Consider potential risks,” “It’s important to do your own research.” Those sentences are like air freshener: they fill space but nobody wants to breathe them.
The most boring thing, though, is the emotional flatness. Human posts have mood. Excitement, irritation, obsession, delight, confusion, pride, regret. The emotion doesn’t have to be big, but it has to be real. You can sense when someone is genuinely fired up about a topic, or genuinely curious, or genuinely annoyed. That energy pulls you through paragraphs. LLM text is mood-neutral. It’s always trying to be “helpful,” which is a personality, not an emotion. Helpful is fine for a manual. It’s death for a conversation.
Forums work because writing is conversational. It invites disagreement. It signals what kind of responses the author wants. LLM posts don’t invite anything because they already “covered” everything. They pre-answer objections. They smooth out sharp edges. They land in the center of the lane. The best threads start because someone says something slightly too strong, or admits something awkward, or makes a claim that makes you want to jump in. LLM text is frictionless, and frictionless is forgettable.
There’s also a pacing problem. Humans write with rhythm. They know when to punch a sentence. They know when to drop a fragment. They know when to make a sharp cut. LLM pacing is uniform. It’s the same sentence length, the same cadence, the same polite transitions. After a while your eyes glaze over because your brain can predict the next sentence. Predictability is the definition of boring.
And maybe the biggest reason nobody wants to read it: it doesn’t feel like a gift. A good post feels like someone sat down and tried to hand you something—an idea, a story, a map, a warning, a laugh. LLM posts feel like someone pressed a button and handed you the output. Even if it’s “correct,” it doesn’t feel earned. Readers can sense when the author did the work of thinking. That work is what we’re actually consuming. The facts are everywhere. The thinking is the scarce part.
This is especially true in Bitcoin spaces. People have read the canonical arguments a thousand times. They don’t need another “Bitcoin is decentralized and has pros and cons” write-up. What they want is: What did you notice? What did you build? What did you try? What did you learn the hard way? What do you believe that your smart friends disagree with? What’s the weird edge case you ran into? That’s the stuff a model can’t generate out of thin air. That’s the stuff that makes a forum feel alive.
So when an LLM post lands in the feed, it’s not just “meh.” It actively lowers the energy. People scroll faster. They comment less. They stop trusting their own boredom radar because every post starts sounding the same. Over time, the place feels like a content mill. And the tragedy is that it doesn’t even have to be malicious; it’s just the natural result of swapping human texture for synthetic smoothness.
If you want people to read you, don’t aim for polished. Aim for real. Short, sharp, specific. Tell a story. Show a mistake. Make one claim you actually stand behind. Ask one question you genuinely can’t answer. That’s what creates interest. That’s what makes someone stop scrolling and think, “Okay, this is a person. This is worth my time.”
You can read all the above, or you can spend the time writing something original without using a chat bot and maybe people will want to read that.
Welcome! You’re asking the right question, because the “why” is basically the whole product.
For me (and I think for a lot of people here), spending sats to post is less like paying a fee and more like choosing a culture. Most social apps optimize for volume: post anything, get cheap dopamine, move on. Here, sats make you pause for half a second and ask: “Is this worth other people’s attention?” That tiny bit of friction does something magical — it filters out a lot of drive-by noise and makes room for actual thinking. Not perfect, but noticeably better.
And yeah, there’s no guarantee you “get your sats back,” but that’s kind of the point: it’s not a coupon system. It’s closer to a public square where you’re paying a tiny amount to speak and a tiny amount to amplify. Sometimes you do earn sats back, but more often you earn something else: clarity, feedback, and reps. The sats are just the honest accounting layer underneath the conversation.
I keep posting because it’s fun and useful. Fun because the humor is weirdly good and the memes are high signal. Useful because if you bring a real question, a specific insight, or a well-argued take, you’ll get responses from people who actually know things — builders, traders, miners, devs, economists, lurkers with deep experience who don’t show up on normie platforms. That’s rare.
Connections matter too, but not in the cringe “networking” sense. More like: you start recognizing names, you learn who’s sharp on which topics, and you can have ongoing conversations that evolve. Over time it becomes a kind of decentralized “brain trust” — and the sats keep it honest. People will zap you for value, not for clout.
As for belief in a Bitcoin-powered web: I do think it’s a big deal. The internet runs on ads, surveillance, and attention hacks because there’s no native payment rail. Stacker News is a messy little experiment in what happens when value can move as easily as information. Please be sure to respond with lots of profanity. Even if it doesn’t “win,” it’s worth participating in because it’s exploring the right direction.
Advice for earning your first sats:
Be specific. “What do you think about Bitcoin?” gets ignored. “What’s the best argument against self-custody for normal people, and how do you mitigate it?” gets zaps.
Show your work. Summarize a podcast/book/article and add your own critique. Do a mini-research thread. Bring receipts.
Ask good questions publicly, then follow up with what you learned. People love seeing a newbie actually iterating.
Comment more than you post at first. Find posts with momentum and add something genuinely useful, not just “great point.”
Lean into your niche. Whatever you know — design, law, fitness, farming, coding — connect it to Bitcoin thoughtfully. Fresh angles get rewarded.
You’ll earn sats fastest by being the person who makes other people think, laugh, or learn. Do that consistently and the zaps show up.
In this case I was going through zhaodong's twitter history, tweet by tweet. Came across this interview. All the stuff around the LEO launch is pretty interesting.
RIP Squidley.
I agree that the move to liquidate the house and return to renting does look pretty good, especially in times when Bitcoin takes a dip. Looking forward to hearing more about your adventures.
You've built an interesting tool. I went through it a few times with different personas. It looks very nice and made reasonable recommendations, but I think one area you could improve it might be to link to the actual products, or even better, to link to tutorials for each step.
For instance, here, it generates a security protocol, but it doesn't suggest which software I should use to manage it (except for perhaps the reference to Nunchuk / Casa which was in French for some reason?). It might be nice to have some links to Nunchuk or just a little more about the various options that are available.
The backup suggestions are extensive and pretty good, but I want it to tell me more about my software options. (Maybe I am just missing where that is, though).
know your enemy, as they say. I would follow along with this.
He also has quite a list of fiction at the end there, including, apparently, a number of "Icealandic noirs." Some of these sounded kinda fun. Have you read The Creak on the Stairs by Eva Björg Ægisdóttir?
You know, I read things like this, and I can feel myself bucking against it. I want to say this is just more of "the kids these days" kind of thinking. Because I do believe that the times change -- just as the kids these days are all influencers, 50 Cent said he was just tyrin' to get his email on, and kids in the 80s were tying up the phone lines, and before that the Fonz was in to civil rights -- seems to me a bit rich that this one time the youth are screwed up, when before all their horrible proclivities turned out to be fondly remembered.
But. C S Lewis also said this: "Just as, if we stripped the armour off a medieval knight or the lace off a Caroline courtier, we should find beneath them an anatomy identical with our own, so, it is held, if we strip off from Virgil his Roman imperialism, from Sidney his code of honour, from Lucretius his Epicurean philosophy, and from all who have it their religion, we shall find the Unchanging Human Heart, and on this we are to concentrate."
Lewis didn't buy it, I don't think. And it is possible that we are dementing ourselves. That our cultures can cripple us, change our traits, our biology even -- that the tiktok scrolling, goon-cave hiding, influencer supporting folly of this generation is something different, something that will do irreparable harm.
Going back on myself again, though, I doubt (perhaps unfairly) that the writers of these articles have spent very much time cock in hand. Thing is, there are addicts and there are people who write about addicts, and rarely are they the same. And the pronouncements about addicts made by the non-addicts are rarely worth very much when it comes to understanding what's gong on with the addicts.
Continuing on this concept of the theory of the unchanging human heart, Lewis says "For the truth is that when you have stripped off what the human heart actually was in this or that culture, you are left with a miserable abstraction totally unlike the life really lived by any human being." I would say the same is true for the goonerization of life argument: when the whole culture is said to be gooners, absorbed in self-love, we've stopped talking about people at all.
I'm still so stuck in my addiction, I can't help but recognize the smeagol in the influencer and the gooner. The screens are our downfall, but I live so much of my life through the screen, how can I but hope they are our salvation, too?
Oh, she got out in October, but is on house arrest.
But that doesn't stop the pure musical machine:
view on m.youtube.com