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.
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.