The enshittification of "blogs"
I'm seeing a real trend amongst vendors to post verbatim AI-generated 💩 under the guise of a blog.
The irony is that people aren't stupid—they will see this for what it is and rather than raising the profile of a vendor for having relevant content will actively harm it.
Like, "top realtime ETL tools for 2024" has Kafka and Kinesis. These aren't realtime ETL tools. They're components of a realtime ETL platform. (ok ok maybe you could theoretically use KStreams and do the whole ETL in Kafka alone, but not so common).
People reading this shit are just going to be confused, and then frustrated. DevRel, or Developer Marketing, or whatever you want to call it today, is about reaching developers with relevant and useful content. You nurture the soil, you raise awareness.
You set your company up for success with the developer when they are looking for a vendor by leaving a positive impression in their mind. "Hey, I read this really useful blog" is a positive impression. "JFC that vendor publishes AI slop under the guise of a blog" is not.
I realise I'm shouting into the void here because the people publishing this shit don't care, because they'll be driven by short-sighted metrics. Oooh we got more clicks, oooooh we're up the Google rankings. But do they translate into material value? Probably not.
But like DevRel in general, it's about the long game. It's about the nurturing of a community, about providing real, genuine, useful content that helps developers in their jobs. And yes, helping the developers choose your product over another when they come to make that decision. Ultimately it's a symbiotic relationship. The developer and vendor both benefit.
Vendors publishing this kind of shit are simply parasitic, or even self-sabotaging. They're poisoning the well and spoiling it for those of us trying to publish genuinely useful content.
Ranty? Sanctimonious? Job preserving? Nostalgic?
Yes, all of those.
But tell me I'm wrong :P
Database Educator (and LLMs for fun)
1moEven more than the AI generated blogs, I hate the AI generated comments on LinkedIn where they pretty much just summarise what the author said but in a different order. Oh and some podcasts I've listen to have been putting in NotebookLM generated segments and it's so hard to listen to. I know it's cool that it can do it, but it's so blah
SVP, Customer Success at Confluent
1moIf a developer AI generates bad code because it read a poor AI generated vendor blog, does it generate a blog to warn others not to make the same mistake?
Enterprise AI Transformation | Co-Founder at Ensemble AI
1moEven if it’s handwritten, mediocre or ghostwritten content doesn’t seem to move the needle in the slightest. I’ve always blogged for my businesses, and if I write something for the sake of it then it inevitably flops. If I write something with a genuine insight and passion then it inevitably does better in social, Google and personal recommendations. AI generated content will never stand out in such a crowded marketplace.
Senior Software Engineer @Confluent | Delivering data streaming to the world | I ❤️ Data and Developers
1moThank you for “delving” into this issue ;)
Chief Technology Officer / Fractional CTO | AI/ML, Data, IoT
1moAgree 100%! People need to stop using AI to be lazy or due to being overworked. (If the latter due to the huge layoffs that have been ongoing for 2 years, I recommend to focus on self-care and flag the lack of staffing as the reason for the reduced outputs.)