341–350 of 513 posts
Here I had Claude rewrite his post into a 300 word version without all the filler. https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/d49d81d6-7aab-4730-9c3c-4... Which I’m sharing as a meta point…I think self help books are declining because there’s a better way to get the information without all the filler. But filler makes the books thick enough to sell at the airport Also - aren’t LLMs the ultimate choose your own adventure vers…
I work for a large online news publisher, one of the oldest in the US. Our traffic is down 50% in year. We likely won’t survive for much longer.
People use LLMs for news?
The interviewer asked something like "who is our competition here?", and the friend of friend listed off other places in the mall to get ice cream, candy, deserts, etc.
Wrong answer. The ice cream and chocolate store was in competition with every other store in the mall. Time or money spent at the GAP can't be time or money spent here.
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Whether or not people are using LLMs for news specifically, any new, large eater of eyeball-time is going to hurt the business landscape for all other eyeball harvesters.
Personally, I see the self-help industry dying because people are starting to realize that it’s just a network of individuals selling products, promoting each other’s products, and creating new avenues to sell more products. I refer to it as the “self-help mafia.” Tim Ferriss kind of created it.
Here I had Claude rewrite his post into a 300 word version without all the filler. https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/d49d81d6-7aab-4730-9c3c-4... Which I’m sharing as a meta point…I think self help books are declining because there’s a better way to get the information without all the filler. But filler makes the books thick enough to sell at the airport Also - aren’t LLMs the ultimate choose your own adventure vers…
Youtube killed them because it is just a faster delivery of knowledge and information. For super-specific questions chatbots are even faster.
> 2025 was the first big drop, 2026 looks more severe, and the only thing that’s really changed in that timeframe is the acceleration of AI. It all hinges on this statement. But I’m not sure it’s really AI that’s doing it, and not just a contributing factor. There’s higher cost of living, inflation, economic uncertainty, seemingly looming financial crisis, etc. A lot of impactful things happened!
Weirdly I would expect those things to boost sales. At least of certain type of content at right sale price. People will always look for easy solutions. And self-help is exactly that. Or maybe we are already over the horizon where no hope is left...
Here I had Claude rewrite his post into a 300 word version without all the filler. https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/d49d81d6-7aab-4730-9c3c-4... Which I’m sharing as a meta point…I think self help books are declining because there’s a better way to get the information without all the filler. But filler makes the books thick enough to sell at the airport Also - aren’t LLMs the ultimate choose your own adventure vers…
Don't know if you did it on purpose or not, but this is hilarious.
Personally for me I realized I could learn everything from YouTube for free so I stopped buying most books, just to save money.
I can think of many subjects which are not well served. Scottish history certainly isn't. The only suggestions it tends to give are Scotland History Tours (who is quite good but surface level) and commentators like BBC (who are often way off the mark and have their own agendas)
Personally, I see the self-help industry dying because people are starting to realize that it’s just a network of individuals selling products, promoting each other’s products, and creating new avenues to sell more products. I refer to it as the “self-help mafia.” Tim Ferriss kind of created it.
Here I had Claude rewrite his post into a 300 word version without all the filler. https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/d49d81d6-7aab-4730-9c3c-4... Which I’m sharing as a meta point…I think self help books are declining because there’s a better way to get the information without all the filler. But filler makes the books thick enough to sell at the airport Also - aren’t LLMs the ultimate choose your own adventure vers…
Reading an entire book may be more beneficient for habit forming, but most readers probably don't care about this.