It is SEO-y and I’m sure no small impulse is to drive traffic to his website since he’s primarily an AI influencer.
However, there are always people who are “native” to a platform and field. Pieter Levels is native to Twitter and the nomad community. Swyx is native to Twitter/HN and the devtools community. And simonw is native to at least HN and the LLM-interest community. And various streamers and onlyfans creators do the same with theirs.
Through some degree of releasing things that whatever that community values they build a relationship that allows them greater freedom in participating there. It does create a positive feedback cycle for them (and hopefully the community) that most of them will try to parlay into something else: Levels and the OnlyFans creators are probably best at this monetization of reputation but each of them is doing this. One success step for simonw would be “Creator of Pelican LLM benchmark”.
Once you’ve breached some stable point in the community the norms are somewhat relaxed. But it’s not easy to do that. You have to produce some extraordinary volume of things that people value.
I think, tbh, tptacek here could most effectively monetize if he decided to. But he doesn’t appear to want to so he’s just a participant not an influencer so to speak. Whereas someone like Levels or simonw is both.
It’s just creator economy stuff. Meta discussions like this always pop up. But ultimately simonw is past the threshold of trust. There are people who say “wtf? Why is levels making $50k/mo on a stupid vibe-coded flying game?”
It ain’t the game. It’s the following before the game. The resource is the audience.