Lucas Sifoni didn’t write a long goodbye. Just a quiet post on his personal blog: “Ending my elixir exploratory writing.” No fireworks. No call for help. Just a tired developer closing the door on a project he clearly loved.
And when I read it, something in my chest caved in. Because I’ve felt it. You’ve felt it. Anyone who has ever poured their knowledge into a public post and watched it get scraped into the algorithmic meat grinder knows exactly what that feeling is.
It’s not burnout. It’s grief.
The open web — the web that was supposed to be a gift economy of ideas, where a stranger in Ohio can learn from a tired engineer in Brazil — is dying. Not because people stopped sharing. Because the machines made sharing pointless.
Look at the comments under Lucas’s post. They’re a chorus of the same confession from all over the internet:
“I came to the same conclusion with my math blogging a couple years back. There’s little point to publishing any personal effort on the internet anymore.”
“I’ve been blogging weekly for more than 15 years, and I have fewer and fewer incentives to share my learnings.”
“I am loath to share ideas to the scraper marketplace just to have some executive prompt an LLM two years from now and claim the idea for themselves.”
These aren’t lazy people. These are the people who built the web. The ones who wrote the tutorials you saved, answered the forum questions that got you unstuck, and showed up with their imperfect, human experiments because they believed knowledge should be free.
And we’ve rewarded them by turning their generosity into fuel.
The open web isn’t dying of neglect. It’s being harvested until nothing living remains.
Here’s the cruel paradox: the more accessible and high-quality your writing is, the faster it gets sucked into a model that outputs “something similar but different.” The machine doesn’t need to know if it’s right. It just needs to sound like you. And once it can sound like you, why would anyone need you?
So what happens next? The people who have actual, hard-earned experience quietly retreat into private groups, paid newsletters, password-protected repos. They keep their hard-won lessons to themselves — not because they’re selfish, but because sharing now means feeding the thing that is erasing their craft.
Meanwhile, the public internet fills with AI slop: articles that have the shape of knowledge, but none of the scars. No dead ends. No late-night debugging stories. No “wait, I finally figured it out after three weeks of being wrong.”
And that’s the twisted part. The early web was beautiful because it was full of people being wrong — and learning from each other. Now we’re building a web that is always confidently, blandly, generically right. And it smells like nothing.
Every thoughtful post you write becomes a free training meal for the machine that will replace you.
I’m not saying AI is evil. I’m saying the incentive structure is broken. In the old days, you wrote a blog post because it might help someone — and maybe that person would email you, and you’d have a conversation. There was an economy of respect, not just attention. Today, the most likely response to your public post is a spam comment linking to a casino, or a bot that steals your content and republishes it on a site that outranks you.
At best, you get ignored. At worst, you get doxxed and harassed. And underneath all of it, every single word you publish is quietly scraped into the training corpus of a tool that some executive will use to “democratize knowledge.”
But there is nothing democratic about a library where only a few companies hold the books, and the authors are no longer allowed to see who is reading their work — or whether they should even bother writing at all.
So, yes, Lucas is quitting his Elixir blog. And another math blogger quits tomorrow. And a food blogger quits next week. And slowly, the web becomes a read-only broadcast system: a billion screens showing AI-generated summaries of what human beings used to know.
We are transitioning from a ‘read-write’ web back to a ‘read-only’ web — where humans passively consume what machines generate, and the act of sharing your own thinking becomes a privilege you have to pay for.
This is not progress. It’s a reversal. We built the internet to hear each other. Now we’re building it to hear the average of everything we’ve ever said, with the edges smoothed off and the courage deleted.
Maybe you think I’m overreacting. Maybe you think AI is just a tool, and smart people will always find a way to share. But ask yourself: when was the last time you wrote something long, thoughtful, and public — purely because you wanted someone else to learn from it?
If you hesitated, you already know.
The open web isn’t dead yet. But the people who made it worth visiting are logging off, one by one. And the saddest part isn’t the lost tutorials or the abandoned forums. It’s the knowledge they’ll keep in their heads from now on — because no one made it worth their while to let it out.
FAQ
Q: Isn't AI just a tool that gives more people access to knowledge?
A: Free access to derivative summaries is not the same as knowledge. It's a corpse. When original creators stop publishing, the machine has nothing new to learn from, and all you're left with is a smoothed-out average of yesterday's ideas — stripped of context, struggle, and courage.
Q: What's the practical move for someone who still wants to write online?
A: Stop feeding the public slurper. Put your best work in private newsletters, paid memberships, or small communities where bots don't roam. If you must write publicly, write for humans, not for search engines — and accept that you're doing it for the joy, not for the reach. But don't pretend the old model is sustainable.
Q: Isn't this just natural evolution? Maybe the web needed less noise anyway.
A: That's the same lie we told ourselves about spam. But this isn't filtering out noise — it's filtering out the exact people whose curiosity and willingness to share built the web. AI slop is not a content problem; it's a public goods problem. Once the human writers are gone, the noise is all that's left.