The best thing I read this week: The Expanding Dark Forest

This week I finally caught up with Maggie Appleton’s “The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI”. It’s the most thoughtful thing I’ve read in a while about how artificial intelligence is reshaping the incentives behind creating things for the web.

Appleton argues that the social web is sliding further into a “dark forest”—private group chats, newsletters, and smaller communities—because the open web is getting noisier and more hostile. She walks through how cheap content mills, SEO spam, and AI summarizers undercut the trust we used to have when we clicked a link. Her take isn’t cynical, though; it’s a sober look at why so many of us are publishing in quieter corners of the internet.

What I loved most was her reminder that the public web still matters. Appleton lays out a few strategies for keeping our writing discoverable without surrendering it to engagement hacks. My favorite suggestion was to build more thoughtful “home pages”—gardens of notes and essays that make it easy for real people to explore, even if the algorithms never surface them.

Reading it made me want to keep tending this site. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by feeds and recommendation engines, give it ten minutes. It might nudge you to share something in your own voice, too.