There is a specific deformation that online publication produces in writers. It is not the corruption of selling out — that is old and well-documented. It is subtler. It is the drift toward writing that confirms what the audience already believes, at the pace the audience prefers, in the register the audience finds most comfortable.
This drift is not felt as compromise. It is felt as improvement. The metrics go up. The response is warmer. The writing becomes more fluent, because fluency at pleasing people is a learnable skill. What is lost is harder to name than what is gained.
The Applause Machine
Every platform that shows you how many people liked your work has built an applause machine. The applause machine teaches you, through operant conditioning, what kind of work gets applause. This is not a neutral feedback mechanism. It rewards what is already liked, which is a proxy for what is already believed.
Writing that challenges what the audience believes does not get applause. Writing that confirms what the audience believes, in increasingly sophisticated ways, does very well.
The applause machine does not care about truth. It cares about engagement.
What Performance Costs
The writer who performs — who shapes their thinking to the available responses — loses something that is difficult to recover: the experience of not knowing what they think until they have written it.
This is, in my view, the central experience of writing. You begin with a half-formed intuition. The act of articulating it — of forcing the intuition into sentences, of testing it against objections, of following it to conclusions you did not anticipate — is how you find out whether it is true. The essay is the process of thinking, not the report of a completed thought.
Performance reverses this. You begin with the conclusion — the position that will play well — and construct an argument backward. The form of thinking is maintained, but the substance is gone.
The Practice
What remains is a practice that resists quantification: writing for no audience, or for an imagined audience that does not care whether you please them.
This is not mysticism. It is craft discipline. It means not publishing things before they are finished. It means being willing to reach conclusions that are difficult to say clearly. It means maintaining the distinction between what you think and what your audience wants to hear, even when those categories begin to blur.
Write the thing that is true. Then worry about whether anyone will read it.
