Am I shouting into the void?

When I write stuff online, I feel like I’m shouting into the void. Whether it’s on this site, my personal website, or anywhere.

I don’t think the internet and technology ever really solved the problem of connection. Like I guess we previously had books, and you’d publish them, sell them, and have people buy them (I have no idea how this works, tbh). I thought the internet sold us on a promise that you can reach people on the other side of the world through a laptop and some time.

That is definitely true, but are the people on the other side of the world even interested in what you have to say?

Technology is only making the easy parts easy and the hard parts harder. The internet solved distribution, not connection, IMO. Even before the internet, reach was never the bottleneck. You could get your book into the hands of everyone with enough money, but you can’t force them to read it and force them to like and share it.

So the amount of attention is still the same, but now we have way more people and things competing for that attention.

And it’s not even a fair fight for that attention. There’s definitely an aspect of the big corporations in here too. They essentially decide for us, and curate the content that captures most of our attention, even if it isn’t the best. I highly doubt that YouTube Shorts or AI-generated Instagram Reel slop would be anywhere as popular as they are today if the companies weren’t shoving them into our eyeballs every moment.

Still, I think it’s important to get your thoughts out there. The web is soon just gonna be bots collectively jerking off other bots. But whenever I see that one website that I can tell had a ton of tears and sweat poured in, I get a little happier knowing that not everyone wants to let go that easily. And that I’m not the only one shouting into the void.