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Linch (@linch): "My friends often tell me: "Even if a topic has been covered, write it anyway! People come for your unique perspective." I think this is wrong for anybody without their own parasocial cult of personality. When I think about the audience, the main economic model for my external w…"

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My friends often tell me: "Even if a topic has been covered, write it anyway! People come for your unique perspective." I think this is wrong for anybody without their own parasocial cult of personality. When I think about the audience, the main economic model for my external writing is monopolistic competition within the marketplace of ideas. In other words, for a specific sub-sub niche (e.g. Ted Chiang book reviews, or a summary article on bee welfare, or an introduction to anthropic reasoning), it is very important for me that, at the point of publication, my writing is plausibly a contender for the very best post in that genre. This isn’t insanely difficult, but it’s fairly hard! My main model is that assuming search and recommender systems are good, people want to read the best article for their sub-sub topic of interest first. So I primarily provide value to readers if my articles are better than the existing contenders. This isn’t completely true: the “best articles” in a given

My friends often tell me: "Even if a topic has been covered, write it anyway! People come for your unique perspective." I think this is wrong for anybody without their own parasocial cult of personality. When I think about the audience, the main economic model for my external writing is monopolistic competition within the marketplace of ideas. In other words, for a specific sub-sub niche (e.g. Ted Chiang book reviews, or a summary article on bee welfare, or an introduction to anthropic reasoning), it is very important for me that, at the point of publication, my writing is plausibly a…

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