Why the open web matters more than ever
I read a piece this week that explained, with absolute certainty, how a hobbyist’s weekend project had destroyed the business model of companies worth $300 billion. It had probability distributions. It had a section called “Bayesian Update.” It had the quiet authority of something that knows exactly what it’s talking about.
It was also, in the ways that matter most, wrong.
Not entirely wrong — that’s what makes this kind of thing effective. The genuine questions were real. Model commoditisation is happening. Value is migrating in the AI stack. IPO pricing is uncertain. These are complex, evolving dynamics that deserve careful thought. But the piece didn’t offer careful thought. It offered a story — ‘hobbyist kills giants’ — and then dressed it in the language of analysis until the story felt like fact.
This is what I’ve started calling the confidence machine. Not misinformation in the old sense — not someone deliberately lying. Something more subtle and, I think, more damaging: platforms that systematically reward the ‘performance’ of expertise over the practice of it. A well-structured Substack post with some percentages and a compelling narrative will always outperform a nuanced, uncertain, honest assessment of the same topic. The algorithm doesn’t check methodology. It checks engagement.
And engagement selects for emotional satisfaction. “The moat is dead” feels better than “it’s complicated.” A clean narrative with a villain and a hero travels further than a careful weighing of evidence. So the ecosystem breeds confident oversimplification at industrial scale, and the people consuming it walk away feeling more informed, not less.
That’s the trap.
I notice this because I build things. I’ve spent years developing transmedia universes, and I’ve watched content farms scrape the surface terminology and generate synthetic versions that get instant traction — precisely because they’re shallow enough to be immediately consumable. The deep work doesn’t travel as fast as its flattened imitation. That’s not a complaint. It’s a structural observation about how these platforms operate.
The real cost isn’t to people like me. It’s to everyone navigating these spaces looking for genuine understanding. When mediocre analysis gets elevated by platform mechanics into something that looks authoritative, it shapes decisions. Investment decisions. Policy conversations. Public understanding of technologies that are genuinely reshaping how we work and create. People end up making important choices based on something that was optimised for clicks, not clarity.
So here’s the helpful bit — because this isn’t meant to be a lecture, it’s meant to be a nudge.
Seek out the open web.
Independent blogs. Small communities. Writers who publish on their own domains because they care about the work, not the metrics. People who link to each other because the thinking is good, not because the algorithm surfaced it. RSS still exists. Blogrolls still exist. There are people doing extraordinary, careful, generous work in spaces that no platform owns.
Read for uncertainty.
The most honest writers will tell you what they don’t know. If everything in a piece feels resolved and confident, that’s a style choice, not a reflection of reality. The world is genuinely complicated. Trust the people who seem comfortable with that.
Support what you value.
Subscribe to independent writers. Share work from personal sites. Link to things that changed how you think, not just things that confirmed what you already believed. The open web survives because people actively choose it.
The gated platforms aren’t going anywhere. The confidence machine will keep producing. But it only wins if we forget that alternatives exist — and they do, quietly, stubbornly, in the spaces where people still build things because the work matters.
That’s always been enough.
It still is.
