The 162nd Block: WordPress v Substack?

Plus minor redesigns and recommendations for The Starting Block readers

Jun 11, 2023

This week…

Your reading time is about 7 minutes. Let’s start.

From my personal archive, a sign stuck to the editorial team’s room warning that the most stressful period of a newspaper publication process is in progress.

There are more redesigns to The Starting Block. They are small but important. That is because, in recent weeks, I have received an uptick of new subscribers (hi, welcome, everyone!) due to interest in my recent postings about academic integrity and AI.

Then, via Rishad Patel’s Splice Frames newsletter this week, I learned that Simon Owens probably does not think that newsletters like mine are optimised enough to cater to new audiences without them feeling left out or confused.

So, following the tweaks he suggested in his Substack newsletter, I provided an intro blurb at the top of the email version of this week’s edition, which you will continue to see every week for the benefit of any new subscriber. That means it will become background noise at some point for the rest of you, or it will annoy you enough to unsubscribe.

Interestingly, Owens’ second suggestion is to push readers to the newsletter’s web version. That has always been my preferred alternative for those fighting the futile fight against email trackers—although Owens’ argument has nothing to do with that. There are legitimate reasons we do not want our online behaviours to be datafied and linked to our personal email accounts, but we will not get into that today (although the third story below gives some insight).

Nevertheless, I have mentioned before, such as in “The 96th Block,” that Substack, like any online marketing service, tracks recipients’ activities on the emails it sends. That is how I know where the vast majority of new subscribers came from.

While I do not normally look at Substack stats, whenever there is a slew of irregular behaviours on the Block, good or bad, I investigate. The usual suspects are trolls that pop up from time to time, typically whenever Chasseur Group’s Munira Mustaffa publishes a new article or makes a media appearance. Due to the nature of her work, it is not surprising. Ironic, if anything. Longtime readers might remember her from our interview on deepfake and online deception.

Now, of course, Substack tracks user activities on its web version too, but if you browse as a guest and set your browser up to protect your user data, which I have written about, you are a little bit better off. And, I know, the urge to sign up for a Substack account to post a nasty comment is strong, sometimes. Use a temporary email, then. Like the trolls.

Two other things Owens suggested in his post are (a) to add a featured image to each post, which I addressed in last week’s edition (although, again, different motivations), and (b) to link back to past content, which I think I have done quite seamlessly here. I also thought it would make it easier to highlight any correction notice for the preceding edition. Not that I have made any grave errors before. Right?

I hope it does not make everything too clunky and unfriendly. Feel free to share your feedback. Unsubscribing is also a form of feedback.

Anyway, in case it is not clear, it is not that I want to deter (new) subscribers, but I understand if you choose to be an incognito web reader. Everyone is welcome here. Except for trolls.

And now, a selection of top stories on my radar, a few personal recommendations, and the chart of the week.

ICYMI: The Previous Block showed AI’s impact on news, newsrooms, and search results. CORRECTION NOTICE: None notified.

WordPress.com challenges Substack with launch of paid newsletters

Sarah Perez for Tech Crunch:

Writers can opt to use the feature solely for newsletters or they can add the option to their blog to cater to readers who want to receive new posts via email instead.
While for years there have been plug-ins and third-party services that allow blog owners to send out their posts via email, WordPress.com’s decision to move more directly into this space was a reflection of how people now prefer to read news and information.

Splice Media’s Rishad Patel describes the paradox in Splice Frames:

People went back to email newsletters because the web — and the WordPress hackery that powers most of it — has become unwieldy and cluttered with banners, pop ups, and ads. Newsletters were the solution, because they’re opt-in, they run on old tech that won’t tolerate the nastiness that makes so much of the web unusable, they have interactivity baked in (they’re email, after all), and they’re a profoundly intentional way of following the niches, interests, and rabbit holes we actually want to explore. WordPress is finally solving the very problem it had a hand in creating, and it’s a stroke of genius.

In related news…

WordPress has a new AI tool to write blog posts for you

James Vincent for The Verge:

The assistant is the work of Automattic, the company that owns WordPress.com and contributes to the development of the open-source WordPress platform. Automattic describes the tool as a “creative writing partner” that lets users “generate diverse content at your command, significantly reducing the time and effort required in content creation.”
Demos show the tool being used to summarize a blog post in a headline, adjust the tone of text (users can choose between options including “formal,” “provocative,” and “humorous”) and even generate an entire blog post from a single prompt: “Write a list of Tokyo’s must-visit destinations, and give me a table with exchange rated from JPY to USD and Euro.” Automattic says the tool can also correct spelling and grammar and translate between 12 languages, including English, Spanish, French, Chinese, and Hindi.

Well, Tech Radar’s Muskaan Saxena is not a fan. Even though she acknowledges it’s a no-brainer, she writes, “We could also begin to see the rise of what I would call ‘hollow blogs’; empty websites on WordPress that hold no authenticity, are written and maybe run entirely off AI and provide no useful or insightful content.” If we learn one thing from the preceding story, WordPress might well again be the cause of the next big Internet noise problem that the next big Internet thing will offer a solution for.

AI clones made from user data pose uncanny risks

Dongwook Yoon for The Conversation:

Unlike fictitious characters in digital environments, these AI clones are based on existing people, potentially mimicking their visual likeness, conversational mannerisms, or behavioural patterns. The depth of replication can vary greatly, from replicating certain distinct features to creating a near-perfect digital twin.
AI clones are also interactive technologies, designed to interpret user and environmental input, conduct internal processing and produce perceptible output. And crucially, these are AI-based technologies built on personal data.
As the volume of personal data we generate continues to grow, so too does the fidelity of these AI clones in replicating our behaviour.

The 2020 Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma (dir. Jeff Orlowski-Yang) illustrated this concept of having a digital twin quite well. As did Irene Ng, whose 2019 Cambridge talk I briefly discussed in “The 26th Block.”

What I read, listen, and watch…

I’m reading “Lost in Translation: Large Language Models in Non-English Content Analysis,” a report by Gabriel Nicholas and Aliya Bhatia from the Center for Democracy & Technology.
I’m listening to Tech Talk on BFM where Richard Bradbury spoke with James Thorley, regional vice president of APAC at Turnitin, about academic integrity in the time of AI.
I’m watching UC Berkeley’s Alison Gopnik’s lecture on LLMs as a cultural technology.

Chart of the week

While it comes with “caveats and blind spots,” which are addressed in the article, here’s a snapshot of the languages of the web, based on data from Ethnologue and W3Techs as of May 2023, as reported by Russell Brandom for Rest of World. At least one language, I believe, is severely undercounted. Take a guess which.