Interesting history but what's going on now is so crazy as a reader. Amazon kindle publishes 7500 new books daily. There's no longer gatekeepers like in the article.

About two years ago I was searching for a new sci-fi book to read - I routinely rotate genres. I did my research in goodreads and started reading a trilogy that was highly rated. Holy crap it was so bad a quit about halfway through the second book. I went back to goodreads and the rating since my last visit had dropped drastically. A bot campaign or something fooled me, I guess.

I've since just started reading older stuff, before the 2000s. I'd try to find a gatekeeper to filter newer stuff for me but everything seems corrupt - even the Hugo awards gets scammed by influence campaigns.

> I did my research in goodreads and started reading a trilogy that was highly rated. Holy crap it was so bad a quit about halfway through the second book. I went back to goodreads and the rating since my last visit had dropped drastically. A bot campaign or something fooled me, I guess.

Sites like Goodreads and Rotten Tomatoes are targeted by marketing firms.

Every popular outlet that become a proxy for reviews gets targeted. The New York Times best seller list has been gamed for decades by publishers who will mass-purchase their own books to get on to the list.

When getting a high score on Product Hunt was viewed as impressive it was standard practice for startups to have all of their friends and family register accounts and then have everyone spam their LinkedIn to beg for Product Hunt upvotes in a coordinated campaign. Now you can just buy Product Hunt upvotes for negligible prices from people in other countries who maintain hoards of sock puppet accounts. Anyone who posts to Product Hunt gets DMs from these companies offering their services. Nobody takes Product Hunt seriously now.

Influencers, and people with zero talent, but who have a public audience, are the new target for publishers, so expect a fuck-tonne more rubbish to be pushed by the usual channels and algorithms.

This is not a good time to be an indie author (I should know) writing the book is only the start of the journey, if you want people to now read it you have to fight a system dead set against your success. Word of mouth eventually gets you a few readers, or sales (thankfully) but there are plenty of really good indie authors out there, and you will never find them in the normal algorithms or book recommendation sites.

I don't think he's talking about "gatekeepers" per se, I think he's talking about the publishing model being incomprehensible if you're in it.

I think the old publishing model is dying. self-publishing is routing around it.

As a reader, it is sort of amazing. I've been reading more than I ever have before in my life.

If I like a book, I can read the next in the series, and there's a good chance there are 8 other books in the series. When I was younger, scifi novels would rarely have follow-on books, and if they did, maybe max 3 at that.

The hard one for me is continuing a book after I see a typo.

I used to (years ago) find new sci-fi and other fiction by going to the library and looking inside at the cards and seeing which had been checked out the most, and grabbing one.

Unfortunately that's all digital now and so you kind of have to go by how worn the copy is.

Not that this is the perfect fix, but at least for sci-fi books you can usually look the Hugo Award winners[0] for ones that are solid. Not all of them are my cup of tea, but I have found that I definitely love some of the series that are found there. I'm sure there are other award types per genre that could help point you to some as well. Not that these can't be gamed, or sponsored or whatever, but at least it is a good starting point that is (¿maybe?) less prone to bot bias campaigns.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Award_for_Best_Novel

Publishers served a really valuable purpose of curation and keeping good authors productive.

Now we have the double whammy of a consolidated publishing system pumping out whatever James Patterson’s assistants churn out and and a long tail of drivel, both AI and regular slop.

What I am surprised is the fact that people expect everything to be an exception to Goodhart's law, by default.

> I'd try to find a gatekeeper to filter newer stuff for me but everything seems corrupt

Word of mouth is the best way to do this, among friends who read similar things to you.

Even if you're recommended something you end up not liking, it's not because they're malicious, their tastes are just not the same as yours - and after awhile, you learn to adapt. Friend A recommends a space opera? Great, you have very similar tastes. They recommend a horror novel? Eh, you know that what they consider to be good horror isn't what you do, so you skip that one.

7500 books a day… what percentage are AI slop? Half the non-fiction and children’s books I see are clearly just free tier ChatGPT with poorly generated AI imagery.

People who don't see any issue with writing novels with LLMs probably correlate heavily with those that also don't see any issue using a botnet of them to promote it. So it's always the worst slop that ends up being pushed the most. We could call this "the Openclaw effect".

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