Essays became way to easy to write with AI. It used to be a basic filter that if text was long the author put a lot of thought (even if misguided) and effort (even if low quality) into it.

Not its just another torrent of words.

We need proof of work on long texts, a service that guarantees that the author was whipped for more than 20 lashes for this text to exists and thus we know he cared enough to publish it.

I dunno, this may have been him. He's always been writing crazy long blog posts, it's sort of his signature.

Writing short posts is the new test

yegge has been famously writing ultra long blog posts for decades now