The world needs more true content, not more AI.

By Nizar Mahmoud · 27 September 2026

AI made writing free, so writing stopped proving anything. What is scarce now is content a person can stand behind: first-hand, specific, checkable. The right job for AI is not to write it. It is to find where yours belongs, and when, so you can write it yourself.

Writing got free

For most of the internet’s life, a paragraph was evidence. Someone had sat down and typed it, so someone probably meant it. That was never a guarantee, but it was a cost, and the cost filtered.

The cost is gone. A model will write a thoughtful comment on any thread, in any voice, in a second. So a thoughtful comment no longer tells you anything about who wrote it, or whether they were there.

The result is not a shortage of content. It is a shortage of reasons to believe any of it.

What is scarce is true

True content is writing a named person can stand behind: something they did, saw, measured or built, said specifically enough to be checked. It is not the same as correct. A correct summary of what everyone says is not true content. It is a summary.

True content is expensive in a way AI cannot fix. You have to have been there. You have to have crashed the motorcycle, shipped the migration, lost the users, kept the receipt. The model can phrase it. It cannot have lived it.

That is also why it travels. People share what they could not have written themselves.

The platforms already said so

Hacker News put it in its guidelines, plainly: “Don’t post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans.” That is not a rule against tools. It is a statement of what the place is for.

“HN is for conversation between humans.”Hacker News Guidelines

Every community worth being part of has some version of that sentence, written down or not. The ones that do not have it are the ones you stopped reading.

Where AI belongs: reading

Here is what a model is actually good at. It can read every new thread in fourteen subreddits and the top sixty stories on Hacker News every ten minutes, all day, and never get bored. I cannot. Neither can you.

It can notice that the question someone posted forty minutes ago is one you have a real answer to, because you lived it, and send you there. It can check that every number in your draft came from somewhere. It can tell you that you answered too late, again.

That is the division of labour I think is right. AI reads and finds. People write. The machine carries the part that does not scale for a person, and leaves the part that is only worth anything because a person did it.

The minute matters

I measured my own Reddit comments. Thirty top-level comments, grouped by how long after the post I replied:

One account, u/-nizar, read from Reddit on 27 September 2026. Bars show the best score in each group. Scores move; these were the scores that day. Thirty comments is not a study. It is a pattern I stopped arguing with.

Nothing I posted after six hours scored above two. Not the good ones either. The words were fine. Nobody scrolled that far.

What I got wrong first

The first version of the tool I built for this drafted my replies. It sent me a list once a day, with text to paste. I pasted one into a thread about Claude’s overconfidence. It went in twelve hours after the post and scored one point.

Two things were wrong. It was late, which the table explains. And it was not mine. I agreed with it, but I had not written it, and it read like it.

So the tool changed. It stopped drafting replies. It started reading every ten minutes instead of once a day. Now it sends the link and the age of the thread, and gets out of the way. I go and be myself there.

Five rules

1. Use AI to find the conversation, not to have it.
2. A reply is only as good as the minute it lands. Early and specific beats late and polished.
3. Never let a model write a number it was not given. A true number with the wrong owner is still a lie.
4. Never let a model post. The moment it posts for you, nothing it says is yours.
5. Be the same person everywhere. Your LinkedIn and your Reddit should sound like one human, because they are.

More true content

More AI will not make the internet worth reading. More true content will. The people who have it, the ones who built the thing or were in the room, are mostly too busy to find the thread where it belongs.

That is the only job I want AI to do. Not to talk for you. To get your voice out there, into the rooms where it has a chance of being heard, while there is still a chance.

What you say when you get there has to be yours.