The Internet needs more You · Arunrocks

Arun RavindranDreams, Writes & Builds

Something happened to the internet around 2018.

It didn’t happen overnight. It crept in slowly — the way a room gets messier until one day you can’t find anything.

First, tweets became threads. A format built for brevity stretched into multi-part essays, because engagement algorithms rewarded length and click-through. Writers who had something real to say were forced to perform it in a format that wasn’t built for them.

Then the feeds went algorithmic. You stopped seeing what you chose to follow. You started seeing what platforms decided you should see — calibrated not for your curiosity, but for your outrage, your anxiety, your impulse to keep scrolling. The deliberate curation you’d built, the blogs you’d bookmarked, the writers you’d subscribed to — quietly buried.

Content got commercialized. Every post became a funnel. Every newsletter became a pitch. Personal blogs quietly became brand strategy. Writing because you had something to say — without a conversion goal attached — started feeling almost quaint.

And then came the LLMs.

There are now over 600 million blogs on the internet. Seven and a half million posts are published every single day. And yet fewer than 10% of them generate any meaningful traffic. The irony is that never has more been written, and never has less of it said anything.

Here’s what the platforms don’t want you to know: readers are tired of it too.

The indie web is quietly staging a comeback. People are returning to personal sites, RSS readers, and hand-curated blogrolls — not out of nostalgia, but because the algorithmic feed has failed them. Studies show 83% of internet users still regularly read blogs. Newsletter platforms are seeing explosive growth in readers actively seeking out voices they trust — moving inside platforms to find writers, rather than waiting for algorithms to surface them.

The audience exists. It’s waiting for something worth reading.

The personal voice has become the scarcest resource on the internet.

Not because humans stopped having opinions — but because the dominant platforms trained us to sand them down. To optimize for reach. To ask “will this perform?” before asking “is this true?” The result is a vast, fast-moving river of content that sounds like everything and means nothing.

I know this because I’ve lived the alternative.

In 2013, after a Django talk at PyCon India, someone asked me whether the framework would ever adapt to Single Page Applications. I gave the best answer I could in the moment — which wasn’t a very good one. But the question wouldn’t leave me alone. A few days later, I sat down not to publish something impressive, but to figure out what I actually thought. I reached for analogies from my game programming days. I followed threads I wasn’t sure would go anywhere. I wrote honestly about Django’s genuine shortcomings, something a promotional post would never do. I wrote my way toward an answer I hadn’t had at the conference.

A PyCon attendee posted it to Hacker News. The next morning I woke up to find it sitting at #5 on the front page. I hadn’t optimized for anything. I’d thought out loud, honestly, in public — and it turned out a lot of developers were sitting with the same unresolved question. That post is still one of the most-read things I’ve written. The patterns I worked out in it eventually found their way into my Django book.

No algorithm put it there. No content strategy. Just a question I couldn’t answer and the willingness to work through it in front of strangers.

A blog is where that kind of thinking lives. Not polished takes. Not hot angles engineered for sharing. The real thing: specific, from a specific person, in a way no language model can replicate — because it comes from a life actually lived and a mind genuinely at work.

So this is me, restarting.

Not because blogging is trending. Not because I ran the numbers on organic reach. But because I have things to say that deserve more than 280 characters and less than an AI Overview.

If you’ve been sitting on a half-written post, an old blog that went quiet, or an idea you’ve been carrying around for months — this is your signal.

The internet doesn’t need more content. It needs more you.

Hi, I’m Arun. Human.

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Arun Ravindran

Arun is the author of "Django Design Patterns and Best Practices". Works as a Product Manager at Google. Avid open source enthusiast. Keen on Python. Loves to help people learn technology. Find out more about Arun on the about page.

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