Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.
Blaise Pascal
I don't know if this is an artifact of SEO optimization, LLM output, or a pushback from the microblogging format, but to me it feels, every time I want to read something interesting, that thing is 5 thousand words long, with diverse preambles, ins and outs, and all sorts of padding.
If it's a pushback from the microblog, I understand. I despise that too, but if anything, that format made me very good at being succinct, but in a Monkey's Paw fashion, it probably destroyed my attention span too.
I suspect, however, that this is more an effect of SEO optimization now 'roided up by the LLM flood.
And to be clear, nothing wrong with essays, long format pieces can be very good and entertaining, but that's the catch: if you are talking just doing plain and simple exposition of a concept or idea, and the text is informative without padding, that's what the text is. It's something that will inform, and can judged only by that.
It is, however, a proverbial pain in the ass to find some interesting idea or concept buried in a very long essay, written by a mediocre writer that has no capacity for entertaining.
Still, I sympathize with the person, maybe they really like writing but never bothered to get better at it. That's fine. The big caveat, though, is that it has to be a person. If the "author" of said piece is an LLM, and the author didn't want to spend the time and effort to actually make that enjoyable to read, and invert the balance, where the creation of something takes 5 minutes and the consumption takes 30 minutes, then I'll not read that shit.
There are too many good things to be read to waste our time with long form LLM output.