I’ve been in the blogging business for a very long time — more than 20 years in various forms. Ever since I began my Montaigne project in 2011, it has been an essential part of my method, a means for discipline, the way I enforce my daily writing habit by placing it out in the open.

But these are not the early heady days of blogging anymore — nor even the 2010s, when there was a healthy market for it. Blogging is now largely the province of writers who don’t have newspaper columns anymore. They are established figures who already had a presence and maintain them on Substack or similar sites.

I have not made it easy for my readers through the years. I’ve moved to new URLs, changed the style and topics of my platforms, experimented with form numerous times. And worst of all, I’ve quit on my readers several times. This has required me to pick up and start over.

When I kept a consistent URL, mymontaigneproject.org, it was possible to pick up and restart to some extent. There were still links out there that pointed in my direction and leftover RSS feeds still collecting my works. But now, on the URL I’ve been using for the past year, there’s basically no traffic and no easy way to build it.

In essence, I’ve become a free trainer for AI platforms, because the scrapers are essentially the only “readership” I have left. That makes me feel that I’m doing something worse than writing material that won’t be read — I can live with that. It’s worse to end up being a free resource for these AI megatrons.

I’m going to do some research and see if there are any writing platforms that block AI scraping as a default. I still need some incentive to keep up my daily practice, so I have the raw material to create the books that I’m committed to continuing.