Legibility of Effort and The Social Contract of Writing

Nolan Royalty (@eieio.games), writing without the assistance of generative AI, in a post entitled "Legibility of Effort": What software (and writing, to an extent) is missing now is legibility of effort - the ability to tell at a glance whether something took a human meaningful work. First of all I cannot emphasize enough how much I appreciate that this was a blog post and not a tweet. The dense hypertextual writing in itself suggests some greater degree of effort. But as Nolan points out, even that isn't a trustworthy signal: I wrote this blog post in my text editor. It took me a while. Until recently, “someone cared enough to write this” was an ok heuristic. Plenty of writing on the internet was bad, but you could convince me that you cared about something just by writing it down. Of course, generating plausible-looking text - or a plausible-looking website - is trivial now. This reminded me of a post I bookmarked last week by Johanna Larsson (@jola.dev), entitled "The Social…