When content is free, trust is the product

There is more technical content available today than any human being could read in a thousand lifetimes.

Every topic has a dozen YouTube videos, three Substack posts, a GitHub repo, and a Reddit thread, most created in the last six months and, in many cases, technically accurate.

And yet most of the professionals I talk to say they don't know what to trust.

They can't tell what’s important to read first, or which of 10 plausible answers is the one that holds up.

That was true before AI, and AI has made it more true.

For most of the history of technical publishing, editing and verification were the same process, and that process was slow and expensive.

Getting a book out took years.

We found an author, vetted them, had them work with an editor, and checked their claims with technical reviewers.

A lot of that time went into separating what was correct and useful from what was confusing or only sounded right.

It was laborious, but it meant a reader could depend on the claims on the page.

The credibility of the book, and of the publisher behind it, mattered as much as the information itself.

When the cost of production drops to zero, that credibility becomes worth more, not less.

Content is easier to make than ever, but without a transparent process behind it, readers have no idea where the knowledge came from or whether it holds up.

As Jasmine Sun puts it in “The Independent Writer’s Advantage in the Age of AI,” "Trust is not about information and its quality alone.