This was the original use case of bitcoin's Proof of Work system. Initally it was to impose a (nominal) fee on senders of email by mail clients.

If you didn't submit a proof of work of N or greater difficulty the email would be thrown out.

> One possible future is going back to a medium with higher cost of publication. Books

Honestly I’ve switched to books and papers a few years ago and it has been fantastic. 2 hours of reading a half decent book or paper outweighs a week of reading the best blogposts, twitter threads, or YouTube videos.

I generally go to cited papers in Wikipedia articles

Do you have a favorite source for papers?

HN surfaces a lot of good ones. Sometimes friends recommend stuff. Or I search for things I'm interested in.

Then once you have a hook into your topic, it usually cites 30+ other papers that may be worth reading. You will never run out.

> One possible future is going back to a medium with higher cost of publication. Books.

The grifters are all over that already. No AI necessary to generate and publish drivel.

See “Contrepreneurs: The Mikkelsen Twins”¹ by Dan Olson² for an informative and entertaining documentary on the matter.

¹ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw

² A.k.a Folding Ideas. A.k.a. the creator of “Line Goes Up – The Problem With NFTs”.

fun thought: its more reliable to store information on stone tablets over very long time periods of time then it is harddrives or other modern data storage devices