Personally, I see the self-help industry dying because people are starting to realize that it’s just a network of individuals selling products, promoting each other’s products, and creating new avenues to sell more products. I refer to it as the “self-help mafia.” Tim Ferriss kind of created it.
Hard disagree. I have read lots of books, participated in events and training seminars and had profound results in my life. My marriage is better because of what I learned, I am a better father and leader because of what I learned. And the fact that people sell things as part of that growth journey is how they support their ability to share the lessons and techniques.
"because of what I learned." Do these books/seminars actually teach you something new about being married or a father, that you didn't know before? Like what? I always figured they were more about coaching, persuasion, convincing. To the extent I've scanned them, I never saw any kind of new fact, definitely not about something like being married.
I'm definitely a better father because of a bunch of the self help books I've read. Things like better ways to communicate with my son, more effective ways to transfer knowledge, encourage independence, etc. Other areas of my life have definitely improved too though I agree when people say most self help books could be a blog post and in cases where it's an expansion of a blog post I'll generally just go read that.
With these types of books(and I read a lot of self help) I generally expect to get like 1-2 good pieces of advice/ideas per 200 pages so I generally just scan through them until I hit areas that seem high value then read those areas more deeply. I've read all of Tim Ferriss' books and haven't really gotten anything I can think of from his stuff to be honest they are a bit too general for me but I've gotten some good advice from his podcast though I only listen to maybe one episode in 10 when it is with someone or about something that sounds very interesting and even then I tend to scrub through it since there is a lot of filler in a 2 hour podcast.
I mean I can see it. Books are just a way to transmit one’s thoughts and experiences to other people. So it’s no different to being exposed to someone with a different viewpoint. Common sense isn’t common or innate, it’s tribal knowledge.
There’s that XKCD about someone learning something new that was just thought to be something everyone knew.
Also you don’t know what you don’t know.
Agree though — coaching and persuasion are a huge part which is why I think a lot of these books seem ‘fluffy’ if all you’re wanting is a collection of facts.
Can you share an easy-to-understand example for someone who is similarly highly sceptical of self-help products?
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Getting Things Done by David Allen gave me a framework to get out of the weeds when I am overwhelmed (usually once or twice a year when I stretch myself): build a to-do list that us complete enough to stop thinking about what you have to do, if a new task take less than 5 minutes just do it right away, and then prioritise the rest.
Deep Work by Cal Newport gave me a way to think about my time management: information work is not the same as a factory line where doing the same thing at similar productivity from 9 to 5 makes sense, and it is important to dedicate long stretch of quality time to be productive (vs busy).
There are no silver bullets, but learning what worked for a group of people, testing it for myself, adapting it, and using it as needed has been helpful to me.
1. Fact vs interpretation. Many things we think of as facts are really our narrative interpretations that are incomplete. A few self help books talk about the story of 4 blind men that are asked to interact with an object: one says it’s a snake, one says it’s a tree, one says it’s a wall, one says it’s a flag. Their interpretations are all wrong, it’s an elephant trunk, leg, body and ear. So when someone says my boss was unfair and mean, that’s not a fact, it’s a narrative interpretation, for all you know they are committed to mentoring you and sometimes that requires trial by fire. Drill Sargent, medical residency, and many professions have converged on that type of training. It’s much easier to stay connected to a spouse, child or coworker when you are operating on the assumption that your beliefs and their beliefs might both be equally valid. The righteousness of having “the facts” destroys a relationship. It’s not that there aren’t facts or right answers but a little humility as a finite being has a lot of benefits.
2. Dispute resolution. There is a three step process that transforms how you fight. A) what did I do to contribute, B) what I’ll do different next time, C) I am sorry and I’ll do X to make amends. When you do this you stop blaming others, which is what causes defensiveness, escalation, and the cascade of in tractable conflict. When you lead with this you’ll be amazed that your counter party feels heard, seen, validated, and connected to you and all of the sudden stops attacking, defending and starts to listen.
3. Characterization. In our lives we often define people based on aspects of their personality that are incomplete. The problem is that stunts their growth and limits the depth of the relationship. So the “ambitious” daughter, “funny” son, “techy” coworker gets defined as only that and can’t break out of it in relation to the person characterizing them. So when the ambitious kid has a failure they turn to the parent for support and get characterized instead treated like a human being that can change. So when an “ambitious” kid says I don’t want to go to university are they suddenly not ambitious? Are they allowed to redefine themselves? There are entire categories of books written by people with a chip on their shoulder because they were characterized.
I did a leadership training that had a session on purpose. They discussed the Harvard study that followed people over their lives and careers and their reported sense of wellbeing. The clear trend of what creates fulfillment at the end of life makes it hard to dwell on a lot of what most people suffer for during different phases of life. I have seen people in college, law school, early careers, doing startups, being parents, even all grinding it out and then looking back with the realization they were and remain miserable.
I could keep going and going and going.
Most self help books can be boiled down to very obvious tools and coping strategies. If it is the first time you have come across the concepts, it can be useful but if it isnt, it is useless.
Is paying 15$ too much to pay? If learning about an obvious but unknown idea for doing the things saves 10 minutes a week, it is.
Do you need to pay 15$ for the result? No. But a result is better than no result.
Well grifters can also be marks. It sounds like you're both.
Sounds like you need to learn some healthy communication. If this is how you show up in relation to others your network of collaborators will be small, keep you weak and limit your availability to effectuate your will in the world.
> limit your availability to effectuate your will in the world.
It might limit his ability to effect his will in the world, but I see his availability as unchanged.
A self-help movement worth their reputation is one that sells more than a book. In fact many give away the book and then charge you a sub for being part of a club
> it’s just a network of individuals selling products, promoting each other’s products, and creating new avenues to sell more products
I've got some bad news for you about the SaaS industry
Considering he named it “the Tim Ferris mafia” makes me think he’s fully aware of that.
The sooner people realize that, the better.
I do not have data, but from first glance, if anything, the overall demand for self-help and self-improvement increases Y/Y. We can correlate it with a sharp drop in alcohol sales, or raising revenues of therapy industry or fitness industry. YT and podcasts still looming too.
But the form of books … Yes, by some reason it collapses. I personally attribute it not to “people realise those guys are salesmen”, but with the fact that none of really good ideas were produced by such books for a while. Now anyone who really has a new angle or new idea to say — they go straight to YT/podcasts, bypassing writing a book altogether. Because of this, me personally, when I check bookshelves, do not see any really new or interesting idea published in the field.
Dale Carnegie created it, Tim Ferriss is a century too late to point as origin.
Dale Carnegie -> Jim Rohn -> Tony Robbins -> [all hacks now]
the man leveraged the fact that his name was the same as Andrew Carnegie (having no relation) to launch a publishing empire. it was hacks from the beginning
All the writers that I love to hate - hariri, gladwell! Will give it a listen
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Even worse he changed his name from Carnagey, presumably to deliberately cause confusion.
Why is Tony Robbins a hack?
Also personally, my self help consumption (across all media) has been dropping lately. Part of it is that quality of content has been worsening over the years. But the part that’s put me off the most is the general burnout I’m facing in life: professional stagnation, uncertain future (will I be employed in a year?), more work, financial pressure, politics upending my life directly etc. Funnily enough I’ve started consuming more content around hobbies, crafts and other fun stuff, which the blog mentions was one of the only two categories that saw growth in sales.
I wonder if that is a reason for the decline rather than AI.
Self-help industry is something that literally can't die. It's in the same category as astrology and technical analysis.
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you've giving people way too much credit here. People never start to realise en-masse.
Why now though? Based on the sharp decline since 2022 (according to Ferris’s numbers), s/books/chatbots seems like the Occam’s Razor explanation here.
Self help is just education from a book rather than from an in person instructor.
There's a lot of self help YouTube videos.
I think the core problem of most self-help books is that at best, they're usually an article's worth of knowledge and insight stretched to book length for economic reasons.
To be fair, some people probably do benefit from, or at least enjoy, the history, examples and stories used to pad out the length. But in my career I've had to constantly learn new domains to varying depths at high velocity. A good LLM, properly prompted, can be an amazing self-learning tool. Before LLMs I'd often hire an expert, usually a post-doc or professor to spend 2-3 hours one-on-one answering my questions - and those sessions would move at very high-speed, making the investment worth it. For those who are experienced self-learners, an LLM can deliver 60-70% of that value. And, frankly, extracting the relevant knowledge out of the average self-help book is a vastly easier task than that.
"Self-help" readers are probably moving from self-help books to llms because they give them the shallow "fix my life" and "get rich quick" answers they want at a faster rate. Now the redpillers have to think even less about why they are such losers.
Obviously this is mean but I do think "self-help" has been incredibly inflated by these people who think there are some sort of magic answers out there to solve everything about their life. And those people are now moving to short form redpill content and / or llms that gas them up.
I have read countless self help books where I complained about fluffy filler material and the book should have been fifty pages instead of two hundred. Not a surprise to me that a topic distilled through an LLM is a better experience.
Some of the best books on JS which were online went recently off-line for that reason. Blog post by the author: https://2ality.com/ (Dr. Axel Rauschmayer)
This stat is limited to print-books only. He talks about all sorts of other forms of content, but seems to mysteriously miss audio books.
If this source [0] is true then 65% of audiobooks (in 2022) were non-fiction. Likewise that the audiobook industry has grown by nearly 3x since 2022. So, by my math, it's simply that people prefer to listen to self-help books (which matches my own experience).
> If this source [0] is true then 65% of audiobooks (in 2022) were non-fiction. Likewise that the audiobook industry has grown by nearly 3x since a2022.
Lead to
> by my math, it's simply that people prefer to listen to self-help books (which matches my own experience).
I'm not sure I see the math there, when most nonfiction is not self-help books (and an increase in the broader genre says nothing about a specific niche)
And my experience is that the freebie books available through your local library's online service absolutely pollute the available offerings with self-help and associated types of books.
Even more than audiobooks self-help has become the preserve of substack blogs, podcasts and YouTube channels. A lot of the low end of older gen media has moved over to the low end of modern media.
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Hardly. I've read several good ones during the AI era and I'm still reading them.
However, that doesn't mean AI is useless for this type of thing. Its very, very good at acting as an "expert" to answer questions you may have after reading the book.
Depending on the model and size of the book, its also possible to load the entire book into the context window and ask questions.
Something not mentioned that links to both LLM training AND drop in book sales... Anna's Archive
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I would be extremely surprised if piracy accounts for any serious dent in the sales of books.
The implication is that the self-help books were scraped from Anna's Archive to train the LLMs, thus the content in the books has been integrated into the LLM and may be regurgitated on command. With the content then being available straight from an LLM, there's no need to buy the books.
If this was true, they wouldn't be getting sued and aggressively pursued for takedowns
" they wouldn't be getting sued and aggressively pursued for takedowns"
I don't think so. That behavior only tells you the modest cost of sending takedown notices/threatening letters is less than the (supposed) lost revenue. Kids I know (I'm a teacher) don't seem at all aware of it when complaining about textbook costs and I kind of vaguely hint they look online for it--nothing like the popularity of napster.
To get the DOJ and FBI to move on on this takes a lot more than submitting paperwork, costs a lot more too.
I'm going to admit that I tend to hit a brick wall when these books tell me I need to fill out a worksheet if I really want to make a difference. You're telling me I have to do homework now? But ai can give me feedback on my thoughts anyway, directly what I'm interested in, and provide sources, even though it's probably patronizing me? Not a difficult decision.
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Almost zero readers buy a book based on the title or content alone. They buy Dr.Phil because they saw him on TV and know a bit about who he is. On the other end of the spectrum, there's people buying books because they respect and admire the author's other work.
AI can never touch the human interest angle of authors, the best it can do is hope to trick people temporarily, and that doesn't last long.
Ask yourself, how many "self-help" books are published by Anonymous?
> Find your 1,000 True Fans. If you started off doing this well but have meandered, it’s time to revisit. Get very clear on who those 1,000 people are.
Well this is the difficult part. You can 10x the number of followers and still have less than 50 true fans.
On the actual content, I am actually not surprised at all. These AI systems are surprisingly convincing when giving personal advise - for better or worse.
depending on the medium one might be better served with a single middling fan with a lot of disposable income, then 10 true with little money available.
followers is a shit metric that only advertisers care for but they also want like 50-100k bare minimum. You need to find 1k people who are willing to give you money, or go out of their way to advocate for you.
With a book you cannot do "that's not what I wanted to read, I'll adjust the prompt."
Personally for me I realized I could learn everything from YouTube for free so I stopped buying most books, just to save money.
He speaks to three examples: YT videos, podcasts, and newsletters/etc. With YT videos and podcasts, I either yank the transcript and pipe it through whisper.cpp, or with YT videos, I'll use the built-in "Ask [Gemini]" and ask it to summarize.
I work for a large online news publisher, one of the oldest in the US. Our traffic is down 50% in year. We likely won’t survive for much longer.
People use LLMs for news?
I suspect AI summaries are just reducing peoples need to click through on anything, possibly.
Still too narrow a take on what self help techniques are killable by ai. I also think self help as a bunch of life hacks and habits is precisely what’s wrong with the industry writ large. They are based on what sells in a capitalist system targeting the attention economy. Creating scarcity on supply side of attention(work longer) and demand side(addictive apps). Take Atomic Habits, one of the things it says is out of many is making the habit you want to form easy to do, e.g place sneakers and shorts next to your bed to make a habit to run in the morning. It presumes a lot about how exactly habits are actually internalized, retained and how one falls into or out of them. I’ve fallen in and out of such habits even after I did them for a while(months). Techniques are very ripe to disruption because people don’t quite understand or have time to understand or observe their own mental state, so hacks sell because you can do them(presumably) as a monkey would.
It’s not an electronic problem but an human first IRL interface problem. A shining example to the contrary is meditation practice like Vipassana. Saying you can kill that with AI is like saying “Gandalf is here and he explained to you the meaning of life and said now you don’t have to live or learn lessons anymore because you know I can always ask him”. Of course living the actual life is the whole point! It’s also why IRL experiences like classes and communities tend to work better when structured as lived experiences.
If this industry of self help books dies I won’t shed too
many tears.
I never understood how anyone could write more than 40 pages of “self help”. Especially not for a general audience. All self help boils down to the very foundation of your worldview, all other advice stems from it.
All weight loss books, if they are truthful, boils down to: eat healthy, exercise more, everything in moderation. That doesn't really make you money, which is what the author actually want. Other categories are equally padded, or the topic has been sufficiently covered for 2000 years or more.
The whole spiel about "I just want to help others in the same situation" died with the Internet, because for the past 30 years it has been entirely feasible to publish your advice and guidance for for free. The books are just for money and fame.
It depends on the topic, of course. I have a self-help book for my computer science students that talks about the best way to get a computer science bachelor's it weighs in at 64 pages. It's too small to print, but it really doesn't need to be any bigger.
A lot of non-fiction fits in 50-100 pages or so. Longer than a magazine article. But it's not publishable through a publisher if it's less than 250-300 pages. One of the reasons I probably won't work through a publisher any longer.
> How-to YouTube videos. Why scrub through a 24-minute video to find the 40 seconds you need, when an AI can watch it for you and hand you the steps?
Why make a 24-minute Youtube video instead of an article with proper navigation?
This is slightly off-topic, but this is a pet-peeve of mine. I believe that for most practical purposes hypertext beats video:
- you can Ctrl-F through text (well, now you sort of can search through a video, but it is much less efficient)
- you can quickly skim through text to find what you need
- text can have proper navigation (chapters etc)
- texts can be linked to each other. Link could lead to a specific part of the text (proper navigation)
- text is much quicker and cheaper to produce
Yet a lot of people make and watch serious educational and informational videos. Why? I don't get it.
The right 15 seconds of video can be extremely helpful with household tasks. I'm thinking specifically of super-tactile ones like getting such-and-such panel off the car or appliance so that you can get at the bit you're looking to replace. Those can really be worth a thousand words.
Of course I'd prefer a blog post with many looping, silent 5-15 second gifs and no extraneous like-and-subscribe and life-story-delivery. But c'est la vie.
Yep, for home improvement and work on cars, I’ll take the video every time. Everything else, if only a video is available, I’ll ask Grok to summarize it so I don’t have to sit through it.
But last weekend I had to remove a trim panel under the hood of my car to extract a dead rodent, and I was wondering how to get those round clips off without breaking them. This video helped: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=K_rsVDj5s1o&ra=m
The AI summary of the same video explains the exact steps but doesn’t show them actually being done.
> Of course I'd prefer a blog post with many looping, silent 5-15 second gifs and no extraneous like-and-subscribe and life-story-delivery. But c'est la vie.
This feels like something you could vibe code up (creating the blog posts from YouTube videos). Fascinating times.
Perhaps, but the recently shared vibe-coded blog posts I've seen on HN have been… not that great.
Wouldn't be surprised if this is viable by next year though.
Between the bloat and bad UI in both modern OSes and modern websites, I'm seriously considering if my next OS will be a command line pointing to an LLM where most web browsing is rendered out in plain text (perhaps LCARS, just for fun?), and any apps that actually need a UI are just-in-time generated as each feature is needed.
> Why make a 24-minute Youtube video instead of an article with proper navigation?
Which one is more likely to result in more ad revenue for you?
It's because you get better ad rates on Youtube than if you made a website and posted the information there. Additionally, the current state of the web (Google only exposing SEO blogspam, AI overviews making it so ~60% of searches end without the user clicking on a site) pushes people further and further away from making websites.
Being able to skim, filter and comprehend large amounts of text is much more rare than you might think. More than half of Americans read below sixth grade level and a fifth is functionally illiterate, struggling even with the most basic reading tasks. Videos are the only way for these people to consume any kind of information.
It's the money that comes from getting people to watch ads, generally speaking. If people write an article, even if it blows up all over the internet, nothing happens. If they make a little shitty short that appeals to kids, with a thumbnail where they make a stupid face, they get a a chunk of actual money. I imagine it's real hard to not get influenced by that.
But as understandable as it may be, a clown whose job is to keep people entertained until the ad break can talk about a lot of things, but cannot be something else. This clown talks about math, the other one just rubs the microphone over materials and then says "smash that like button", but they all have the same purpose and can only differentiate themselves by how much engagement they create. The platform is the payload, the content is whatever.
Isn't it obvious? The creator gets paid much more, in whatever currency they care about:
- ad revenue
- youtube algorithm placement
- sponsored content
- street cred
With an article, if you're lucky google will base their AI overview on it, and the creator gets bupkis.
One would make a long education video to hold eyeballs longer that can lead to more ad revenue (if that's your goal and your video is sufficiently entertaining).
I've commented about this before [1] but a lot of my simple searches lead to monstrous walls of text with tangential information about the query. The answer is buried well past a simple ctrl-F on the page. It definitely varies for domain though.
It's a mixed bag. When you're (for example) repairing a lawnmower, being able to see parts from different angles and hear what it sounds like is very useful.
When you're trying to repair a Playstation motherboard, you gonna need some photos and text.
There can be a lot to gain from the graphics and audio, depending on the topic.
>Yet a lot of people make and watch serious educational and informational videos
a picture is worth a thousand words. Of course your text article can have pictures, but how can you sure you include all the "useful" pictures. Then there is animation which is impossible to do with static picture.
A certain portion of people just prefer learning from video instead of text.
And audio. This also explains the popularity of podcasts, the descendants of a century or so of radio shows.
I thought the explanation for podcasts was people who drive to and from work, and don't care for current radio shows.
More than just your commute. Any downtime where you are doing a mindless chore is prime podcast time.
Personally, I don't care for podcasts much around the house. I listen to them much less now that I don't commute.
>Why make a 24-minute Youtube video instead of an article with proper navigation?
Because increasingly many people wont even stoop to reading an article, but will put on some bs video - even for tutorials
I wonder why not write an article for people with correct information. Then have the LLM create 5 articles with slightly wrong information with generated plausible URLs.
It’s because large fractions of internet users today are functionally illiterate and can’t follow an article.
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>Why? I don't get it
Because articles make no money?
Yeah since most are visual learners. Of course reading is quicker.
YouTube handles distribution. Some people search for information by typing their question in the YouTube search box. Whatever article you wrote won't surface there. You have to post to many social media sites if you want to show up everywhere people are looking.
Text is not cheaper to produce. Most people can type out a lot of drivel but something worth reading takes practice and talent to write.
Probably podcasts killed them.
Self-help non-fiction books killed themselves by focusing on entertainment, in the form of amusing anecdotes, rather than substance. Most self-help books could be reduced to a 3-by-5 card without losing any of the core information.
Conversely: the self-help nonfiction book existed because it was the only practical way to monetize "good advice" or "good ideas" at scale. Now you can do a podcast or a youtube series and try to make money from advertising/affiliates/etc, but for a very long time, "buy my book" was the only game in town
The article gives anecdotal evidence that combining personal stories with advice in a book is more effective than delivering distilled information.
The author even mentions this. Why watch a 20-minute video when you can just scrub to the 40 seconds you need?
A lot of self-help books fall into this category. But if you go to a publisher and say that you're going to publish a 20-page book, they're going to laugh you out of the room.
self help books aren't really my thing, but I have to say I love the guy's attitude in that post.
Probably not. And you certainly cannot use a retrospective analysis to answer this question.
What you needed was a survey.
Fiction books to follow soon? Will kids still sit down and read an assigned book when they can just prompt "generate a movie of Shelley's Frankenstein, faithful to the source, except as required by my_movie_preferences.md". Reading the text may become as rare as learning ancient Greek to read the Odyssey.
You say soon but what you just described is still sci-fi as far as I can tell.
I wonder, if the technology will actually get to the point where it can AI/Remix up a bunch of TV shows or movies that are as high quality / nonslop as the original, and if that would satisfy me.
Let's say I'm living in the past and think Star Trek TNG and the X-Files was peak TV. If I could just hit enter and generate an in-all-ways-believably-authentic episode, maybe I just wouldn't watch anything else. Would it matter to my brain that real people didn't make the episode if it was indistinguishable from the real thing?
On a similar vein, I was just thinking of the TNG episode Hollow Pursuits earlier today.
Somehow, this is one of the episodes I never actually watched, but it is interesting to me how often the Trek scripts cover essentially identical ideas to current discussions about AI: Moriarty insisting to Barclay that he was conscious even when his program wasn't running, Pulaski saying Data was just remixing and not actually intelligent, various examples of deep fakes, cyber addiction, AI going weird sometimes while following orders and sometimes just as an emergent bug.
Nothing, Forever was basically this idea applied to Seinfeld. The video quality was low, but some of the ways it captured the same absurdities as Seinfeld was remarkable at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing,_Forever
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It may not yet be fully automated, and you may have to choose between "cheap and bad or the price of a house and kinda acceptable", but it's definitely possible.
"Self-help nonfiction" have always been a waste of paper. And honestly, most of the time I hear "X was replaced by AI" I find myself thinking "good riddance, but we could drop X altogether and not loose anything of value."
Fiction, on the other hand… Much of fiction's value isn't just the content itself, is that they create a shared language medium. A book might actually be meh (came up with some examples, but then decided to drop it so as not to offend anyone), but the fact that people you talk with have read the same book and understand same references makes reading it valuable. So, it's unlikely to happen, until we delegate all of our communication to AIs, which isn't likely to happen any time soon.
"Luke… I am your father."
"…You're absolutely right!"
c'mon, spoiler alert, jeez
Grifter publishing-slop sector devastated by slop automation.
Finally AI-skeptics found something positive
Tim Ferris bemoaning AI in self-help books is like John Henry vs. the drilling machine, except for bullshitting instead of driving rail road spikes.
I'm more curious how Publisher's Weekly defines "sales" in this era of subscription plans (e.g. Kindle Unlimited).
Some of this probably isn't just "AI" but the quantified/journaled lifestyle trends. Do Oura rings and Apple watches impact self help as much as basic health questions on Google and routine doctor visits?
It feels more like a broader information abundance and a more educated consumer base that started over at least a decade ago. AI's impact is hard to measure since it's just the hot feature resting atop existing tech. It certainly did none of the heavy lifting to nudge people this direction.
>But looking more closely, Self-help had the steepest subcategory decline, with units down 26.3% year-over-year. Only two of 16 subcategories—crafts/hobbies/antiques/games and religion—grew at all (9.6% and 1.6%, respectively). The exceptions alone could make an interesting blog post for another time.
Self help being generally part of a larger grift pipeline for authors (for selling overpriced courses, seminars, retreats, infoproducts etc.), this is an actual positive silver lining for AI in society.
I suspect AI is replacing my need for productivity content much faster than it’s replacing my need for books.
I read fewer blog posts, fewer newsletters, fewer “10 lessons from…” articles, and fewer productivity videos than I did three years ago.
But I still buy books.
The first casualties seem to be the intermediaries, not necessarily the original sources.
This is me too. Just finished the latest Dungeon Crawler Carl book, bought on day 1. Have completely replaced Google, stackoverflow, medium, digital ocean documentation, etc. Only HN remains and honestly it’s less to keep my finger on the pulse and more habit than anything these days. Went from a large part of my consumption to zero visits since I got Claude code.
Makes me wonder what’s going to happen to AI’s results if all these content streams dry up.
Betteridge's law of headlines applies. "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." Why would anyone ask AI?
Makes sense. Self-help books are kinda the human slop of the publishing business. Easily replaced by AI slop? Probably.
To be (slightly) more charitable to the genre and to AI, self-help books are a blog post's worth of content padded out to look worthy of the sticker price, so LLMs provide a fair bit of value in extracting the signal from the noise (assuming they do it accurately).
also assuming there's signal in that noise...
> What happens when 99% of the rigorously fact-checked media is behind a paywall? The short answer: people skip it and ask the AI.
Perhaps there is a business opportunity for a "rigorously fact-checked" chatbot?
You can test chatbot to see if it gives "correct" (according to the author's opinion) answers on a topic of your choice and fix errors through prompt engineering, RAG (or other "memory" techniques), fine-tuning the base model if previous two approaches didn't work.
You can also probably teach it to use your own voice instead of dreaded LLM-isms, to make it sound less like typical AI-slop. This potentially can attract people, who are annoyed by the typical AI voice.
Perhaps, people who wrote self-help books should craft bespoke, custom-made chatbots instead?
I think the more salient points for the paywalls is people want pay once access everything, instead of piecemeal. I would certainly be happy to subscribe to "news" in general, but not a dozen different providers for one article apiece.
Now I'm curious, were there any self-help fiction books?
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance comes to mind, I suppose also the business-parable style books like Who Moved My Cheese?.
If you count Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, almost any fiction book with a philosophical angle would fit that description.
Or even books like “The Phoenix(/Unicorn) Project”.
I had trouble finishing Zen and the Art because my recollection is he drones on and on about the philosophy after the initial set up. The story disappeared. I felt kind of being had because I remember being intrigued by the title in a used bookshop as a teenager and buying it (this was before the internet) so my viewpoint is biased by that. My college philosophy textbooks managed to be more interesting and deeper than Zen, even a book about Aurelius was more interesting to me.
I wouldn't say any fictional book with a philosophical angle fits, but ones that could have been written as non-fiction but for the purposes of getting the point across weren't. Phoenix/Unicorn Project are good examples!
Pretty much all of them.
perhaps they made the fiction/non-fiction Freudian slip? Here I was thinking "Are there any non-fiction (actually true) self help books?"
I've never read it but I think Atlas Shrugged might qualify. I don't think I've ever heard anyone praise the plot or talk about it as a novel, instead people who liked it say it changed their life, changed how they view themselves, etc.
I thought it was pretty well paced as a novel until it got to John Galt's big speech which seemed childishly self-indulgent and then after that it goes to hell. The novel is about 1200 pages and it's pretty amazing that it held my attention for the first 800 because I've rarely been able to enjoy a novel for that long.
as a lite-BDSM wish fulfillment romance novel, it's quite compelling. better plotted and written than much successful romantasy today. the whole plot is about a bunch of hot rich guys fighting over who gets to dom the self-insert female protagonist.
there's another fantasy aspect, which is discovering your sense of alienation from family and society is really because you're part of a special but oppressed group and won't admit it to yourself, and once you embrace your identity you can find fulfillment, love, and community.
now, in this case, the repressed identity is "capitalist", which is a peculiar way of looking at the world. but if you ignore this, the emotional beats of the story (finding yourself, coming out, found family) also work for the LGBT experience, even perhaps neurodivergence. I think this is why so many confused teenagers find themselves very moved by the book and are later embarrassed to admit it.
on the whole, it's not high literature but competently executed, the only really stupid thing about it is Objectivism.
I think it appeals to people with toxic "lone wolf" mentality.
The other, of course, involves orcs.
The art of war is probably fictional.
Yes! plenty of them: The Secret, The 4-hour Work Week, Rich Dad Poor Dad, Think and Grow Rich, etc…
I think there are some good things in the 4-hour Work Week but the concept as a whole is problematic: e.g. Tim Ferris himself has more like a 400-hour work week. Rich Dad Poor Dad is a right wing scam. There is a psychotechnology that people call "magic" but The Secret and Think and Grow Rich won't teach you it.
> Rich Dad Poor Dad is a right wing scam.
I think he was actually saying that by calling it fiction, lol.
Yeah, but it's the worst of the four. I remember his advice that you should buy a rental property which is cashflow positive after the mortgage payment on day one. (As opposed to profitable considering that you're building equity)
These were just not on the market except for one that had 8 section 8 apartments and would have driven me crazy trying to manage as a bleeding heart who cares about people.
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I liked Ferris explaining that you can validate a market exists by serving ads pretending you already have a product. What a scumbag. Isn't the rest of the book just drop shipping and selling supplements with high margins? I recall snippets of a manual for unethical but mostly legal small business between stories of people making money on such practices.
I like his description of how you could just call up an expert on the phone and often get a quick answer to any question they can answer quickly. I'd learned that one myself.
Like it or not a lot of successful businesses have some bodies buried somewhere, particularly those that have been successful in two-sided markets such as online communities. There have been legendary successes in marketing enterprise software that didn't quite exist but I can say it didn't work when I tried it.
“The Alchemist” by Paulo Coelho qualifies.
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> [the numbers]
> Let that sink in for a minute.
Jesus Christ. Here is how AI relates to me—ooh, with suspense-driving one-sentence paragraphs and reflective commandments. Come on, in Q2 2026 this is still a thing?
The self-involved industry is in shambles.
> What’s actually going on?
Need the meander headlines. I told you what is going on. Now. Let me interpret what I just wrote for you.
It would be just boring if self-help books were down because people believe less in astrology and affirmations or something. Couldn’t write about the Zeitgeist that way.
---
I’m not just a cynic. I lived a former life as well. And self-help is something ranging from entertainment to fantasy to small chance of personal transformation. And for books, it’s a cheap hobby compared to one-on-one pscyhology. So would it make sense to replace that with a language soup? Not really. The idiosyncracy is the whole point, jesus.
People might get taken in by it. That doesn’t mean that it will work in the long run.
everyone has their own contribution to this observation
but how is everyone missing the enormous amount of self published slop released since 2022?
that stuff actually is selling, diluting the interest in the rest
its the law of diminishing returns
this may coincide with people also realizing they bought slop, as well as all the other distractions and ways of consuming that people identified
but just like software is experiencing this year, the same has been occurring in writing for 4 years
has bruv updated said book to include tips on using AI to automate?
unfortunately, as a reader, I am not buying any books post-ChatGPT era. Author maybe did their best, but it anyways feels like I will be buying ChatGPT's opinion
In my corner of the internet people started to recommend reading fiction rather than self-help. Books like the count of montecristo for example, where the characters overcome through perseverance, patience and planning.
The criticism of self-help books in my little internet bubble is that if you've read one you've read them all. So why not go for works of fiction that are time-tested and are greatly entertaining and nourishing?
Personally, I see the self-help industry dying because people are starting to realize that it’s just a network of individuals selling products, promoting each other’s products, and creating new avenues to sell more products. I refer to it as the “self-help mafia.” Tim Ferriss kind of created it.
Hard disagree. I have read lots of books, participated in events and training seminars and had profound results in my life. My marriage is better because of what I learned, I am a better father and leader because of what I learned. And the fact that people sell things as part of that growth journey is how they support their ability to share the lessons and techniques.
"because of what I learned." Do these books/seminars actually teach you something new about being married or a father, that you didn't know before? Like what? I always figured they were more about coaching, persuasion, convincing. To the extent I've scanned them, I never saw any kind of new fact, definitely not about something like being married.
I'm definitely a better father because of a bunch of the self help books I've read. Things like better ways to communicate with my son, more effective ways to transfer knowledge, encourage independence, etc. Other areas of my life have definitely improved too though I agree when people say most self help books could be a blog post and in cases where it's an expansion of a blog post I'll generally just go read that.
With these types of books(and I read a lot of self help) I generally expect to get like 1-2 good pieces of advice/ideas per 200 pages so I generally just scan through them until I hit areas that seem high value then read those areas more deeply. I've read all of Tim Ferriss' books and haven't really gotten anything I can think of from his stuff to be honest they are a bit too general for me but I've gotten some good advice from his podcast though I only listen to maybe one episode in 10 when it is with someone or about something that sounds very interesting and even then I tend to scrub through it since there is a lot of filler in a 2 hour podcast.
I mean I can see it. Books are just a way to transmit one’s thoughts and experiences to other people. So it’s no different to being exposed to someone with a different viewpoint. Common sense isn’t common or innate, it’s tribal knowledge.
There’s that XKCD about someone learning something new that was just thought to be something everyone knew.
Also you don’t know what you don’t know.
Agree though — coaching and persuasion are a huge part which is why I think a lot of these books seem ‘fluffy’ if all you’re wanting is a collection of facts.
Can you share an easy-to-understand example for someone who is similarly highly sceptical of self-help products?
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Getting Things Done by David Allen gave me a framework to get out of the weeds when I am overwhelmed (usually once or twice a year when I stretch myself): build a to-do list that us complete enough to stop thinking about what you have to do, if a new task take less than 5 minutes just do it right away, and then prioritise the rest.
Deep Work by Cal Newport gave me a way to think about my time management: information work is not the same as a factory line where doing the same thing at similar productivity from 9 to 5 makes sense, and it is important to dedicate long stretch of quality time to be productive (vs busy).
There are no silver bullets, but learning what worked for a group of people, testing it for myself, adapting it, and using it as needed has been helpful to me.
1. Fact vs interpretation. Many things we think of as facts are really our narrative interpretations that are incomplete. A few self help books talk about the story of 4 blind men that are asked to interact with an object: one says it’s a snake, one says it’s a tree, one says it’s a wall, one says it’s a flag. Their interpretations are all wrong, it’s an elephant trunk, leg, body and ear. So when someone says my boss was unfair and mean, that’s not a fact, it’s a narrative interpretation, for all you know they are committed to mentoring you and sometimes that requires trial by fire. Drill Sargent, medical residency, and many professions have converged on that type of training. It’s much easier to stay connected to a spouse, child or coworker when you are operating on the assumption that your beliefs and their beliefs might both be equally valid. The righteousness of having “the facts” destroys a relationship. It’s not that there aren’t facts or right answers but a little humility as a finite being has a lot of benefits.
2. Dispute resolution. There is a three step process that transforms how you fight. A) what did I do to contribute, B) what I’ll do different next time, C) I am sorry and I’ll do X to make amends. When you do this you stop blaming others, which is what causes defensiveness, escalation, and the cascade of in tractable conflict. When you lead with this you’ll be amazed that your counter party feels heard, seen, validated, and connected to you and all of the sudden stops attacking, defending and starts to listen.
3. Characterization. In our lives we often define people based on aspects of their personality that are incomplete. The problem is that stunts their growth and limits the depth of the relationship. So the “ambitious” daughter, “funny” son, “techy” coworker gets defined as only that and can’t break out of it in relation to the person characterizing them. So when the ambitious kid has a failure they turn to the parent for support and get characterized instead treated like a human being that can change. So when an “ambitious” kid says I don’t want to go to university are they suddenly not ambitious? Are they allowed to redefine themselves? There are entire categories of books written by people with a chip on their shoulder because they were characterized.
I did a leadership training that had a session on purpose. They discussed the Harvard study that followed people over their lives and careers and their reported sense of wellbeing. The clear trend of what creates fulfillment at the end of life makes it hard to dwell on a lot of what most people suffer for during different phases of life. I have seen people in college, law school, early careers, doing startups, being parents, even all grinding it out and then looking back with the realization they were and remain miserable.
I could keep going and going and going.
Most self help books can be boiled down to very obvious tools and coping strategies. If it is the first time you have come across the concepts, it can be useful but if it isnt, it is useless.
Is paying 15$ too much to pay? If learning about an obvious but unknown idea for doing the things saves 10 minutes a week, it is.
Do you need to pay 15$ for the result? No. But a result is better than no result.
Well grifters can also be marks. It sounds like you're both.
Sounds like you need to learn some healthy communication. If this is how you show up in relation to others your network of collaborators will be small, keep you weak and limit your availability to effectuate your will in the world.
> limit your availability to effectuate your will in the world.
It might limit his ability to effect his will in the world, but I see his availability as unchanged.
A self-help movement worth their reputation is one that sells more than a book. In fact many give away the book and then charge you a sub for being part of a club
> it’s just a network of individuals selling products, promoting each other’s products, and creating new avenues to sell more products
I've got some bad news for you about the SaaS industry
Considering he named it “the Tim Ferris mafia” makes me think he’s fully aware of that.
The sooner people realize that, the better.
I do not have data, but from first glance, if anything, the overall demand for self-help and self-improvement increases Y/Y. We can correlate it with a sharp drop in alcohol sales, or raising revenues of therapy industry or fitness industry. YT and podcasts still looming too.
But the form of books … Yes, by some reason it collapses. I personally attribute it not to “people realise those guys are salesmen”, but with the fact that none of really good ideas were produced by such books for a while. Now anyone who really has a new angle or new idea to say — they go straight to YT/podcasts, bypassing writing a book altogether. Because of this, me personally, when I check bookshelves, do not see any really new or interesting idea published in the field.
Dale Carnegie created it, Tim Ferriss is a century too late to point as origin.
Dale Carnegie -> Jim Rohn -> Tony Robbins -> [all hacks now]
the man leveraged the fact that his name was the same as Andrew Carnegie (having no relation) to launch a publishing empire. it was hacks from the beginning
Highly recommend "If Books Could Kill"
https://bsky.app/profile/ifbookspod.bsky.social
It really is all the same book.
All the writers that I love to hate - hariri, gladwell! Will give it a listen
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Even worse he changed his name from Carnagey, presumably to deliberately cause confusion.
Why is Tony Robbins a hack?
Also personally, my self help consumption (across all media) has been dropping lately. Part of it is that quality of content has been worsening over the years. But the part that’s put me off the most is the general burnout I’m facing in life: professional stagnation, uncertain future (will I be employed in a year?), more work, financial pressure, politics upending my life directly etc. Funnily enough I’ve started consuming more content around hobbies, crafts and other fun stuff, which the blog mentions was one of the only two categories that saw growth in sales.
I wonder if that is a reason for the decline rather than AI.
Self-help industry is something that literally can't die. It's in the same category as astrology and technical analysis.
you've giving people way too much credit here. People never start to realise en-masse.
Why now though? Based on the sharp decline since 2022 (according to Ferris’s numbers), s/books/chatbots seems like the Occam’s Razor explanation here.
Self help is just education from a book rather than from an in person instructor.
There's a lot of self help YouTube videos.
I think the core problem of most self-help books is that at best, they're usually an article's worth of knowledge and insight stretched to book length for economic reasons.
To be fair, some people probably do benefit from, or at least enjoy, the history, examples and stories used to pad out the length. But in my career I've had to constantly learn new domains to varying depths at high velocity. A good LLM, properly prompted, can be an amazing self-learning tool. Before LLMs I'd often hire an expert, usually a post-doc or professor to spend 2-3 hours one-on-one answering my questions - and those sessions would move at very high-speed, making the investment worth it. For those who are experienced self-learners, an LLM can deliver 60-70% of that value. And, frankly, extracting the relevant knowledge out of the average self-help book is a vastly easier task than that.
"Self-help" readers are probably moving from self-help books to llms because they give them the shallow "fix my life" and "get rich quick" answers they want at a faster rate. Now the redpillers have to think even less about why they are such losers.
Obviously this is mean but I do think "self-help" has been incredibly inflated by these people who think there are some sort of magic answers out there to solve everything about their life. And those people are now moving to short form redpill content and / or llms that gas them up.
I have read countless self help books where I complained about fluffy filler material and the book should have been fifty pages instead of two hundred. Not a surprise to me that a topic distilled through an LLM is a better experience.
Some of the best books on JS which were online went recently off-line for that reason. Blog post by the author: https://2ality.com/ (Dr. Axel Rauschmayer)
This stat is limited to print-books only. He talks about all sorts of other forms of content, but seems to mysteriously miss audio books.
If this source [0] is true then 65% of audiobooks (in 2022) were non-fiction. Likewise that the audiobook industry has grown by nearly 3x since 2022. So, by my math, it's simply that people prefer to listen to self-help books (which matches my own experience).
[0] - https://electroiq.com/stats/audiobook-statistics/
How does this
> If this source [0] is true then 65% of audiobooks (in 2022) were non-fiction. Likewise that the audiobook industry has grown by nearly 3x since a2022.
Lead to
> by my math, it's simply that people prefer to listen to self-help books (which matches my own experience).
I'm not sure I see the math there, when most nonfiction is not self-help books (and an increase in the broader genre says nothing about a specific niche)
And my experience is that the freebie books available through your local library's online service absolutely pollute the available offerings with self-help and associated types of books.
Even more than audiobooks self-help has become the preserve of substack blogs, podcasts and YouTube channels. A lot of the low end of older gen media has moved over to the low end of modern media.
Hardly. I've read several good ones during the AI era and I'm still reading them.
However, that doesn't mean AI is useless for this type of thing. Its very, very good at acting as an "expert" to answer questions you may have after reading the book.
Depending on the model and size of the book, its also possible to load the entire book into the context window and ask questions.
Something not mentioned that links to both LLM training AND drop in book sales... Anna's Archive
I would be extremely surprised if piracy accounts for any serious dent in the sales of books.
The implication is that the self-help books were scraped from Anna's Archive to train the LLMs, thus the content in the books has been integrated into the LLM and may be regurgitated on command. With the content then being available straight from an LLM, there's no need to buy the books.
If this was true, they wouldn't be getting sued and aggressively pursued for takedowns
" they wouldn't be getting sued and aggressively pursued for takedowns"
I don't think so. That behavior only tells you the modest cost of sending takedown notices/threatening letters is less than the (supposed) lost revenue. Kids I know (I'm a teacher) don't seem at all aware of it when complaining about textbook costs and I kind of vaguely hint they look online for it--nothing like the popularity of napster.
To get the DOJ and FBI to move on on this takes a lot more than submitting paperwork, costs a lot more too.
I'm going to admit that I tend to hit a brick wall when these books tell me I need to fill out a worksheet if I really want to make a difference. You're telling me I have to do homework now? But ai can give me feedback on my thoughts anyway, directly what I'm interested in, and provide sources, even though it's probably patronizing me? Not a difficult decision.
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Almost zero readers buy a book based on the title or content alone. They buy Dr.Phil because they saw him on TV and know a bit about who he is. On the other end of the spectrum, there's people buying books because they respect and admire the author's other work.
AI can never touch the human interest angle of authors, the best it can do is hope to trick people temporarily, and that doesn't last long.
Ask yourself, how many "self-help" books are published by Anonymous?
> Find your 1,000 True Fans. If you started off doing this well but have meandered, it’s time to revisit. Get very clear on who those 1,000 people are.
Well this is the difficult part. You can 10x the number of followers and still have less than 50 true fans.
On the actual content, I am actually not surprised at all. These AI systems are surprisingly convincing when giving personal advise - for better or worse.
depending on the medium one might be better served with a single middling fan with a lot of disposable income, then 10 true with little money available.
followers is a shit metric that only advertisers care for but they also want like 50-100k bare minimum. You need to find 1k people who are willing to give you money, or go out of their way to advocate for you.
With a book you cannot do "that's not what I wanted to read, I'll adjust the prompt."
Personally for me I realized I could learn everything from YouTube for free so I stopped buying most books, just to save money.
He speaks to three examples: YT videos, podcasts, and newsletters/etc. With YT videos and podcasts, I either yank the transcript and pipe it through whisper.cpp, or with YT videos, I'll use the built-in "Ask [Gemini]" and ask it to summarize.
I work for a large online news publisher, one of the oldest in the US. Our traffic is down 50% in year. We likely won’t survive for much longer.
People use LLMs for news?
I suspect AI summaries are just reducing peoples need to click through on anything, possibly.
Still too narrow a take on what self help techniques are killable by ai. I also think self help as a bunch of life hacks and habits is precisely what’s wrong with the industry writ large. They are based on what sells in a capitalist system targeting the attention economy. Creating scarcity on supply side of attention(work longer) and demand side(addictive apps). Take Atomic Habits, one of the things it says is out of many is making the habit you want to form easy to do, e.g place sneakers and shorts next to your bed to make a habit to run in the morning. It presumes a lot about how exactly habits are actually internalized, retained and how one falls into or out of them. I’ve fallen in and out of such habits even after I did them for a while(months). Techniques are very ripe to disruption because people don’t quite understand or have time to understand or observe their own mental state, so hacks sell because you can do them(presumably) as a monkey would.
It’s not an electronic problem but an human first IRL interface problem. A shining example to the contrary is meditation practice like Vipassana. Saying you can kill that with AI is like saying “Gandalf is here and he explained to you the meaning of life and said now you don’t have to live or learn lessons anymore because you know I can always ask him”. Of course living the actual life is the whole point! It’s also why IRL experiences like classes and communities tend to work better when structured as lived experiences.
If this industry of self help books dies I won’t shed too many tears.
I never understood how anyone could write more than 40 pages of “self help”. Especially not for a general audience. All self help boils down to the very foundation of your worldview, all other advice stems from it.
All weight loss books, if they are truthful, boils down to: eat healthy, exercise more, everything in moderation. That doesn't really make you money, which is what the author actually want. Other categories are equally padded, or the topic has been sufficiently covered for 2000 years or more.
The whole spiel about "I just want to help others in the same situation" died with the Internet, because for the past 30 years it has been entirely feasible to publish your advice and guidance for for free. The books are just for money and fame.
It depends on the topic, of course. I have a self-help book for my computer science students that talks about the best way to get a computer science bachelor's it weighs in at 64 pages. It's too small to print, but it really doesn't need to be any bigger.
A lot of non-fiction fits in 50-100 pages or so. Longer than a magazine article. But it's not publishable through a publisher if it's less than 250-300 pages. One of the reasons I probably won't work through a publisher any longer.
> How-to YouTube videos. Why scrub through a 24-minute video to find the 40 seconds you need, when an AI can watch it for you and hand you the steps?
Why make a 24-minute Youtube video instead of an article with proper navigation?
This is slightly off-topic, but this is a pet-peeve of mine. I believe that for most practical purposes hypertext beats video:
- you can Ctrl-F through text (well, now you sort of can search through a video, but it is much less efficient)
- you can quickly skim through text to find what you need
- text can have proper navigation (chapters etc)
- texts can be linked to each other. Link could lead to a specific part of the text (proper navigation)
- text is much quicker and cheaper to produce
Yet a lot of people make and watch serious educational and informational videos. Why? I don't get it.
The right 15 seconds of video can be extremely helpful with household tasks. I'm thinking specifically of super-tactile ones like getting such-and-such panel off the car or appliance so that you can get at the bit you're looking to replace. Those can really be worth a thousand words.
Of course I'd prefer a blog post with many looping, silent 5-15 second gifs and no extraneous like-and-subscribe and life-story-delivery. But c'est la vie.
Yep, for home improvement and work on cars, I’ll take the video every time. Everything else, if only a video is available, I’ll ask Grok to summarize it so I don’t have to sit through it.
But last weekend I had to remove a trim panel under the hood of my car to extract a dead rodent, and I was wondering how to get those round clips off without breaking them. This video helped: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=K_rsVDj5s1o&ra=m
The AI summary of the same video explains the exact steps but doesn’t show them actually being done.
> Of course I'd prefer a blog post with many looping, silent 5-15 second gifs and no extraneous like-and-subscribe and life-story-delivery. But c'est la vie.
This feels like something you could vibe code up (creating the blog posts from YouTube videos). Fascinating times.
Perhaps, but the recently shared vibe-coded blog posts I've seen on HN have been… not that great.
Wouldn't be surprised if this is viable by next year though.
Between the bloat and bad UI in both modern OSes and modern websites, I'm seriously considering if my next OS will be a command line pointing to an LLM where most web browsing is rendered out in plain text (perhaps LCARS, just for fun?), and any apps that actually need a UI are just-in-time generated as each feature is needed.
After all, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VibeOS already exists.
> Why make a 24-minute Youtube video instead of an article with proper navigation?
Which one is more likely to result in more ad revenue for you?
It's because you get better ad rates on Youtube than if you made a website and posted the information there. Additionally, the current state of the web (Google only exposing SEO blogspam, AI overviews making it so ~60% of searches end without the user clicking on a site) pushes people further and further away from making websites.
Being able to skim, filter and comprehend large amounts of text is much more rare than you might think. More than half of Americans read below sixth grade level and a fifth is functionally illiterate, struggling even with the most basic reading tasks. Videos are the only way for these people to consume any kind of information.
It's the money that comes from getting people to watch ads, generally speaking. If people write an article, even if it blows up all over the internet, nothing happens. If they make a little shitty short that appeals to kids, with a thumbnail where they make a stupid face, they get a a chunk of actual money. I imagine it's real hard to not get influenced by that.
But as understandable as it may be, a clown whose job is to keep people entertained until the ad break can talk about a lot of things, but cannot be something else. This clown talks about math, the other one just rubs the microphone over materials and then says "smash that like button", but they all have the same purpose and can only differentiate themselves by how much engagement they create. The platform is the payload, the content is whatever.
Isn't it obvious? The creator gets paid much more, in whatever currency they care about:
- ad revenue - youtube algorithm placement - sponsored content - street cred
With an article, if you're lucky google will base their AI overview on it, and the creator gets bupkis.
One would make a long education video to hold eyeballs longer that can lead to more ad revenue (if that's your goal and your video is sufficiently entertaining).
I've commented about this before [1] but a lot of my simple searches lead to monstrous walls of text with tangential information about the query. The answer is buried well past a simple ctrl-F on the page. It definitely varies for domain though.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45830763
It's a mixed bag. When you're (for example) repairing a lawnmower, being able to see parts from different angles and hear what it sounds like is very useful.
When you're trying to repair a Playstation motherboard, you gonna need some photos and text.
There can be a lot to gain from the graphics and audio, depending on the topic.
>Yet a lot of people make and watch serious educational and informational videos
a picture is worth a thousand words. Of course your text article can have pictures, but how can you sure you include all the "useful" pictures. Then there is animation which is impossible to do with static picture.
A certain portion of people just prefer learning from video instead of text.
And audio. This also explains the popularity of podcasts, the descendants of a century or so of radio shows.
I thought the explanation for podcasts was people who drive to and from work, and don't care for current radio shows.
More than just your commute. Any downtime where you are doing a mindless chore is prime podcast time.
Personally, I don't care for podcasts much around the house. I listen to them much less now that I don't commute.
>Why make a 24-minute Youtube video instead of an article with proper navigation?
Because increasingly many people wont even stoop to reading an article, but will put on some bs video - even for tutorials
I wonder why not write an article for people with correct information. Then have the LLM create 5 articles with slightly wrong information with generated plausible URLs.
It’s because large fractions of internet users today are functionally illiterate and can’t follow an article.
>Why? I don't get it
Because articles make no money?
Yeah since most are visual learners. Of course reading is quicker.
YouTube handles distribution. Some people search for information by typing their question in the YouTube search box. Whatever article you wrote won't surface there. You have to post to many social media sites if you want to show up everywhere people are looking.
Text is not cheaper to produce. Most people can type out a lot of drivel but something worth reading takes practice and talent to write.
Probably podcasts killed them.
Self-help non-fiction books killed themselves by focusing on entertainment, in the form of amusing anecdotes, rather than substance. Most self-help books could be reduced to a 3-by-5 card without losing any of the core information.
Conversely: the self-help nonfiction book existed because it was the only practical way to monetize "good advice" or "good ideas" at scale. Now you can do a podcast or a youtube series and try to make money from advertising/affiliates/etc, but for a very long time, "buy my book" was the only game in town
The article gives anecdotal evidence that combining personal stories with advice in a book is more effective than delivering distilled information.
The author even mentions this. Why watch a 20-minute video when you can just scrub to the 40 seconds you need?
A lot of self-help books fall into this category. But if you go to a publisher and say that you're going to publish a 20-page book, they're going to laugh you out of the room.
self help books aren't really my thing, but I have to say I love the guy's attitude in that post.
Probably not. And you certainly cannot use a retrospective analysis to answer this question.
What you needed was a survey.
Fiction books to follow soon? Will kids still sit down and read an assigned book when they can just prompt "generate a movie of Shelley's Frankenstein, faithful to the source, except as required by my_movie_preferences.md". Reading the text may become as rare as learning ancient Greek to read the Odyssey.
You say soon but what you just described is still sci-fi as far as I can tell.
I wonder, if the technology will actually get to the point where it can AI/Remix up a bunch of TV shows or movies that are as high quality / nonslop as the original, and if that would satisfy me.
Let's say I'm living in the past and think Star Trek TNG and the X-Files was peak TV. If I could just hit enter and generate an in-all-ways-believably-authentic episode, maybe I just wouldn't watch anything else. Would it matter to my brain that real people didn't make the episode if it was indistinguishable from the real thing?
On a similar vein, I was just thinking of the TNG episode Hollow Pursuits earlier today.
Somehow, this is one of the episodes I never actually watched, but it is interesting to me how often the Trek scripts cover essentially identical ideas to current discussions about AI: Moriarty insisting to Barclay that he was conscious even when his program wasn't running, Pulaski saying Data was just remixing and not actually intelligent, various examples of deep fakes, cyber addiction, AI going weird sometimes while following orders and sometimes just as an emergent bug.
Nothing, Forever was basically this idea applied to Seinfeld. The video quality was low, but some of the ways it captured the same absurdities as Seinfeld was remarkable at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing,_Forever
It may not yet be fully automated, and you may have to choose between "cheap and bad or the price of a house and kinda acceptable", but it's definitely possible.
"Self-help nonfiction" have always been a waste of paper. And honestly, most of the time I hear "X was replaced by AI" I find myself thinking "good riddance, but we could drop X altogether and not loose anything of value."
Fiction, on the other hand… Much of fiction's value isn't just the content itself, is that they create a shared language medium. A book might actually be meh (came up with some examples, but then decided to drop it so as not to offend anyone), but the fact that people you talk with have read the same book and understand same references makes reading it valuable. So, it's unlikely to happen, until we delegate all of our communication to AIs, which isn't likely to happen any time soon.
"Luke… I am your father."
"…You're absolutely right!"
c'mon, spoiler alert, jeez
Grifter publishing-slop sector devastated by slop automation.
Finally AI-skeptics found something positive
Tim Ferris bemoaning AI in self-help books is like John Henry vs. the drilling machine, except for bullshitting instead of driving rail road spikes.
I'm more curious how Publisher's Weekly defines "sales" in this era of subscription plans (e.g. Kindle Unlimited).
Some of this probably isn't just "AI" but the quantified/journaled lifestyle trends. Do Oura rings and Apple watches impact self help as much as basic health questions on Google and routine doctor visits?
It feels more like a broader information abundance and a more educated consumer base that started over at least a decade ago. AI's impact is hard to measure since it's just the hot feature resting atop existing tech. It certainly did none of the heavy lifting to nudge people this direction.
>But looking more closely, Self-help had the steepest subcategory decline, with units down 26.3% year-over-year. Only two of 16 subcategories—crafts/hobbies/antiques/games and religion—grew at all (9.6% and 1.6%, respectively). The exceptions alone could make an interesting blog post for another time.
Self help being generally part of a larger grift pipeline for authors (for selling overpriced courses, seminars, retreats, infoproducts etc.), this is an actual positive silver lining for AI in society.
I suspect AI is replacing my need for productivity content much faster than it’s replacing my need for books.
I read fewer blog posts, fewer newsletters, fewer “10 lessons from…” articles, and fewer productivity videos than I did three years ago.
But I still buy books.
The first casualties seem to be the intermediaries, not necessarily the original sources.
This is me too. Just finished the latest Dungeon Crawler Carl book, bought on day 1. Have completely replaced Google, stackoverflow, medium, digital ocean documentation, etc. Only HN remains and honestly it’s less to keep my finger on the pulse and more habit than anything these days. Went from a large part of my consumption to zero visits since I got Claude code.
Makes me wonder what’s going to happen to AI’s results if all these content streams dry up.
Betteridge's law of headlines applies. "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." Why would anyone ask AI?
Makes sense. Self-help books are kinda the human slop of the publishing business. Easily replaced by AI slop? Probably.
To be (slightly) more charitable to the genre and to AI, self-help books are a blog post's worth of content padded out to look worthy of the sticker price, so LLMs provide a fair bit of value in extracting the signal from the noise (assuming they do it accurately).
also assuming there's signal in that noise...
> What happens when 99% of the rigorously fact-checked media is behind a paywall? The short answer: people skip it and ask the AI.
Perhaps there is a business opportunity for a "rigorously fact-checked" chatbot? You can test chatbot to see if it gives "correct" (according to the author's opinion) answers on a topic of your choice and fix errors through prompt engineering, RAG (or other "memory" techniques), fine-tuning the base model if previous two approaches didn't work.
You can also probably teach it to use your own voice instead of dreaded LLM-isms, to make it sound less like typical AI-slop. This potentially can attract people, who are annoyed by the typical AI voice.
Perhaps, people who wrote self-help books should craft bespoke, custom-made chatbots instead?
I think the more salient points for the paywalls is people want pay once access everything, instead of piecemeal. I would certainly be happy to subscribe to "news" in general, but not a dozen different providers for one article apiece.
Now I'm curious, were there any self-help fiction books?
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance comes to mind, I suppose also the business-parable style books like Who Moved My Cheese?.
If you count Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, almost any fiction book with a philosophical angle would fit that description.
Or even books like “The Phoenix(/Unicorn) Project”.
I had trouble finishing Zen and the Art because my recollection is he drones on and on about the philosophy after the initial set up. The story disappeared. I felt kind of being had because I remember being intrigued by the title in a used bookshop as a teenager and buying it (this was before the internet) so my viewpoint is biased by that. My college philosophy textbooks managed to be more interesting and deeper than Zen, even a book about Aurelius was more interesting to me.
I wouldn't say any fictional book with a philosophical angle fits, but ones that could have been written as non-fiction but for the purposes of getting the point across weren't. Phoenix/Unicorn Project are good examples!
Pretty much all of them.
perhaps they made the fiction/non-fiction Freudian slip? Here I was thinking "Are there any non-fiction (actually true) self help books?"
I've never read it but I think Atlas Shrugged might qualify. I don't think I've ever heard anyone praise the plot or talk about it as a novel, instead people who liked it say it changed their life, changed how they view themselves, etc.
I thought it was pretty well paced as a novel until it got to John Galt's big speech which seemed childishly self-indulgent and then after that it goes to hell. The novel is about 1200 pages and it's pretty amazing that it held my attention for the first 800 because I've rarely been able to enjoy a novel for that long.
as a lite-BDSM wish fulfillment romance novel, it's quite compelling. better plotted and written than much successful romantasy today. the whole plot is about a bunch of hot rich guys fighting over who gets to dom the self-insert female protagonist.
there's another fantasy aspect, which is discovering your sense of alienation from family and society is really because you're part of a special but oppressed group and won't admit it to yourself, and once you embrace your identity you can find fulfillment, love, and community.
now, in this case, the repressed identity is "capitalist", which is a peculiar way of looking at the world. but if you ignore this, the emotional beats of the story (finding yourself, coming out, found family) also work for the LGBT experience, even perhaps neurodivergence. I think this is why so many confused teenagers find themselves very moved by the book and are later embarrassed to admit it.
on the whole, it's not high literature but competently executed, the only really stupid thing about it is Objectivism.
I think it appeals to people with toxic "lone wolf" mentality.
The other, of course, involves orcs.
The art of war is probably fictional.
Yes! plenty of them: The Secret, The 4-hour Work Week, Rich Dad Poor Dad, Think and Grow Rich, etc…
I think there are some good things in the 4-hour Work Week but the concept as a whole is problematic: e.g. Tim Ferris himself has more like a 400-hour work week. Rich Dad Poor Dad is a right wing scam. There is a psychotechnology that people call "magic" but The Secret and Think and Grow Rich won't teach you it.
> Rich Dad Poor Dad is a right wing scam.
I think he was actually saying that by calling it fiction, lol.
Yeah, but it's the worst of the four. I remember his advice that you should buy a rental property which is cashflow positive after the mortgage payment on day one. (As opposed to profitable considering that you're building equity)
These were just not on the market except for one that had 8 section 8 apartments and would have driven me crazy trying to manage as a bleeding heart who cares about people.
[dead]
I liked Ferris explaining that you can validate a market exists by serving ads pretending you already have a product. What a scumbag. Isn't the rest of the book just drop shipping and selling supplements with high margins? I recall snippets of a manual for unethical but mostly legal small business between stories of people making money on such practices.
I like his description of how you could just call up an expert on the phone and often get a quick answer to any question they can answer quickly. I'd learned that one myself.
Like it or not a lot of successful businesses have some bodies buried somewhere, particularly those that have been successful in two-sided markets such as online communities. There have been legendary successes in marketing enterprise software that didn't quite exist but I can say it didn't work when I tried it.
“The Alchemist” by Paulo Coelho qualifies.
> [the numbers]
> Let that sink in for a minute.
Jesus Christ. Here is how AI relates to me—ooh, with suspense-driving one-sentence paragraphs and reflective commandments. Come on, in Q2 2026 this is still a thing?
The self-involved industry is in shambles.
> What’s actually going on?
Need the meander headlines. I told you what is going on. Now. Let me interpret what I just wrote for you.
It would be just boring if self-help books were down because people believe less in astrology and affirmations or something. Couldn’t write about the Zeitgeist that way.
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I’m not just a cynic. I lived a former life as well. And self-help is something ranging from entertainment to fantasy to small chance of personal transformation. And for books, it’s a cheap hobby compared to one-on-one pscyhology. So would it make sense to replace that with a language soup? Not really. The idiosyncracy is the whole point, jesus.
People might get taken in by it. That doesn’t mean that it will work in the long run.
everyone has their own contribution to this observation
but how is everyone missing the enormous amount of self published slop released since 2022?
that stuff actually is selling, diluting the interest in the rest
its the law of diminishing returns
this may coincide with people also realizing they bought slop, as well as all the other distractions and ways of consuming that people identified
but just like software is experiencing this year, the same has been occurring in writing for 4 years
has bruv updated said book to include tips on using AI to automate?
unfortunately, as a reader, I am not buying any books post-ChatGPT era. Author maybe did their best, but it anyways feels like I will be buying ChatGPT's opinion
In my corner of the internet people started to recommend reading fiction rather than self-help. Books like the count of montecristo for example, where the characters overcome through perseverance, patience and planning.
The criticism of self-help books in my little internet bubble is that if you've read one you've read them all. So why not go for works of fiction that are time-tested and are greatly entertaining and nourishing?