It all started almost 4 years ago (September 2019) when we had the idea of professionalizing the arsouyes. At that time we were working partly in training and we taught to ourselves that there was a synergy with our website and that we should develop it in order to, who knows, live from our publications, financially supported by our readers.

Spoiler: that wasn’t such a good idea.

The anxiety of donations

Basically, we did not have any ready-made content and as we are perfectionists, we did not envisage being able to quickly produce autonomous training. We therefore turned to crowdfunding with the idea that against a monthly subscription, we would produce content one step at a time.

And that’s where it starts to get stuck… Because in order to get people subscribing, you need content, and to finance content, you need subscribers…

The problem is that even though we have a lot of content, nothing is really organized or targeted for an audience ready to subscribe. And without subscription, no funding, therefore no content, therefore no subscription.

Dispossession

To make it works, we therefore need to produce content. But not whatever or whenever content. There are rules…

More visuals. We started by adding artwork images. As headings of the article first, then included in the indexes. And finally everywhere in the article “to ventilate it and help reader breathe” (sic). Then we inserted images into old articles to dusting them.

More international. We then systematically translated all new articles and started translating the previous ones as we went along.

More dynamic. Then we considered video content. We wrote scripts, we shot and edited to see what happens. You haven’t seen them because we haven’t published them.

More authentic. Then we did a twitch live with root-me which worked well. Then organized a live to answer questions from listeners… it flopped because there were only three of them and they didn’t react at all. NOTHING.

More demonstrative. Then we thought that for our live broadcasts to work, we would have to show something. Nothing professional since everything is covered by professional secrecy. So we need to show something else, like solving exercises, like musical scales.

Always more. And above all, publish always more so as not to be forgotten on social networks and go live for several hours a day, for several months to hope to reach an audience.

Et là, on s’est demandé comment on avait pu en arriver là !?

Dopamine

Generative AIs

We could also tell you about our research to create more official training, financed by the CPF (French grant alike for professionnal to train themselves) for example, and the administrative burden imposed by the Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations (agency that manage the CPF stuffs).

But the truth is that before we even got there, an event forced us to open our eyes: the arrival of generative AIs.

For more than a year, companies have been offering applications to generate content generated by AI (texts, images, videos, etc.). The principle is always the same: after having read or seen a lot of content available online, these AIs will take inspiration from it to produce things that look like what already exists. In short, automated plagiarism.

Among many others, two consequences particularly affect us:

1. These AIs can produce content faster and much cheaper than any human being, it’s vain to create “basic” content, they will be drowned in the crowd.
2. Each novel content produced by a human being will be plundered by these AIs who will then be able to plagiarize it and write on the subject.

In fact, regardless of the strategy used, if the goal is to be read, an AI will always be more effective.

Back to basics

Looking back, regardless of the content, there are only two types of writers. Artists who have something to say (it doesn’t matter if someone is listening or not), and advertisers who impersonate artists to sell you something (a product or a reputation).

Wanting to sell you something, we got lost trying (vainly) to be advertisers.

We have therefore extracted our professional part to a separate website (esplori.pro) so that we can refocus, here, on the publications that we really like.

This new version of the site, which revives the static generation of content, also aims to return to greater simplicity.