Watching someone online for ten years gives you exactly one honest data point about them: whether their work is any good.
That part is real. You can read the code, use the product, follow the argument, check it against what you already know. Over enough years it tells you something solid. Everything else you think you know about that person is inferred from material they chose to show you, in their best light, on their best day, in a medium that pays them to look certain.
I’ve been publishing online for over twenty years, so I’ll say the uncomfortable half of this. I do it too. The week I handled something badly doesn’t get written up. The decisions that embarrass me don’t become posts. What goes out is the finished thought, not the three months of being confused that produced it. That isn’t dishonesty, it’s just what the format is, and it means the version of me that people read is edited by me.
The Two Piles
So I’ve started sorting people into two groups, and being strict about what I’ll take from each.
The first is people I know in person. I’ve seen how they handle being wrong in front of others. I’ve seen what they do when there’s money on the table and nobody would know either way. I’ve seen how they treat someone who can’t do anything for them. That kind of knowledge takes years and it doesn’t scale, and it’s the only way I’ve found to actually know something about a person rather than about their output.
The second is people I only watch. From them I take the work and nothing else. Their technical judgment, inside the specific domain where I’m able to check it myself. That’s the entire permitted surface, and it’s still worth a great deal. Some of the most useful things I’ve learned came from people I’ve never met and never will. What I stopped doing is letting any of that spill into trusting them about money, about how to live, or about anything I can’t verify on my own.
Why the Distance Matters More Over Time
If the assessment stayed still, this would be a smaller problem. It doesn’t. The second pile drifts, and the drift is invisible from where you’re standing.
One way is a change of subject. When you first backed someone on tech, you knew tech well enough to check him, so the trust rested on something real. Then he moves into an asset class, or parenting, or governance, and you keep the trust while losing every means of verifying it. Nothing about how it feels changes to warn you, because the feeling was never attached to the checking in the first place.
Another is agreement. Someone says what you already wanted to hear, and agreement feels like alignment. A man can be entirely sincere, loud about it for a decade, and still hold a position that pays on a different timeline from yours, with a downside he can survive and you can’t. He isn’t lying to you. He’s just not in your seat, and his conviction tells you nothing about whether the same trade makes sense for you, with your obligations and your time horizon.
The third took me twenty years to notice. You calibrate on someone when you’re both twenty-five and roughly nowhere, wanting roughly the same things. Two decades later he has a great deal to protect and you’ve walked your own road, and neither of you announced the turn. The trust was formed on a version of him that stopped existing at some point along the way, and you never went back to re-examine it, because re-examining old trust isn’t a thing anyone thinks to do.
None of this requires anyone to be a villain. Scale selects for it from both directions. An audience rewards having a confident position on everything, including the subjects you know least. Success hands you a set of interests to defend that your readers were never told about. Put those together for fifteen years and the person at the end is not the person you started following, even if the name and the face are the same.
Take Ideas From Anyone, Exposure From Nobody
That’s the rule I’ve landed on, and it’s simpler than it sounds. Ideas are safe to take from strangers, because an idea arrives with its own evidence and you can test it. Exposure is different. Exposure means money, reputation, career direction, or identity, and it’s the conversion from admiration into exposure that actually costs people.
There’s also an asymmetry worth sitting with. You’ve spent years with someone’s thinking. They have no idea you exist. Whatever that relationship is, it isn’t mutual, and it can’t carry the weight of a decision that affects your family. The people who can carry that weight are the ones who’d notice if you disappeared.
None of which means becoming a cynic about the internet. I still read and follow a lot of people, and I’d be worse at my job without them. It just means holding two things at once without needing to resolve them. A book can change how you think while its author is someone you’d cross the street to avoid. Both can be true, and you don’t owe anyone a verdict on which one wins.
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