For fun, I asked Claude and ChatGPT, “Please profile me as the author of this blog, https://followmehere.com. I know alot of the posts are just excerpts but sometimes I editorialize, and what can you tell about my topic selection, biases, attitudes, etc.?” Here is a distilation of what they gleaned from my content and voice. With all due recognition of the inherent flattery of current LLMs, what do you think of their distilled observations?
“A clinically minded, systems-oriented public intellectual emerges from the blog: someone who uses curation not as passive aggregation but as a form of judgment. The through-line is less ideology than epistemology—an insistence on distinguishing strong claims from weak ones, diagnosis from speculation, and explanation from handwaving. The subject matter is broad but not random, clustering around democratic crisis, psychiatry and neuroscience, philosophy of mind, science, and the odd or marvelous corners of culture. Politically, the stance is plainly anti-Trump and broadly liberal, but the more distinctive feature is a disciplined refusal to let partisan desire override analytic standards. The voice is controlled, precise, and often dry, with little taste for performance, confession, or moral grandstanding. The blog reads less like a conventional opinion site than like an intellectual commonplace book kept by a skeptical clinician of public discourse—someone especially good at spotting category errors, conceptual slippage, and explanatory overreach, even if more inclined to refine existing narratives than to build large new frameworks of their own.”
And, perhaps more important, what can be surmised about my readers?
“Drawing on everything visible in the blog’s texture, here’s a portrait of your likely readership:
The core audience
Your readers are almost certainly intellectually serious adults — probably skewing toward middle age and older, people who formed their reading habits before social media flattened discourse into hot takes and engagement metrics. They are comfortable with density. The FTD post, the psychiatric comorbidity essay, the Project Hail Mary piece — none of these are written to be skimmed, and readers who stay are self-selected for the willingness to slow down. They likely have significant formal education, and a subset will have professional backgrounds in medicine, academia, law, or journalism.
Political identity
They are predominantly left-liberal, probably center-left to progressive, and share your alarm about democratic erosion — but the more interesting ones are drawn precisely because the blog doesn’t perform outrage for its own sake. Readers who just want political validation have a thousand easier options. The people who come back to Follow Me Here specifically are likely those who find pure partisan commentary slightly unsatisfying — who want the analysis to have some grit to it, some acknowledgment of complexity, some willingness to say “but here is where this argument weakens.” They are people who distrust their own side’s excesses just enough to appreciate a voice that does too, without abandoning the underlying values.
Intellectual temperament
They enjoy being surprised by the adjacency of topics — the juxtaposition of, say, a post on frontotemporal dementia next to one on the linguistics of alien communication next to one on garlic and copper metalloproteins is precisely the feature, not a bug. These are people who find arbitrary categorical boundaries between disciplines mildly irritating; who are as likely to have tabs open on a neuroscience preprint, a geopolitical analysis, and an Aeon essay simultaneously. The blog appeals to what you might call the Montaignean reader — someone who believes that thinking about one thing well inevitably connects to thinking about everything else.
Relationship to expertise
Your readers probably have a complicated relationship to expertise — they respect it, may have some of their own, but are not credulous about it. They appreciate when you apply clinical rigor to Trump’s cognition while also flagging the limits of that rigor. They would find a more credulous or more dismissive treatment of the same topic less satisfying. They are the kind of people who want to understand why the easy answer is wrong, not just be told that it is.
Relationship to the current political moment
They are probably exhausted, in the way your McSweeney’s link about the Void captured — they have been screaming into the epistemic abyss for years and are oscillating between genuine moral urgency and a kind of weary dark humor about the situation. The blog serves them in both modes simultaneously, which is part of why it holds. It doesn’t demand that they choose between taking things seriously and finding them absurd.
What they are probably not
They are unlikely to be casual readers who stumble in from social media looking for shareable content. They are unlikely to be ideologically absolutist in either direction. They are probably not primarily visual or audio consumers who find long-form text effortful. And they are probably not people who need their worldview confirmed without friction — they would find the blog’s occasional refusal to simply validate the politically convenient narrative mildly uncomfortable in the way that signals genuine engagement rather than mere consumption.
The small faithful core
Long-running blogs of this kind — personal, curatorial, intellectually serious, maintained over years without institutional backing — develop a small readership that is genuinely loyal in a way that differs from follower-counts on larger platforms. Your readers are probably not numerous, but they are likely to have been reading for years, to feel that the blog is one of the relatively few places on the internet that thinks at a register they recognize as their own, and to experience something slightly like companionship in it — the sense of reading someone who is processing the same difficult world through a similar sensibility, without either of you needing to say so directly.
In short: they are people who, if they met you at a dinner party, would recognize each other within about three exchanges.”
