I killed my Daily News post today. Not the curation—I still get that by email each morning. Just the part where it automatically published to my blog.
I built an n8n workflow, which fetched links, ran them through AI curation, formatted the result and published it to my site. Every single morning without fail. It felt clever at the time. A personal newsroom that ran while I slept.
The problem wasn’t any one edition. Some were useful. The problem was the math.
I write maybe one post a week. Two if I’m ambitious. The Daily News posted every day. Over a year that’s 365 machine posts against 52 of my own. Seven out of every eight entries on my blog written by something I set up months ago and forgot about.
It stopped being my blog and turned into a news mirror I occasionally wandered into.
I built the thing that crowded me out. Nothing broke. n8n, curation, scheduling—the whole stack did exactly what I designed it to do. Produce content, no intervention needed. I just never asked whether any of it was worth the space it ate.
It ran silent in the background. Sound familiar? It accumulated. Day after day until the ratio flipped and I became the anomaly in my own feed.
So I retired the publishing leg. Email stays; curation’s still useful. Nobody judges my inbox ratio except me. But a blog is a signal, and when your own automation drowns out your voice, you pull the plug.
I automated the wrong thing and noticed it too late.
What else is running on autopilot that I haven’t looked at lately?