# postmore: blog more and link posts to keep discussions shorter

when i partake in some philosophical email discussions, i tend to write overly long emails. and usually such emails contain thoughts about multiple topics. this can be quite exhausting for the recipient to read and respond.

often those subtopics could be a blog post on their own. while i appreciate the nuance and understanding that comes from 1:1 discussions, there's no reason to limit ideas to two people. ideas are meant to be exchanged! maybe twitter was right: one should keep the direct messages short. instead we should write more on our public spaces and simply link them in discussions. when a reader wants to respond, they can just write their own public post. not responding to a public post feels less rude than not responding to a direct message. it feels much easier to ignore a link than a long passage of text in an email.

this is not the same as a forum discussion. first, forum posts are in a context of a thread, while a blog post ideally stands on its own. you can't just write "this is dumb" as a post on its own. second, you can disable comments on your own blog, and then you'll get less responses so you'll have to worry less about them. besides, more often than not, comments bikeshed about the small points, or the specific metaphores you used, rather than talking about the overall message of the post. this then makes the comments section not a very informative place. if one has an insightful addendum or rebuttal, they should write a post on their own, notify the original author, and that author should link to that post in their original post. this is a lot more effort than comments, but i think the resulting quality is worth the effort over the long term. it also limits the amount of the content associated with each post which is rather quite an underappreciated quality these days.

in other words i'm suggesting that people should blog more. sure, more posts mean less quality and more half digested ideas. but i think that's fine, the posts don't have to be perfect. maybe over time you learn more and completely disagree with your old posts, or maybe even regret or are ashamed of your old posts. i think it's still worth to keep the old posts, so that people can see how you changed over time. you can simply edit that old post to include links to your updated views. eventually we'll all die and everything will be in vain, so in the end there's nothing to lose by opening up a little bit and writing about the thoughts swirling in one's head.

i'm actually trying to convince myself to write more with this post. i have a lot of small things that i just want to see written down somewhere publicly. most of them are possibly dumb things that i'm somewhat reluctant to share. but maybe i shouldn't be and i should still make a post about them even if it's like a one sentence's worth of content. even this post fits that criteria: i don't really have anything interesting to say here, and yet i'm already in the 5th paragraph. actually, this post is very similar to the freewriting i often do in notebooks. just jotting down thoughts one after the other as they come. now that i'm doing it for a long time, i see the psychological benefits of having a much calmer, less stressed mind in general. so i might as well do it in the form of posts more often. and others should write more too!

published on 2020-12-04

to the frontpage