Blogging as Structured Thinking
When’s the last time you just sat down and thought about stuff?
For me, it’s not a regular habit, but I think it should be, and I think formalizing it as “blogging” is the way to make it happen.
While it could be just a me-problem, I suspect in the advent of the Instagram and TikTok eras I’m not the only one constantly on a media-powered serotonin high.
Leveraging “Blogging”
Perhaps writing a blog should be for just yourself, thinking about things. It forces you to concretize ideas, thus building scaffolding for future thoughts down the line.
If you’ve noticed changes in how you think about things over time, such as a radically different opinion, I think it’s because you’ve learned and formulated new thoughts. So writing things down in a way that others can understand forces you to address these new thoughts and make steps forward. I suppose then, you don’t need to publish everything you write. And it can be just brainstorming, or writing definitions, or drawing diagrams, maps, structures, or just lines separating things of different categories.
Also, I suspect most people are pretty bad at writing. It’d be nice to have a community helping each other just formulate thoughts and present them better. In some way that sounds a lot like Tumblr.
Ramble About Social Media
But I think though that Tumblr never would’ve succeeded on the scale Yahoo wanted it to. When you monetize through ads, you’re necessarily inviting a third party with a competing interest - the users’ attention. You can see this now with Facebook, how they have to play with the “monetization-retention” curve as investors are increasingly interested in milking their cash cow, but it’s very easy to slip up.
Even if you have a ton of metrics, humans can behave in complex long-term patterns you’ll fail to notice, especially when you priortize “growth”. As an example, I think the “high interest” timeline order probably got a lot of engagement (and thus good for both “retention” and monetization) but as users got used to the new hedonistic treadmill pattern over a long period of time, that engagement faded out, and I suspect the eventual level of engagement is lower than the original chronological order.
Back to me
I realize I’m saying “I suspect” a lot, but also I realize this is just me thinking about things now. I don’t do this enough. I’m terrified to publish shitty thoughts memorialized on the internet forever.
But whatever, these are actually just for me, you reading this post is just happenstance.
Maybe once I churn out enough content I’ll hire an editor and achieve 450x growth like that one guy 🤔
P.S. Also, I’m going to start posting these on Hacker News and using it as a comment section. Because if you’re not embarrassed about shipping, you’re shipping too late!
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