If I post something to a forum, there's an implicit assertion that this thing I'm posting should be interesting to that community. Otherwise I'm wasting people's time with noise. Something feels egotistical about assuming that people in some community want to hear my hot takes.

On the other hand, if I tweet or post on my own personal blog, then I'm not making any assertions that my writing is valuable. It's entirely up to other people to choose whether to follow me or unfollow me depending on whether they get any value out of it. This makes me feel much more comfortable posting random thoughts.

Only if you make the value judgement that having hobbies that are centered around one's self is intrinsically narcissistic and therefore bad. If you think of "self-centered" simply as "centered around one's self," then there's no doubt that writing in a place that people visit with the specific aim of reading your writing is more "self-centered" and writing in a place where people visit to participate in a wider community, and are thereby exposed to your writing, is less so.

I don't even understand the claim that asserting that your writing could be interesting to a wider community is more "self-centered" than not asserting that your writing could be interesting to a wider community, and therefore should be in a place all to itself where people would only visit if they were specifically interested in you.

I think the words for the feeling you're describing are "self-important" or "egotistical." Let's instead assume that neither choice is a moral failure.

"Egotistically obsessed with oneself."

Using "self-centered" in a neutral way is significantly less common than using it in a derogatory way, hence the previous poster's response to the phrase.

Not everybody is narcissistic on Twitter and some people add value with their expertise, but a lot of people are seriously self centered.

If all you wanted to do was write down your random thoughts and truly didn't need for anyone else to see them, then you could journal them on a piece of paper instead.

Being public means you can still access old posts even if you get locked out of your account.

But I do copy everything to local, backed-up storage.

What I haven't done yet is make it public. I expect this to be easy as I'm a full-stack dev with a custom CMS already.

There's two obstacles to that happening, however: 1) I don't believe anyone cares (yet), and 2) I'd need to check literally the entire archive for anything I don't want to publish, because I occasionally paste secrets there.

The common goal is community. You have a small gaming forum and you're talking with your gaming friends about strategies and mods and maps you've made and you connect over the shared interest.

The new goal is commercial. By writing sufficiently engaging content or understanding how to play the algorithms, or how to play the memes you can expand your reach/influence/follower-count. Now your writing is a private marketing channel. The other side of the commercial goal "coin" is the idea of discovery. There are lots of people looking for new things to read, and these are the people that commercial goals are trying to get in front of.

Things like the "endless feed" cater exclusively to discovery/commercial goals.

FYI: I'm working on an open-source self-hosted private blogging system called Haven[1] that explicitly excludes discoverability and commercial as goals.

[1]: https://havenweb.org

For instance, Adam Tooze, an economist historian. He is very active on Twitter, runs a weekly paid and unpaid Substack news letter and has also recently taken to podcast. This, besides writing articles for magazines. He also has his personal website which I guess aggregates all/most of his content.

It’s quite daunting to keep up with his rate of high quality content creation, but I guess it helps that he’s had a few decades of experience in his field and is a professor so is used to engaging with community.

I hate the meme of everything being some "content creator" hustle. I post on forums about hobbies and stuff I enjoy. The last thing I want is that medium invaded by a bunch of social media hustlers trying to sell me dumb shit.

The reason you're asking a question is to have it answered. If the question is not compelling enough to get a reply, you have failed to get the information you want, and your efforts have been wasted. The reason you're picking a nit in public is because you either want other people to empathize with you, argue with you, or both. Otherwise you'd keep it to yourself.

But I'm not going to shop and edit a question to make it extra compelling. It gets answered or it doesn't. Depending on the forum's rules I might be fine bumping it later to get some extra attention later.

I'm also not going to spend more time than necessary to write some post talking about something. I might want to start some type of conversation but again I either get a conversation or I don't.

I'm not going to make a post "more compelling". I get replies or I don't. I have no personal identity tied up in the process. I might want to have a conversation but little is lost if I don't have one.

Sure, that doesn't mean I've got to compose some social media hustle SEO keyword laden engagement over all else bullshit post. I'm on forums covering hobbies. It's not a job and I'm not hustling. I like to spell check and use at least passable grammar but I'm not writing a novel. Forums are a step up in formality over chat rooms. If everything's a hustle then everything is stressful and nothing is fun. I've got enough not-fun shit to deal with, I don't need to pull that into forum posts about Star Trek or whatever.

I've been on web forums for a couple decades now, I'm well aware of how to contribute but thank's for the advice.

If you did that here or anywhere else self respecting, you’d be met with loneliness. We wouldn’t partake.

I’m sure you know, as I do. There’s no pretty picture next to my name, no claims of success, but I can post here. I have good thoughts or ideas or I don’t, literally nothing else matters.

Here, at least. But you already know I’m doing fan service to you.

Many of these tools and centralized platforms automate most of the process (encouraging even structural uniformity), and that's quite convenient in many cases. I think most people would be surprised what kinds of communities can arise from humble links and by-hand human convention even on a read-only network (where we can only write to our own node).

I don’t like the phrasing of “owning the means of production”—no matter where you express your thoughts, presumably you will always own those particular means of production—but agreed on distribution. Still, if one is thinking in terms of “distribution” and “publishing” with regards to their thoughts or writing, one definitely leans towards a platform, be that microblogging or something else; for others this is not even a problem as they rather seek exchange of ideas or the feeling of belonging.

The point about playing with the limits of a medium is appreciated. I suspect if this problem is tackled with an engineering/experimental mindset, rather than identity mindset, interesting results could be achieved. However, on the face of it, doing this publicly seems to require either certain fearlessness or a healthy degree of sociopathy—being OK experimenting with communication, even if it means being fatally misunderstood. (I don’t mean sociopathy in a bad sense—I myself follow a few accounts, many anonymous, who do this kind of explorative posting and I enjoy it a lot. Maybe their owners engage in what @vgr calls “minimum viable sociopathy”.) In this sense, a community provides a shared framework that reduces the chance of this misunderstanding, which could be appealing to some.

Creating my own space enables me to provide or define a structure into which contributions are placed. I've found the structures (or structurelessness) of virtually all third-party platforms to be ultimately highly distracting and unsuited.

(My own structures also usually show their own weaknesses over time. This doesn't keep me from trying to improve on them, and perhaps find a different form (e.g., non-hiearachical, multiple dimensions or facets) that affords greater utility.)

Organising and managing all of this is incredibly time-intensive. (The fact that I've been more-or-less attempting to do this under a set of increasingly adversarial external circumstances for much of a decade ... rather proves this point.)

If a personally-managed platform gives structure, then large public fora give reach, exposure, and increased potential for engagement (though very often of a much lower quality than a specifically-focused space). These are trade-offs. I make them with a strong awareness of them.

Virtually any general-public forum becomes immensely noisy. Whist illuminating tangents are gold, irrelevant or very tired ones are rather less so (see HN's own guidelines for avoiding shallow and/or dogmatic diversions). Having to repeatedly address the same very basic points becomes tiresome, and the inability to bundle, aggregate, and address in mass repetitive and tiresome points is a particular source of pain. Temporality is very often the principle (or only) organising mechanism, and any substantive discussion developing over time is actively deprecated and pushed out of public view by newer material, that almost always of vastly lower interest. (Power laws: high value is of much lower frequency.) Time-ordered presentation inherently promotes low-quality content.

(This affects HN as well. I've commented that at least via Algolia Search it's possible to find the highest-ranked (if not necessarily best) stories of a given period: day, week, month, year, or other: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28806795)

An extreme frustration I have with federated protocols to date has been their lack of effective search. Mastodon and Diaspora* both exhibit this. HN has been more useful to me in many ways due to its excellent Algolia-based search capabilities. Reddit has no comment search at all, but pretty powerful post-based search, which for "self-post" based subreddits proves reasonably useful.

I've remarked for years on how the instructional method used by the Scholastics of lectio, meditatio, and quaestio seems as if it might be very useful to resurrect, though how to do this effectively in an asynchronous distributed format is a real challenge. Paraphrasing slightly:

- lectio is Reading the Fine Article. It emerged as practice because books were literally worth more than gold, and too expensive to grant students their own copy. A university lecture was often literally the professor reading the book to the class.

- meditatio was an interval in which the content was considered and reflected on, before questions and disputes were raised.

- quaestio was a submission of questions based on the passage. Thse were asked, but not immediately answered (a practice still observed by some institutions, the London School of Economics comes to mind where 5--6 questions are asked, then answered in one pass by the speaker). Disputationes were explorations of controversies.

It's all very ... mediaeval ... but also at least ensures that the disucssion 1) is based on having been exposed to (if not informed by) the material and 2) questions and commentary are moderated and managed in a way that should encourage substance and minimise disruption.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholasticism#Scholastic_metho...

What we have now faces markedly different circumstances:

- Reproduction of content (textual, audio, images, video) is trivial. Getting everyone to access that at the same time is ... harder. (Oddly: in the broadcast world, especially before personal recording systems were prevalent, this was less the case.)

- Conversations occur with participants distributed across space, and often at least staggered in time. Most significantly focus and attention are rarely concentrated on any one specific discussion. Spatial orientation, literally gathering participants within a single chamber, affords far greater attentive orientation. We are trading reach for focus.

- Assuring and assessing RTFMedness is difficult. Much discussion is initiated by little or no awareness of the actual material at all. (Mind: I do this myself as much as anyone, though I try to be aware of it and chide myself not to.)

- Questions and discussions tend to be less rather than more moderated. There are exceptions, but they're rare. Odds that a given discussion remains productive and reasonably focused on a large / general-access site are quite low. Where threads can be personally-managed (e.g., Diaspora*), I've managed to at least have a few smaller-scale, longer-term, and productive discussions (often 4-10 participants, but lasting over days or weeks, occasionally months).

All of this of course assumes that substantive discussion (or even just good shitposting) is a primary goal of such platforms. Most often it's not; advertising reveue is the overarching consideration. Sadly this is sort of an anti-Midas touch: everything it comes in contact with turns to shit.

It's also long struck me that pairing a discussion and wiki (or other distillative format) site would be a superpower of sorts. Reddit's exceedingly anaemic Wiki functionality offers the merest of hints of this potential power, and the fact that that's not been more significantly developed remains a major disappointment.

I haven’t experimented much with how I present my thoughts, but much as Paul Graham has asserted repeatedly, I pursue longer-form writing to better structure my thoughts.