There’s a particular kind of person — and I think most of us working on the internet have been this person at some point — who treats their feed as their writing practice.
I did this for years. It felt productive. It wasn’t.
The cost of fast
Short, frequent posting selects for thoughts that can survive being compressed to a paragraph. That’s a real skill, but it’s not the same as thinking carefully. Long-form writing forces you to notice when an argument falls apart in the middle, when you don’t actually have the data you thought you had, when the thing you were so sure of yesterday turns out to depend on a definition you can’t pin down.
When the cycle is fast, you ship the half-formed version, get some likes, and the thought never finishes maturing.
What slow looks like
For me, slow looks like:
- A note in a draft that sits for a few days
- A rewrite where I throw out the original premise
- Letting an idea cool until I’m bored of my own cleverness
- Publishing the version that’s honest, not the version that’s clever
This site exists partly to enforce that rhythm. There’s no streak to maintain, no algorithm to game, no “engagement” to chase. The only signal I get is whether someone replies to the email — which is the signal that’s worth paying attention to anyway.
Permission to publish less
Most of what gets written about writing online assumes you should be writing more, faster, louder. I think for most of us the right move is the opposite: write less, write slower, and let it be a little less clever.
The good stuff takes time.