Twitter sucks. Microblogging sucks. It encourages people to make hot takes, quips, and shut others down without having any meaningful discussion.
But that doesn’t mean short-form writing isn’t useful.
I often see people use Twitter as a place where they post thoughts that come to their head without having to wrap the thought in presentable language. This might sound dumb at first (i.e. the guy who tweets “eating a sandwich #lunch” every day) but, if done right, this doesn’t seem like a bad practice to me. It can be useful to have time stamped, short-form thoughts cataloged somewhere so you can review them at a later date.
But those ill-formed thoughts don’t need to be public for the mob to dig up on you later. So what can you do to get the best of both worlds?
Timestamped notes as private tweets
This probably seem obvious, but Twitter didn’t invent the idea of time stamping texts. You can return to monke and just keep a series of your own unique, time stamped notes.
I use Obsidian’s Unique Notes plugin (a core plugin in all Obsidian installations) to create a note titled with the current date and time. I then write the one or two sentence thought that I had. I can easily open my phone and do this as fast as I would be able to send a tweet. If you really want to go old-school, simply having a pocket notebook and a pencil to write down time stamped thoughts works just as well.
What do I generally put in these notes? Looking through my current unique notes, the topics are all over the place.
- Cataloging a strong emotion I was feeling after injuring myself.
- Quoting a real-life conversation I overheard and how it made me feel.
- An argument against a comment that I read on HN, but I didn’t want to get into the emotional stress of replying to someone on the internet.
- A software project idea that popped into my head.
- A few sentences on why I like jazz and why I think others should listen to it more.
- A quote by Dostoevsky.
But these thoughts are my own. I already don’t agree with some of them, and I’m sure that as time goes on I’m going to revisit them and disagree with them. So why bother making them public?
But say I do want to make them public. What should I do then? Well…
Write a blog for public posts
One of your ideas might be worth fleshing out more. If you think it is good enough, or you just want external feedback, then you should invest the time into expanding upon your idea out and making it presentable to others. This is good for several reasons:
- It builds your critical thinking skills. It encourages you to play devil’s advocate or steel-man an opposing opinion.
- It’s respectful to others’ time. Making posts about topics that you’re ignorant about only makes people angry. You didn’t need to post that.
- It lets you add all of the flourish, caveats, etc. that conversation etiquette requires. These extra sentences can demonstrate that you’ve first put effort into your thought before requesting others’ opinions. You can say something like “I know I don’t know much about this but I also don’t know where to start learning about it. So this post represents my initial thoughts on it. Are there any recommendations for further reading?” Or, ”You might think this startup idea is similar to X, but I think it is different because of reasons Y and Z.”
Interestingly enough, this blog post itself started off as a unique note, which I then fleshed out as this. I don’t think this post is great, but I am curious what others think about it. So I spent 30 minutes of my time writing this up and posting it.
Note that none of this is unique to blogging, either. These things should be considered when writing a forum post, for example. And none of this even has to be done on the internet. Go grab a drink with a friend, coworker, or someone who is knowledgeable on the subject and talk to them about your ideas. Use these guidelines to present your thoughts to them in a humble, well-thought-out way.
It doesn’t have to be perfect, but it should come from a place of humility and respect for the reader. And in this day and age of hot takes and clap-back tweets, I think those are virtues that we could all focus on more.