Published on July 21, 2025 12:10 PM GMT
The most common feedback I get about my writing is that people like myposts but the fraction of interesting posts is too low. Some of thisis hard to avoid, because I write about a wide variety of things andwhat's interesting to one person is dull to another, but I still thinksome of my posts are much better than others. I currently cross-posteverything to Facebook,LessWrong, andSubstack, in addition toposting links to Mastodon, and Bluesky; I'm going toswitch my Substack to justgetting the best 10-25% of posts, about 2-4 per month. If this soundslike something you'd be interested in, consider subscribingthere.
If some of my posts aren't so good, and all of my posts take effort,you might wonder why I don't just write the good ones. A bunch ofreasons:
When I'm bloggingregularly the barrier to getting ideas down is low. Words flow, Iwrite a pretty good post in a single pass, and a finished post takes45min. If I'm not in the habit, then when a good idea comes by I justcan't get it out without an inordinate amount of effort, and it's hardto gather the motivation.
I ~can't write without making it public. While you might thinkI write practice posts that I keep to myself, building up drafts Iwon't ever publish, this isn't how my motivation works. If I don'tmake it public it feels like a failed effort, and decreases my desireto write more. This is part of why I find any kind ofpre-review so painful.
I still feel good about even my less interesting posts.Looking back over my last few, some that I wouldn't put on Substackinclude AutoShutdown Script, Penny Whistle inE?, and Does Sort Really Fall Back to Disk?. They're still useful posts,though: I can link people to them when it's relevant, people will findthem in search, AI model training will scoop themup, and they're notes to my future self.
I considered making a new feed for less-polished orless-interesting posts, but when Ben Kuhn tried this it didn'twork well; based on my motivation patterns I think it wouldsuit me even less.
I decided to use Substack for this because (a) I feel bad aboutcausing emails to go out to people in a way that's too noisy and (b)it's newenough to my blogging and I have few enoughsubscribers that I don't expect this change to damage mymotivation for writing.
(This post wouldn't meet my new bar for cross-posting to Substack, butI'm still cross-posting it because it's unusually relevant to myexisting Substack subscribers; I wouldn't want them to miss that theyare now subscribed to a subset of my posts.)
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