I used to be very public, just as the author prefers. However, as the amount of surveillance on the internet increased it eventually reached a tipping point for me and I switched to being much more private as a matter of self-protection.

There's no way I'd be comfortable going back to the way things used to be unless the web becomes better -- and I don't think that's happening anytime soon.

I have similar feelings as the author. I aim to be as public as possible while maintaining personal privacy. I *want* to meet other like-minded people that enjoy the same topics I do.

I treat any of my public facing information as a honeypot for nerds (i.e like-minded people). In real life, if I meet interesting people, I point them to my website. If they reach out with questions, I know I found "one of my people".

On a similar note, if I an idea, project or thought of mine could benefit someone else and allow them to learn and gain from it. I'd like to publish it with my privacy in mind.

I write for myself so I don’t forget things and so I can have a record of my thought processes as empirical proof of my processing and understanding

I publish so that I get feedback grounded in alternative interpretations which helps sharpen the ideas and processes and understanding

You can’t actually understand anything in any real way if it’s not subject to intense and widespread scrutiny

Doubly so if you think you’re onto some new idea.

> I try to apply a rule that if I do something, and don’t write about it—or otherwise generate external-facing evidence of it—it didn’t happen. I have built so many things in the dark, little experiments or software projects or essays that never saw the light of day. I want to put more things out. If it doesn’t merit an entire blog post, then at least a tweet.

I think this might be the crux of a lot of the disagreement that seems to be present with article (which I feel as well admittedly). So much of my life is stuff that isn't around things I've built or written; sometimes I'm just existing without producing, nowadays with my wife, but in the past maybe with a friend, roommate, or just relaxing alone. I'm not the type of person to be greatly concerned with my legacy or whether lots of people remember me after I'm gone as much as whether the people who do happen to remember me from the interactions I had with them have good memories. I don't see any purpose in documenting this sort of thing, and most of the time it would actively worsen the experience to do so. I don't know if this isn't something that would apply to the author's life or if they're just talking about something else specifically and don't intend to imply that it should literally be every moment, but by their own rule, if they spend any time like this, it didn't happen, so I guess it would be hard to tell the difference.

The post made me think of a different compromise: more public artifacts when we choose, without surrendering our lives to centralized platforms. Like mentioned in the comments, today’s internet is permanent, searchable, and easily weaponized through harassment, surveillance, or data exploitation, so the personal cost of being ‘public’ can be unpredictable and high. So why don’t we build a system where our identity and activity data live with us by default, on a small server in our home, instead of scattered across company clouds? Everything we do online could be logged locally under our control, and shared only when we explicitly allow it. If a company wants to use our data (for ads, analytics, or training models), it should be a clear opt-in, scoped to a specific purpose, and priced transparently. If it’s valuable, we should get paid for it and that creates incentive structures. This also matches how I want to use AI personally. I want my own local model that can learn from my data privately, say something like training or updating nightly while I sleep; so I get the benefits of personalization without handing over the raw contents of my life to someone else’s servers. In a world like that, being “more public” becomes a choice you can make safely, not a gamble you’re forced into.

~ organized thoughts with GPT5.2 and used Apple proofread

I resonate with this. I enjoy reading people's technical, artistic and personal writings. How they built, solved, or learned something new. Their favorite tools, workflows. Favorite authors, concepts, interests. @simonw is a great example of this kind of openness and working in public. I'm learning how to do that in my own way.

It makes the world friendlier, more welcoming for beginners and life-long students. It also creates a sense of community and human connection, which is often cynically exploited in today's society.

Never have so many people with so little to say, said it so loudly.

Beautifully written, and something I resonate with. But I find myself wanting to read other peoples thoughts and peer at what they are doing. But I do not want to share any of that from myself because the internet is to permanent. I do not want to create an online footprint on this internet.

As interesting as such a world is to the author, the post fails to appreciate that the beneficiaries of such a world won't be us, but AI companies that hoover this data, pollute it with "alignment", and sell it back to us.

As well as nefarious government actors.

I still love the era when everything online was text-based.