There is no advantage to being "more public" when it's all to common to get hit by marauding bands of idealists and trolls of all atripes. Nobody rewards you for having nuanced opinions on things like immigration publicly, nor trans rights, nor even something as banal as programming language choice.
We've now lived through a full pendulum cycle where public writing that was insufficiently woke was punished via internet lynch mobs and state pressure, and now we are seeing the exact same thing with insufficiently reactionary ideas invoking...internet lynch mobs and state pressure.
So, no, I don't think I will be more public, and I'll be unsurprised--if sad--when other rational actors do similarly.
There's no reason to be public, because people have made it clear that they'd rather support a system that attacks that than protects it.
* I am trying to write more because writing is a good skill to practice, and it's fun to discuss with colleagues and have meanings that resonate with people. Or not. I still think most use of Cloudflare is naive and unnecessary cargo culting that just adds infrastructure complexity, but last time I complained it got a reasonable amount of pushback :D
* But being a public person has downsides. The more public you are, the less of an expectation of privacy you have, and the less you are allowed to make mistakes.
I grew up as a somewhat infamous person in my local community due to sticking out, it wasn't unusual that people already knew of me when I met them for the first time. As a result I had to accept that there was no such thing for me as simply going somewhere, the chance was high that someone who knew who I was (even if I didn't know them!) spotted me.
I have lived long enough to see many people mess up being a famous public person on the internet. Often they never even wanted to be famous, it just happened and then they had to deal with the consequences. It could happen to anyone who happens to be at the right place at the right time. For hackers and similar people, it seems some just find a calling and that calling makes them well known as a side-effect.
If you do anything that could be considered novel, you risk becoming well known. If you have a public persona and people like it, you will get followers. And if that happens, your public activity becomes the bane of your existence. You will be picked apart, analyzed, and possibly targeted by people who disagree with you. People will expect you to have opinions on things and drag you into conflicts. And what you say _matters_ - you have to think about everything you say because one misstep and entire communities will mobilize against you. Many people have gotten hate for saying something controversial on a topic they had little knowledge about. This is normal in a private setting, we discuss politics we aren't experts on with friends all the time. But if you are a public person, you lose many avenues to do this.
I am Norwegian, and the lack of tech literacy in government and the general public is frankly depressing. This isn't necessarily because the general public is stupid. Bob Kåre (49) has better things to do with his life than learn about tech-politics. Norway needs more technical people to be politically active. But doing so seems downright stupid, considering the reflections above. It is practically a sacrifice.
I think the reward has to be pretty large for this to be worth considering. It is a lot better, and easier, to just stick to yourself and your circle.
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.
Only if you don't apply anything you learned publicly.
For example, I read " evil is suffering passed on" and was able to relay that quote to an entitled friend to help hen change hens perception of how hens impositions affected others.
I once was interested in things like lifelogging, radical sharing, etc. Then the internet became super toxic, and it was clear that humans who don’t like you will use any information they can find as a weapon against you. I found through real life experience that the marginal benefits I gained from sharing were outweighed by the downsides. So I no longer share.
Normalize privacy. You can engage in radical sharing if you want to take the risk, but the average person probably won’t see a net benefit from it. Don’t push people into it if they don’t want to, and respect people who prefer to stay out of the spotlight.