I Wish People Were More Public

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.

"And beyond my selfish curiosity there’s also the Fedorovist ancestor simulation angle: if you die and are not cryopreserved, how else are you going to make it to the other side of the intelligence explosion? Every tweet, blog post, Git commit, journal entry, keystroke, mouse click, every one of these things is a tomographic cut of the mind that created it."

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Historians pour over this sort of stuff. If a historically interesting figure wrote a letter to their neighbour to complain about a noisy dog, it's been carefully preserved and obsessively analyzed. Historians want to get inside their subjects' heads and figure out what they were thinking when they did that big, important thing, and every scrap of remaining written material helps.

We live in a period that is going to be real tough on historians studying it. Over the last few decades, physical correspondence (i.e. letters, etc.) has mostly died out. A lot of people still journal, but on their computer. Will that folder of old journal entries be found by whoever inherits your house full of junk or will it be tossed? A dead-tree diary is pretty easy to recognize for what it is. A computer's contents are comparatively easy to overlook.

Most people who have lived over the last few decades have had multiple email addresses that, at first, they eagerly used for personal interactions and then, over time, more and more only for professional/commercial correspondence. At the same time, people started writing for fun and passion under anonymous pseudonyms in a variety of online forums. Some remain online and still operating. Some have been curated and remain online. Some are archived. Some are just gone. Then came social media and texting. A huge proportion of people's most intimate interactions are in texts now, but for how much longer? We seem to be on a novelty treadmill when it comes to personal interaction mediums. Yesterday's source of joy is today's chore.

Imagine that you do something really significant in a decade or so, and some historian a hundred years from now is trying to figure out why you did it. Getting access to as much of your written output as remains and correctly associating the anonymous stuff with you is going to be a tough problem. How much of what is online today will remains? How much of it will be possible to associate with you, and not a pseudonym? Even if they speak your native tongue, they'll have to learn how to interpret your slang and texting shorthand. This sounds almost impossible today, but what kind of tools might they have in a century?

My suspicion is that history is going to remain remarkably unchanged in a very specific way: For some historical figures we'll have mountains of material for. Others, despite their importance, will be complete enigmas.

Until someone evil uses all that to investigate you or do something against you...

If you're on the internet long enough, I think you learn that openness has plenty of downsides. You indirectly interact with tens of thousands of people and in that set, there will be people who don't wish you well, sometimes for reasons you can't even grasp. In the 1990s, I used to put my phone number in my .signature file. I've come to regret that. In the 2000s, I participated in relatively large online forums under my real name, and have gotten threats mailed to my family and employer. Etc, etc.

If you want others to broadcast their lives, I don't think that moralizing is enough; you gotta offset the negatives. Which basically means "positively engage", but we mostly don't do it on forums such as Twitter.

I am. I know it’s not free but I think it’s important for humanity to move forward.

E.g. my genome variant report https://viz.roshangeorge.dev/roshan-genvue/

My wife’s pregnancy as logged by me https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Pregnancy

It's all very well being more public, until a government decides to make 5 years of social media history an entry condition[0], and moreover imprisons those people who are denied entry instead of simply sending them home on the next flight[1].

I have no problem with this per se, as I have no plans to go to the US this decade, but I do worry about contagion. Perhaps being a public person on the internet is an idea whose time has come and gone.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1dz0g2ykpeo.amp

[1] https://amp.dw.com/en/german-nationals-us-immigration-detain...

[delayed]

Everytime I intentionally interact with Meta's apps/data factories, I feel a bit like in the movie Matrix when Neo is disconnected from the Matrix, wakes up from his pod and sees the other pods. And have to admit I saw that movie when I was to young for it and that scene really did a number on me.

I don't mind being public but I mind if I'm in a way a slave to an entity that farms my identity and distorts my perception of reality.

Officials in my country of origin might lock me out of using banking and government services if I post something wrong on the internet even if I permanently reside abroad, and while I still have relatives there I cannot risk that happening. Oh and if they do and I come back they might also slap me with a 10-20-year sentence for good measure. So nope, can't afford to be any more public than I am (I'm under no illusion that connecting my nickname to my real name isn't a piece of cake, but at least it's one layer of indirection).

I imagine that many people are in very similar boats, and more and more countries steer that way as of late.

> I will often find a blog post on Hacker News that really resonates. And when I go to check the rest of the site there’s three other posts. And I think: I wish you’d write more!

I really miss that period in the 90's and early 2000's when:

- people were doing interesting things online and tending to those spaces regularly,

- Google actually worked and it was easy to find those things,

- Myspace/Facebook wasn't a thing

I'd love to have the general mood and vibe of the 90's back, which I think contributed greatly to the early Internet and the ability and desire to be public within it.

But even in the 90's, spam was a problem, and it's grown amd morphed into different things over time. Banner ad popups, link farms, SEO optimization, etc.

Age verification laws are going to fully destroy the Internet for anything other than approved business uses, such as selling stuff. Soon, any "public" left will be spammers-spammers in the modern form of influencers either directly trying to sell you something or sponsored in order to support/create a market. Some may argue we've mostly reached that point.

It's over. The forward thinkers need to think beyond the Internet. Until then it's closed groups and chats.

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.

Reading is as much engagement as writing if not more.

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

> This is one of the best things about writing online: your future friends will seek you out.

Do I live in the same reality as the author? is that really a thing as in "it happens regularly enough to be mentioned as if it was"?

Apart from this I'm so-so about this, like I believe a lot of people from my generation I'm fond of the idea of the internet as it was in the 90s, like a decentralized cyberspace of free spirit thinkers, which slowly diluted itself as decades past, and might have been at its peaks during the blog bubble and rss feed era (meeh it's arguable). But it seems like that spirit is long gone and we've been compartmentalized, our spaces enclosed like the British luddites were before us. I'm all for the permacomputing self-hosting ring websites but it seems like a thing mostly done by the cool kids, the Artists, the few that tend to do it for the performative angle more than from their own tropism or one from the culture (as it was done when it was natural to do so).

I'm not sure we could really go back to that era flavored kind of culture without burning the centralized juggernauts to the ground.

I resonate with the "honeypot for nerds" sentiment mentioned by others here. There is a distinct difference between "being public" as a performance (influencer style) and "working with the garage door open." The author seems to be advocating for the latter.

I've found that publishing raw notes, half-baked projects, or niche interests acts as a high-quality filter. It might not get mass engagement, but the few people who do reach out are almost always high-signal connections. The fear of surveillance is valid, but the cost of total obscurity is missing out on that serendipity.

No thanks.

I once was interested in things like lifelogging, radical sharing, etc. Then the internet became super toxic, and it became 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.

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.

Clearly phrased to take advantage of the "controversial opinion" for clicks. "I wish people would publish more" is what they mean, but that's not interesting. Can one even "be public"?

I think an answer is maybe to have multiple identities on the web. Like I've got real name stuff on Facebook and Linkedin and some anonymous accounts too. You keep the real name stuff safe for work and your mum seeing.

We have systematically dismantled by popular consensus the safety of liberalism and belief in a marketplace of ideas.

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.

The internet is a very different place nowadays. There are private companies using your data for profit and manipulating you. Governments prosecuting you based on what you post and bad actors trying to hack/scam you. Even if you stay anonymous. And yet I think there are plenty of people being public online, just perhaps not as much sharing the kinds of things the author mentions.

" I say reading in private is solipsistic"

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 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.

Post brought to us by the NSA

the anonymous are more honest because they don't worry about ostracization or whatever bullshit if people don't like their opinion ... i treat people with their "real name and real face" with suspicion because they're putting on a display that makes them "look good"

A very self centred viewpoint

[delayed]

When I was a child my teacher told me to never use my real name online

A lot of people are talking about the downsides and I get it - for me it's about authenticity. I think it's really lacking in today's world, and if you don't feel comfortable sharing on the internet (which is fair!) at least do it irl. We need more real human connection and people being themselves!

> I wish you’d write more!

As someone who has done a lot of public writing, I really don't think most people appreciate just how thankless the task is and what an objectively terrible idea it is to write (despite having more fan mail than I ever would have expected, which I do appreciate).

For starters, the public, as a general rule, is critical and unkind. The foundation of this is that readers generally view writing as somewhat audacious. Most readers, even (especially?) on HN, see a post and think to themselves "who does this person think they are!?" But, especially for beginning authors, it's difficult to overstate how vulnerable writing in public makes you. Even for the laziest piece of content I've created, I've spent hours thinking about and writing on the idea (other content comes after years of reflection). But when you publish it every blemish has ample time to be inspected. Critiques are ephemeral for the critic while the consequences of those critiques can be quite long lasting for the author. Even look at this comment, what a ridiculous rant in response to a well meaning post!

So writing in public incurs immediate risk, but what is risk without reward!?

The rewards for writing range from middling to being almost punishments in disguise. Do I need to mention the money? (the money authors brag about.. is well, not worth bragging about). But there are the career opportunities! Over my career I've had many people write to me from various institutions that would never hire me telling me how "valuable" my writing is (a personal favorite was authors of a paper saying my work was pivotal to theirs by it would look bad if they cited a blog, so they couldn't cite me, but boy did their appreciation make me smile!) If you're interviewing at a large company, having a name writing in the field makes you a liability. Nobody climbing the corporate ladder wants to hire competition (I've learned not to mention any of my books during certain interviews, even when they're relevant). Now I have gotten some great jobs from my writing, but in all honestly, if I had studied leetcode as much as I had written I would have made far more money for my efforts, and a much more attractive job title.

Writers are people who write despite (or, maybe secretly because of) writing being a terrible idea. If you haven't struggled with depression at least part of your life, don't bother writing (it's a tremendous leg up if the people who hate you online still hate you less than you personally have hated yourself, inexperienced dilettantes that they are). Writing involves taking perverse pleasure in putting in hundreds of hours of work for what ultimately might be no reward (and maybe even a bit of pain).

Oh, and the icing on the cake is you need to post with a pseudonym on HN so you can be allowed to be a bit of an asshole without it impacting your public perception!

All of this, on reflection, makes me realize I do in fact agree with the author. Please, dear reader, go out and write! You deserve it!

I usually don’t like it when people use unnecessary big words. But sometimes a word comes by that explains exactly the idea. One of my favorites is Schadenfreude ( it’s funny and real at the same time). When I noticed the author used Solipsism, I definitely judged him for a moment, but after I read the explanation, it was a beautiful description of his stance :)

Solipsism is a philosophical position asserting that only one's own mind is certain to exist.

Acting in public is hyperlocal - your behaviour affects those around you and gives those affected right of reply, if they have the courage to take it.

Publishing your actions on the Internet is a little different. If people were affected by the action, they are affected (likely unknowingly) by the publication too - and the audience that you grant right of reply has at best an ideological horse in the race, not true skin in the game. And not much courage is required to engage with an opposing position.

So "living publicly" on the internet leaves a permanent door open to ideological conflict, mob behaviour, and creates a disconnect between action and reaction - in both time and space.

Kinda alien for a monkey brain to wrap banana powered neurons around.

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.

We're in an environment in which a handful of billionaire techbros (and aspiring ones) have simply taken most of the world's copyrighted material, and are using it to destroy the livelihoods of people who create it.

Why give them more stuff to steal for free?

(HN techbros are slow on feeling the pain of the greed and corruption, partly because we can temporarily ride the coattails of the exploiters. And partly because we don't have field-wide strong tradition of ethics and integrity, unlike some disciplines that are objecting fiercely to plagiarism and shoddy quality. But eventually HN will feel the livelihood impact, and many AI slop poems will be written about not speaking up when some earlier groups got wronged.)

No thanks.

I wish people kept to themselves more.

Questions surrounding this has plagued me for the last years, and this is basically where I'm at right now:

* 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.

Public is that which happens once, in real time,and most importantly derives it's content from spontainious colaberations of humans.Speaking and acting to the moment. Everything else, the all of all, is a spin off from this.

I like this guy. I want to know more about him.

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 read in private, build in private, learn in private. And the problem with that is self-doubt and arbitrariness.

Certainly if you do it in public, you don't have doubt yourself. Everyone else will do it for you.

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