And if you're going to publish something, for heck's sake don't publish it on facebook.com. It's a terrible platform for content. To even read this article, I had to sign into facebook, deny a prompt to provide alerts, close 4 messenger windows, etc. etc. Not a good way to read.
"Pollute everybody's attention as much as you can, since occasionally you might say something useful"<p>It's the ego-centered approach to publishing, maximizing your returns, at a large cost to the commons. (If everybody follows that advice, the Internet will be a smouldering garbage heap. Wait, they do, and it is)<p>I'd much rather all of us focused on publishing something that has an actual chance of being useful. Be picky. Respect other people's time and attention.<p>And as a reader, choose authors that have proven to respect your time. (Or, alternatively, have others pre-filter the garbage stream for the jewels)
The missing caveat form the title would be: IF and only if your goal in writing is to get your words in front of as many eyes as possible.<p>I write as an exercise to clarify my thinking and organize thoughts, and much of my writing is thereby naive and off-target because my thoughts aren't yet fully baked. I would not want something accidentally blowing up and getting 300K views unexpectedly. That simply isn't what my writing is for.
Most comments are already contrary to the article, but to add to the sentiment, my English professor memorably said, "Free writing is like going to the bathroom. Very important, but you don't need to show the results to the world" (I think his wording was more eloquent, but the theme is correct).
This needs to be read with the mindset that it's for people who've decided to publish opinions, and care about having more people read them.<p>There are lots of reasons you might not want to do that: you're the kind of person who picks stupid fights[0], your opinions are deeply hated by most people, etc.<p>For the people it's aimed at, I think it's close to being right. For many others, writing is a tangential part of what they do, and they ought to be a lot more careful. But that probably also means giving up on having a lot of people read their opinions. You can't spread your ideas with one hand tied behind your back.<p>[0] Not being judgmental here...I've picked too many stupid fights in my time.
contrariwise:<p><i>That is not such a terrible outcome, but neither is it an especially good outcome. The quality of my e-mails and public speaking is, in my view, nowhere near that of my novels. So for me it comes down to the following choice: I can distribute material of bad-to-mediocre quality to a small number of people, or I can distribute material of higher quality to more people. But I can’t do both; the first one obliterates the second.</i><p><a href="https://www.nealstephenson.com/why-i-am-a-bad-correspondent.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nealstephenson.com/why-i-am-a-bad-correspondent....</a><p>(pardon the utterly horrible formatting)
The attention merchants soliciting as much free content as you can produce so they can exploit it.
The emails we get saying what is recently posted on FB and how you are missing out by not participating. It's all increasingly naked and greed driven...and quickly destroying brand allegiance and credibility...
I really REALLY hope people will take the opposite approach. Publish well thought out, well edited, original pieces. Take your time and reflect. Quality over quantity.
Bad idea. Maybe for journalists on a deadline (and there's a plethora of that already).<p>Instead, publish what you believe is solid, worth the effort to read, and has lasting value ... for at least a small audience.<p>You have to be the jaded editor missing from the loop. There's plenty of verbal clutter in the world.
And this way of thinking makes the world fill up with garbage. I'm doing the opposite: I never publish anything unless I'm proud of it and I can defend it as being of good quality. The world doesn't need another useless piece of anything.
>Publish pretty much everything you write because you can’t predict what is going to be popular. There is a lower bar for quality, but barring dishonesty and literally unreadable prose, everything else should go out somewhere.<p>Extremely reckless advice, so many people have lost their jobs, friends, and livelihoods due to publishing the 'wrong' thing on facebook. And the definition of 'wrong' is ever-changing. Bottom line is you need to consider the downside tail risk if you want the upside tail risk, this post baits you with the latter.
This just sounds like Facebook begging for more content so it can profile more people.<p>"You just published a blog post on cats? We didn't know you like cats! Here's 15 ads about cats. And we sold your name to a mail-order cats-for-sex company. But that's OK because you agreed to that by clicking on something at one time years ago. Or maybe it was when you visited a 'partner' site and didn't click on anything at all. Still, it's all cool because we're 'friends' and you 'like' us!"