WeWrite is philosophically opposed to the idea of Posts. A Tweet is a post. An article on Substack, Medium, or Beehiiv is a post. A post is content that's published at a specific point in time, usually never to be worked on again. It's a snapshot. All the editing and drafting happens behind the scenes, until the author is finally ready to step into the limelight and click the "publish" button.
Sometimes this stage fright leads people to not even click the publish button. Sometimes good ideas are abandoned in the drafts folder. What a shame!
Knowledge Gardens
The philosophy of WeWrite is that we should all be drafting our little essays and thoughts and ideas in public, all the time. We should be seeding each other's ideas with our own, we should be donating to pages that seem promising.
This is like cultivating a little knowledge garden, whereas post-based systems hide all the hard work put into the garden and only show the final product. Not everyone is a content machine. Let's let people just live.
The Content Treadmill
Any app that incentivizes posting is contributing to the infinite content treadmill. It's a rat race. Run faster to get less far. Now ChatGPT will outrun you. The loud and verbose win over the humble idea-tinkerers. What happened to deep introspection? What happened to building greatness? Our tools do not incentivize such things. Our pornographic culture doesn't recognize that The Good must be cultivated over a lifetime, but we seek instant gratification.
This "treadmill" metaphor is borrowed aptly from the "Hedonic Treadmill" where the slave to pleasure must endlessly chase evermore potent "highs" and is left unsatisfied in the end.
WeWrite is the cold shower of one online self. Take it slow, build your ideas in public. They're not finished. You might not finish them in your own lifetime. Perhaps that will be job of your grandchildren.
Work in progress
Appropriately, I'll admit this piece is a work in progress. I kind of meander to and fro, but I wanted to get this out so I can go back and improve it. And if this were published on WeWrite, you could donate to this page to encourage me to improve it or expand on it!
Who isn't guilty?
Who isn't guilty of the content treadmill? Despite its flaws, GitHub's activity feed seems to be a decent measure of "real work" being done. That being said, the nerds in the GitHub community quickly figured out how to game it to create either custom activity feed designs or fake data to make it seem like they're accomplishing a lot.
See also
Say Less
