I care

Post them anyways. I post my fucking philosophy homework. Post it, and someone will respond. Post enough times, and they will have to respond.

I have like five .odt files on my desktop that are three pages about a topic no one but me will ever care about. But once in a while someone will ask a question that is tangentially related and I will self-plagiarize a paragraph or two and feel like my time was not totally wasted.

That sounds super interesting to me.

You write for you not us. These points we hand to each other actually do nothing.

I do 🥺

I have a bunch of drafts for nerdy FOSS propaganda that I just never show anyone. Even if you don’t post, you still created something useful and you should keep doing it.

Post them

My brain is usually in recovery mode after taking in so many high level ideas from hexbear dot net

Honestly, the only time I regret writing an effort post is when I realize most of the way through that I’m wrong, or that I’m saying something obvious or redundant with way too many words. Otherwise it’s just a great opportunity to properly articulate a thought. If someone else appreciates it, that’s great, too.

Saying “you should write for yourself” or whatever can seem trite, but there’s a good reason to do it, even if no one reads it or cares: being able to take something that’s in your head and properly express it to other people is a skill on its own, and not everyone has it or wants to practice it.

Think of how many internet losers (or even real life people) you’ve encountered who insist that they’re geniuses, but who never actually present any evidence of that. They think they’re smart because, in their heads, all of the things they’re thinking are correct and consistent with one another. The only way to test whether or not your ideas are valid, though, is by going through the exercise of articulating them. Writing an effort post, regardless of whether anyone reads it, requires that you satisfy yourself that what you have in your head can be expressed to someone else, or if it’s more like a feeling you remembered from a dream and don’t actually understand it. It goes beyond merely being right or wrong, it’s about whether or not your thoughts are even coherent enough to exist outside of your head.

In short, if you can’t explain something to someone else, you probably don’t understand it, and effortposting is a way of validating (or refuting) your understanding of something. The bonus is that someone else may get some value out of your post, or might help you clarify your thinking by responding, but even if all you do is post it, you at least proved to yourself that you had something to say and were able to put it in words.

Yeah, I only post like 20% of the good posts I start (I post 100% of the bad posts I start, tho)

Only write for yourself imo

I do. I think people talking passionately about things they think are important is very cool and good.

Like I can distinctly remember the times I haven’t cared because it’s so infrequent. Like the time I was drunk at a bar and another drunk dude was talking at length about the walking dead comic series and I just could. Not. Give. A. Fuck. I think I smoked like 9 cigarettes just to give my hands something to do while pretending to listen to the guy.

But most of the time I think it’s rad.

You could always do it anyway, someone might care.

I mean maybe not lmao, but perhaps!

i do that before writing anything. i’m constantly thinking about writing and then being like… who wants to read this?