I do the same. I write tweets, or facebook notes to family or friends -- argumentative or loving. Or hacker news comments, or blog posts, or whatever. I often spend a surprising amount of time in editing, re-reading, and honing them out.
Then, I tap `CTRL+A, delete, CTRL+W`.
I have an old draft post where I mused about a coworker's hamfisted and awkward attempts to magnify the voices of those around him whom he felt were under-represented. He, a cisgender cissexual 30s-ish white tech guy, would often single out visible-minority individuals and then loudly try to cajole them into giving opinions on topics he felt they should have opinions about, or whenever he felt they were being unheard. It was surely coming from a good place, but without fail, it made his targets and everyone else uncomfortable. It was interesting, so I wrote about it.
Then I didn't post it, because I really don't know if my own take as another 30s-ish blah blah white tech guy on some hamfisted attempt to be an ally would ring true or read well at the time. Or especially years later. But I wrote it and then stashed it. Part of that 'chilling effect,' right?
But, I also wrote a big 'intro to contributing to open source' post, which I felt was too long and rambling, maybe had its own share of bad takes, and I honestly worry that I'm not qualified to post it. I'm just some guy! So I stashed that, too.
Was I self-censoring in the most dangerous way in the first instance, but not in the second? What brings about the distinction? I felt in both cases that the post might reflect poorly on me, so I didn't post it.
Snowden's post reads to me a bit like a writer's writing about having writer's block. I imagine him sitting down to write something, because he has this big new writing project he has to do, the newsletter. He comes up with 10 ideas, but then in thinking about really seriously grappling with each of them, he crosses each one out. Who is he, after all? Just some guy! He did a great thing that one time, that doesn't make him an expert on every info-sec/cultural/political topic du-jour.
So... what's left? Well, he can write about what he's going though! And 'how bad it is to censor yourself' is a pretty unique and elevated take on writing about 'how hard it is to figure out what to write', so, voila.
(And I'd love to just delete this rather than post it.)
> Was I self-censoring in the most dangerous way in the first instance, but not in the second? What brings about the distinction? I felt in both cases that the post might reflect poorly on me, so I didn't post it.
If you as an individual self-censor on a particular topic because of a lack of expertise, that's not particularly dangerous to society - different people have different areas of knowledge, it'll all average out.
If the environment around a particular topic leads every moderate to self-censor on that topic, that is a lot more dangerous because it applies systematically; the societal discourse on that topic will be dominated by zealots who may steer us ever further astray.
No “perhaps” necessary—Facebook employees have even published academic papers based on this.
> Social media also affords users the ability to type out and review their thoughts prior to sharing them. This feature adds an additional phase of filtering that is not available in face-to-face communication: filtering after a thought has been formed and expressed, but before it has been shared. … Last-minute self-censorship is of particular interest to [social networking sites]…
> In this paper, we shed some light on which Facebook users
self-censor under what conditions, by reporting results from a large-scale exploratory analysis: the behavior of 3.9 million Facebook users.
Thanks for fighting the urge to delete and posting this. I appreciate the nuance of your perspective, and I think it brings a lot of value to this discussion. I don’t particularly want to express an opinion about the broader topic under discussion, but I do think that regardless of the cause, introspection of our “hot takes” as to whether they’re worth taking public or not is a valuable thing, and something it seems like not enough people do.
Then, I tap `CTRL+A, delete, CTRL+W`.
I have an old draft post where I mused about a coworker's hamfisted and awkward attempts to magnify the voices of those around him whom he felt were under-represented. He, a cisgender cissexual 30s-ish white tech guy, would often single out visible-minority individuals and then loudly try to cajole them into giving opinions on topics he felt they should have opinions about, or whenever he felt they were being unheard. It was surely coming from a good place, but without fail, it made his targets and everyone else uncomfortable. It was interesting, so I wrote about it.
Then I didn't post it, because I really don't know if my own take as another 30s-ish blah blah white tech guy on some hamfisted attempt to be an ally would ring true or read well at the time. Or especially years later. But I wrote it and then stashed it. Part of that 'chilling effect,' right?
But, I also wrote a big 'intro to contributing to open source' post, which I felt was too long and rambling, maybe had its own share of bad takes, and I honestly worry that I'm not qualified to post it. I'm just some guy! So I stashed that, too.
Was I self-censoring in the most dangerous way in the first instance, but not in the second? What brings about the distinction? I felt in both cases that the post might reflect poorly on me, so I didn't post it.
Snowden's post reads to me a bit like a writer's writing about having writer's block. I imagine him sitting down to write something, because he has this big new writing project he has to do, the newsletter. He comes up with 10 ideas, but then in thinking about really seriously grappling with each of them, he crosses each one out. Who is he, after all? Just some guy! He did a great thing that one time, that doesn't make him an expert on every info-sec/cultural/political topic du-jour.
So... what's left? Well, he can write about what he's going though! And 'how bad it is to censor yourself' is a pretty unique and elevated take on writing about 'how hard it is to figure out what to write', so, voila.
(And I'd love to just delete this rather than post it.)