Friction is a Feature
11 points by abnercoimbre
11 points by abnercoimbre
Writing is hard. I want to express my thoughts in a way that is helpful for other people, but also makes me proud. I want to be correct. I want to be informed. I don't want my writing to contain blatant errors caused by poor editing.
This pressure adds inherent friction. So I reduce that friction. I write in Markdown, which is comfortable for me. I use a simple static site generator that gets out of my way. I push updates directly a repository which is built and published automatically. This is complicated for some people, but is comfortable for me.
I think others are in a similar place. While some people are comfortable throwing their words out there, others are concerned about their thoughts being perfect. More friction is the last thing we need.
For Philip, adding friction brings him to balance. For me, reducing it does.
POSSE'd from https://gracefulliberty.com/notes/friction-is-an-antifeature/
Tldr the author is better than “corporate” people because they “hand write” html in a “real editor”
A more charitable read is to take "is a feature" more as "is good for the blog" than "is objectively better". The friction induced by hand-writing HTML means publishing fewer low-effort posts which raises quality. It's easy to think that emulating professional practices would make things better (as in improve the personal blog), but maybe that's backwards.
I have definitely avoided the friction Of publishing on my blog by instead posting unpolished thoughts on social media.
Not sure if some of the ideas would have benefited from more thoughtful text… guess I will never know :)
This is somewhat like associating a "cost" with any action. Lower the cost, easy it is, to make that action. For "good" actions, low cost is preferred and I would say posting long form articles is definitely one of those good ones. For "bad" actions (sending spam emails, making infinite scrolling hard etc), I would prefer a high cost, which is unfortunately not the case with internet being cheap in certain parts of the world.