My style of online participation has been shaped by 2 ideas:

1. I rarely fully understand my own positions on minutia 2. Writing is rewriting.

I write forum posts to solidify my understanding of my own interests, beliefs, and reasoning. I often edit them multiple times before moving on and ignoring the responses thereafter. I can reference them and have to other people who ask my opinion. Sometimes I do respond back to replies immediately, and sometimes I revisit days later, after I've had time to put it in my day-to-day context. It's not a hard and fast rule.

Posting stopped being about convincing someone else maybe 20 years ago (around age 30). I do post to look back and understand myself. To others, I'm sure this sounds like existential navel-gazing and self-centered blathering, but I don't mind.

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sejje 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I do the same, except mostly I delete the responses. The writing was important to me, but the reading is rarely important to someone else. It would be wasting their time.

I would guess I post about 40% of the comments I write.

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lelandfe 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Lincoln famously wrote and never mailed letters as a way to vent emotions.

	▲	EvanAnderson 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's so bizarre to me that this works and I can't say I believed it until I tried. I shouldn't be surprised that it's so easy to trick our brains. I assume the phenomenon where I write 90% of an email, save it as a draft to finish later, never remember to finish it, get asked about it and have irrefutable certainty I sent it, then finally discover it as an unfinished draft is a facet of the same trickery. Stupid brain... Grrr.

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throw0101a 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I often edit them multiple times before moving on and ignoring the responses thereafter.

"Sorry this letter is so long as I did not have time to make it shorter."

* https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/

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pbronez an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

1000% this. I write to force myself to think deeply and crystallize my opinion on things.