Over the years, I've struggled with what I wanted my internet presence to look like. Social media has a lot of downsides which are well known and I won't enumerate here--suffice it to say, I'm not interested. The sensible alternative to this is a blog, but there are a few problems with this. In this page I will note some of those problems, and how I think a wiki in this form solves those problems.

First, blogs usually have some sort of comment feature. At first glance, allowing people to comment on what I say seems sensible and friendly, but the results of this are generally a lot of work for very little benefit. Blog maintainers can carefully curate a community with ever-present moderation, but the effort involved in doing this is massive. And exposing yourself to every poorly-thought-out commenter on the internet isn't an upside. There are a handful of places where commentary on posts is equivalent in quality to the content, and having been on the moderation side of things, I can say that people underestimate how much work goes into making that happen. The best-case scenario for comment sections is usually polite stupidity; the worst case is flaming and unironic bigotry. In short, if I care about your opinion, you probably have my contact information.

I suppose I could simply just have a blog without comments, but there's a second aspect to how people treat blogs, which I think is perhaps more important. That's permanence. There's an implication with a blog post that it is a snapshot of what the author thinks at a given time, which won't be changed. But in other people's perceptions, the "at a given time" part often gets lost. I can make a blog post with a bunch of errors, and then post a retraction years later, but if the retraction never reaches the popularity of the original post, then what people see is the original post, and they think that's what I think. In a sense, posting an idea to a blog post is committing to that potentially being your public opinion forever.

And that's crazy. My opinions on anything from Uber to ketogenic diets have changed over the years, and I hope I continue to learn. If ten years from now I believe everything I believe now, I would regard that as a horrific personal failing, among the worst things I could do. And I want my public internet presence to reflect that.

This has enormous negative effects. One thing I've noticed is that when public figures get called out for bad ideas/behaviors, they basically have two options:

1. Apologize and change, and still get canceled because nobody cares about their apology or notices their change.

2. Double down on their bad idea/behavior, and become more popular with the demographic that agrees with it.

It's my observation that most people confronted with these options choose option 2. It's not the ethically correct choice, but it's the easier and more pragmatic one if you're trying to keep a career based on popularity. There's a side conversation to be had here about making it easier for public figures to do the right thing, but that's not the topic of this page.

The point for me here is, at a personal level, I'm not committing to any of the opinions or beliefs I express here forever. I'm going to change my mind as I learn things, and I don't feel like I need to tell you that in an "EDIT:" side note. It's implied. Obviously, I can't delete anything I say from the internet if people choose to copy it everywhere, but at least I can set the expectation that my beliefs are subject to change.