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Work with the garage door up (2024)

notes.andymatuschak.org

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Re: Work with the garage door up (2024)

#91

Post by Shog9 »

dvt wrote: post #69
cyberge99 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Xtwitter is NOT the best place to be. For anything unless you’re a horny cryptobro.

Curious as to why people think this (other than partisan trend-following). I've been on Twitter since 2009, and it's arguably in the best spot it's ever been, apart from Grok being pushed so aggressively. A lot of people still build publicly on Twitter. If you're conservative you can follow conservatives, if you're liberal you can follow liberals. I find Elon annoying, so I just muted his account because it seems lik…

So, I suspect the key to your experience is buried in this sentence: "I do follow politics pretty closely, and it seems relatively balanced overall."

Balance doesn't mean much by itself. Doesn't mean "informative" or even "accurate". Extremists from every walk of life screaming at each other might be in balance, but isn't much fun to be around. Note that the person you're replying to didn't even mention politics as such, much less a lack of "balance".

I watched twitter for years, starting in 2007. It was never what I'd call "good", but for quite a lot of years you could reasonably use it to follow people or topics that interested you without consuming an inordinate amount of time or attention. In fact, for most of its history you could do this without even bothering to log in - for a long time, that made it fairly useful as sort of an alert system. And that is long gone, so gone there's a good chance most folks using it now don't even remember (or never knew) that was ever a draw.

What's left is people who are logged in, _engaging_. And man, that was always the worst part of Twitter, the constant posturing and troll-baiting for clicks, pushing every viewpoint toward its extreme.

Re: Work with the garage door up (2024)

#92

Post by Gigachad »

mattkevan wrote: post #24

Genuinely curious where the best place online to do this is today. Until recently my reflexive answer would have been Twitter, but [gestures vaguely at the state of it]. Would it be Substack, Bluesky, Mastodon, a personal blog, or somewhere else? Maybe I'm overthinking it, but it's hard to know where to get started.

Against the grain here but I feel like it needs to be popularised. But have you considered trying to do it in person? Going to shared spaces, meetups, etc and talking to people.

It’s almost a dying practice but I feel it’s massively valuable in a way that can’t be replicated online.

Re: Work with the garage door up (2024)

#93

Post by nozzlegear »

kristianp wrote: post #70
mattkevan wrote: post #24

Genuinely curious where the best place online to do this is today. Until recently my reflexive answer would have been Twitter, but [gestures vaguely at the state of it]. Would it be Substack, Bluesky, Mastodon, a personal blog, or somewhere else? Maybe I'm overthinking it, but it's hard to know where to get started.

I like reddit, but feel the moderation model is too skewed towards censorship. I created an informational post recently on a niche subreddit and it seemed well received, but then was deleted by a mod with no explanation.

> I like reddit, but feel the moderation model is too skewed towards censorship

I saw that the r/dotnet subreddit banned posting personal projects or "Show r/dotnet"-type posts except for one day per week, and only in the moderator's New Zealand timezone to boot. The reasoning was, apparently, because too many people were submitting projects that might be personal promotion (the horror), and that accelerated with agentic coding taking off.

Seeing what people are building with dotnet was the only reason I used to go there. Without it, it's just an Entity Framework bikeshedding support group (DAE think we should use the repository pattern on top of the repository pattern) where Microsoft's Github projects are promoted by default instead of individuals'.

Re: Work with the garage door up (2024)

#94

Post by nkrebs13 »

simonsarris wrote: post #26
mattkevan wrote: post #24

Genuinely curious where the best place online to do this is today. Until recently my reflexive answer would have been Twitter, but [gestures vaguely at the state of it]. Would it be Substack, Bluesky, Mastodon, a personal blog, or somewhere else? Maybe I'm overthinking it, but it's hard to know where to get started.

> but [gestures vaguely at the state of it] Everyone wants to gesture vaguely at the state of it but it's still by far the best place. Just use the site the way you want to use it, post the way you wish others posted, and mute stuff you don't like aggressively.

yep, x/twitter is great (relative basis). people will confirmation bias their way to whatever matches their priors though. i spent a day or two marking things as "not interested" and blocking people -- my feed is great: 99% tech niches, 0% politics.

i find reddit to be particularly bad; a true cesspool of negativity. Seems to be mostly just bots and incels looking for someone to blame and/or somewhere to direct their unhappiness towards.

Re: Work with the garage door up (2024)

#96

Post by mavleop »

holybbbb wrote: post #95

Yeah work with the garage door up so better equipped competitors can have an easier time copying your work. Do these navel gazing blog posts come with any life experience?

I really dislike this comment as it assumes that everything is a competition and needs to make money.

If you just do things for your own enjoyment, then it’s obviously better to do it semi-publicly so that you can connect with other like-minded people or simply give online passers-by something neat to look at.

Plus, if you’re motivated by the activity and not the outcome, you don’t have to worry about competitors at all because you have no competitors.

Re: Work with the garage door up (2024)

#97

Post by dvt »

Shog9 wrote: post #91
dvt wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious as to why people think this (other than partisan trend-following). I've been on Twitter since 2009, and it's arguably in the best spot it's ever been, apart from Grok being pushed so aggressively. A lot of people still build publicly on Twitter. If you're conservative you can follow conservatives, if you're liberal you can follow liberals. I find Elon annoying, so I just muted his account because it seems lik…

So, I suspect the key to your experience is buried in this sentence: "I do follow politics pretty closely, and it seems relatively balanced overall." Balance doesn't mean much by itself. Doesn't mean "informative" or even "accurate". Extremists from every walk of life screaming at each other might be in balance, but isn't much fun to be around. Note that the person you're replying to didn't even mention politics as s…

> What's left is people who are logged in, _engaging_. And man, that was always the worst part of Twitter, the constant posturing and troll-baiting for clicks, pushing every viewpoint toward its extreme.

I do agree that engagement farming is—and has been—a problem, but as someone that worked in social media (mostly on the data side, fwiw), it's been a problem for like a decade+ now, long predating "modern" Twitter. And it's a consistent problem on all platforms (I mostly use Instagram, and it's annoying on there as well).

Re: Work with the garage door up (2024)

#98

Post by mattkevan »

nozzlegear wrote: post #93
kristianp wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like reddit, but feel the moderation model is too skewed towards censorship. I created an informational post recently on a niche subreddit and it seemed well received, but then was deleted by a mod with no explanation.

> I like reddit, but feel the moderation model is too skewed towards censorship I saw that the r/dotnet subreddit banned posting personal projects or "Show r/dotnet"-type posts except for one day per week, and only in the moderator's New Zealand timezone to boot. The reasoning was, apparently, because too many people were submitting projects that might be personal promotion (the horror), and that accelerated with age…

I’m building a new product design app that is made from the start for design systems and agentic collaboration. Tried posting about it a few times in the UX design sub as I thought it might be interesting to fellow designers, but they all got deleted by the mods for unspecified reasons even though I was careful to follow the rules. Gave up in the end.

Re: Work with the garage door up (2024)

#99

Post by fragmede »

tristor wrote: post #28

I'm kind of disappointed that this is about social media presence and not the physical world. I am a big proponent of working with your garage door up, quite literally, and I make it a point to do projects in my garage or my driveway, visible to my neighbors. I also make it a point to interact with my neighbors if they're doing a project and offer a hand or company (if they're interested in either). This is part of h…

So... join the Facebook group?

Re: Work with the garage door up (2024)

#100

Post by fragmede »

triwats wrote: post #83

THe interface - or the garage itself - is huge here. I want multiple ways to publish. Sometimes I wanna share images, sometimes I just wanna pipe output from a command and add some context. Pretty frustrated of going into apps like X that break my train of thought instantly.

makes me want to make a blogging platform that gets your post by catting to binary at the of a pipe.

    vi new-post.md
    cat new-post.md | newblogservice


    cat my-open-garage-door.jpeg | newblogservice
etc.
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