Writing is networking for introverts

Perhaps, but this sounds like what someone who doesn't know many extraverts would say.

If your default preferred way of being isn't "with other people" -- to the point where you feel anxious when you're alone for any reasonable length of time -- you're probably some flavor of introvert?

It is. It's also more than that.

Writing is a communication medium.

For some of the reasons we want to communicate, it's the perfect tool for the job. For some of the reasons we want to communicate it's a bit rubbish.

Writing is extremely abstract. It has less of a connection to our subconscious, it's a long, long way from the real world. Humans are creatures driven by human shaped, in person interaction.

Quieter cats love writing for exactly that reason, the emotional ups and downs are much more mellow.

I find though, many people use writing and other tools as a band-aid for how they deal with their emotions. Instead of exploring them.

Instead of seeking, enjoying, laughing, crying, being curious about at all the joys of life, they use multiple abstractions to control their emotions.

Rather than throwing themselves into an emotional whirlwind and growing as a person, they throw up safety barriers. They never figure out how they, themselves actually work.

They'll happily devote years of their lives towards optimizing language compilers, without even thinking to learn what makes the Mountain Dew compiler tick.

I think this could be achieved by indexing only tags on blog posts. Aside from having to groom the tag corpus (maintaining sets of synonyms would probably be a big part), this would seem to be a fairly pain-free way of deriving some of these associations. It could be extended into "hmm, what other things are the people I share this with also interested in," which happens to be just about where I think the entire field of recommendation engine research should have ended. But I digress.

Yes, you would have to use tags to participate if you weren't already, but that just makes it opt-in.

tl;dr: faces usually don't matter

I read blogs from authors I have no idea what they look like or where they live or anything, some for almost 20 years, and longer than even that with ppl on IRC. All you need is some consistent identity for people to internalize, which in a lot of cases is a nickname, username, or whatever. Heck, I'm certain a site that used only database IDs to identify users would see (stronger, perhaps) connections form just the same as you see on LinkedIn. "On 11/21/21, 384372 wrote:..." Furthermore I'd bet that there are people who still think to themselves something like "I wonder what happened to 'gardenfloot' on Napster."

>On a related note, I often wonder how people are so sure it’s him.

It's him because it's his (I assume) channel and username. That's a reasonable assumption under the social contract such that any aberration would likely be an emergency or a successful hack or something. There have also been groups of people who act as a single online identity, but yours doesn't sound like it's that at all.

I also think celebrity itself is transforming into something a little less oriented around mobbing and paparazzi, and that being recognized is something relative nobodies can get and somebodies can lose, increasing the number of doppelgangers and diluting the entire celebrity industry.

If you see it the other way around - you just need one person to discover your writing to unlock the depth of your thinking as a person.

Writing for the internet > Doing that one on one through networking IRL