I've stopped posting long-form thinking on social platforms. The reason isn't algorithmic, ideological, or tribal — though there are versions of each of those reasons. The actual reason is the cost of context.

A 2,000-word essay on this site costs the reader 8 minutes and assumes they showed up wanting it. A 2,000-word thread on a social platform costs the reader 8 minutes plus all the context-switching of arriving from a feed designed to interrupt them every 15 seconds. The same words land differently.

Worse, the context cost is asymmetric. It costs me almost nothing to publish a thread; it costs each reader a great deal to actually absorb it. The platform makes me unaware of the cost I'm imposing because I never see the readers who bounced after the second paragraph.

A static site flips this. The cost to publish is slightly higher (a git push, a thirty-second build). The cost to read is much lower (no notifications, no replies, no algorithmic next-thing). The total transaction is more honest.

This is the deeper reason I write here now. The platform was making me a worse writer by making my readers worse readers. Removing the algorithm from between us was the smallest version of fixing that.

Related: Notes on writing in public, Why I distrust productivity systems.

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