Doing a little "housecleaning" today on my PeakD "Drafts" folder. Amazing what has accumulated in there, particularly given that I copied over a good number of partially finished pieces from the old SteemPeak front end.
I suppose the argument could be made that there's not much use in saving "old" drafts around here because we work with this short 7-day window here, so a lot of ideas quickly grow "stale on the shelf." It's interesting to consider the implications of that short exposure... and that this is really my first experience of writing and contributing substantially to a venue that looked for anything other than "evergreen" content.
I was pretty much trained to write evergreen content. You know "relevant NOW, relevant next week, relevant next YEAR." Which suits me fine, as I am generally too slow to develop and create time sensitive content... I spend far too much time mulling things over in my head, getting ideas "just right" and then making it all "pretty" for publication. I'd never make it as a news journalist!
Anyway, getting back to my drafts folder, there were some fairly interesting pieces that basically got "round filed" today.
Among them, several explorations that were immediate post mortems of the Steem/Hive fork debacle. The articles are irrelevant now, but I did notice that I was remarkably consistent in my assertions that Steem would NOT just roll over and die following the Hive community exodus, because of my old cynical view that "the money" will pretty much always trump idealism.
And I also wrote — several times — that JS might be an a-hole and a megalomaniac, but he didn't end up a billionaire as a result of making stupid business decisions. I don't say that to defend him, just to point out an inconvenient reality of human existence. Most "great" business people are basically a$$holes.
And here we are, some 14 months later, and Steem is basically doing its thing, and Hive is basically doing its thing. That's the thing about reality. Reality doesn't care whether we want it to be true.
I definitely wrote my share of interesting "opinion pieces" during the early days of Covid-19... mostly roasting people for not being able to distinguish between the actual illness being a real and potentially dangerous thing, and it's presence being what might be due to nefarious motives.
Again, as humans, we seem to be very fond of being able to wrap up complex issues in a single simplified and neat package, when those situations actually include a myriad shades and nuances to consider.
The thing about "fence sitting" is that it's not always about being wishy-washy... sometimes it's about being able to think for yourself, and then being willing to stand apart and declare that NEITHER side in an argument has sufficient information to make intelligent choices.
Of course, there were a number of "opinion pieces" on the US Presidential election which never got published.
One of them still included a somewhat famous photograph of someone standing inside the US Capitol, waving a Confederate flag. 4-6 months later, and all those articles are basically as useless as last week's fish.
Looking at that particular set of writings served mostly as a reminder of why I largely abandoned Facebook back in late 2016.
Of course, not everything in my drafts folder was round filed — far from it. In spite of deleting some 40+ previously unfinished posts, there are still more than that remaining.
Most of them are on psychology, community building and broader topics of the Human Condition and what it means to be alive in 2021 and beyond. There are also a good number of explorations of one of my "pet" subjects: Universal Basic Income. Or rather, the "hybrid" versions of it, created by various private entities, rather than governments, to allow people 20-50 years down the road the basic means of survival when 50% of "jobs" as we know them today will have been wiped off the map by the incursion of automation.
One of the reasons I enjoy sorting through my accumulated drafts now and them is to ascertain what sorts of trends keep coming up in my thinking... and then exploring those.
Of course, I'm also reminded that my thinking tends to be all over the map, most of the time!
Thanks for reading, and have a great remainder of your week!
How about YOU? DO you end up saving a lot of partly written posts? Or do you pretty much go from start to finish to publication every time? If you do have a full drafts folder, do you learn anything about yourself from what's sitting in there? Comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!
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Created at 20210512 12:40 PDT
0260/1503
I'm not at the part where I have enough ideas and inspiration to start various drafts yet. A little while ago, I did delve into my Wordpress blog and found a few old ones there. I do get ideas on topics that I write down for later use and I do the same for designs. When inspiration really hits though, most of the time I create it all in one go (and do some touching up later if I wait to publish). I'm not one for postponing when I'm in the flow. I should learn though, because sometimes I work on one piece long enough to give myself a headache.
I at some point thought of doing that... but at some point I go back and read what I have written and I die in cringe, so that plan quickly got abandoned! Most of the things I wrote were rolled out on the day I thought about it, mostly in one writing session as well, since I find leaving a draft and coming back to it later makes the thing tastes weird.
But you reminded me that I have a document sitting in my Dropbox. It was planned as a light novel or just a light-hearted story something like that, and I already had that document for years, but, yeah, it never got more progress than getting a title. Now I'm not sure if I want to start on it as well... sounds like a cringefest!