Friction is a Feature

Hand writing HTML files is hard. I mean, not that hard. I've been doing it since I was a teenager, it's second nature to me now.

But when compared to a polished UI designed by a trillion dollar corporation, explicitly made with the singular goal of ensuring you are as incentivized as possible to always post more, it's certainly not easy. It requires of me to sit down at my desktop computer and use a real text editor (Shoutout to Nova by Panic!), mess with SSH connections, heck sometimes I even have to email my webhost because something is wrong with their SSH configuration, and I can't upload updates. By and large this is inconvenient.

But as it turns out, I've come to believe that the inconvenience is truly crucial. Its role is ensuring I actually have something to say, before going through the effort of saying it. When there's no effort involved, it's much too easy to blurt out some meaningless “hot take” with no other purpose than generating noise. With time, I suspect we'll come to see that was a mistake from the very start.

I acknowledge of course that writing HTML files does not represent the same level of friction for every person out there. For me it meets the threshold of being painful enough to force me to reconsider whether it's worth saying what I have to say, without being prohibitive in nature. But for someone else, that same bar might be met by having to navigate to Facebook.com and find the text box to write a post in. I'm not prescribing that this is the way for everyone, but I suspect it is for me.