¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

I am a fan of the Stack Exchange network, which includes Stack Overflow.

At the time of this post, I even link to my profile there from the footer of this website.

Nonetheless, nothing beats owning your own content:

Theodore R. Smith:

If someone with 20,000+ karma has their nicely-formatted questions closed so quickly, what must the newbies and rank-in-file encounter? This is probably a big reason why it’s declining.

Moderators tend to be extremely (nit)picky there, oftentimes in a way that is obtrusive and wielding gatekeeping, especially to newcomers.

It’s great when you’re under the radar and avoid them; otherwise, it can be quite cumbersome although, statistically speaking, it’s unlikely that you would encounter this experience. It only happened to me once in 12 years using the site – but it’s worth to note I am not much active there.

I am trying to post these “today I learned” posts in my own blog for a myriad of reasons, some of them including a) owning my content, b) not having to fight for the right of my own content to exist, c) not wasting time on frivolous discussions with moderators.

And there’s a bit of a psychological dopamine hit as well – it surely feels good to look back at a subset of lessons from what I have accomplished / learned, represented by textual blog posts.

In my opinion though the dopamine is only healthy because the blog is a toy project. If I had to commercialize it and/or have to care about viral content / number of readers / impressions / ad revenue then it would sooner or later feel burdensome and transactional.