u/Glittering-Scene204

I was trying to track down why a specific decisionss were made a few years ago, and I realized the entire thought process is just gone.

The Slack thread auto-deleted. The Zoom calls weren't recorded. We have the final outcome but zero record of the actual reasoning that got us there!(Please don't tell me I'm overthinking)

Think about Darwin or Einstein. We have their letters and notebooks. We can see the messy first principles reasoning, the wrong turns, and the arguments they had with colleagues because they wrote it ON PAPER

Now the most important technical and scientific work in the world is happening in Slack, Signal, and Discord.

And it all just deletes automatically. We are generating more important knowledge than ever before and losing almost all the context behind it.

We get the outputs (papers, code, policies) but we lose the reasoning. In a few decades we are going to have systems we depend on completely but cant actually explain how they were built or why certain trade-offs were made. We wont be able to interrogate the main source which can be used to save so many ch time for building future projects

The monks who copied manuscripts didn't do it for fun. They knew preserving knowledge takes active work. But right now we just let the internet default to temporary

Has anyone else noticed this happening in their field? How are you actually preserving the "why" behind the work? And yes before anyone of you comment, YES this was a 3 am thought.

I've been building in public for about 8 months now. Here's my honest experience.

The first month was great. I shared real decisions, real numbers, and real mistakes. People engaged because they found it authentic

By month three, I was spending more time crafting my daily updates than building the product😭

I was writing threads, recording screencasts, formatting screenshots. I started making decisions partly based on what would make a good post.

I started focusing more on what others would like to say rather than what needs to be done.

By month six, I realized I was doing content marketing. Not building in public. Content marketing. The 'public' part had become the product, and the actual product was the afterthought

I know I'm not alone because I see the same pattern everywhere. People whose entire online presence is about building something, but the something never quite ships because the meta-work of documenting the building has consumed the building itsel

I'm not saying BIP is bad. I'm asking: where's the line? When does sharing your process stop being accountability and start being performance?

And also seriously, how do I stop this being content marketing? Cuz all i genuinely wanted was to share my progress