Recently I was drafting a post and had to catch myself as I almost inserted a jab at someone else, a callback to something from a while ago that no longer matters. That kind of post is not me. I sometimes brainstorm reactionary posts that I wish I could write, but always think better of it, staying away from extremes.
I think I’ve been listening to the pessimists too much. It’s true that some things are bad, and I’ve blogged about many of them, but the only way out is hope. Otherwise we get stuck, caught in a spiral of outrage, never moving forward.
When I quit Twitter in 2012, I was outspoken in my worry about developer-hostile, centralized platforms. I paired the dissent with advocacy for open formats and eventually built my own social network. Complaints should lead to progress, not paralysis.
