Day 288: Celebrating Others Publicly

I spent a few hours today writing a little love letter to uBlock Origin:

https://twitter.com/dk_the_human/status/1318259672034414592

(Even though it never fails to surprise me how long it takes to write something to share, posting on Twitter is a great exercise because it forces you to write concisely and clearly structure your ideas.)

I also posted it to HN where it got over 50 upvotes super quickly. HN Rankings shows that it was at #3 after 5 minutes, but it suddenly disappeared. It seems like a mod manually took it down although I’m not sure why since other Twitter threads have been popular on HN, and I didn’t try to manipulate the votes or do any funny business. (I didn’t know all this happened until later because I was on a call onboarding some folks to Browserflow.)

(Update: I heard back from HN’s moderators and they said that the post was flagged by users. I suspect it’s probably because it links to Twitter, which is likely viewed as more self-promotional than a blog post, even though I don’t see how they’re substantively different. Note to self: Don’t post links to Twitter on HN.)

Anyway, I enjoyed writing that Twitter thread because it was a chance to publicly praise someone whose work I greatly appreciate. It also gave me a reason to draw on my iPad, which I’d like to do more of. I’m thinking of doing this more regularly — that is, think of someone whose work I appreciate, research their philosophy and approach, draw a picture, and write a thread about them. Maybe I’ll do it every Monday and call it #MakerMonday?