Why blog?

Why? 

I first want to establish why I came up with this blog. Especially since I already have the newsletter going on. Simply put - I want to write more often and write freely. The newsletter takes up a lot of my thinking and time - but most importantly the periodic nature of the publication means that the newsletter must come out great, always. Which it will, as always. But I want to experiment with shorter posts that I can write and publish quickly.

Ashish writes in his post, "My stubborn attachment is to know more, and help others to know more. Not only can I share my ideas, I ought to share my ideas. Growth comes from ideas meeting". I have held this principle as the bed rock of my interactions since school. I remember coming across cool difficult mathematical problems and writing them on my class blackboard so that everyone could take a look. That habit was strengthened during college where I was a part of my college's debating society. We built a very close and cohesive knowledge sharing network and the currency of ideas were primarily articles, videos and podcasts. Coming out of college - my feeling of 'ought' to share grew even more. The feeling manifested into me starting up a podcast, a newsletter, a now abandoned blog, and now this blog.

The problem with knowledge groups

The status quo is such that my first reaction to whenever I come across something cool - is to share it with people. I have had people to share stuff with for the most part - I've been fortunate enough to have the company of some very interesting and curious people. But two issues come up - First is the issue of range. People become interested in niches as they grow up. It is an optimization technique and very much needed as well. There's only a few things you can become good at in your life and thus you must choose well. Thus, it becomes difficult to share all the things that I like with a select few people. Second - is the seen versus read ratio of the materials that I share. Even if you share a lot of things across subjects with someone (or a group of people - the Whatsapp group and broadcast list for example), it is very likely that the actual percentage of material that they're consuming is anywhere between 10% to 25%. Thus I want to write this blog in an attempt to solve this issue. I can better solve the first one rather than the second one. I think the second one isn't even a problem per say - most work that has happened in this field to increase the interaction of people with content has been in the entertainment content creator industry (which I despise for the most part - a blog on what kinds and types of content (and creators) will be out soon). Also on the first problem - both, the whatsapp group and the sublist broadcast suffer from lack of open accessibility. You'll have to be a part of either in order to receive the resources, and I think blogs are much better in that aspect. Easily searchable, easily distributed and you can choose to subscribe as and when you wish. The other issue with both of these medium is that all the past material that has been shared (which of course isn't accessible to non members) cannot be shared by members across platforms. This in my opinion is the biggest reason why I think these knowledge communities will not scale. I am also skeptical of the 'Whatsapp is the new distribution medium" frenzy. My prediction for the communities that have scaled is that they'll soon plateau (if they haven't already). People use Whatsapp for a fundamentally different purpose i.e. talking and not for consuming content. And I think no matter how good a product you distribute via Whatsapp - this base logic is bound to run the product to ground.  (I hope I'm wrong in the long run).

The newsletter will go on as is. Bi weekly publication on my perspectives on life and learning. However the newsletter will also be published here as well. If you want to engage more with my writing, or would even want to contribute - subscribe to the blog! 

Stay curious, I'll see you soon.