A while ago, I read this piece on [the Dark Forest Theory of the Internet](https://www.ystrickler.com/the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-internet/). It has stuck with me; a lot of my best internet happens in the darker bits of the forest. But I think that there’s a spectrum, isn’t there? Some things are less Dark Forest than others. Let’s try to sort this out. 1. There are blogs, both micro (Twitter and Mastodon and whatever) and macro (WordPress and the like). These have no access controls to read, and anyone can set up their own to write. 2. There are walled-garden posting systems. For me, this was LiveJournal and then G+. For many people, it’s been Facebook. You *can* post publicly, à la Type 1, but you can also limit posts to specific other users on the system, or groups of users. This can be used to limit to folks you think will be interested, and to limit to folks you trust with the post. (NB, microblogs above often can do this, too, but aren’t _oriented_ towards this behaviour.) 3. There are IRCs, Slacks, Discords, and such: “The people in the room can see this, the people who aren’t, can’t ever.” It’s oriented towards privacy, but privacy shared with _groups_ by default. 4. Your DMs, emails, etc: “This message is for a particular named recipient, or small ad-hoc group of recipients.” The closest of circles. I absolutely don’t want to say any one of these tiers is categorically better or worse; each serves a purpose. Ideas can be explored more safely in the higher-number types, and disseminated more widely in the lower. This is a public/private, published/journaled distinction we’ve always had. What stands out, to my mind, is the curious attempt to lower the friction at the lower-numbered types. Even blogs were too-high-friction, and Twitter and Twitter threads came along to get people to barf ideas into the public sphere with less filtration and work. My personal view is that the Engagement Optimizing Panopticon wants more words, and sees more thought as an obstacle to that goal. But the old E.O.P. can’t stop the amount of scrutiny that half-baked things get when they’re published in Type 1 (and public or quasi-public parts of Type 2). Historically, the barriers to getting things published widely encouraged more work and thought going into them, making sure that they were scrutinized and edited before being broadcast. There were other problems, of course! But “no think, only publish” certainly carries its own freight of problems. In my perfect world, we would facilitate the kinds of conversations where ideas can be criticized and explored and experimented with in spaces of Types 3 and 4, and then facilitate their broader publishing *after thought and work* at Types 1 and 2. I know I can’t stopper up the microblogging (and really, I don’t think I want to?) but I want to make more options, so we’re perhaps somewhat less dominated by “no think, only publish”.