Thinking in Public

I first came across the idea of thinking in public long before I had words for it. It was when I was learning to code many years ago.

Back then, I noticed something about comments. Most programmers used them to explain what their code did—which was almost always pointless, because the code itself already said that.

Some programmers, however, did something far more interesting. Their comments didn’t explain what the code was doing, but why it existed at all. They explained what they tried first, what didn’t work, what forced them towards this particular solution, and the specific reasoning behind a choice that might look strange to an outsider.

The comments were there to record a line of thinking. That was my first encounter with thinking in public.

What those programmers were really doing was leaving a trail of thought behind. They were making their reasoning visible.

Much later, I found myself doing something similar, but with writing. I started sharing what I now call “public drafts.” Notes that are sometimes clearly unfinished. Notes that I share early, just to return to later, expand, revise and refine indefinitely. Notes that sometimes contradict each other, or whose fate is simply to be abandoned.

Notes that are allowed to live in the open whilst they are still being born.

No one is watching

Gradually, I came to realise that thinking in public is valuable even when nobody is watching.

A lot of writing only makes sense if there’s an audience waiting for it. Blogs often exist to be found. Social posts live and die by replies and likes. Novels assume future readers. Strip the audience away and much of that writing loses its reason to exist.

This is because we live in a culture that demands we choose between two extremes. On one side, we have private thinking—the personal journals, the messy Obsidian vaults, the hidden Notion pages and the like. On the other, we have public broadcasting—the polished blog posts optimised for SEO, the performative threads on Twitter/X, and the newsletters that feel like they’re constantly shouting for attention, or trying to sell a product, subscription, book, or course—otherwise, what would be the point?

But some forms of writing survive perfectly well without attention.

There is a large, quiet middle ground that we’ve mostly ignored. This kind of writing sits in an awkward middle space. It’s not polished enough to feel like a blog post. It’s not intimate enough to belong in a private diary. And it’s not commercial enough to justify worrying about SEO.

It’s the kind of writing you do when you’re trying to understand something. Philosophical notes. Half-formed arguments. Conceptual sketches. Fragments of an idea you’re still circling around. Writing where the primary audience is you, but not in a way that needs to stay hidden.

What makes this interesting is that it doesn’t require many of the things we’ve come to associate with “publishing.” It doesn’t need timelines, feeds, algorithms, comment sections, or performance metrics. In many cases, those things actively get in the way. They turn thinking into a performance. They add pressure where it is not needed.

When you remove the metrics, the comment sections, and the algorithms, writing changes. There’s no pressure to grow an audience or optimise for engagement. You write something down, look at it, and decide whether it actually makes sense.

Today, there’s a strange gap between private thinking tools and public publishing platforms. Tools like Obsidian or Notion are excellent for private thought, but they’re not built to be shared cleanly. Blogs and newsletters are designed for broadcasting, even when you don’t want to broadcast. Somewhere in between is a quieter mode of writing that says: this is public, but it’s primarily for me.

You see it in researchers who publish reading notes. In students who make their course reflections public. In independent learners who document what they understand so far.

This is writing as record, not performance.

Some people write to leave an intellectual trace. To mark where they stood, even if that position later changes. To write against forgetting. For them, the absence of noise isn’t a drawback; it’s the point.

Rather unsurprisingly, thinking in public often feels worse on the platforms that dominate today. It’s too raw for blogs, too slow and nuanced for social media, too exposed for private notes, and too uninterested in monetisation for platforms that expect it. You end up feeling like you’re always in the wrong place, writing the wrong kind of thing for the room you’re in.

Thinking in public needs a space that feels calm, serious, and unrushed. A minimal publishing environment for unfinished ideas and long-term thinking. Somewhere text can stand on its own without needing images, optimisation, or engagement metrics. Somewhere a note can simply exist.

That’s why I keep coming back to the idea of the public draft. A note that’s allowed to be incomplete, but not disposable. Something you can refine over time without pretending it was ever final. In that sense, it’s not quite blogging, not quite note-taking, not quite publishing as we usually understand it. It’s closer to an intellectual tool.

The people who need this kind of space tend to have something in common. They write because they think, not because they want to market themselves. They’re comfortable with text-only. They share selectively, often by sending a single link rather than broadcasting to everyone.

They don’t need a crowd and a megaphone.

They need a place where notes deserve permanence simply because they represent the honest effort of a person trying to understand the world.

This kind of writing—the public draft—is a way of writing against forgetting. By giving a thought a permanent URL^[1], we mark a moment in time. We build a public archive of our own evolving logic. Where notes deserve permanence simply because they mattered to someone at the time.

– Mahdi

Footnotes

1. Technical term for a web address. ↩︎