Q&A Week: Intro

In the Fall 2019 issue of the supporter newsletter, I mentioned that one of the best parts of doing the site was being able to run it with full autonomy. Even though the site is reader-supported, I have great freedom in how it operates due to the generosity of the supporters who don’t really make any demands on me in regards to what I write about.

And unlike working in a big corporation where everything needs to be tested and approved before implementation or cessation, I’m free to try something new and see how it goes and immediately stop it if it doesn’t turn out as I hoped. There’s tremendous freedom being in that situation. It’s like if you’re a guy who loves to have sex without condoms and you’re an abortion doctor. You don’t have to worry too much about consequences.

Last week I announced a Q&A feature. I am now suspending (aborting) that feature. The reason I’m suspending it is because I didn’t get the results I had hoped for. I’m not sure I knew 100% what I was hoping for, but whatever it was, I didn’t get it. I had thought that having the Q&A form might lessen the number of full emails I received. But that didn’t really happen. I get a lot of emails from operating this site. And while I think people understand that I can’t respond to every one with a long thought-out response, I still feel weird responding to an email of many paragraphs with just a couple sentences. So part of the idea behind the Q&A was to limit people to 150 characters. I said, “Give me a short question and I’ll give you a short answer.” But I got a lot of short questions which required long answers.

And because I made it easier to contact me, I think the quality of the questions, unsurprisingly, went down. People only go to the effort of putting their thoughts/questions into an email, if they have something they think might be worthwhile. Whereas with the short, Q&A format, there was a bit more chaff with the wheat. This makes sense. The easier you make communication, the less thought out it will be, on average. If construction workers could only say something to hot females via a written letter, women would probably have a much nicer time walking down the street, and the comments they did receive via mail would likely be of a higher discourse than, “Hey, nice pooper!”

So, I’m suspending the Q&A feature. It may be something I do from time to time, but I’m turning it off for now.

Now, just so it wasn’t a complete loss, I’m going to burn through the questions I received over the course of this week. I said I would give “short answers” to any questions for which I had a satisfying answer. Instead, I’m giving unsatisfying answers to all the questions that came in whether I have anything worth saying or not. A dozen or so questions per day, starting tomorrow. See you then.