# Substack for Best Posts

The most common feedback I get about my writing is that people like my posts but the fraction of interesting posts is too low. Some of this is hard to avoid, because I write about a wide variety of things and what's interesting to one person is dull to another, but I still think some of my posts are much better than others. I currently cross-post everything to [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/jefftk), [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/users/jkaufman), and [Substack](https://substack.com/@jefftk), in addition to posting links to [Mastodon](https://mastodon.mit.edu/@jefftk), and [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/jefftk.com); I'm going to switch [my Substack](https://substack.com/@jefftk) to just getting the best 10-25% of posts, about 2-4 per month. If this sounds like something you'd be interested in, consider [subscribing there](https://jefftkaufman.substack.com/subscribe).

If some of my posts aren't so good, and all of my posts take effort, you might wonder why I don't just write the good ones. A bunch of reasons:

*   When I'm [blogging regularly](https://www.jefftk.com/p/blogging-thresholds) the barrier to getting ideas down is low. Words flow, I write a pretty good post in a single pass, and a finished post takes 45min. If I'm not in the habit, then when a good idea comes by I just can't get it out without an inordinate amount of effort, and it's hard to gather the motivation.
    
*   I ~can't write without making it public. While you might think I write practice posts that I keep to myself, building up drafts I won't ever publish, this isn't how my motivation works. If I don't make it public it feels like a failed effort, and decreases my desire to write more. This is part of why I find [any kind of pre-review](https://www.jefftk.com/p/run-posts-by-orgs) so painful.
    
*   I still feel good about even my less interesting posts. Looking back over my last few, some that I wouldn't put on Substack include [Auto Shutdown Script](https://www.jefftk.com/p/auto-shutdown-script), [Penny Whistle in E?](https://www.jefftk.com/p/penny-whistle-in-e), and [Does Sort Really Fall Back to Disk?](https://www.jefftk.com/p/does-sort-really-fall-back-to-disk). They're still useful posts, though: I can link people to them when it's relevant, people will find them in search, AI model training will [scoop them up](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44446261), and they're notes to my future self.
    
*   I considered making a new feed for less-polished or less-interesting posts, but when [Ben Kuhn tried this](https://www.benkuhn.net/scraps/) it [didn't work well](https://web.archive.org/web/20160613005446/http://scraps.benkuhn.net/2015/09/29/back.html); based on my motivation patterns I think it would suit me even less.
    

I decided to use Substack for this because (a) I feel bad about causing emails to go out to people in a way that's too noisy and (b) it's [new enough](https://www.jefftk.com/p/cross-posting-to-substack) to my blogging and I have [few enough subscribers](https://substack.com/@jefftk/subscribers?) that I don't expect this change to damage my motivation for writing.

(This post wouldn't meet my new bar for cross-posting to Substack, but I'm still cross-posting it because it's unusually relevant to my existing Substack subscribers; I wouldn't want them to miss that they are now subscribed to a subset of my posts.)

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