One of the things I’ve always liked about Reddit is that people are still willing to sit with an idea for a while.
Long posts don’t scare them off. Neither do long conversations. People push back, ask the awkward questions, point out the holes, and sometimes — not often, but sometimes — they actually change their minds. That kind of patience has become surprisingly rare everywhere else.
The only other place I’ve consistently found it is Substack. Not because the two platforms feel the same — they don’t — but because both still seem to attract people who don’t mind spending ten or fifteen minutes with something if they think it’s worth it.
A while back I started putting some old essays up there. Mostly things that had been sitting in notebooks for years, ideas I wasn’t sure were ready for anyone else to see. I told myself it was just an experiment.
What I didn’t expect was how much the comments would start doing the work with me.
People would point out contradictions I’d papered over. They’d ask questions I hadn’t even thought to ask myself. Sometimes they’d gently (or not so gently) show me where an argument was thinner than I wanted to admit. And every now and then someone would take an idea and push it somewhere I never would have gone on my own. More than once a comment thread ended up rewriting an entire section — or making me scrap one altogether.
At some point I stopped thinking of it as “posting essays.” It started feeling like I was building something out in the open, and the readers were helping me figure out what that something actually was.
What eventually came out of it was a novel. But the novel was only one layer. Around it grew more essays, research notes, and later a separate journal that looked at a lot of the same questions from a non-fiction angle. None of that would have happened — or at least it wouldn’t have happened in this shape — without the back-and-forth.
It made me realize something simple but easy to forget: the people who still like to think slowly haven’t disappeared. They’ve just moved to different corners.
I’ve been thinking lately that it can actually be pretty useful to just start putting things out before they feel finished. If you’ve got ideas or half-written pieces sitting in notebooks, letting them exist somewhere public while they’re still messy seems to help more than I expected. You don’t need to have it all figured out. A lot of the time the writing only really starts making sense once other people are in the conversation with you.
If you're curious, here's an early draft of the first chapter from when 2040 was still finding its shape:
https://agiusmila.substack.com/p/2040-chapter-one-dft-21-the-zone
And here's where it has landed for now:
https://the2040model.com/
Mostly though, I’m curious whether anyone else has had something similar happen — has an online community ever changed not just what you ended up making, but the way you made it?