Getting Up the Guts to Type into Tiny Text Boxes on the Internet

Whenever I talk to people about the power of regularly publishing content online, I often hear a wistful daydream: “I wish I could write more, but I just don’t have the time.” 

But then, when you push a little deeper, another emotion starts to emerge. When they do sit down to write (and many do), they realized it’s actually a deeper fear that’s been holding them back all along: “What if people don’t like what I have to say?”

Funnily enough, this fear seems most acute among those who care deeply about how they come across in writing. I suspect it’s partly the paralysis of starting any project when the bar for quality feels impossibly high. But it’s also about how we were taught. As a classically trained journalist, I spent far more time in school mastering the art of the objective narrative than learning how to coax out my own opinions and editorial voice. It’s hard to un-learn that habit.

This is nothing new to the Internet. As it turns out, this fear of getting something wrong, or having the Internet “come after you” is quite a powerful anti-motivator. 

When I worked at Stack Overflow—a website that used to be the only (and best) place for software developers to get answers to their real-time coding questions—we used to talk a lot about this fear. Our head of community would remind us all that it took a lot of guts to put any content into a tiny text box on the Internet, particularly on a website that publicly posted all questions in a live stream on the home page, with each user’s profile lined to each question, along with a dynamically changing reputation score.

We would puzzle over this in product meetings, how the vast majority of our web traffic came from users who never took the time to make an account or post a question at all. Over time, we found that approximately 10% of Stack Overflow users contributed nearly 90% of the site's questions and answers—driving immense value for everyone else. At the extreme end, the top 1% were even more engaged, dedicating countless hours and threaded discourse to discussing Stack Overflow itself on a specialized Q&A vertical appropriately named Meta.

In some ways, this hesitation to put yourself out there hasn’t changed—it’s just evolved. The fragmentation of social media means you can try things on different platforms with limited reputational risk (since no one really sees your posts, anyway). On the other hand, the ever-present fear of “cancel culture” is still enough to hold many people back from ever getting started.

Of course, there’s another dynamic at play. AI chatbots now offer an always-on, judgment-free space where people can type their thoughts or silly questions hundreds of times a day—without any social capital or reputation at stake. You can post what you want, write what you want, express your silly fears and deep anxieties to feel that satisfaction of getting it out there without the risk of exposing yourself. If you do want to publish content for the masses, you can work hand-in-hand with AI as your patient little collaborator with infinite energy for every word edit and revision. (And even if you’re still feeling scared, you can just publish something AI-generated.)

I’ll be curious to see how the increasing fluency of and use of AI chatbots correlates with people’s interest (and willingness) to post publicly on Web 2.0-era platforms like Stack Overflow. How will the rise of these AI tools reshape online comment culture? If an AI can instantly generate an answer, does sifting through human responses—or posting in a public forum—still feel as necessary? 

It’s hard to say how much of our current LLMs and AI models that are “trained on the Internet” are also trained on the quotidian human commentary of platforms like forums, comment threads or social networks. But I wonder—if people post less on public forums, what happens to the next wave of AI models trained on that shrinking pool of human-generated content? How will it shape the future of the applications we rely on?

Regardless of where you stand on the “AI of it all,” one thing is clear: The barrier to publishing and creating is lower than ever. Maybe the act of posting content is about more than just overcoming fear—it’s about keeping human insight alive in an era where machines are learning from us. 

So if you’ve been waiting, now’s the time. Go ahead, type something into that tiny text box today. Push “publish.” And if you're still feeling timid, consider instead this reframe: What's the best that could happen?