Copycat Inkhaven 2 retrospective

Dentosal
Thu, 30 Apr 2026 13:33:19 GMT

I did some Inkhaven-y copycatting again.. It was, once again, not fun. Then again, most worthwhile things aren't. They're only worth it afterwards.

When getting started I said:

I'll also try to treat this less as a commitment, and more as a hobby; once I stop feeling like this is a good idea I'll drop it. Even if that happens tomorrow, or on the 28th.

I failed to do that. I seriously considered stopping many times, and pushed through regardless. I consulted Claude and when told to drop this, got defiant enough that the sheer self-hatred was enough to energize me.

Half of the posts I wrote were in my shortform. I also wrote way less words this time, some of the texts were tweet-sized. Some of them were not good fit for LW, and shouldn't have been published here. I'm unhappy with the amount of effort put in these. I wrote a single text every day, no buffers at all. A post or three got written on my phone while taking a train somewhere on busy weekends.

But then again, it's done. I'm quite happy with some of the stuff I got out, but a good post often takes 10+ hours to write. A full-time job or a social life really don't seem to be compatible even with each other. Writing on top of that; no way.

I got drafts for about five good posts left. I didn't want to rush them out because time pressure would make me publish subpar quality. On the other hand, without time pressure I wouldn't be publishing at all.

Someone created Inkhaven tag on LW. I tagged one post with it, and ended up getting instant downvotes, despite the post was about my average quality. I'm not sure if there's any causality here, but correlation is enough for me to feel betrayed. This is irrational, especially with n=1 data points. Nobody else has tagged any posts with it, so hard to evaluate. Another feeling is the eroding-public-good by polluting LW with my low-quality writing. This isn't irrational. I'll leave the implications as an excercise to the readers.

Perhaps I can make it to the next Inkhaven in person, if I feel like doing this again by then. Before that, I'll be at LessOnline and Manifest and likely LWCW as well, so feel free to complain to me in person.

Discuss