The version of building in public nobody talks about

Most building in public is loud.

Thread after thread of "here's what I'm working on". Follower milestones. MRR updates with the number formatted to look exciting. Progress posts timed for maximum engagement. The implicit message is: watch me, I am someone worth watching.

I understand the appeal. Building in isolation is hard. External validation is motivating. An audience creates accountability in a real way.

But I find something exhausting about that version. It optimises for visibility rather than honesty. It produces content about building more readily than it produces actual buildings. And it creates a dynamic where the performance of progress starts to substitute for progress itself.

That is not the version I am trying to do at Sidewrks.

What I mean by quiet building in public

The distinction I keep coming back to is between making your thinking visible and making yourself visible.

Most building in public does the latter. You are the protagonist. Your journey is the content. Your audience is the point.

The version I find more useful is less personal. It is about making decisions legible, tracking outcomes honestly, and creating a record that is worth something even if no one reads it.

That might look like:

A decision log that captures what you decided and why, at the time you decided it. Not a retrospective polished for an audience, but a rough record that preserves the actual context.

Status that is honest about where things are. Not "exciting progress" as a framing device, but a clear statement of what is live, what is paused, what has been killed.

Outputs that stand on their own. Things built and shipped, rather than descriptions of things that might be built or planned.

None of that requires an audience. If an audience shows up, fine. But the record has value regardless.

Why no comments, no likes, no follower mechanics

When I was thinking about how Sidewrks should work, this was one of the clearest decisions.

Every engagement mechanic you add changes what you are optimising for. Comments create pressure to respond. Likes create pressure to post things that get liked. Follower counts create pressure to grow follower counts.

These are all subtle redirects from the actual goal, which is to build things and learn from them honestly.

I have watched the same pattern in teams. The moment you introduce a metric, behaviour shifts towards that metric. Sometimes that is exactly what you want. Sometimes the metric starts to diverge from the thing it was supposed to measure, and people follow the metric anyway.

Building in public with engagement mechanics tends to produce the same effect. You start optimising for engagement rather than for the thing engagement was supposed to represent.

Removing those mechanics removes the incentive. What is left is either genuinely worth sharing or it is not.

The accountability that actually works

The version of accountability I find useful is not "other people are watching". It is "I will have to look at this again later".

When I write down a decision now with the intention of reviewing it in three months, that creates a specific kind of pressure. Not to perform, but to be honest. Because I know that the person reading it later will be me, and I will know if I was vague to avoid committing to something.

That is quieter accountability than a public audience, but I find it more durable. It does not depend on maintaining an audience. It does not require regular content. It just requires being deliberate enough to record things as they happen and honest enough to check back.

Build on Record was built around that idea. The primary audience for your decisions is your future self.

What this costs

I want to be honest about the trade-offs.

Building quietly means you accumulate less social proof. The momentum that comes from an engaged audience is real and I am not dismissing it. There are types of products where that audience is also your user base, and building publicly in the loud sense is genuinely strategic.

There is also something motivating about external attention that I am deliberately foregoing. Some people do their best work with an audience. I am not making a universal claim here.

What I am saying is that the loud version has costs too, and they are less often acknowledged. The pressure to post consistently can produce content that should not have been produced. The optimisation for engagement can distort what you build. The performance of progress can substitute for progress in ways that take a while to notice.

The quiet version has different costs. Less momentum, less visibility, slower feedback from the outside world. I accept those costs because the alternative creates incentives I do not want to build under.

Signal over audience

The question I try to keep coming back to is: what would actually teach me something useful right now?

Sometimes that is sharing something publicly and seeing how it lands. Sometimes it is shipping something with minimal announcement and watching what real usage looks like. Sometimes it is writing a decision down with no audience in mind at all, just to force clarity on what I actually think.

An audience can be useful. It is not the point.

The point is to build things that work, learn from them honestly, and leave a trail that is worth something when you look back at it. That is the version of building in public I am trying to do.

Whether anyone is watching is a secondary question.