Philosophy
This page is the argument. What actually happens when you use it is on How it works.
Think about the 17th century
You are someone with a lot of thoughts, and you have started putting them on paper. You want some of them to be available to others, so you take the notes, or the book if you have gathered them together, and you leave them with a library.
You never knew who read them. You wanted the thoughts to exist somewhere outside your own head, and you expected nothing beyond that. Your thoughts might have been picked up a century later, and you would never have known.
PreciousList is precisely that. You write. You keep it private, or you publish it for anyone to read. You never learn who read it, who liked it, or who saved it. It is a place to put your thoughts down with no external assistance, no instant gratification, no dopamine hits and no engagement anxiety.
Just peace.
Why the counting had to go
Every symptom worth complaining about is downstream of a number. The post that exists because posts perform. The one-line hook with a blank line under it. The reply aimed at reach. The story about a candidate who was not hired, with a lesson bolted onto the end. Nobody makes any of that in a room where nothing is counted, because there is nothing to win.
So the count is not a feature that was left out. It is the thing being removed, and everything else follows from that one decision.
What is preferred here
- Deliberate over instant.
- Human words over machine text.
- Effort over automation.
- Writing over engagement.
- Reading over performance.
- Chronology over algorithms.
- Privacy over popularity.
- Simplicity over features.
What this will never become
PreciousList will never be a social network, an engagement platform, an AI writing tool, a performance marketing platform or a creator economy platform. Any feature that would tell a writer how they are doing puts the count back, and will not be built.
On getting nothing back
People do say there is nothing in this for a writer. That is correct, and it is the design. What is on offer is the writing, the fact that you typed it, and the possibility that someone read it and you will never find out. If that is not enough, this is not the right product, and that is a fine outcome for both of us.