A few days ago I’ve disabled the auto-posting of my starred Instapaper articles, thus forcing myself to ponder about why and how to share and describe a piece before hitting Instapaper’s “Share” button.
I think this worked out well in several regards:
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I do less “mindless sharing”. My old setup meant that I only had to click the little star icon in Instapaper, and the link would be posted on my Tumblr, which resulted in a barrage of articles which I merely liked. Problem is, I am rather easy to please and always willing to share stuff I like with everyone who would lend me an eye or ear – and so I starred a lot of posts. But if I share basically almost everything I read, I’m nothing but a goddamn one-man link farm, and that’s not a label to aspire to.
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Less fast-food-minded reading. … Well, no, that’s not quite correct. Now when I like an article and have a feeling it might be worth spreading, I try to quantify why I like it. So I ended up thinking more about what I’ve just read. I don’t just munch through my reading list anymore – I chew more slowly. So to speak.
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As an added bonus, my Instapaper’s “Starred” folder has become more than just a link dump.
All in all, after a week of testing, I’d like to declare this experiment a success. As a result I’ll do my article sharing here on my blog – the funny clown pictures and awesome cooking videos will go to my tumblelog as usual.
