Good reminder.

Here's one more tip that helps me a lot in deciding what to post or what not to post. Before you write, and again before you push the button to publish your post, just take a minute to think about what your purpose is with that post. What do you want to accomplish? Ask for support for yourself? Show that you understand? Help someone to make a decision? Brighten someone's day? Extend an offer of friendship? There are lots of possibilities. If you are sharing information, why do you want to share that particular information and how do you expect it to help someone? (sometimes a post makes us think of an experience of our own, and we want to tell what happened to us, or just show what we know about the subject, and sometimes that helps but sometimes it either steals the show from the person we meant to support, or just isn't as relevant to them as we thought.)

Then consider whether your intention is actually the most likely outcome from what you wrote. Anticipate how people are probably going to feel when they read it, and how you are going to feel when they reply. We can't predict everything, of course, but if we think it through we can see a lot more coming than if we go on gut instinct.

Rap