What I expect
My content will be stolen and republished in ways that violate my extremely permissive Creative Commons license. This will be done by both bots and humans. The bots will use my content to steal pennies from advertisers and time from people. Some of the humans won’t realize they’re doing anything wrong. The others think I won’t notice.
People will misquote, re-title, and edit my content to make it more sensational, at the expense of my credibility and their readers’ trust, in an effort to increase pageviews to their own site, like Business Insider, or increase their rank or reputation on someone else’s site, like Hacker News.
People will misread and misunderstand my content, usually because they’re inattentively skimming it for trigger phrases and concepts that confirm or inflame their own biases.
This will incite many of them to leave misguided, poorly written, ad-hominem comments on every site that republishes or links to my content. Most of the commenters will only read the (edited, sensationalized) title before commenting. They’ll insult my intelligence, call me names, tell me I suck, and refute arguments I didn’t make. Many of them will email these comments to me to make sure I see them.
But I still write.
Because amid all of the spam, fraud, and nastiness, people are reading what I write. Some even send positive feedback or valid counterarguments.
But most importantly, I’m freely expressing my ideas in public, which helps me clarify my thoughts, enhance and alter my views, and improve my writing over time.
I think I’m getting the better end of the deal.