Always leave something behind. If you find something interesting, leave a trace that you were there.

This is a little thing that over time leads to a friendlier, more humane internet. Here are a few examples.

Blog post that helped you

Imagine you’re reading a blog post and you find it helpful. Or, you agree with it, but find one part of the argument lacking. Before moving on, leave a comment!

As a writer, receiving feedback on my work is welcome and rare. This blog gets thousands of readers a month, and yet the amount of direct feedback I’ve received over all the years is a small fraction of that.

I want to hear it! Praise is encouraging. Criticism is often enlightening. If it’s a nitpick or aside, that’s almost always interesting.

When it doubt, reach out.

Something that helped you

Imagine you’re stuck on a tough bug, and you’re searching the internet for help. You find a solution to your problem in a forum post, buried on the second page of results, down the page. Before celebrating and moving on, stop and leave a message!

It could be simple “This worked!” or even an emoji. Leave something behind that showed you were there and that the solution helped you.

Something that didn’t help you

Imagine you’re about to abandon a software tool. The docs seemed promising, but it doesn’t satisfy your use case, and you’re moving on. Before doing so, leave a friendly message telling the provider that you’re leaving and why.

It can be as simple as “I couldn’t get single sign-on to work. The authentication console is different from the screenshots in the docs.” Drop a stack trace. Share a link to source code or a repository that reproduces the issue.

Tell them it didn’t work and why.

Why bother

By bother with this? Why not just consume and move on? Nobody is going to care immediately if you do and it’s an investment of your personal time.

First, it’s positive and affirming in the aggregate. Despite its scale, the internet can be a lonely place. Most creators create in a vacuum. That solution to the tough issue you found was sitting on a forgotten webpage. That project you’re abandoning might be about to crater and the maintainer would love to know that anybody has tried it, regardless of the outcome. Leaving something adds a little humanity to the internet.

Second, it highlights signal in a sea of noise. That solution? It helped you, so it’s likely a useful idea. Help others find it.

Third, you’re building a learning exhaust that shows you exist and are doing real things with software. And if you create an account in the place you’re commenting then you now have a profile you can access that collects the things you found noteworthy. My Stack Overflow account is essentially an index of upvoted hacks and great answers to esoteric questions. It’s valuable.

Leave a trace.