Austin
posts

Where does the best writing happen?

Notion

Musings on the blogging platform to rule them all

Where good writing takes place

  • Twitter
  • Notion, Google Docs
  • Discord
  • SMS/group chat
  • Substack, blogs
  • Email
  • Wikipedia
  • Podcasts? Interviews? AMAs?

Axes

  • Publicity: Private vs few vs public
  • Length: Chat vs shortform vs longform
  • Gamification: view counts, reacts/likes, retweets
  • Dialogue: Conversational (interviews, comments, chat) vs not (essays, blog posts, wikipedia)
  • Formatting: plaintext vs chat vs headers vs images
  • Consideration: Realtime (chat, podcast) vs Tweet vs Blog post

Where are the best comments?

  • Hacker News
  • LessWrong
  • EA Forum
  • Manifold Discord

Misc thoughts:

  • Profile: Show people’s profile? or not?
  • Comments can be more valuable than the post. Cf HN
  • Comments help build a community

Blogs with comments: ACX, MR, every Substack, Scott Aaronson, JeffTk

Blogs without comments: Alexey, Gwern, AppliedDivinityStudies, patio11

Weird angles of attack

  • Highly divergent view lens: E.g. no-image lens; everything-as-a-tweet-lens; dynamic transcription by AI

    • Also: 80k podcast examples. Title, summary, links, quotes, full transcript
    • Also: One database, many views
      • Can I throw a bunch of posts into a DB and then have LLMs figure out how to host competing views?
        • “Twitter view”
        • “LW view”
        • “Discord view”
      • View by:
        • Timeline/History
        • Best writing

  • One post, many reactions: gather all comments & backlinks (like Lesswrong/EAF + HN + twitter reacts etc)

    • Kind of like reddit?

  • Centralizing identity: pulling in information/publications across all of your web presence

    • Then: Some kind of LLM persona thing?

  • Notion but public: different lens on what to read

    • Or: Anonymity? 4chan? LLM-based style hiding?

  • Ender’s Game Newsnets: everything is public, only some people can write

  • Economics of all kinds

    • Tips, bounties, payments
    • Prediction markets
    • Quadratic *
    • Assurance contracts
    • NFTs, impact certs

Aside: New UX pattern: heading minimap

  • Seen on:

    • Notion

  • Substack

  • Lesswrong

Aside: Peak EA Forum