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