Yeah. Arbital tried to do that
Conversation
Oh, cool, thank you!
Is there any sort of community consensus on how well this worked out?
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Badly! But idk why exactly, the view was that it failed relative to its goals but idk what the goals exactly were
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They had a very interesting postmortem, as it happens:
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Amusingly, I disagree with the founder! He clashed w Eliezer, who wanted to focus on specific content, do special-case stuff, perfect that. Alexei thinks they should have focused on getting more authors. Premature in my view: prove in the high-effort case, then generalize.
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It’s sad: in the end, we’re left with no clear insight about what the best-case problems were with that core idea of surfacing and navigating dependency chains.
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I’m reading it now… thank you, extremely interesting, and discouraging.
Given your bearishness on the whole space, I’m wondering why you have built, and are actively using, one yourself?
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My goals are very different. My writing system is about helping me think, not about creating a legible communications artifact. The challenges are quite different across the two domains! The classic hypertext problems aren’t so limiting in a writing-focused context.
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I put my notes online almost as an afterthought. I’m frankly quite surprised that many people seem to enjoy reading them! I hate navigating that kind of atomized hypertext someone else has written. e.g. I haven’t yet come across a public Roam I enjoy reading.
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Thanks for that, Ryan. There *are* other public working note archives I enjoy. For instance, John Carmack’s .plan files! Even some personal wikis. My hunch is that outliner-oriented writing encourages more atomization by default—hence less coherently-legible-to-others by default.