How do you make writing a more deeply social activity, multiplexed at the level of the smallest possible thought chunks? I don’t mean more hyperlinking, transclusions, or awkward collaborative-writing games. More like longform that’s social the way a twitter convo thread is. 🤔
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Code went from highly personal to very social with version control and fork/merge toolchains. That has not really happened to writing. I guess because it’s much easier with code given its hard-edged functional boundaries and potential for encapsulation and scope control.
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Hollywood writing is probably the most collaborative known to the world. Especially TV. Movies are a serial relay race, but TV is parallel+multiplexed with a series bibleand showrunner coordinating things. Like a symphony orchestra.
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Isn't that basically what Wikipedia is? Along with the discussion page.
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Kinda, and the problems getting it to generalize beyond *pedia models illustrates the problem.
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Writing of *what*? Code is oftentimes collaborative, but only once the functions & designs have been made modular. There is such thing as "single developer code"; there's nothing intrinsic about code that does/doesn't enable modularity.
The Lego studs are at the semantic level.
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Alternatively: Wikipedia and Choose-your-own-adventure novels can be written in a modular way, thereby lending themselves to collaboration. But longform narrative, as a style, requires both a coherent voice and an aligned vision. Tools probably aren't really the limiting thing.
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I don't personally participate, but
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It’s an awful frankencollaboration game. Worse than writing by committee.
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