Someone needs to make a writing editor that disguises itself as forum threads, because I can write paragraphs off the cuff in response to Reddit and Hacker News no problem, but when I sit down to a blank editor I ...well it's hard to even sit at the blank editor to begin with, but it takes a lot of effort to get going.
If it weren't for Nanowrimo and being reminded consistently to participate in a short story anthology every year, I'd be a writer who didn't write (except comments on HN/Reddit).
I'm really not kidding all that much. I'm tempted to make an app that's basically this idea. I have heard of that story, but haven't really sat down to read it yet. Is it pretty good?
So ... the fifty thousand dollar question is: would you, as a writer, pay a meager fee to have real people read your Writers' Forum App posts and make engaging replies? Or, perhaps the writer might leave tips for audience members who contribute meaningfully to their forum writings?
I think the reason writing in the forum style is exciting is because having an audience for anything you do is exciting. Also, you can teach, moralize, scandalize, etc and get near-realtime reactions to the thread being teased in the writings.
I think the risk would be that if a writer edited too heavily based on feedback, the work ceases to be purely the writer's and now it's a collaborative effort, which may lead to an impersonal writing style or threaten one's claim to copyright.
In my opinion, the best place for an app like this is within Reddit. You have the willing audience already in-place to offer you the feedback. Although, I could imagine an unfiltered forum might present a distraction. There might need to be a separate forum moderator that can control visibility of comments to the writer.
Hahah, I was thinking something a lot simpler than that. Something more like 'Insert subject:' -> fetch recent article about subject -> You give your thoughts about that subject -> you get a 'reply' that's like "Your opinions are wrong because <basic common argument pattern using keyword(from reply)>" or "That sounds interesting. Could you elaborate more on <keyword(from reply)>?"
And then when they're done they could export it to a text editor of their choice, or save it to dropbox or something.
I once made a chat app in Flash a long time ago called Mimic, that would take in whatever you said, infer connections between words (based entirely on what words were next to other words, so you could use just about any language or slang you wanted), and then build a sentence off that in response, that would almost kind of make sense. I would a good hour or more at a time responding to that thing trying to train it and getting a kick at the silly things it said.
This would be kind of like that. Yes, it'd be a pretty dumb app, but I could see myself being entertained by it, so maybe it'd be entertaining to other people as well.
I find it's way easier to write stories when I have a known audience (i.e. I'm posting on Reddit).
Heck, one of my favorite plot ideas came when I was taking a SciFi lit class in college, and the final had a short response where we had to sketch an original short story concept.
I've turned lots of off the cuff reddit posts into full length blog posts. In fact, it's my default when it's been two weeks since I last posted and I need to write something. Just go through comment history and find one that's at least a hundred words long with a lot of upvotes, and spin it out.
Problem is that information snacks like news and forums are the intellectual equivalent of vending machine junk food. We know it's better for us to cook our own food but we get lazy. Same with forum posts. We feel like we're actually doing something when we're not.
There are comments that are superior to the article they're responding to. There are books that are better off not being read at all. Forums also serve a few purposes that raw reading material cannot.
I think moralizing the activity brings with it the peril that you may start feeling good about consuming information the "right" way, and feel bad about consuming it the "wrong" way, while what you should really care about is the information itself. How you get it doesn't really matter.
Granted, I don't see anything particularly virtuous or advantageous about cooking your own food, either, so perhaps we're at an impasse...
Well, it's better to get your spouse to cook for you....
But baring that, restaurant food is generally too salty and fatty and light on fresh vegetables to be healthy to rely on for most meals. There are exceptions, but those restaurants tend to be drastically more expensive.
I seem to be able to find plenty of restaurant food that's not too light on vegetables, and it's not significantly more expensive. Price is a factor, but I think it's an overall factor: it's drastically more expensive to eat out than at home.
But there are alternatives to cooking and going to restaurants that are often frowned upon, yet nonetheless allow you to get everything you need and are already drastically cheaper in many cases:
Does anyone actually feel like they're being productive on HN? I mean I'm taking time out of my work day to write this. There are plenty of things I could be doing otherwise, and fully 100% of them are better than writing this comment.
>Does anyone actually feel like they're being productive on HN?
Mostly no, but sometimes yes. I've not found a more thought provoking place of discourse than HN, and have been referred to a number of good books on here.
There have been successful epistolary novels and plays. Maybe two or three people writing dialog in a forum as the characters would be an interesting way to attempt a collaborative work.
If it weren't for Nanowrimo and being reminded consistently to participate in a short story anthology every year, I'd be a writer who didn't write (except comments on HN/Reddit).