I say this not to be mean -- I understand where you're coming from, I myself have written a "pure plain text" service in the past and thought it would be revolutionary due to its simplicity.
Pretty cool nonetheless.
Try applying this logic to politicians or bankers or whatever class you don't like.
As someone also building and running a "plain text" service, I know there's a lot you can do with such a simple product, if you care to. [0][1] It's great to have more services like this -- it's what the web is all about.
Just in the field of text-sharing, there are tons of problems which are not being solved by these pure plain text services, while these are not new problems and other services are already trying to solve them in multiple different ways.
Text is communication. Anything else is an increase of human efficiency at a cost of data. I wouldn't say the web's about text...but I would say that it's about communication, and that services like this clear away the extra frills to get to the essence and remind us all.
And certain services (like Write.as) keep track of all the posts you've written, and they can optionally can be tied to a pseudonym. I don't think that an assurance on who wrote what is always necessary. If the writing is good, the author doesn't necessarily matter. And anecdotally I think people who abuse anonymity online are in the minority -- most people use anonymity to share more candidly where they otherwise feel repressed.
And I think "worth" is best decided by the reader, and a human touch continues to be superior to any technical solutions we've come up with. Platforms who try to uniformly enforce some standard of "worth," in my opinion, risk alienating a large amount of people, and usually miss the entire standard they were going for in the first place.
But what other problems do you think exist with text publishing services? Or what do you think needs to change? How do we solve those things?
I'm not saying it is always necessary, but that it is a recurring problem that occur but txt.fyi doesn't care about.
> most people use anonymity to share more candidly where they otherwise feel repressed.
It doesn't matter if you share something anonymously in txt.fyi if nobody is ever going to find it.
> And I think "worth" is best decided by the reader, and a human touch continues to be superior to any technical solutions we've come up with.
You're proposing that we go read everything on the internet to pass our judgments on what is worth. That was the problem in first place. Categorization, ratings and reputation are some of the solutions already tried. I don't know if they've solved everything or if there is room for better solutions. What I know is that txt.fyi doesn't care about this problem.
> But what other problems do you think exist with text publishing services? Or what do you think needs to change? How do we solve those things?
I don't know. I just imagine that there are many problems we know of (such as the ones I listed) and the author of txt.fyi is not trying to solve any of these. Other problems may exist or come into existence, and it is up to platform developers to try to solve them too. There is of course room for pure plain text published anonymously, but the supply is already immense there. I don't think we should incentive new developers to write one more of these services (and worse: keep running it an improving it technically for a long time).
https://twitter.com/Beschizza/status/834582107569655810
Hopefully it can become a good contribution to the independent web: a place to put words without any fuss or fury.
https://twitter.com/Beschizza/status/834599500039729164
Seeing how something this simple reacts to such events would be interesting. I'll be as transparent and open as I can
(the latter is a reply to a post to the platform about difficulties running a similar service)