Ask HN: Do we need another blogging platform? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do we need another blogging platform?

So, I have got this idea and wanted to get an opinion regarding what others might have to say.

How about a blogging platform that forces the writers to write articles/tutorials/blog-posts in bullets, aiming to summarise their thoughts in to-the-point bullets?

The reason why I wanted to make is, most of the times I see people using _thousands_ of words to say something that could be said in _a hundred_. And the platform will force you to produce to-the-point content.

Business model: Everything that medium has to offer will be for free with custom domains, email based subscriptions, analytics, SSL support in the paid tier.

What do you guys think?

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I thought Twitter is the platform of choice for the concise and the impatient. A consequence is all the outrage due to people misunderstanding those concise sentences.

Being a non-native English speaker, I'm aware when I'm becoming wordy, but improving sentences while retaining meaning and details takes quite some time and effort for me.

Perhaps you can consider a solution like providing paragraph improvement suggestions using automatic text summarization. That seems more constructive to me in permanently improving a writer's writing skills.

I like it. Tools with a different take on a regular problem like this are always useful, and can make people more creative under new constraints. It sounds like a tool that needs to exist and one I'd love to try out.

If you haven't seen it yet, there are some kinda-similar tools out there like Little Outliner [0] that might serve as inspiration. Otherwise, as someone also running a niche-ish blogging platform (anonymous, writing-only), I'd definitely suggest getting the tool out there and tweaking it based on real feedback before worrying about what business model will fit best. Not saying those ideas won't work, just that it's a crowded space and you might need to do more to differentiate or bring people value. In case you want an idea of what the growth / revenue timeline has been like for our platform, you can see our metrics: [1].

[0] http://littleoutliner.com

[1] https://inside.write.as

I both agree with your desire for to-the-point content and the status quo. [Just now, I was about to list out the pros/cons of these two and decided instead to write the main points.]

The main advantage of prose is that it expresses more than the presented facts -- the character of the writer which is then gauged to estimate the authority of the data. Also well-written pieces can be quite enjoyable to read.

So the big issue to be solved in a 'point-form' platform is credibility. This is typically done by focusing on a subject area. To work as a general platform would require many contributors in areas similar to sub-reddits. And of course discoverability, but that's general and not specific to the format.

I might use it. Facebook is too cluttered. Twitter is too short. Medium has a very high bar when it comes to aesthetics, so it's a lot of effort to write something of moderate quality. WordPress is good but it's turned into a CMS.

I personally think we don't need many of the stuff we have right now. Sometimes we are just making stuff more complex in order to "create" something.

As long as you don't add fixed header+footer it's good.

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