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Comment by physicsgraph | Hacker News Reader

I'm unable to find the specific company and website in my old emails, but I have seen an example on the web of what you're describing. The reader could select whether to expand or collapse sections (e.g., I want more detail on this subsection).

The web interface was similar to a medium blog post, but the amount of work for both the writer and the reader was more than I think most folks are willing to invest.

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I’ve stumbled across something similar. It was a personal portfolio / bio site. The owner wrote several versions of each section, using different styles and level of detail. The various versions were selected by the reader with some sliders or something.

I thought it was pretty neat. A huge pile of work to write all that, but neat.

It's interesting if you consider the time spent writing versus time spent reading. This post will take me less than a minute to write, you less than a minute to read, but perhaps five/ten people will read it - a 1:10 ratio.

Popular content will have a much larger ratio - if I am a popular writer I might spend a day or two on a fancy blog post like described above, but if 60,000 people spend 10 minutes reading it that's 600,000 minutes - 10,000 hours! Now spending a bit more time to make it more useful/enjoyable/readable seems worth it.

Sounds like a job for GPT-3. The author writes the long form version of each section and then GPT writes the simpler versions.

Something like this? https://quillbot.com/summarize

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