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Comment by samuelcole | Hacker News Reader

you wrote brat! i 'own' your book (on kindle, ha, so i'm not sure if that counts as real ownership), and it's on my to-read pile

anyways, i'm going to send you an email

i filed tickets for myself for the play button weirdness, thanks for including the browser, it might be related, and the product feedback around sign up (i didn't want to be too pushy, maybe went too far in the other direction)

for your thinking:

global user highlighting is basically half-done: tap any paragraph to leave a note, however the only way to share that note is with links... tale.fyi needs some way to discover other people's notes. did you ever play dark souls?

i also like integrating other forms of criticism from around the web, hmmm

you don't care about user-written fiction? interesting from you, since you know all the mechanics... is it because it's unedited basically? like when does fiction cross from user-generated to commercial? is it curation?

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lol, nice. I think AMZN can revoke your ownership of my work at any point, but your sale is still chalked up towards the total, which seems more like a very expensive library to me except with no incentives (other than user retention) for AMZN to behave like a library.

I never played dark souls… bad attention span. What’s the link? I would just have global highlights as toggleable, personally, with some kind of relative upvote threshold, and ‘crit only’ mode, or something. A link feels hard to discover.

> is it because it's unedited basically? like when does fiction cross from user-generated to commercial? is it curation?

Yeah - though not for subjective quality reasons. I think the lit fic short story ecosystem is most akin to the art world - the gallery and gallerist matter for understanding what you’re getting into with a short story. You’ll know their taste, tone, vibe, editing style, etc. It’s a small world with a low enough barrier to entry - ‘someone who knows how to make a website wants to put it on their website’ - that I think it’d be quite difficult to write an innovative short story and not find an editor in some form.

Subjectively, the lit fic I’m into when I read new work for pure pleasure is such a tiny slice of a tiny genre (‘Gordon Lish-influenced outsider artist maximalism’?) that I think the writer would end up emailing me or someone I knew, and I’d discover their work that way if they were unable to find an editor to work with. Maybe not everyone has that privilege, but I guess the websites people make to solve that problem are already called lit mags.

i used to run a literary journal in college, so i built that dna into tale as 'lists', so that curators can be followed and they can create lists of their favorite work. i dunno if it creates a gallery type environment, but that's the dream

dark souls: in dark souls as you wander around you can leave little notes around the world, and then the game will surface them to other players, almost randomly. players can vote on notes, which makes them appear more or less often. dark souls is a famously obtuse game, so the notes are genuinely helpful sometimes, and sometimes they are trolling you. but it makes the whole experience less lonely. i wonder if that's what people are missing when they read a book: the book _club_ feeling.

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