Ask HN: Anyone interested in forming a community of blog post reviewers?

This seems to have at least a positive reaction from a few folks who'd like to see something accomplished. So to get the ball rolling:

http://draftreview.tenderapp.com

It's a private site. If you want to join, email me at nate at inklingmarkets.com

Tell me if you want to be a reviewer as well.

Sound like a good place to start?

Why not do this via email? I don't think a lot of people need to be involved. Once or twice a day, a moderator circulates draft articles to the list. Each author can list a publishing deadline, so a reviewer can choose whether or not to start reading the piece based on the time available, and so nobody contributes thought to a piece that has already been published.

Granted, this doesn't scale, but I don't think this is something that is meant to scale: it should be a small group of eloquent, thoughtful writers who can provide meaningful feedback prior to publishing to a broader audience.

The problem with web-based solutions is that they're not pushed to reviewers, so many of the busier people whose insights may be most valuable to an author will not remember to check the site. For example, I doubt Paul posts an essay draft to a private site and waits for his colleagues to check it for drafts to review.

Although I wouldn't be able to provide feedback on every entry, I would enjoy contributing thoughts to authors in a format like this, and I think it would help create special relationships between people in a different way than the HN community boards (less anonymous, more thoughtful, etc).

Edit: I see a lot of suggestions here about how to fix this problem with technology using crypto, etc.; I don't think this is a technology problem as much as a social organization problem.

All good points. And I'm going to sound like a pitchman for Tender (http://tenderapp.com) :) But that's kind of why I liked using this to create a minimum viable version of this community. Tender is very friendly with email. So new things submitted to be reviewed will get blasted to submitters who have their email alerts turned on. They can reply via email. There's also queues if someone wants to put something in their queue so the duplication factor might go away some.

If you are looking to foster real collaboration (as opposed to copy editing and spell checking) I would use a private wiki to let all parties edit the post (or leave comments). I think a discussion board serves a different purpose, preserving authorship of each contributor and allowing you to have a discussion instead of reaching working consensus on a common narrative. Both are useful but serve different purposes.

Committee editing of blog posts is not a way to go. Blogs are good because they have a distinct point of view and voice. Group editing would have the effect of homogenizing the distinctive voices into something more bland like you find in wikipedia articles.

I think the intent of the post was to have people review the post at an idea level, not to collaboratively write something.

Yep, I wasn't imagining this as some kind of lets all get together and write a blog post kind of thing. Really just to get some comments on "does this make sense", "am i dangerously offending anyone here", etc.

Just like Paul Graham's essays. Those are still very much his voice, even if his friends and colleagues submit their opinions to him on earlier drafts of it.

I think the forum approach is also a good one for the purposes that you envision. I was also trying to suggest that collaborating more deeply also has benefits. It's also good practice for teamwork in startups where you often need to reach a working agreement on document content against a deadline.

Wikipedia strives for neutral point of view. You don't have to strive for that in a blog post. Try it with someone else who also feels the same passion or has a stake in the outcome and you may see a different effect.

My experience has been that collaborative efforts have been helpful in improving structure, adding examples or references I hadn't thought of, strengthening explanations, and in general strengthening the effect or purpose I wrote for. This is distinct in many ways from improving technique, which is also important.

For a blend of the two you could do something like:

* A draft can only be viewed by reviewers approved by the writer * When a post is published, it also turns world-readable on the reviewer site, including the reviewers' comments * Let the writers add any reviewer they want to their list of approved reviewers

This lets new writers see which reviewers provide the best feedback, and they can add them to their pool of reviewers. The number of approved writers and feedback quality could be used as the base of some sort of karma system.

Each reviewer sees a "Most recent" or "HN frontpage"-like list of articles available for review. No action should be required to decline reviewing a article, to prevent popular reviewers from getting swamped.

For a business spin and to provide an incentive for reviewers, you could also add a fee to post a draft and distribute (part of?) the money to the reviewers based on their karmic score. Make the size of the fee based on the size of the article to review.

That's a really intriguing idea (I too noticed how pg gets people to read drafts - I started doing the same here and there with varying results).

The issue would be it would have to be fairly private, right. In some way at least. Because if the idea is to preview and make suggestions for improvements / revisions prior to posting you wouldn't want it public at any stage :P At the same time you'd want to keep it vibrant and full of content.

(by which I mean #1 sounds the better way)

Right, it would definitely be "private". Meaning, in #1 the reviewers would be a group of moderators who the community trusts through a "Friend DA". Not sure we are going to get some legal document drawn up, but basically the community knows the moderators aren't going to be sharing the early draft of a blog post with anyone.

The blog post only exists in the system for the submitter (reviewee) and the group of reviewers.

That's why http://tenderapp.com/ stood out to me, because it it's a support tool, so has this idea of moderators (support staff) who are the people allowed to view a private post.

FWIW, the community at the newish ProBlogger.com does stuff like this. (I have no connection with it other than being one of the first to sign up and a prolific poster over there :))

But, actually, I'd see value in something like you're suggesting where the "reviewers" aren't professional bloggers or even "better than most" blog writers. Most blog readers are not better-than-most writers and might raise comments that are ultimately more useful.

Oh, that's interesting. I'll dive into this community maybe a bit more. My initial reaction is the community here seems to be catering to very beginners and up. And maybe what I'm purposing is a bit more for people who already have some skills at blogging and some established readership, who just want reviews and not tips on adsense, etc. Also I think what I'm purposing keeps the draft a bit more private since the post would only be shared with a smallish body of reviewers.

From my experience, I've seen about a 50/50 split in "pro" bloggers versus newer people who want to become pro bloggers. That split might have changed a little because Darren opened it up to his wider audience - though early on it was nearly all "pros". There's a very active "critique" board on there though - I've done perhaps 10-15 critiques so far - they range from overall designs/strategies to posts.

You may want to also check out kuro5hin.org. They've been doing a form of what you are talking about via the "edit queue" for quite some time, where members can comment and suggest changes using a different class of comments that reset prior to the article being published.

It's a shadow of what the community was at it's peak, but it still may offer some insight.

No suggestions other than I think it's a great idea.