「CHANNEL UPDATES」

 

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What's next for this channel? Daily content. As time permits.

The previous day's essay will mysteriously double in length. Or there'll simply be new text posted. Fiction and nonfiction.

 

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Do you like the new format?

I'm going to play with markup further.

What is really desirable is for long form content to be clear.

I write long form content. (In case you haven't noticed.)

 

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Which brings me to goals.

I'd like to post around 2000 words every day.

You can get a lot done that way.

At 6 characters a word a page is 250 words and that which I suggest is 8 print pages. Every day.

If the text is of sufficient quality those 2000 words are 8 books in a year.

Today I added over 1000 words to yesterday's essay. And then I made this post.

And that makes 4500 words today. In print that would be 18 pages.

I have many things to do. But I'd like to throw out more online content.

Most of the nonfiction and fiction I've published in magazines, journals, monographs, those sorts of things, is not free; and it is not primarily online.

What's the problem with that? This is the question on the lips of those who don't publish in print. Or they don't ask. They read this line and think privately. What's the problem with that? (They can't get published.)

You can look at it the following way. The problem is that I write far more than I can edit for print. Far more. That's problem number one.

Problem number two is that I have many things to do. It's like I said.

Wanna publish in print? You absolutely must prepare content in advance. There is a deadline. What happens happens.

You cannot have too many things going on at once.

There are two manners of writing.

Suppose you're writing. Clickity click clack. Text is flowing from your fingertips. You continue writing. Then you stop. There is a snag. Something requires further thought.

Here you can perform one of two actions. Choose your poison. You can sit there, and think a little, quickly, and finish what you write. Finish what you write, because if you don't, it won't be published. You'll miss the deadline.

Insight doesn't necessarily happen quickly. Time as nothing to do with it says Wertheimer. Your brain will continue to process information and settle on some invariant over a long period of time. It will change its model of the world and suddenly you will see the snag a problem in the context of the whole problem situation and here you can abstract suddenly what is needed to most elegantly move being the snag. This might occur quickly; but more often it will occur slowly and then suddenly while you are doing other things. And the trick is to leave the problem unsolved. You will not forget it. The brain does not much forget unsolved problems. It's operates pragmatically.

Sitting there and then and trying to force your way past the snag will take some time then and there. Switching to write other things before you hit a snag there, while your concurrent and parallel long time interval processing continues to work and overcome the snags encountered days or weeks or months earlier is more efficient. Depending on what you mean efficient.

Paradoxically switching to another subject upon encountering a snag is the way in which writers become able to maximize their page count. This is how those who write hundreds of thousands of pages write hundreds of thousands of pages. What happens is that they simply don't lose much time trying to resolve snags. They just write and write and write; they can get a lot done.

But they cannot get a lot published. They will get more work done; and possibly what they write will be more elegant. And they might even by sheer experience learn to write elegantly the first time. Without revising. No shitty first drafts. You don't have time for that. Editing is more time consuming than writing. Finding and correcting bugs in programming, maintaining code, is more time consuming than writing programs the first time. Better you have time to think.

There was a slogan among the quality gurus. Quality is free; but only if you do everything correctly from the first time. Otherwise quality is not free.

Neither is quantity free; unless your quality is free. That is true at least in writing.

James, discussing his Principles of Psychology with the publisher Holt, replied that sometimes tinkering with a text must end and you're better off writing another one.

That does not work if you work toward a deadline.

How long it takes you to solve problems, overcome snags effortlessly, without wasting time, and writing elegantly, because you properly comprehend the issue, is not correlated with how long you have until what you are writing becomes unpublishable.

Assuming you submit to somewhere that actually has readers.

Miss a deadline and you suddenly have solved the problem and yet delayed publication significantly. You pick your poison.

Having your work printed and distributed and archived in that fashion is very nice. I agree.

But this forbids you from working with ideal efficiency. Paradoxically.

Then you have one or two chances to read the galley proofs. For this you also have deadlines.

Yet strict deadlines are necessary in print publishing.

That brings us to the next point. Some well known individuals have argued the internet revolution hasn't quite happened yet.

And this phrase these individuals repeat every now and then; and their argument is valid, I suggest. I think they are basically correct.

The online and free space is not yet the first choice for long form content. And this despite the fact that with rare exceptions technical publication in print doesn't pay anything either. Merely fewer persons have access to it. What is so good about that?

The reason for print was that it was archived.

However it was archived as dead text on forgotten paper.

Leibnitz according to Lichtenberg speculated that libraries will become as vast as cities.

In fact libraries have not become as vast as cities. They've been throwing shit out. Except that it's not always shit. One one another illiterate simply observes a book is not checked out much. It goes in a bin; the bin is sold. Failing that it, it gets tossed.

Russell write that he often had peculiar nightmares. They were of a certain type: the last surviving copy of Principia Mathematica has been thrown out by a library. The other ones have long been lost or trashed or been used as a coaster. Until the coffee or tea or wine or pepsi or coke or some other sugar water was spilled. Then safely into the trash.

The reason for print was that it was archived. It was archived as dead text on forgotten paper. But today it can be live text. It can be subject to easy revision and improvement, multiple iterations, provided that it's online. And the possibilities for networking and rapid response are far greater.

At least the Steem platform now archives content. There's also memo.cash and ono.eos. Soon there'll be others which shall also provide archiving.

Nobody throws money away and content is being written on money. In basically permanent ink.

My opinion is that one should avail oneself of this opportunity.

Then also Steem is an experiment and it's rather interesting to see just where it goes.

「PUBLISHING SYSTEM PROPOSAL」

 

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I'm surprised I don't see more publications using Steem as their base platform. There are reasons to use Steem. Or at least something like it.

Even if they wanted a paywall they could simply encrypt their posts with multiple signatures being complementary and then able to view it. All they need is a front end that displayed their text as they want it. That's not to difficult to make.

I'm also surprised that more occasional publications have not popped up here. There are a couple of loose communities. But little more or less professional production. Without professional production it's not easy to get a large market position.

Here's a game plan: getting a group of writers and illustrators together. And producing content daily, under one common leading account. Several large accounts might sponsor for various benefits. But ultimately a combination of steem power and market position is the aim. Exposure.

Details. A comment in an obscure post is used to receive submissions in a place most readers won't accidentally see. Revisions might be suggested and made at this stage.

But this is primarily for authors to submit content for consideration. Then also to handle licensing. All while the content remains new to virtually all readers of the site.

The leading account further formats articles which it accepts. And it posts them to trend. Attributing the respective authors in each post. It transfers all rewards to the respective authors when rewards come.

Fiction and nonfiction according to this pattern would post several times a day.

Therefore a market position would be established.

It would decrease the need to advertise. Each author would receive much more than they typically earn. They have reason to use the service.

Only long and relatively professional content. Professionally illustrated such that illustrators are matched with writers.

A few large accounts supporting a few leading accounts of this sort is sufficient to bring readers to the platform — and for writers to stay on the platform.

My suggestions would be only to avoid gmail — and generally any other email service.

Submissions are posted for inspection as comments. That in an agreed upon place. And that with creative commons licenses conditional on acceptance. Then what happens happens.

A blockchain means the author does not need to trust the publisher.

This way lo! they have evidence of having written and submitted the content. And lo! the publisher demonstrably has license to use it.

Make trustworthy collaboration easier. No disputes arise. No contracts required. Everything is self organizing. Very good. Decentralized. Pseudonymous, decentralized publishing. Because trustless publishing. Consider trust as harmful. It's a transaction cost in the end.

Lower transaction costs and lo! you suddenly have more people participating.

Several posts each day from the same leading account is important, I suggest. A single account cannot do this if they have other things going on. (Steem isn't going to earn much for most persons so they better have other things going on.)

The desired end result: — to develop market position as a "bookmarked" account for the leading account.

 

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That was the what. Here's the why.

It's quite simple.

A market position is eminently desirable.

That would not require paying for trending every single day. Which is desirable financially. It makes the publication concept viable.

Observe that winner's curse makes most first price bids for votes in a popular auctions a loss if they actually win the votes. — At least relative to the subjective valuation the winner places on that vote compared to what they'd bid. — Second price auctions match bids and subjective valuations but don't maximize the returns to bid bots. The owners of bid bots won't use them. — Posters use bid bots primarily to gain exposure. This is not always necessary. Or at least it's not necessary if you're organized.

So organize.

The market position achieved in this manner further increases the return to authors — which attracts more authors — which means more content — which solidifies the market position.

With so much information around and most of it trash the prospective consumer of information a few shelves in their mind. These are filled up and they mostly consume that information. Otherwise they sample. They don't search. Search is meaningful only if it covers a representative and sufficiently significant portion of the search space. Which is almost never possible at this point. Yet any below threshold search is about as effective as a bit of random sampling or relying on market position. Which is to say not very effective. You may quibble about what means the very in that sentence, but what I mean is specifically the consumer performing a search and more often then not the costs significantly exceed the benefits. They find what they already know; or they find nothing.

More on organization: the lead account retains the SP rewards. While the SBD rewards for posts go to the respective authors. After rewards materialize the leading account posts a rewarded comment, beneath the comment that submitted the content. The author then posts accepted.

Neat. Simple. Few misunderstandings are possible.

(A few months I started off organizing such a project. But then I moved on to another project. Thinking about new algorithms. New ways to sort feed. Primarily to deal with the possibility of censorship and flag battles. Flag bid bots already exist. Real or potential arbitrary post hiding by large accounts, with no recourse and irrespective of content, is the major user turn off in the near future for the platform, not so much even the rewards. This is the issue with centralized platforms and if present here removes the primary incentive of using this decentralized platform.)

 

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I'm still thinking about the correct valuation for a Steem or token archived magazine. Especially a free magazine.

Now what I'm seeing an increase in active users. It's there. But it's not much. Organic votes are worth very little at the moment. They're almost negligible. Unless you aim to trend with obscure or niche tags and get a few more votes for the sake of fun.

So the demand part of the valuation is quite low. Intangibles like good will are also very low. (Obvious reasons. See conversations on Telegram. ``ONO team! ONO team! Youre platform ... it will be ... erm ... better than Steemit? Right? Right? Hearts hearts. Smiles smiles.'')

Advertising therefore also reaches few persons. That is the state of things anyway in the near future. Later we will see.

Hope the best; prepare for the worst. That is how one can be, at once, both wise and mellow.

But even in this case the incentives are there for a magazine to take off.

Other factors. Authors typically want > 30,000 subscriptions to impress their print publishers. That's a hard one. Unless you're a large account and can give out votes worth several steems, or you're gaming subscriptions by one of several vehicles (in which case most of those subs don't vote your content), with around 70,000 active users that's going to be hard.

There should be 10% votes from your subscriptions. It's an invariant in publishing. Approximately. That's how you know your followers are real. (Unless they're all helix1, . . . , helix100k, with helix(n) voting helix(n+1) to helix(n+10) or something like that. Which is another issue. A significant part of the valuation has to be in using Steem to expand opportunities outside Steem. Therefore subscriptions have to be trustworthy signals to a sufficient extent. Yet few will go through a user's subscribers and check.)

And per every 100,000 words the rewards have to be > 10K to consistently bring in the people at least who actually submit work to publishers in the broader world. So about 20 trending posts a year required for each author, which may cost promotion. And so on.

However most active accounts are basically paying accounts. They all signal willingness to pay, merely by sticking on the platform. That's a major positive signal.

Much valuation right now will comes from indicator variables, boolean events which have above threshold value and probability.

There is much yet to consider.

 

「STEEMIT IMPROVEMENTS」

 

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I dislike the 5 tags system. Really dislike it. The reason should be evident for those who follow my writing on this platform.

You may observe that I typically discuss more than 5 topics. Actually about half of the active users discuss more than 5 topics. This is typically because some of the popular tags are vague and ambiguous.

#writing cover one may think anything that is longer than 250 words. Almost everything of sufficient length on Steem can be properly considered writing. #nonfiction has . . . nonfiction. That's a lot. #fiction has . . . fiction. One needs to use appropriate tags and that means coarse and fine levels of description. You want content to be properly described on

With feed and other filtering being basically worthless, there being insufficient control, one must use tags. Or bookmarks. Which means readers cannot easily find content they might want. So now I juggle tags in the 5 tags. At least during first several days. Can somebody (@Ned) please, please, please take a lesson from @Steepshot and permit double that.

This is especially difficult if you participate in several communities and would like to use their tags. That eats most of your tags.

If later Steem is going to have communities and subchains, there will need to be many more tags. So they as well be enabled now, as now there is the choice between manual juggling or visibility or participating in communities.

Only 5 tags. What for?

 

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The other major improvement would be front ends (Steemit) that did not disable the HTML markup for bookmarks linking within a page.

For then the writer of a long post can make life easier for readers by proving links within the post linking to other sections of the long post.

Making life easier for readers bring more readers. And then more writers have more readers. Then both more readers and writers will use the platform.

A social network is first of all social. It must have more people.

Why is the bookmarks code that does not link off the page disabled on Steemit?

I mean what for?

©2018 tibra.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License  . . .   . . .   . . .    Text and images: @tibra. @communicate on minds.com