If it weren't for Nanowrimo and being reminded consistently to participate in a short story anthology every year, I'd be a writer who didn't write (except comments on HN/Reddit).
Problem is that information snacks like news and forums are the intellectual equivalent of vending machine junk food. We know it's better for us to cook our own food but we get lazy. Same with forum posts. We feel like we're actually doing something when we're not.
There are comments that are superior to the article they're responding to. There are books that are better off not being read at all. Forums also serve a few purposes that raw reading material cannot.
I think moralizing the activity brings with it the peril that you may start feeling good about consuming information the "right" way, and feel bad about consuming it the "wrong" way, while what you should really care about is the information itself. How you get it doesn't really matter.
Granted, I don't see anything particularly virtuous or advantageous about cooking your own food, either, so perhaps we're at an impasse...
Mostly no, but sometimes yes. I've not found a more thought provoking place of discourse than HN, and have been referred to a number of good books on here.
This started as a comment in a G+ thread, _including_ the 37 footnotes: https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/5l_8MqtVwLLvX_DabPjY-g
This got written (along with the research for the numbers) because I'd gotten sufficiently pissed off at zero-information-basis discussions on the topic: https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/nAya9WqdemIoVuVWVOYQUQ
A re-share of a meme that struck me as slightly too-good-to-be-true inspired this: https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/39w8u4/jp_morg...
Follow-ups to the Google numbers piece above inspired this: https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin...
I've also used forums to try out ideas I'm developing, solicit feedback, etc., etc.
Most of my writing is nonfiction and explores topics, or reports on findings based on explorations, usually of literature within one or more fields.
And I've considered shopping a few of these pieces around, though I've not yet done so.
But baring that, restaurant food is generally too salty and fatty and light on fresh vegetables to be healthy to rely on for most meals. There are exceptions, but those restaurants tend to be drastically more expensive.
But there are alternatives to cooking and going to restaurants that are often frowned upon, yet nonetheless allow you to get everything you need and are already drastically cheaper in many cases:
- canned food;
- frozen food;
- meal replacements;
- supplements.
I think the reason writing in the forum style is exciting is because having an audience for anything you do is exciting. Also, you can teach, moralize, scandalize, etc and get near-realtime reactions to the thread being teased in the writings.
I think the risk would be that if a writer edited too heavily based on feedback, the work ceases to be purely the writer's and now it's a collaborative effort, which may lead to an impersonal writing style or threaten one's claim to copyright.
In my opinion, the best place for an app like this is within Reddit. You have the willing audience already in-place to offer you the feedback. Although, I could imagine an unfiltered forum might present a distraction. There might need to be a separate forum moderator that can control visibility of comments to the writer.
And then when they're done they could export it to a text editor of their choice, or save it to dropbox or something.
I once made a chat app in Flash a long time ago called Mimic, that would take in whatever you said, infer connections between words (based entirely on what words were next to other words, so you could use just about any language or slang you wanted), and then build a sentence off that in response, that would almost kind of make sense. I would a good hour or more at a time responding to that thing trying to train it and getting a kick at the silly things it said.
This would be kind of like that. Yes, it'd be a pretty dumb app, but I could see myself being entertained by it, so maybe it'd be entertaining to other people as well.
Heck, one of my favorite plot ideas came when I was taking a SciFi lit class in college, and the final had a short response where we had to sketch an original short story concept.