Danica Swanson on Warpcast

Danica Swanson pfp

I've been thinking about this stubborn how-to-get-writers-sustainably-funded problem for a long time, since it pre-dates crypto. It's actually become one of my main intellectual interests over the years. Without getting too far into the weeds, here are a few thoughts: What if Paragraph were to zoom out and focus more on the social layer from a systems perspective -- i.e., think of context, curation, and conversation as the primary paths to value creation, rather than individual writers? Could Paragraph help writers collectively build thriving creative scenes with network effects accruing to the contributors -- writers, editors, curators, preservers, and readers? One of the things that drew me to Paragraph in the first place was the quote-highlight feature, for example. Could Paragraph give contributors places to preserve quotes and respond to them in ways that might help draw others into an ongoing conversation around the work? Maybe in a mini-app?

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Danica Swanson pfp

For reference, I wrote about what I mean by "from a systems perspective" in this piece. (Look at that beautiful preview pane! Great design work, @paragraph!) https://paragraph.com/@danicaswanson/quality-writing-is-systemic

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BrightFutureGuy 🎩↑Ⓜ️ pfp

BrightFutureGuy 🎩↑Ⓜ️

many good points in this thread - will come back to it. Quick thoughts before calls: Monetizing something that's free to get (here writing) is always hard. If it's not free it doesn't get reach. There're three angles I see: 1/ your writing has value inside then that's what can be monetized (think data nobody else has), probably not us, some companies possible or very good analytical work of individuals. 2/ your writing just creates "better app experience" for everyone - because it sparks conversation or provides something to read - then it's public goods and can only be rewarded by the network 3/ your writing has a community that values "You" and your journey and they're willing to pay you for sharing your journey with them - sounds great but is actually limiting, because you need to be very focused (clear to read for folks - what do you offer), if you write about broad topics and don't offer people "progression towards something" with their own life, then this model doesn't work

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Ashwinikumar pfp

@christin just as we were speaking about it, what do you think about this?

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Kent Babin pfp

"Could Paragraph help writers collectively build thriving creative scenes..." This. Really well said. After fairly recently being introduced to the concept of ergodic ecosystems, it's now clear to me that we're not going to solve the problem by making writers go it alone in competition with all the other writers. We need support to produce great work. For all its faults, trad publishing provided that support. If we were to bring writers, editors, curators, designers, et al. into an ecosystem, it would make the finished product better and, in theory, worth paying for.

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Reid DeRamus pfp

I love the line of thinking! And we definitely want to bring back collectible highlights in some form. Beyond collectible highlights, I would love to hear what we could do to enable you to build a creative scene! Thanks for the feedback & sharing. :)

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