

Ask YC: Do you think there's an audience online interested in reading/writing? - unalone

I had an idea back in September about creating a new method for editing and revising text files online. You know, for people interested in critiquing things and for writers who want feedback on their writing. Right now, the only solution available is text document - textarea, which is inefficient and scares away both writers and editors. I had a better idea and worked on mapping out a quick idea for a site.<p>I've had quite a lot of work since then, but now that I'm graduating I have a lot of time to actually work on things, and I'm wondering if it's worth trying to make this site. I'm not thinking about venture funding or anything regarding making money off of it, not yet. I just want to see if it's possible to make a sizable set of writers online, more so than there are on sites already. (Not counting Scribd, which is focused more on display than it is on editing/revising.)<p>My one worry is that text takes more effort from users. It's harder to create and it's harder to read over, even if editing is made potentially simpler. Do you think that Internet users would be willing to spend their time reading and editing people's work if it was made easy for them? Or do you think that there's an inherent barrier in text that keeps people out? What would you think considering the various communities online you've all seen?
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goofygrin
there are two issues that I see:

1\. People tend to lurk rather than participate (on most large forums,
something like 1% generate 90% of the traffic)

2\. People as a whole have very poor writing skills and "crowdsourcing"
editing and revisions will likely result in works with poor grammar and
structure.

I've thought about an idea like this, but more like a 'Choose your own
adventure' type crowdsourcing/entertainment site. I'd make it wiki style where
each "page" would have multiple paths to go down.

The hard part is keeping the pr0n out (there's actually a huge demand for text
based porn of all things).

