

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

The problem:<p>I like to have blog posts I write to be reviewed by someone else. A co-worker, wife, etc.<p>It's definitely made my blog posts clearer, more effective and less dangerous (for those posts that sometimes contained something I shouldn't have said)<p>But sometimes it would be nice to bounce the post off more people with varied interests and writing skills than my small network.  I don't seem to be alone as Paul Graham seems to use his network of friends and colleagues to review his essays.  (for example, the bottom of http://www.paulgraham.com/discover.html)<p>A possible solution:<p>What do you guys think of me and the guys at Inkling putting together a community to get blog posts reviewed.  Maybe it's something as simple as setting up a private discussion board like http://tenderapp.com.  Where folks can submit drafts of their blog posts and have a group of people review them and offer comments before they get posted to the rest of the general public.<p>The community could take at least a couple forms:<p>1) There's a group of moderators who do the reviewing.  They might nominate themselves, but are voted on by the community.  The rest of the community then submits their blog posts to this body of reviewers.<p>Maybe for compensation, the reviewer doesn't get paid, but their name and link to their blog/project is added at the end of the blog posts they review.  Maybe so that the quality of posts being reviewed starts much better than lots of junk, people that want to join the community of reviewees "applies" to be accepted into this community by submitting their current blog and a little about themselves.  This way reviewers aren't going to get bogged down with reviewing total blog spam and those "reviewed by:" footnotes will be more worthwhile.<p>2) Or the community could just all be "better than most" blog writers that band together.  Everyone is a reviewer and reviewee and the community is a bit more tight knit and challenging to get into.<p>Thoughts or ideas about this and making this idea better?
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nate
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?

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mediaman
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.

~~~
nate
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.

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skmurphy
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.

~~~
Kaizyn
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.

~~~
yankeeracer73
I think the intent of the post was to have people review the post at an idea
level, not to collaboratively write something.

~~~
nate
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.

~~~
skmurphy
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.

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m_eiman
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.

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ErrantX
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)

~~~
nate
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.

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petercooper
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.

~~~
nate
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.

~~~
petercooper
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.

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run4yourlives
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.

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

