From the position of author, the important difference between posting an article here and posting an article on my personal webpage is the control over the discussion.
Posting here is convenient: the whole website is already set up and maintained, I just need to write the text. My article will immediately get many readers, and it will be approximately the kind of readers I want. Even the moderation by crowd is provided for free.
On the other hand, the cost of the convenience is my freedom to make different choices. If I have opinions on the website functionality or design, it’s not my choice. I have to think whether my topic is appropriate for the website; while on my own blog I can post anything. If I disagree with the moderation, too bad, I am just one among many voters. On my own blog I can make the ultimate decisions, block the users I don’t like, and keep the debate nice according to my criteria of niceness.
One of the interesting things about NNTP’s structure is that the moderator and the host don’t need to be the same entity or even use the same software. The same goes for UX elements. It would be entirely possible to run something-that-looks-like-a-blog on your own site, have it use hypothetical-lesswrong-hosted NNTP for hosting its content (buying you native-client support for users who want it), and still have ultimate control over who can post what. I’ll be describing how that works at some point.
It would rely on goodwill from the LW hosts, of course; but the worst they could do is stop hosting you—and they could not hold your content hostage as long as someone, somewhere, has kept a local cache of it. You could even self-host and still interoperate with the site, because the system was designed to be decentralized even though it doesn’t have to be used that way.
My understanding is that another difference is even more important to the author, and that is control over client-side user experience (UX). A neutral protocol or API would allow for different and/or more customizable clients, and readers (posters, commenters) could modify their UX and do things like aggregate content from different sites without imposing on other users or on the site maintainers.
From the position of author, the important difference between posting an article here and posting an article on my personal webpage is the control over the discussion.
Posting here is convenient: the whole website is already set up and maintained, I just need to write the text. My article will immediately get many readers, and it will be approximately the kind of readers I want. Even the moderation by crowd is provided for free.
On the other hand, the cost of the convenience is my freedom to make different choices. If I have opinions on the website functionality or design, it’s not my choice. I have to think whether my topic is appropriate for the website; while on my own blog I can post anything. If I disagree with the moderation, too bad, I am just one among many voters. On my own blog I can make the ultimate decisions, block the users I don’t like, and keep the debate nice according to my criteria of niceness.
One of the interesting things about NNTP’s structure is that the moderator and the host don’t need to be the same entity or even use the same software. The same goes for UX elements. It would be entirely possible to run something-that-looks-like-a-blog on your own site, have it use hypothetical-lesswrong-hosted NNTP for hosting its content (buying you native-client support for users who want it), and still have ultimate control over who can post what. I’ll be describing how that works at some point.
It would rely on goodwill from the LW hosts, of course; but the worst they could do is stop hosting you—and they could not hold your content hostage as long as someone, somewhere, has kept a local cache of it. You could even self-host and still interoperate with the site, because the system was designed to be decentralized even though it doesn’t have to be used that way.
My understanding is that another difference is even more important to the author, and that is control over client-side user experience (UX). A neutral protocol or API would allow for different and/or more customizable clients, and readers (posters, commenters) could modify their UX and do things like aggregate content from different sites without imposing on other users or on the site maintainers.