Launching a neuroscience blog is on my to-do list—although it’s currently in the idle-daydream-planning stage.
I, too, looked at Lesswrong’s reddit-blog hybrid format and thought it was awesome and worth imitating. However, I don’t have the technical skill make any forum let alone a reddit hybrid, nor do I have a good estimate concerning how long it would take to figure it out. I also don’t have any idea how to deal with spam and stuff.
Here’s an intermediate coding-noob friendly solution I’ve been considering, inspired by the existence of reddit.com/r/hpmor
Rather than a traditional comments section, you make a subreddit devoted to your blog. You post all blog posts on the subreddit. The “comments section” consists of a hyperlink to the subreddit post. If any of your readers have anything to say, they can post on the subreddit. You can take the high quality reader posts from the subreddit and transfer them to the main blog, giving the poster credit. Reddit does all of the anti-spam stuff for you, and you just piggyback off the service. It’s a mutualistic relationship—reddit assists with forum infrastructure, and your readers will become redditors. If readers is important to you, you might even get a little traffic from users cross-posting your stuff to other subreddits.
Again, this is idle daydreaming on a topic for which I have no experience, so it’s completely possible that this is a dumb idea. If you know what you are doing and idea strikes you as incredibly bad or incredibly good, please do let me know.
Launching a neuroscience blog is on my to-do list—although it’s currently in the idle-daydream-planning stage.
I, too, looked at Lesswrong’s reddit-blog hybrid format and thought it was awesome and worth imitating. However, I don’t have the technical skill make any forum let alone a reddit hybrid, nor do I have a good estimate concerning how long it would take to figure it out. I also don’t have any idea how to deal with spam and stuff.
Here’s an intermediate coding-noob friendly solution I’ve been considering, inspired by the existence of reddit.com/r/hpmor
Rather than a traditional comments section, you make a subreddit devoted to your blog. You post all blog posts on the subreddit. The “comments section” consists of a hyperlink to the subreddit post. If any of your readers have anything to say, they can post on the subreddit. You can take the high quality reader posts from the subreddit and transfer them to the main blog, giving the poster credit. Reddit does all of the anti-spam stuff for you, and you just piggyback off the service. It’s a mutualistic relationship—reddit assists with forum infrastructure, and your readers will become redditors. If readers is important to you, you might even get a little traffic from users cross-posting your stuff to other subreddits.
Again, this is idle daydreaming on a topic for which I have no experience, so it’s completely possible that this is a dumb idea. If you know what you are doing and idea strikes you as incredibly bad or incredibly good, please do let me know.
Note that reddit closes comments after something like 6 months.