Failed as a platform for hosting galaxy-brained attempts, or failed as in every similar galaxy-brained attempt on it failed? I haven’t spent a lot of time there, but my impression is that Arbital is mostly a wiki-style collection of linked articles, not a dumping ground of standalone esoterically-structured argumentative pieces. And while a wiki is conceptually similar, presentation matters a lot. A focused easily-traversable tree of short-form arguments in a wrapper that encourages putting yourself in the shoes of someone trying to fix the problem may prove more compelling.
(Not to make it sound like I’m particularly attached to the idea after all. But there’s a difference between “brilliant idea that probably won’t work” and “brilliant idea that empirically failed”.)
Arbital was a very conjunctive project, trying to do many different things, with a specific team, at a specific place and time. I wouldn’t write off all Arbital-like projects based on that one data point, though I update a lot more if there are lots of other Arbital-ish things that also failed.
Arbital was meant to support galaxy-brained attempts like this; Arbital failed.
Failed as a platform for hosting galaxy-brained attempts, or failed as in every similar galaxy-brained attempt on it failed? I haven’t spent a lot of time there, but my impression is that Arbital is mostly a wiki-style collection of linked articles, not a dumping ground of standalone esoterically-structured argumentative pieces. And while a wiki is conceptually similar, presentation matters a lot. A focused easily-traversable tree of short-form arguments in a wrapper that encourages putting yourself in the shoes of someone trying to fix the problem may prove more compelling.
(Not to make it sound like I’m particularly attached to the idea after all. But there’s a difference between “brilliant idea that probably won’t work” and “brilliant idea that empirically failed”.)
Arbital was a very conjunctive project, trying to do many different things, with a specific team, at a specific place and time. I wouldn’t write off all Arbital-like projects based on that one data point, though I update a lot more if there are lots of other Arbital-ish things that also failed.
As a person who worked on Arbitral, I agree with this.