I'm interested in thinking about how SN, or at least, the SN software and the incentives that it provides, could be used in service of content creation / community formation. In a previous post I raised the idea of making posts perpetually editable by their authors, while maintaining an edit history. The hypothesis was that this would unlock a different kind of content, specifically, evergreen content. Some thoughtful discussion ensued, so if you're interested in the topic, check it out.

In that spirit, here's another idea.

What if SN removed the exponential comment pricing for a post's own author? In other words, right now, each successive comment you make to a post (even your own post) within a certain temporal window (10 mins, I think?) costs an order of magnitude more sats. This is a sensible policy to impose a cost to spamming. But rescinding it, at least initially, on your own posts could unlock another use case.

Inspired by some of the excellent longform writing that has recently appeared on SN (some nice examples on gold and 6102, Starlink, and energy grids) I've been wondering if I could use SN incentives to work on some longer drafts of my own pieces, and that could benefit from targeted feedback and commentary to help develop them. The idea would be to break a longer piece into logical chunks, where a chunk could be some number of paragraphs. I could create a post, where the actual body of the draft appeared as a number of chunks made as comments.

The interesting idea here is that, using this technique, I could get feedback on a per-chunk level; and not only feedback, but I could potentially get a sense of which of the chunks stackers were most interested in / enthusiastic about, via zaps. If a chunk was zapped with 10k sats, it would be clear that there was something compelling about it, even if it elicited no other comment. This granularity in response would be good for writers, who could get a better sense of what readers were responding to. But it would also help engagement in general, as it's much easier to have a lively discussion about smaller chunks of content than it is about a monolithic essay.

Without exponential pricing, deploying long-form writing in chunks would be a bit unwieldy, but not too bad. With the current exponential pricing, however, pieces of non-trivial length require real commitment to post chunkwise -- for drafts more than a few paragraphs long, suddenly you're talking real money; or else you'd have to incrementally roll out the chunks over the course of hours. Probably that's enough friction not to bother with.

Without exponential pricing there's a potential risk of a user DOSing SN, I guess, by posting infinite comments. A mitigation might be to require a refundable bounty to turn off exponential pricing for a short time, a bounty SN could seize in the case of abuse; combined with a non-trivial limit (e.g., no more than 50 comments allowed before the exponential pricing comes back online).

Any thoughts on this idea? If you're a writer, do you think you could use a feature like this to your benefit? If you're a reader, do you think it would make posts more interesting to engage with?