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Is Obsidian Publish a Good Venue? Is Twitter?

…law of remarkability. This law says that for a project to transform a mission into a success, it should be remarkable in two ways. First, it must literally compel people to remark about it. Second, it must be launched in a venue conducive to such remarking. (Location 2178)

Im conflicted as to whether or not Obsidian Publish is a remarkable venue.

It's Not Intuitive

I wouldn't go so far to argue that the UX of Publish is unintuitive, but it is foreign to many other websites. Certain UX choices (large gutters, too much emphasis on graph view) don't utilize some of the more traditional design affordances of the web.

All Girls YouTubers Are the Same

Unfortunately, these common affordances squash the total creative space, and causes people to "perform" on the Internet in a similar way schoolchildren learn to "perform" to their peers.

No Social Proof

On social media, everything is viewed through the lens of social proof. Check marks, followers, likes, etc all serve the same purpose. The are signifiers that others found it useful. Unfortunately this social proof is a double edged sword as it obviously leads to justified belief and bad actors, or worse, blind trust in anyone who's verified.

This also creates a tragedy of the commons performance stage where everyone unintentionally becomes the same person as a product (PaaP)

On Publish due to the lack of comments I feel much more comfortable being weird and saying things. I think this is a good thing for the longevity of my ideas but bad for marketability (initially)

End of the day, I'd rather be linked to as source material than commented on like a product that has a star review system.

Note: social proof is a form of justified belief which is not equivalent to truth. Belief can only be justified by other beliefs, which in turn need to be justified. This creates an infinite loop of "it is because it is"

HERMES: Congratulations, Socrates, on your epistemological wisdom. The knowledge that you seek – objective knowledge – is hard to come by, but attainable. That mental state that you do not seek – justified belief – is sought by many people, especially priests and philosophers. But, in truth, beliefs cannot be justified, except in relation to other beliefs, and even then only fallibly. So the quest for their justification can lead only to an infinite regress – each step of which would itself be subject to error. (Location 3893)

It's Still the Internet

At the end of the day, the internet is a venue. The fact you are reading this right now makes it a publicly accessible platform. Very much like the early ARPAnet/CSnet days, links are relied on heavily to disseminate information broadly.

Because larger hubs can recurse or point to each other or smaller hubs in an undirected way, the internet has a fractal like shape. In theory, with the right set of links, any place on the Internet is reachable from any other.

the Internet as the VAX strategy writ large: a “fractal” network of networks that would be self-similar from the scale of the planet down to the scale of a microchip. (Location 11766)

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