Timothy Lim

On Hypertext Curation

  • Treating online seriously is something I’m extremely passionate about. I think writing on the web is where true breakthroughs are made whether it is in scientific discoveries outside institutions, financial analysis, journalism or personal journalling. Discovery comes from the individual and the web allows for an individual to distribute at scale.

  • The problem now becomes one of curation see Maggie Appleton’s tweet:

    “We’re in a weird limbo shift without the right cultural infrastructure to encourage, support, distribute, and curate good quality personal writing and research.

    If people are writing thoughtful, quality things on personal sites or gardens, I don’t know how we’d ever find them.

    RSS isn’t dead. Following single sites still works. But community distribution and curation feel like the missing pieces here. Hard not to blame it all on the downfall of the Twitter algorithm. I’m trying to post on Bluesky more (http://bsky.app/profile/maggieappleton.com), but it’s still quiet and lacks the raw mass of people here.”

    https://x.com/Mappletons/status/1847947609421341142

  • I made a prototype in 2023 that sought to address this. The user flow worked something like:

    1. User adds a link (of an essay) that they would like to bookmark
    2. People following that user could see what was bookmarked
    3. Links could be organised to lists, this could be as valuable as music playlists but think of them as reading playlists that can also be shared (this is also known as social bookmarking)

  • There are a few similar services but they fall short in my opinion:

    • Reddit - too noisy, too many social elements, it’s a forum not a curation site
    • Readwise - costs money, not open source and I mean I’m a vim user and that’s just UI slop imo

  • My dream:

    • A place where you can discover great internet essays that have been bookmarked by others
    • You can discover which lists they have been added to and find other essays that are adjacent conceptually
    • You can build and share lists with different people and work on your own taste
    • Create a social dynamic which encourages the scouring of the internet for little known posts - just like how the tiktok environment encourages people to find unknown songs which have a chance of having another life

  • My inspirations: