Integrated blogging for Manifold users

See also Manifold Longform

Stephen’s Thoughts

Stephen Proposal

• Each user’s profile page is modified to include “Stories” as an additional tab.
  • All blog posts a user has written will be listed here in reverse chronological order.
  • Clicking on a story will take users to the story’s page: /{username}/stories/{slug}
  • If the user is on their own profile page, they will see a button that says “Create” which will take them to the compose page at /compose
• Story page
  • Extremely basic rendering of markdown blog post
  • Ability to tip author ? / subscriptions?
    • Potentially a big deal. One of Manifold’s advantages is $ + social network
  • Comments (using existing market commenting system)
• Compose page
  • Simple text input for the title
  • Rich text main content
    • A minimal edit bar
      • Common text styles: Headers, B, I,
      • Image uploading
      • Iframe / Market embedding
• Discovery
  • All users who follow a creator will receive a notification once they publish a new post
  • Feed with posts
  • [A] crosspost stories to:
    • Lesswrong/EA Forum
    • Our own newsletter as a collected journal thing:
      • See: https://www.worksinprogress.co/

Other thoughts

• name
  • “Stories” = vapid Instagram montage [c] +1
  • Alternatives:
    • Blog
      • I think this might just be better.
      • [A] “Maniblog”? I actually do like “Manifold Stories” a lot though
    • Posts
    • Articles
    • Folds
    • Manaforum
    • Manifesto
• Could be an SEO goldmine
• When?

Austin’s thoughts

• Huge fan of this, of course!
  • Austin would use it immediately instead of his own hacked-together Notion blog
• Putting it on the profile is genius
  • Draws attention to individual creators
  • Allows longform content to reside in one place
• Can sponsor specific writers to come on and blog
  • Going rate for eg a Vice-published article is $850 for a single article representing 2-ish weeks of writing; not that expensive for us to commission eg 12 official articles and publish one a week for 3 months, see how that goes
  • See all the Substackers here: ‣
• Can tie into https://effectiveideas.org/; each of our authors can be submitted for this
  • Plus we can have our own prize scheme, sponsoring specific articles we like
  • Types of stories that we could feature:
    • Deep dive into current trending events (Elon Musk & Twitter; Luna crash; Russia vs Ukraine)
    • 80k/OpenPhil-style research on a particular cause area
    • Geekery on mechanism design eg Maniswap v3 diagrams
• Once this is set up, it’d be natural to move our own newsletter from Substack to this
  • Then we can embed markets in our own official newsletter!!!