Self-Interview About This Site

Yeah so this site is a bit of an experiment. One thing I've learned over the years is that literally everyone has interesting things to say, but that sometimes they need the right person to ask them the right question to set them up in a way that allows the good stuff to come out. We get that on twitter sometimes, and it's always beautiful - but twitter's so ephemeral, it's tears in the rain. You'll find some beautiful exchange 30 comments deep after a misunderstanding and feel like you've stumbled upon a natural wonder nobody else will ever see, etc. So I wanted to try to create a way to help people intentionally construct those moments, and then to publish them for others to see. This is sort of an attempt to promote a very specific kind of serendipity, but in a way that formalizes it and surfaces aspects of it into a more intentional construct. Ultimately reply.games is an attempt to give people the ability to collaborate on bringing out the best in each other, and making that visible to others.

A few things! First of all, the intention of this site is to publish the interactions as collaboratively authored documents. They're not ad hoc interactions distributed across five threads over a week, they're curated and crafted. So having a way to capture interactions that bring out the best in each other, and promote them and share them and aggregate them, that feels kinda novel and powerful to me. If twitter is the place where beautiful interactions can sometimes happen, this is intended to be a tool that allows people to craft such interactions with intention and then display them.

What you see in this initial offering is a very simple basic prototype of what I ultimately envision. What we have now is, person A writes some questions for person B to answer. But if what we're really going for here is collaborative publishing we also need collaborative editing, for instance. Maybe I write some questions aimed at you, and you like some of them but you feel like question 3 could be stronger. Maybe you accept the dialog request, but propose some edits to the questions in a way that lets you feel like you're better set up to say the important parts. Maybe when you publish, you both agree to share not only the final dialog but also the edit history - imagine finding people who consistently deliver incredible, engaging and thought-provoking interactions. It'd be cool if they could literally show you their work, allow interested folks to look behind the scenes and see how much effort goes into the effortless-seeming final product. I'm also keen to add a bunch of different kinds of primitives. I started with these sort of targeted interview-style dialogs, and then added the ability to publish an untargeted interview that anyone could just respond to. But this is a pretty rigid structure - it'll be useful for certain kinds of things, but the innovation here isn't "tool for asking someone up to five questions" it's "platform for collaborative authorship of interesting shortform content" and I think we can do cool stuff with that. So maybe this initial offering is what we call an Interview. Maybe we also offer a Conversation, where there's no fixed set of questions in advance and instead the users reply to each other - or offer edits/feedback/etc to each others' words - until the conversation reaches a natural terminus. Or imagine maybe a "Chorus", where it's structured to allow a larger group of people to collaborate in some structured way. What I really want is to challenge the sort of highly reductive, limited primitives that social media has been reduced to. We can and should have so many more ways to connect with each other!

Yeah, at least to start. Twitter, despite the sort of quality and moral free-fall that it's been under since the Boer took over, is still where I spend most of my time online and where most of my closest internet friendships are. In particular, I appreciate my corner of the TPOT scene and really love how I get to just read the thoughts of curious, passionate people all day. This project was initially inspired by me wishing I had a concise way to invite someone to answer some questions about their work, and grew from there.

"A social media platform where the atomic unit is an interview" was the original vision, and this prototype gets us much of the way there. But I rapidly came to understand that actually collaborative authorship and publication could be so much more than *just* this, and I'm excited to flesh this out and see how far I can push it!