Comment by intellegacy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by intellegacy | Hacker News Reader

This is slightly off-topic but I thought I'd ask HN's opinion on an intellectual website idea I have.

I want to call it "intellegacy", for "intellectual legacy"

I really enjoy reading insightful essays and comments on the internet, and thought it'd be cool to have a website with all kinds of intellectuals with their own pages on it where I could read their essays, see a list of their books, and have conversations with them.

I envision scientists, artists, politicians all interacting on the site. For example, Neil de Grasse Tyson could post his blogs or essays there, and fans of his could get a summary of all his work, books, and what he's currently working on or reading.

Besides the goal of intellectuals having their own space to publish their insights, I also want the public to be able to read and learn on a clearly organized website, by taking their time. Maybe this isn't good for pageviews, but on other websites the content refreshes so quickly that a lot of insights are lost in the shuffle.

The grand vision is to be a huge library of insights, clearly organized and that can be read by anyone who wishes to learn and follow the thought leaders in our world.

We could "best-of" the best debates and discussions and future generations could read everything.

This could be very useful. From what I've seen of most intellectuals' personal sites, they are generally not that interested in putting too much work into a website for their material, they just want it on the internet so that it can be referenced and read. If you can make a functional, good looking, and easy to update site like this, it would be of great benefit to everyone involved. Readers get easy access to material, and intellectuals get an easy place to put their work and self promote.

I'd use something like this, but there's the chicken & egg problem. Thing is: the content already exists, but it's spread and fractured across the net. Try making a content aggregator first, with a layer of UI + comments on top, then slowly introduce your own "hosting".

Also: how is this different from a subreddit?

I like this idea. It'll be difficult to convince the best and brightest to start using your site when they have their pick of the entire internet. Tell them that you have a space already prepared for them, with a curated list of all their previous work... might make it more tempting for them to add to it.

And don't call it "intellegacy." When I read it the first time I pronounced it "intellajesse" because I was thinking of "intelligent", then I re-read it as "intel, legacy."

Thank you very much for your comment. The name is now 0/3. Heh.

Will let HN know when the site is launched.

on another note, I will probably need to change my HN username soon :)

I'm willing to do all the work to get the content even if I have to grab the first 1000 pages of content manually.

From that content I want to provide my own summaries and some "clippings" of the originals. But i'm worried about copyright / or stealing of other's work; I know blogs repost content all the time (well usually not the entire article. hopefully not) but I'm just wondering how people will react if I take their insights and "reorganize" them on my site.

I like it and wish such a thing existed (though not sure about the name). I once had a similar idea (sadly never pursued) and planned to call it www.gmuts.org (for: "get me up to speed").

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