What is Sendero?
I’m writing this to announce the beginnings of a personal project. I hope to outline my goals for this project, both in terms of its purpose and in terms of the impact I hope it can have on the broader creative ecosystem.
The project is, for now, named Sendero. Translating to path in Spanish, the name refers to a popular short story by Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths (El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan in Spanish). Thematically, the story centers around an author who attempts to write a book in which every possible outcome of its story plays out in parallel, in order to create a “labyrinth in which all men would become lost”. While I sincerely hope not to lose anybody in my description of the project, as I outline its design I do hope the similarities justify my reference to such a classic work of fiction.
Eventually, I’ll need to come up with a more succinct description of the platform. For now, the simplest explanation I can offer is a description of how I imagine it working in practice.
In many ways, the idea is quite similar to the “Choose Your Own Adventure” series of books that, depending on your age and various other cultural factors, you may or may not have read as a child.
For the uninitiated: You’d read a book until you arrived at an inflection point, ex: “To enter the cave, turn to page 6. To climb the mountain instead, turn to page 9”. You’d make a choice, turn to the indicated page, and the process would begin anew — at least until your character met their end, grisly or otherwise.
The platform I’m building works much the same way: authors present different paths, readers choose which one to follow. However, in this platform, there’s one vital difference: as a reader, you won’t be choosing a path by yourself. Instead, all the readers of a given story will be able to vote on which path the story should follow.
This does mean that stories on this platform will be serialized. An author will publish one chapter together with two or more potential paths forward, and readers will have a set period of time (a “voting window”) in order to place their votes. Once the voting window has expired, the author would then take all votes into account, decide on a path forward, and repeat with a new chapter and new paths.
Some Questions (and Some Highly Tentative Answers)
To my knowledge, no platform like this has ever existed before. There are many parallels, with interactive fiction being a close relative, but nothing exactly like this. As such, when traversing uncharted waters, you’re likely to run into questions with no easy answers, mostly because the questions themselves have never been asked. Below, I’ll run through a list of major questions that come to mind, as well as some thoughts on how they might be answered within the context of the platform. Note that none of these answers are set in stone — I talk about them here mostly to give a more complete picture of my thought process at this moment in time.
How Should Votes Be Distributed?
This is a question where my answer is both fairly definite and, I imagine, fairly controversial. To start, I think that every user who reads a given story should receive some voting power just by virtue of reading the story. The floor for being able to have a voice in a story’s progress should be a contribution of time, not necessarily money.
However, here’s the controversial part: I strongly believe that it is in the author’s best interest if readers are allowed to purchase additional voting power. While this does have the obvious downside of basically allowing voting windows to be “bought”, I believe this downside is outweighed by several important upsides.
It’s my belief that writers are currently poorly positioned to capture the full value from the stories they create. As the most straightforward example, consider the novelist. They write a book, someone purchases that book and, after reading it, become a fan. If that fan now looks to support the author, do they buy additional copies of the book they’ve already read? Pass them out to friends and family in the hopes they’ll read it? To my mind, that’s not a particularly realistic approach. We then have a situation where there’s no obvious way for a fan, otherwise inclined to support the author of a book they’ve enjoyed, to express that support in a way that provides value to both the author and the reader. By contrast, what this platform seeks to offer authors is a unique opportunity not only to deepen their engagement with their readers, but also to more fully realize the fruits of their labors. If readers are engaged with the story, they can show their support financially at whatever scale they see fit, whether that be $1 or $100. In the end, my goal for this platform is to empower authors, not to line my own pockets. I will aggressively look for ways to reduce the platform fees to the absolute minimum required to operate the platform. As compared to platforms such as Twitch and YouTube, which take the lion’s share of money pledged to creators by their fans, as long as I am running this platform my focus will always be on maximizing author autonomy.
How Can Author Autonomy Be Defended?
To explain why I think this question is important, let’s start with a basic truth: writing a story in the format I am suggesting is hard. It’s already hard to write a “regular” story with a singular plot. Add in the number of different directions a story on this platform may take as it progresses, and you can see where the task may be overwhelming.
Now, imagine this writing task, but with a full community of readers giving their input as well. At its best, I imagine this kind of support from the reader community will be encouraging, even inspiring — but one has to consider the worst as well. Writing a story is hard enough in isolation. The last thing authors need when they’re hard at work crafting stories is an angry tirade from a reader disgruntled that the path they voted for wasn’t followed, or that a character in a path they did vote for acted in a different manner than they had anticipated.
This will be an ongoing challenge, and while I don’t have any concrete answers at the moment, what I can say is that I plan to tackle this challenge from two angles:
- Whenever possible, defer to the author. Votes by readers will always be influential, but never binding. If there are feedback mechanisms built into the platform, let authors opt into them rather than force them to opt out.
- Create tools to make the authoring job as easy as possible. Whether this be better writing tools, moderator assistance, writing assistance, or otherwise, strive to innovate in ways that allow authors to focus on crafting better stories.
How Can Reader Engagement Be Rewarded?
As you might have guessed, I’m looking to build a platform that prioritizes authors. Without readers, however, the best writing in the world won’t amount to anything. It’s therefore vitally important that readers feel as incentivized as possible to engage with stories, both as they’re being written and after they’ve been completed.
Here, I’m hoping that the unprecedented access readers will have into the storytelling process will provide a large amount of the draw. No other platform that I know of will give readers the opportunity to shape a story as it’s forming.
In addition, however, I’d like to create more chances for engaged readers to feel some sense of ownership over the stories they’re most passionate about. Some ideas I’ve had in this space include:
- Including the names of top contributors in the credits of finalized stories
- Awarding additional voting points to readers who refer new readers to a given story
- Building community tools for readers to discuss a story as it progresses
What’s Next?
Over the next few weeks, I hope to roll out a basic prototype of this platform. More immediately, however, I plan to build this platform in public as much as possible.
I’m not particularly sure what “build in public” means in a tech context, but most of the content I’ve seen under that label centers itself around an obsession with growth metrics. That’s not what’s interesting to me about this platform, and so while I will share metrics if they become relevant, that won’t be my focus. Instead, I plan to write about:
- Development — technical challenges I encounter while building, and how I end up solving them
- “Product” — not necessarily how to maximize engagement, but how to create an ecosystem in which all participants can contribute so that the whole is far greater than each individual part. Basically, what this article’s been about so far, but in greater depth
One intersection I’m especially interested in tackling is the union of technology and democracy. At this point, it’s clear that the Internet has not ushered in the golden age of universal enlightenment that some had hoped for around the turn of the millennium. Indeed, in many ways web technologies have abetted the decline in institutional trust that has come to define the 21st century.
I hold no delusions of grandeur. I do not believe that any single person or platform can reverse the historical trends that have led us to this climate of widespread distrust and misinformation.
I do believe, however, that shifting the paradigm will require new modes of thinking, communicating and connecting. The platform I’ve outlined above represents one formulation of what these could look like. The journey we’re on is not set in stone, though it may feel that way at times; perhaps it’s time to start forging new paths.