Introducing a blockchain-inspired literary journal: decentre

Hi all,

I thought I would both introduce myself and a project I've been working on that I think may be of interest to the steemit community. I am a Northern Irish writer and editor interested in blockchain tech, decentralised media and computation, literature, and much else. My project is a decentralised literary journal/magazine called decentre. Its url is at: decentrejournal.xyz

A big problem that many information-based forums (where by 'forum' I don't just mean online, but books, magazines, scientific committees, and so on) is that of quality control: making sure the best content gets suitably promoted. The most common way to try to establish quality control is via a centralised expert (an editor, typically) who chooses what to promote and what to reject.

I'm interested in one particular case, that of literary journals. For those who aren't familiar, a literary journal is an online or print publication that prints or posts stories, poems, personal essays, and similar things. It's fair to say there are a lot of them. Check out: https://entropymag.org/where-to-submit-december-2017-january-2018/ for a partial list. Moreover, it's important, for budding writers, that their material appear in such venues. Most obviously, it gets people reading your work; but for the many who want to work teaching creative writing, it serves to credential them.

The problem is, these journals aren't fit for the task. There are simply too many submissions for the editorial staff to deal with; moreover, in the case of literature, it's questionable that there are experts in the field: at least, it's not too plausible that a typical editor is much more of an expert than a typical contributor. The end result is writers wait months if not years for their work to get out there, and editors are buried under a mountain of work.

decentre aims to overcome those problems. In decentre, anyone who submits must also do a bit of editing, promoting, and managing, of the journal, so that the journal will scale up with more submissions, as traditional journals fail to. Provided several submitters taken together are at least as expert as a normal editor, decentre should result in the best work being chosen.

The journal uses anonymity and something roughly like proof-of-work, and I'll be happy to get into that in more detail in another post. For now, if you're interested, check out decentrejournal.xyz and read the about pages to get a sense for the philosophy underlying the project.

Thanks for reading,
Matt