Communicating with Interactive Articles

Re:Communicating with Interactive Articles by cscheid on Sunday February 12, 2023 @12:19PM (#34764634)

Distill was one of the best experiments in publishing of the last decade, no irony. Unfortunately, it’s worth reflecting on why they are on a hiatus that I fear will be (understandably) permanent.

When I was an academic, I had the privilege of participating in the process of producing one article for Distill, and the amount of work was equivalent to 3-5x the work of any one single publication in other venues. I’m not sure that’s avoidable to achieve the quality that Distill strives for, but it means the incentives are all pointed against it.

A direct consequence of working on an environment with bad incentives is that people there will burn out, which is part of what I think happened.

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Re:Communicating with Interactive Articles by amitp on Sunday February 12, 2023 @01:20PM (#34765237)

I loved Distill! My own experience with interactive content (not through Distill) was that it was so much extra work that it was hard to justify, except as a passion project, so I wasn't surprised by their (permanent) hiatus.

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Re:Communicating with Interactive Articles by nl on Sunday February 12, 2023 @08:29PM (#34769126)

I agree that the extra work is very significant and difficult to justify.

I have wondered if there are opportunities for standardizing some types of visualizations so they can be used more broadly.

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Re:Communicating with Interactive Articles by cscheid on Sunday February 12, 2023 @11:49PM (#34770261)

That would make it not really what distill was about. Concretely, the article my students wrote wouldn’t have been possible - it was literally proposing a new visualization method and showing a real implementation on the web.

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