Digital Gardens as a Service

Infrastructure for persistent thoughts

There's something deeply wrong with how we reward intellectual labor online. Gwern Branwen—arguably one of the most rigorous independent researchers of our time—was making poverty-level income from Patreon until his appearance on the Dwarkesh podcast changed his fortunes.

The current publishing landscape optimises for novelty over persistence, engagement over insight. Substack revolutionised the economics of newsletters, but what about thinkers playing longer games? Essays that evolve over years, research that builds on itself, thoughts that deserve to persist but get buried under the endless scroll?

This is fundamentally about incentive design. Current platforms reward regular posting schedules and manufactured controversy. A digital garden platform would instead reward sustained intellectual labor: careful updates, thoughtful revisions, and gradual refinement of ideas over time. Think Substack meets gwern.net, but accessible enough that we might actually get more Gwerns.

You could always use a static site generator, but they’re a pain to use and lack all the nice infrastructure you get from a proper web app: comments, monetisation, email subscriptions and updates. The closest thing that exists is Obsidian Publish, and $8/month add on to personal knowledge management app Obsidian.

But ideally this platform would be free (cross-subsidised by authors who charge for their content or for early access to new articles), and not require the technical putzing that Obsidian does. It's infrastructure for thoughts that deserve to persist, accessible enough for normies but powerful enough for power users.

The technical requirements are straightforward: version-controlled essays with proper diffing, a subscription mechanism for getting updates, and monetisation that doesn't demand constant engagement. Ideally both markdown wonks and WYSIWYG preferrers would be catered for (maybe it’s all git under the hood, I’m not sure).

The success metric: one more Gwern.

Epistemic status: high confidence in the market failure, medium confidence in this particular solution