NoteGive your reasons
The most considered response is a Note. It shows up under the work and has a page of its own.
80characters at minimum
- Several Notes from one person count once.
- Notes an author writes on their own work don’t count.
01 · Writing
Ted Chiang argues that language requires an intention to communicate, and AI has none. Behind an article is a person trying to tell you something: which side they take, what they have lived through, how they worked it out. Often we read to get to know that person.
Readers
Readers often want more than an answer. They want a place where people read closely and argue in earnest. Mill warned that he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. When people with different experiences give their reasons under the same piece, readers see not a conclusion but the whole question.
Mill, On Liberty, 1859; Oldenburg, “third places”, 1989
Authors
Authors need a response. In one experiment, people were paid per piece to build Lego figures. One group saw each finished figure put away; the other watched it taken apart and handed back to rebuild. Pay was the same, yet the second group built a third fewer. Work that is seen and answered is work people keep doing.
Ariely, Kamenica & Prelec, 2008
02 · Interactive pages
An interactive page is a small web page that runs right inside the post, and readers can interact with the work directly.
Saved as a JPEG, a picture often shrinks to a few percent of its size and still looks the same. Squeeze it too hard, though, and the edges give way: the thin gold line smears into a row of blocks, and the white strokes bleed into the brown.
Why a pictureWhat “smears into blocks” looks like is hard to say in words. You have to show it.
Why an interactive pageIn a video, the author decides where to pause and what to zoom in on. Now it's your turn.
2017
The Evolution of Trust
This kind of work isn’t new: Nicky Case turned game theory into a page you can play
2021
Distill goes on hiatus
A journal devoted to these articles; the maintenance burden was too heavy
2022
Mechanical watches, GPS
Bartosz Ciechanowski’s long pieces. Each takes knowing the subject, designing it and writing the code, often months of work
Now
AI writes the code
The coding goes to AI, so people who know the subject can turn an idea into a page readers work with themselves
03 · Responses
AI can write a comment in seconds and pile up thousands of likes. So on Interflus, every kind of response needs a real person who actually read the work.
Hover over a card to see the rules
The most considered response is a Note. It shows up under the work and has a page of its own.
80characters at minimum
Only Interflusers can give one. An UP from someone who read for less than 5 seconds doesn’t count.
5 secof reading before it counts
Save a work to your bookmarks and come back to it later. Nobody else sees what you saved.
0weight in rankings
You get one a day and can save them. One per work, and it can’t be taken back.
1new star a day
On a work’s page, hold UP for 1.2 seconds to UP, bookmark and star it in one go.
Hold the button for 1.2 seconds to try it
04 · Extend
If the author published a work as Open, any Interfluser can extend it. An extension is a new work with you as its author, and it always shows the original and who made it. Unlike a Note, an extension appears in the feed, and others can extend it in turn.
What “fork” means has changed once
In early open source, a fork meant a project splitting apart, something people tried to avoid. GitHub made it the first step of contributing: copy it, improve it, send it back. Interflus wants explanations to work the same way.
The source stays attached
Large models learn from countless people’s work, but what they generate can’t say where it came from. On Interflus, whether you make the changes yourself or with AI, every version records which work it came from, what changed and who published it.
Understanding can stack
A study of Scratch found that users who often remixed others’ projects went on to use more programming concepts in their own. When someone builds on your work, what you both know adds up.
Scratch study: Dasgupta et al., 2016
Click Extend, and Interflus copies all of the original’s files into your draft.
There are two ways to edit: describe the change to AI in the editor, using your own API key, or download the files, edit them in VS Code, Claude Code or a similar tool, and upload them.
Interflus lists the files you added, changed and removed compared with the original. You need to change at least one file to publish.
Say what you changed, then publish. The original author is notified.
You start from a blank page, and nothing is copied from the original. You can open the original beside it at any time.
What you write is an article of its own: an addition, a rebuttal, or the same idea told another way.
Once you publish, the original author is notified and your article appears in the original’s extension tree.
Reading is open to everyone. To publish, give UPs and stars, write Notes or extend work, answer a short quiz about how the community works. It takes about fifteen minutes.