Your Writing is Incredible, An Answer To Your Question, and It's Not Too Late

It’s wonderful to see how many of you are taking on the 100 Day Writing Challenge. The writing that you’re sharing is nothing short of genuine, sincere, and unfiltered. This was what we hoped for when issuing this challenge; that it would be an outlet for you to share who you are without worry and without judgement.

If you haven’t read some of the posts of our members in the Listed Community, you owe it to yourself to have a read. Not just the #100Days challengers, but also the Listed members who write as a means to express themselves, whenever inspiration strikes.

Writing on Listed is like speaking to yourself, and it can be quite strange at first. There are no comment boards, there are no likes, and there's no way to know if anyone is reading your posts. This is by design, and is unlikely to change. The world is chock-full of content designed to please other people. Listed instead focuses on you. It's a sort of self-therapy. And authors on the platform love it.

To help encourage free expression, we want to answer a few questions you may have:

• Is Listed an anonymous platform?
• Is anyone reading this?
• What if I disagree with something someone says on Listed?
• Will Standard Notes and Listed be here for the long term?

Is Listed an anonymous platform?

Listed is anonymous, and private. While not necessarily designed for anonymous sharing, privacy is included naturally as a product developed by Standard Notes. Your IP address is never collected. Registration to Listed does not require an email address or a password. You don’t have to publish under your given name, or you can publish with just a part of your name. It’s up to you how much you share with the public. (If you'd like an extra, super high level of anonymity, you can use a separate Standard Notes account to publish to Listed. But honestly that might be overdoing it.)

Is anyone reading this?

Yes, others are reading your works. Sharing of yourself takes courage, but sharing of yourself can also have great benefits for you. And, as a community made of up readers and writers alike, your words are being read. By how many?

Ah, you number-minded person you. That’s no way to treat your most personal work. Regard the worth of your self-expression not by metrics that ultimately don’t mean anything, but by how it makes you feel to read it back to yourself. If we had a slogan on Listed, it would be “Listed: An audience of one.” We’re really serious about this vanity thing.

The web today has created dangerous incentives, where people transform themselves into what will get the most likes or views. And the result is ungodly. Monstrosities of the human psyche. This spontaneous rage culture of the internet? This isn’t us. This doesn’t have to be the result of the human collective. By focusing on writing in a way that feels natural to you, in a way designed to please only you and no one else, you emanate your longing for a more civil internet. A more peaceful internet.

This is your space, your outlet, your rules on what you want to share and what you don’t. Just know that on our end, we don’t censor, judge, or degrade your works with ridiculous algorithms. So, just write what’s on your mind, what you feel, what you wish, what you want. We’re all enjoying the same.

What if I disagree with something someone says on Listed?

That’s ok. We’re not all here to agree with one another. Your first impulse is to post a comment, right? You need to let the author and the world know you’re in disagreement, and perhaps save a few lives. Well, you can’t do that here. Listed is a personal space for authors, and just as you wouldn’t barge into an author’s home to share your disagreement, you can’t insist on your own views over an author’s here. You can, however, create your own personal space and share your thoughts that way. But there’s no tying yourself to another’s work in the parasitic-like fashion that internet comments are today.

Sorry, we feel really strongly about that one.

Will Standard Notes and Listed be here for the long term?

Standard Notes and Listed were designed for the long run. We make careful design decisions to make sure that keeping our software alive and stable is as easy as possible. It’s awful when a great service or tool gets engrained into our daily life, only to have it suddenly shut down.

We’ve insisted on a longevity statement from day one of our founding, focused on decisions made for the benefit of our users and the service itself.

When you combine Listed and Standard Notes, the end result is freedom of expression combined with deep privacy. And the result and uniqueness in tone of voice on Listed has been awe-inspiring. Keep writing.