Alternatives
Products that do what CoLit – A Collaborative Literature Platform does
Hi HN, We’ve been building CoLit, a platform for collaborative, community-driven writing. The idea came from a simple problem: me and my friends wanted to write fanfiction together, but no existing platform really worked. We ended up juggling Wattpad, Google Docs, Discord threads, and random notes just to piece a story together. Nothing felt built for actually co-writing. CoLit tries to solve that by making collaborative writing feel natural. You can start a project (story, fanfic, script, anything), and others can add contributions, vote on the next direction, remix stories, or help refine…
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We’re a startup called Scholastica(http://bit.ly/rSYdfa), an academic journal publishing platform and scholarly community. We applied to Y-Combinator Spring 2011, PG actually wrote us to ask us some further questions, but unfortunately didn’t get in. With that said, we didn’t give up and have an application with some traction. We’re completely bootstrapped and would love for you guys to check us out and hear your thoughts. Problem:Academics spend their time doing research, then have other scholars peer-review this research at an academic journal, then journals hand over the articles they…
2012
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2014 · writerkata.com
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Hello HN, My name is Deepak. I've created this platform (https://stackcrunch.io) where developers can share their experiences in form of short stories linked to real-world practical solutions on Q&A platforms. This project is currently in early access mode, where you can check out the platform & start writing your stories. Also, please do check out the launch article and how to create a story at https://stackcrunch.io/posts I'd love to hear back from the community. Warm Regards, Deepak
2018
- 6AS
(it's naked and will stay naked for at least a week or two) There are stuff like Discord or Scribophile, which can provide good opportunites, but it's such a mess and sometimes it can be frustrating - for both parties. So, r/betareading is meant to become a platform for both parties to meet and exchange freely. I'll have more free time soon to work on the subreddit and promote it. Probably will add guidelines for both writers and beta-readers. Because a writer can name the genre of his text and his length, but beta-readers skills should be categorized and made public: from grammar to…
2019
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2020 · epictopus.ml
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Hey HN, I'm a longtime reader and this is my first Show HN (exciting!) It's a collaboration between me and two friends, and we're building this upon another app we made called EmailYak, an API to receive email. We're trying something new and releasing the documentation to an app while we're still building it. We'd love feedback. Do you belong to any of these categories? 1) You've built an app with two distinct groups of users (say, people with cars and those looking for a ride) and they were able to communicate with each other. Did you expose personal email addresses? Did you send…
2011 · messagify.com
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Hey HN. We've been working on a community platform/Reddit alternative with a focus on building a place for people to create communities instead of just buckets of posts. We want communities to feel like a place where you want to hang out instead of just scroll. At a high level, our platform is like a Reddit/Discord/Patreon hybrid. We took all of the best features from each of those platforms and combined them under one umbrella. Here's a list of the core features of each community: 1. Customizable discussion boards: Community owners can set up threaded discussion boards for…
2023 · sociables.substack.com
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2015 · codesnap.io
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Written in Rust! (not really) I've been using Git for writing recently and was lacking a good UI for editing markdown files when away from the laptop. I created GitWriter to fill that gap. It's built with Expo and I added caching for offline editing with local sqlite, writing goals and a bunch of other features. Markdown is having a huge moment thanks to AI and more and more people are starting to see Git is a really solid choice for creative and technical writers. I've recently launched for iOS and would appreciate feedback!
Feb 2026 · gitwriter.io
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Hi HN! Writing has been a big part of my life for the last few years. It's helped me make sense of the world around me through journaling, and my blog and technical books have made wonders for my career as an engineer. Something I've always been missing is an online community where I can practice my skills and learn from other aspiring writers. I built Tavern, hoping to solve my own problem. Its main concept is that every Monday everyone in the app gets asked the same writing prompt and you have seven days to submit your answer. You can look at what others have posted, but only after you've…
2023 · writerstavern.io
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Hey HN community, I run a small team of writers that built TheRightMargin, a new writing platform that focuses on your goals first and is aiming to be the smartest writing tool on the market. We launched last summer actually, but we're trying to make a push for some growth, so I thought I'd debut it here on HN! The #1 'writer's block' pain point this app solves is helping you figure out your next step. We have some neat tools to break down your writing project into milestones and task and a way to write side by side with your plan. We also have smart tips and a timer for writing sprints,…
2017
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2020 · poetry-link.com
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Hi HN! I and a couple of friends finally launched a project that's been kicking around since late last year: Stories by AI The spark of the idea was actually inspired by another Show HN ("I had some time yesterday so I made a GPT3 podcast to help you sleep" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29428910). With the emergence of nice tools for co-writing fiction with GPT-3, I really liked the idea of publishing a bunch of short fiction where the AI largely did the writing. I still find the surreal fever-dream esque weirdness of language models really entertaining, and hope we can…
2022 · storiesby.ai
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Hey everyone, I've been experimenting with collaborative learning and active learning for a while (I launched Coderoulette a couple of months ago) and I'm launching something new today that I'm really excited about. Online learning is pretty passive (video lectures) and lonely, and I think we could create an online learning experience much engaging and effective than that. Only 5% of people who start a Coursera course finish it. My hypothesis is that we can increase that number significantly by matching learners online in teams of 2-3 and giving them a real project to build together. On top…
2016
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2020 · tutswiki.com
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A friend and I built this as a side project to help us collaborate on files with our agents. Claude / Codex kept outputting .md and .html files which are great until we needed to share them, so we built this small website to help with that. Agent can either use an HTTP + Skill or an MCP which also uses MCP Apps to add widgets to Claude Desktop / Mobile chat. Would love any feedback and hopefully this helps someone else as it did us!
Jun 2026 · workplane.co
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I'm building an AI platform, FlowChai and found a neat use case for it today that I thought would be useful to HN readers. I use GPT4 heavily for writing / editing code, but a major downside is that it doesn't know about new projects. I made the connection today that I could upload the zip file of a Github repo to FlowChai and then write prompts just like with ChatGPT with code questions. While the original intent for this platform is more around natural language, it's neat how this works so well. It's powered underneath by pgvector and OpenAI embeddings.
2023 · flowch.ai
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A blogging platform where content are markdown files and html files, written in Rust
2024 · crates.io
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Hi guys I know ur time is valuable so I will keep this short. Ever since I was in uni I saw that its been difficult for people finding collaborators for your project/startup. Building something is easier than ever but finding collaborators has never been more difficult. so I interviewed 1083 users (yea i know thats a lot but i needed some validation hehe). Half of them did not hear about yc cofounder matching and other platforms and the ones who were using them still found it quite painful and exhausting and they got no one from there. I found that in most cases for my users the only…
19d ago · cofoundme.app
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This is a tool which lets you easily manage different versions of ideas, helpful for writing essays. I've found myself wanting this every single time I go through the drafting process when writing, and I've been frustrated every time I find myself accidentally working on an old draft just because there was a paragraph that I liked better. This solves it. I hope the community like this as much I enjoyed working on it! Note that it's currently a beta waitlist because there's some bugs with the undo/redo state management and so I want to dogfood it for a bit for reliability. It says April…
Mar 2026 · quillium.bryanhu.com
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Hello HN, I built Teamates.io[0] - a place for professionals to have small coffee chats with a random partner right now. Think of it like a virtual coffeeshop where you can chat with strangers while you're taking a little break. It's in open beta and you can try using it right now. Please be nice and professional to each other :) I noticed over the course of pandemic I missed random coffee chats with my coworkers and random chats with strangers. I think it's important to have these unplanned conversations. I would really appreciate the feedback from you all, since I believe it's a pretty…
2021
- 24TC
Hey HN, We've just launched our team collaboration platform where we're bringing together all the important tools under one app. We've been frustrated in the past with tools which had a huge disconnect between projects and chat. It always inevitably leads to teams using external chat apps for "project management" and then abandoning the main tools altogether. We're creating tools we hope teams will stick with. Super integrated Chat. Convert comments to tasks and have them auto added to project boards. Automations to help massively reduce burden on the team. Workflows, Time-Off and so much…
2024 · teamhub.com
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