[yorwba]

Google Docs makes it easy to add annotations to parts of a text, which you can see used here by the author to add sidenotes, as a comment section and by readers to suggest improvements to the translation.

I'm not aware of it being some general trend, though; I've only seen Jeff Ding use it like that. Could you point to some other writers using Google Docs as a generic publishing method?

[lawrenceyan]

The vast majority of publications from Hong Kong protestors are through Google Docs for example: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZrIiXypVUvPIRs9JG8AsU55F...

[yorwba]

Interesting! I checked the comment history, which has a lot of activity. Most of it is spam suggestions, but I also spotted a few that were accepted. I guess they're also using Google Docs for its collaborative features.

[lawrenceyan]

Oh yeah, don't worry about that. Just switch to view only mode if you want to read the actual document.

Edit: If you don't know how, here's a handy tip. Just add "/preview" to the end of any doc to link directly to it's view only mode. So for the document I linked above, it would be: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZrIiXypVUvPIRs9JG8AsU55F...