Ask HN: Will a digital experience ever emulate the joy of a physical blank page?

[mikaelaast]

Twenty years ago, instead of a smartphone, I used to carry around a notebook. I would bring it with me everywhere, and whenever I had a spare moment, I would take pleasure in sketching out cool inventions and devices, imagining fictional worlds or characters. The notebook functioned as a workout for my creative muscle.

Today, the smartphone has taken the place that my notebook once occupied in my life. Paper and pen have been replaced by an ultra-portable computer with capabilities that would have seemed pure science fiction back in 2003. In theory, the potential for creativity is infinitely greater, yet I find myself ending up as a passive consumer of content, my thumb's scrolling prowess the only muscle being flexed.

Is it possible to rediscover the joy of a blank page within the confines of the digital world? If so, what might that look like?

[codpiece]

I wrote a response of all the barriers between me and my thoughts when an e-Ink tablet (Remarkable) is powered down or sleeping, but that was just kind of pedantic and obnoxious so I deleted it.

The reality is that you can go back to your papers and journals, often many years later, and see an arc, a leitmotif that you cannot with digital.

Yes, I have 20 year old plaintext notes, but there is something about flipping through pages of a diary late night or idly on a sunny day; seeing the scrawls, feeling the urgency or lethargy in the penmanship that cannot be replicated.

I have lots of devices, some of them quite fun and lovely, but really, pen and paper have the least friction and longest conveyance of subtle thought.

[codpiece]

Adding to my thought to answer your question: Too many software products have failed over my 40 years of computing. Plaintext lives. ReadySetGo! documents do not.

What I do now:

- Meeting notes are always digital and plaintext for posterity and search, I use LogSeq

- I have a daily paper journal and calendar. These become interesting over time. Looking at my monthly calendar from 1993 in Prague is pretty cool. I was a cool guy back then, I swear.

- Paper journal for deeper thoughts, ambitions, plans, goals, insights. These matter, and that's where you can see the arc over time. I personally love a Pilot Metropolitan gel pen and a Leuchterm notebook. I have fountain pens and all that, but really, you need a balance between pleasure to use and not afraid to turn the book into a mess.

- For me, the joy of computing these days is using Stable Diffusion (SD) to produce incredible images. I don't want normal, I want whatever SD gives me. Its a surprise and delight. I recall an article in an art magazine about how a photographer gave his blind friend a camera; the images the blind friend produced were unbalanced, blurry and overexposed. Each one visualized a glimpse into a world we can't inhabit. SD does that for me now. I'll keep the old models as it improves.

- Oh (I've edited this like, 10 times), for brainstorming, there is nothing better than an 11x14 newsprint sketchbook. You can draw all over it in every corner and use spacial organization for your thoughts. Like a cheap, indelible portable whiteboard that you can take to the beach or mountains. Best thing ever. What about digitalization? Retyping is an editing exercise.

[latexr]

The issue isn’t that your device is digital, it’s that it has a ton of extra crap to distract you.

Sounds like you’re looking for (something like) the reMarkable tablet.

https://remarkable.com/

[eternityforest]

I doubt it, unless the digital device is just an e-ink stylus type thing with at most MSPaint level capability, plus some data transfer features(Or maybe some different but similarly limited thing like extremely basic vector graphics) and it's tiny and has battery life long enough to forget about battery life.

I never got all that into paper, my low manual dexterity and spatial reasoning always made it seem just as much like a fight with the medium as it is a creative workout, but it seems like the key feature of paper is that it does not have any cues to suggest that maybe there is something else you could do with it, nor any past experience associations with the act of Crapscrolling.

For me, FreeCAD and Google Keep are kind of the pinnacle of digital creativity, it's like accessing a completely different mode of thought, since you can work with 3D objects without needing to be able to hold the state of them in your head, and Keep lets you just write, without a bunch of bogged down slowness or random glitches or wondering if sync will fail.

I also enjoy digital sculpting as with SculptGL for the same reason.

Minecraft seems to for many be the digital paper, or at least the digital Lego.

But for someone who's naturally decent with their hands none of it seems like it would be as exciting as paper, it's got a Vim-like appeal to those who know exactly what they want to make, have the skill to make it happen, and just want to be alone with their thoughts for a bit without distraction.

Maybe someday there will be something that has the core functionality of digital paper, but with a few extras added in ways that don't conflict with that.

Like, no straight line tool because the option might make you subconsciously have to make a choice of whether to use it or draw it freehand, and then you're thinking about the tool again, but you can select a region of screen and make it a hyperlink to something else, or attach a sound to it, or something else that's completely orthogonal and couldn't possibly "compete" with Just Drawing.

Maybe you could do basic animation, maybe you could have layers with different properties, like popup layers with "Only show when something in the area of a drawing on this layer is touched", or "Out of a 10 frame cycle, show this on these frames".

Maybe other similar tools would spring up for editing the same "Digital Sketchbook" that did have all the fancy extra tools to help you out, and people would need some discipline and honesty to choose which one actually made them most creative (I'm pretty sure I'd much prefer the "fancier" ones).

But it might be cool to see what can be done to make use of the possibilities of digital, without changing the paper like aspects and focusing on them separately.