Opyt vs Are.na

Are.na is a channel people browse. Opyt is a corpus a friend's agent queries, then hands back a cited answer.

Are.na is the reference for collaborative, non-algorithmic collecting, and Curius puts your saves on a shared bookshelf so friends read what you read. Both are human-readable surfaces: you browse someone's channel.

Opyt's sharing is agent-readable. You ask for a link, they paste it, and from then on their agent gets search, open and aggregate over HTTPS and nothing else, every result labeled with whose knowledge base it came from. One call cuts off one of them, or all of them. Nobody browses; their agent queries.

At a glance

Where Are.na is better

• Community, discovery and serendipity. Opyt has none of the three.
• Browsing is a real pleasure, and a channel is a finished artifact.
• A network effect that took over a decade to build.
• Opyt's sharing is unvalidated: at the time of writing, the number of other live knowledge bases is zero.

Where Opyt is better

• The reading side does the work, so an agent answers the question and nobody scrolls.
• A shared Opyt knowledge base is a 115.9 MB export of 2,830 documents, built in 4.2 s. An Are.na channel holds what one person placed in it by hand.
• Attribution and revocation are one call each.

Which one

Are.na is a place and Opyt is an endpoint. If you want to be read by people, use Are.na. If you want to be queried by agents, use Opyt.

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