Diary Buying/Selling Marketplace

I am an avid journal keeper because I never stfu. I have been since middle school. Therefore everything that has happened to me or I have thought has been written down somewhere for me to infrequently glance back through. Last year I scanned them all and uploaded them to an LLM, and then posted the results here; for all to see and for people to one shot me in the future.

This project inspired me at the time to look to see if I could buy other peoples journals to be able to compare them and see if there were similar themes or not.

When I was talking about this with some other friends they pulled from their bookshelf a journal that they found in a thrift store in their college town, states away. It detailed this woman in her 20’s who was troubled and going through turmoil professionally and personally. Bad relationships, drug addiction, you name it.

They showed me that they read it at the time and checked up on her later to see that she had gone on to get married and had a kid and seemed to be doing much better. They thought about mailing the journal to her but they figured that something like that could maybe make her sad and she was in such a good place they decided to not reach out.

They also thought about if they wanted to torment her finding her address and ripping out and sending it one page at a time, but decided against as they did not want to bother her. For they were now rooting for her, you have to be after reading something like that and that truly understanding someone I think.

After this validated to me that I would not be the only one interested in reading others journals, which I think are at almost an all time level of significance right now because it really is the first time that we are able to parse these are scale and use computers to find themes and patterns across different contexts and windows, I went online and tried to buy some.

Turns out the only things you can buy right now are like fake excerpts from etsy and no other great options.

Therefore this prompted me to want to make my own diary selling and buying marketplace.

For sellers: a place that you can upload your journals and sell them, I figured this would have to function like etsy because you would want to set your price, I would take some fee on top of the platform of course to fund the transactions and all of that, maybe we can throw in some tools to anonymize your journal too and then you can either publish it under your name or a pen name. I also think it would be interesting to decide if we let people purchase multiple copies or if we only want to sell the one copy of it to keep it feeling more unique.

For buyers: a place where you can scroll through all of the different profiles and portfolios.

Problems: would have to make sure people are not ai generating this stuff. That is kinda annoying to do and also hard and changing every day so let me think on this one. Also the ocr is kinda annoying because the best way is to take photos and then upload them all which these can be like thousands of pages long if you talk a lot like me.

My friend Grant was working on an idea where you can take a video of you flipping through the pages and then it would parse it and would ocr it but he hasn’t finished it yet and I did not want to mow is lawn as my dad would say and so forth so I will give him like one more week until I go ahead and make it myself.

Consider this your formal warning Grant for when you read this.

I made a super super super primitive vibecoded version that I will continue to work on, but I was traveling to Miami today for a work trip and therefore did not perfect the UI in time to post todays article, you can blame American Airlines and not me dear reader, as their wifi cut out for 70% of the flight and I fell asleep (this was also when they handed out pretzels unfortunately).

Here: https://personal-website.dev/folio (screeching in not even a favicon ready for you guys rip)

Its functional at least, and it will take you about an hour to scan all of them and combine them into a pdf anyhow so I feel like I might have some time.

I maybe should also include an option to just sell the entire hardcopy and just receive that in the mail. I haven’t dabbled much in physical post but feel like that could be cool. — there is something about receiving an actual journal that feels different than a PDF, like you are inheriting someone's handwriting and their coffee stains and stuff on the pages.

What is the price that you would set for your journal? Would you price all of them around the same price? I have about 8 or 9 and think that I would sell all of them probably.

My belief is that most of my thoughts are public regardless and I am pretty transparent about how I feel and think. I often find it actually helps when people can understand how I think more. That being said of course there are things that I would remove and filter and edit and shouldn’t ever be seen by another.

I do think I would price them differently depending on how recent and what periods of my life I would be describing.

I turn to you dear reader with a couple questions this week.

1. do you keep a journal and if so, would you sell it

2. if yes to the previous 2 questions, what price would you sell it for

3. would you sell one copy or multiple

4. what is a good name for this platform

5. would you be more likely to purchase or sell one?

What is the price of your worst year? I have been thinking about this for weeks and still don't know what I'd charge for some of mine. Some years feel like they should be free. Some feel like they should cost more than anyone would be willing to reasonably pay. anyways thanks for reading and let me know in the comments. Until next week! :)