Comment by andreyk
4 years ago
Sad to see this. But also not very surprising, given distill has had relatively few or no articles from outside the ediotiral team for years. The combination of extremely polished, interactive articles, and usually great depth made writing for distill a huge challenge. Which makes it not very surprising it was a huge amount of work for the editorial team - I wonder how many articles they helped with that never reached completion. Combined with the lack of incentive for authors to take on the huge amount of work (relative to working on research papers). Still, I hope it indeed inspires more researchers to have personal blogs with in depth articles.
Out of curiosity I just ran some counts using `jq` on our metadata[0]: We seem to have published 48 articles overall[1], of which 22 list at least one of our editors as an author. 10 of those list an editor as the first author. That leaves 26 articles entirely from outside the editorial team. Those are indeed predominantly from the more recent years; I'll try to perform an aggregation to quantify that.
[0] I'm sure there are more elegant ways to form these queries: https://gist.github.com/ludwigschubert/cd2bc4686e3fc6c8202c8...
[1] excluding editorial updates; if that still seems high: this includes every individual article in a "thread"; check out the [Differentiable Self-organizing Systems](https://distill.pub/2020/selforg/) thread, the [Circuits](https://distill.pub/2020/circuits/) thread, or the [Discussion of Adversarial Examples Are Not Bugs, They Are Features](https://distill.pub/2019/advex-bugs-discussion/).