I would absolutely LOVE to hear how this is better than any given free alternative. I'm looking at you, shared Google Docs.

Thank you for checking out our site. I believe you may not have dug deep enough, or you would've found where we compare it to Google Docs, although it is far from an exact comparison. In short, have you ever edited a large file with more than 3-4 users at the same time in Google Docs? I've tried this multiple times at work with big Sheets and it freezes and simply doesn't work. Now add hundreds or possibly thousands of users, not going to happen. Also, can you lock down your words in a shared google doc? I've never tried that, defeats the purpose in my opinion.

For creating a synchronous story you don't need everyone editing at the same time, that's why we created the locking system.

Again, this is not a google doc remake, it's a Social Writing Experiment for fun, made by 1 dev. I can't compete with Google, I truly appreciate your comparison though.

We have a couple options for displaying the story. We can just load the entire story all at once, but who wants to see a giant wall of text/Emoji?

Here you deliberately cut out the rest of the paragraph, and I'm not sure why? Here's the full text:

We have a couple options for displaying the story. We can just load the entire story all at once, but who wants to see a giant wall of text/Emoji? On the front page, we'll likely display only the most recent text (500 words or so). We will provide links to go directly to a certain section (table of contents) and a link to view the entire story and also search for keywords.

We simply don't want the front page to have 80,000 words, that would likely scare new users away.