Where is the Earbits of Science Fiction?

Hacker News turned me onto an article about the importance of curating on the web. Which also turned me onto Earbits - which seems like a fun way to listen to music - particularly since they do have an Android app.


Anyway, I found myself wondering why you have something like Earbits for music but nothing similar for Science Fiction. For example, way back in the mid-90's when CompuServe was king I ran (for about a year) a paid online magazine for Science Fiction that was titled Radius (only links for it now are in articles about some of it's authors). Because it was online (Win HLP files and in later issues this new fangled HTML stuff), folks heard about it fairly quickly. Because it actually paid a professional rate (3 cents a word, good luck getting even THAT now), I was quickly innundated. So much so that after a year I gave it up just as it was starting to break even. Why? Because I had gone through so much DRECK that I couldn't even read the good stuff anymore without noticing the problems I got from even writers who had been in Asimov's and Analog. It would take almost three years before I could convince myself to read a page of SF again.

Bringing this back around to my point, I find it interesting that you don't have a "Quora" or "Earbits" of online fiction, let alone Science Fiction anywhere. I wonder if that's because there are more people who listen to music than who read... or some other problem? Or maybe it's just that my experience still is the average one, and because you need talent to pick up a guitar and get out even a chord, and not so much to write, perhaps there's just so MUCH noise versus signal in writing that you can't curate it successfully (short of being a traditional publisher, and we all know how well they are doing these days).