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everything an author writes is praiseworthy as they write it with their heart

What a beautiful way of looking at it

Wow, Spotify is more broken than I thought

Alright, let’s talk about moderation. I was literally waiting for that day ;) As a Trust and Safety professional I’d bet my house that the more you grow, the stronger you’ll feel pressured into building moderation tools. And once VC is involved they’ll demand it for compliance reasons. I’d recommend you work towards a democratised moderation mechanism. That is, a community driven way of moderating content on the platform (articles as well as comments). You’ll still need a human oversight to prevent abuse of the democratised system (which unfortunately is a high probability) but it will take a way a large part of the manual review burden. I should have started with this: Here are some examples why you’ll want to not be completely hands off and also why the VC firms and other partners will push you toward moderation:

• what if a weirdo decides it’s fun to promote articles on ReadUp that glamorise sexual assault, violence, racism, etc?
• what if a group of trolls join who like to read but then keep harassing the other readers in the comments?
• what if politically extreme people / conspiracy people start flooding the system with QAnon style fake news? Etc etc Obviously this is not an issue now but with growth it will become a topic. In my job as head of trust and safety I keep saving that there is a small percentage of people on the planet with bad intentions. If your sample size is big enough, the small percentage can actually be a big number in terms of total users or total content generated.

Again, you still have time but I’d recommend that over the next few months you consider what it would mean to build (community driven) moderation tools. You don’t want to go down the slippery slope of being known as the next version of Parler (not that this is a real risk but you get the point... Parler people can only read 5 words at the time if it’s part of a meme 😂)

happiness is not something that you just go out and find. It is the byproduct of a well-lived life.

It’s all so insane... I don’t have words. I just hope this nightmare of QAnon propaganda and lies will end soon

I’ve been a fan of Chomsky for over a decade and reading his wisdoms never gets old.

Aristotle observed in politics that if Athens were a democracy for free men, the poor could potentially get together and take away the property of the rich. Aristotle’s solution to this problem was to reduce inequality. The solution propounded by the modern day “masters of mankind” on the other hand, has been to reduce democracy.

Beautiful

REM sleep is triggered by a specialized set of neurons that pump activity straight into the brain’s visual cortex, causing us to experience vision even though our eyes are closed. This activity in the visual cortex is presumably why dreams are pictorial and filmic. (The dream-stoking circuitry also paralyzes your muscles during REM sleep so that your brain can simulate a visual experience without moving the body at the same time.) The anatomical precision of these circuits suggests that dream sleep is biologically important—such precise and universal circuitry rarely evolves without an important function behind it.

Super fascinating

America will not survive the big lie just because a liar is separated from power. It will need a thoughtful repluralization of media and a commitment to facts as a public good.

Be a reader, not a links hunter.

😂

Slack seems to be more transient. It’s a short-term optimization of our first hasty attempts to make sense of a high-tech professional world that will be followed by more substantial revolutions

Interesting perspective

Dude, you’re too hard on yourself. But at the same time I get it... I’d probably think the same way if I was in your shoes.

On the revenue model: the focus on payouts for authors which then drives traffic based on their financial incentive is great! You have now externalised the growth strategy. If that works it will turn out to be the most important decision you ever made with ReadUp. I think 5% is too little though. Did you consider starting with a higher percentage with the option to reduce in the future? Reducing your cut (when things go well) is going to be celebrated. But increasing the cut (when things don’t go well) will make sentiment even more negative. Either way though I’m 100% supportive of the new model.

Also, did you consider building an interface for authors to publish content exclusively on ReadUp? Right now when they say “come read me on ReadUp” they still have to publish elsewhere (on a platform where people can read them for free).

This is awesome. Very insightful and made me feel a lot better about how this can be managed.

Very interesting. Seems like this is just the beginning.

There's an oft-quoted saying that "to a man with a hammer, everything looks like nails." But what if that man had a hammer, a screwdriver, and a wrench?

Nice

Things the mind tends to gloss over the pen tends to highlight

Beautiful 😍

A ton of good advice and some thought provoking statements like this one:

“The dead outnumber the living 14 to 1, and we ignore the accumulated experience of such a huge majority of mankind at our peril.” The biggest lesson from the 100 billion people who are no longer alive is that they tried everything we’re trying today.

This is amazing! I never thought to compare meme culture with dada-ism but when you read it like this... it actually makes sense!

The current moment echoes another. During World War I, a group of expat artists gathered at the Cabaret Voltaire in the neutral zone of Zurich, where they came up with an idea to match the mood: Dada. It would encompass everything and nothing — a laugh in the face of social collapse. Dada was deliberately infuriating as an anti-art art movement whose main goal was to stick a finger in the eye of the Establishment and swirl it around.

Spot on!

How do you prove people are being harmed by a product that’s offered for free? [...] the answer will hinge on privacy.

research shows limiting social media would actually make you feel less lonely

I’m sure Bill can confirm 😊

10!! I was not going to read it because I judged the book (article) by its cover (title) and oh boy, am I glad I trusted the ranking. So many gems.

It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.

If BLC-1 is, against all odds, a postcard from the star system next door, then statistically speaking the Milky Way must be absolutely stuffed with communicating civilizations, says the SETI Institute’s Seth Shostak. “In this case, there would be more than a half-billion societies out there in our own galaxy—that seems like a lot.”

No shit. Seems like quite a lot 👽

a lifelong identity tied to a physical place, with thousands of other people, harboring hundreds of distinct self-sustaining tribes mired in decades and centuries of tradition and stories and identities.

Sign me up!

According to the AG investigation, Facebook promised to tank its header bidding efforts, and in return, Google let Facebook bid on (and win) more auctions.

🤯🤬

I have no words to describe this. So glad the AG in Texas is taking this on

“Measure your progress” and “make it public” are both motivators we use here on ReadUp :)

Great read! Loved this:

Once we remove pastoral blinders, it becomes obvious that the future of work lies in the unexpected and degenerate-seeming behaviors of today

I was worried that I’ll need to remember 7 difficult things. Turns out these points feel pretty much like common sense

How sad that humanity doesn’t care to preserve such historic sites

Looks good. By the way, if you want someone to talk to about the Apple Pay integration let me know. We did this recently as you know.

“Either this is some sort of practical joke or publicity stunt to help sell his book

Definitely the latter. How disappointing

I find this very inspiring

My kids have stopped asking me to put down my phone

It’s so sad that this is a reality for many families

Maybe more smaller digital companies could thrive. Maybe our digital services would be cheaper and better. Maybe we’d have more than two dominant smartphone systems. Or maybe it would be terrible. We don’t know because we’ve mostly lived with unquestioned smartphone app dominance.

Public agencies often buy automated decision-making tools directly from private vendors. The result is that when systems go awry, the individuals affected——and their lawyers—are left in the dark.

This is insane but also not surprising , sadly.

paying people to stop using Facebook for a month caused a decline in negative partisan feelings by around 0.1 [standard deviation].

Whoa... sounds like we just need to shut this thing down

Not a fan of Buffet. I think he’s a dinosaur about to go extinct. His views are outdated but clearly he’s had his time.

I did like this one:

It is very important to associate with people who are better than you, you will move in that direction. It’s just smart to do that. Not just people who are better in terms of IQ but also people who are better in terms of character

Eshed provided more information in his newest book...

... and there you have it. It’s all just a PR exercise. Sounds like his retirement fund needed a top up to purchase that yacht

This is gold. Seems like common sense but I’m sure many people need to read this.

Slowly build yourself a trusted network of people you can support, and key supporters for you in your life.