appreciation

I think appreciation is like investing; so is resentment. 🙌. You put in a little bit every day, and with compounding interest (it generates more of itself) you can end up with a fortune.

Everyone from yogis to Tony Robbins says stuff like this— “whatever you put your attention on grows.” Why? Some ideas: one thing that “generates interest” is our relational network. Expressing appreciation/resentment is usually reciprocated in feedback loops. Another is that experiences accumulate and build on each other through time. Unless we change the past—for example finding forgiveness for a resentment—there’s always whatever we had plus whatever continues to accumulate until we find forgiveness.

What keeps us from expressing gratitude, individually and collectively? Some ideas: Habit. Habits can change with awareness and commitment like my family’s pre-dinner gratitude ritual. Guilt over privilege? Self-defeating. Not a “deep” or “cutting edge” enough practice? The self-important commitment to always being on the edge is ironically age-old narcissism.

And what keeps us in resentment? Some ideas: Feeling justified by awful things that have happened to us and our ancestors. But we don’t honor the legitimacy of this pain through continuing to suffer. As they say in AA (not Buddha), “Holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.” Knowing this doesn’t always make it easy to let go of resentment. There’s always something it gives us, that we have to be willing to let go of in order to change. Sometimes it’s a mistake about how things work—e.g. maybe we accidentally conflate capacity to do something now with blame. But before I continue over-complexifying, back to a simple practice suggested in the title: small daily investments in gratitude. I believe that the wealth of heartbreaking thanks for everything eventually makes resentment too expensive, no matter what it’s giving us. 

#TTT 

An AI safety introduction that I like. I’m curious what people’s thoughts, reactions and impacts from this link are.

I’m already fairly familiar with this space, and it seems like it needs some solid introductory articles - so I wanted to present this one to you all and see what you thought.

UpTrust Aug 15 Updates. New Hire: Dara!

We hired Dara Harmon! Her job will continue to evolve but in many ways she’s building the growth and revenue pipelines. Despite the intensity of starting with a five day hackathon in a foreign country, and the wild complexity and uncertainty of the tasks at hand, she’s hit the ground running. We’re pumped to have you on the team Dara!

Aussie Hackathon 🦘

The team is currently in Australia doing the aforementioned five day hackathon. This is our seventh hackathon since officially incorporating a little over a year ago. We’re totally distributed most of the time so these are fun and important for the team, plus these have historically been turning points and creative hotbeds for us. We also have a few critical team members like Blake and Marcello that aren’t full time, except on these Hacks, so these are precious for tapping in to our full collective capacity. We’re hitting up a ton of critical stuff and we’ve still got another day and a half. So far we’ve addressed:

• image uploading (starting in the next couple of days you’ll be able to update your avatar);
• reconsidering the math on topic-scoring and group scores
• updating and mathematizing the bridging scores
• implementing an everyone score so you can compare your personal trust score with the group (should be live in the next couple of days);
• reconsidering the name (we’ve got a lot of crazy brainstorms and some decent ones),
• Ads. This is a huge piece that Pete has been particularly focused on and is coming together nicely. Most of the team is working on the conceptual pieces as I type this.
• growth strategy
• a good bit of culture and personal self-reflection and updates. For the first time the vast majority of the team attended a full day relateful workshop that Dave organized with a few local Brisbanites. It was an awesome way to kick off our hackathon and we might make this a new tradition
• a bunch of conceptual discussions on minutiae that matter for example how do we determine what content is read, and what isn’t?
• a lot of fixing bugs and backend stuff, like our CI/CD pipeline
• and a lot of crazy ideas about making the world a better place, most of which are too crazy or complicated to mention in this overview.

Ads

In the same way we believe social media and online discussion can meet it’s potential to actually increase collective intelligence in the world and contribute to individual and social well-being, we believe that there’s a way to do ads that makes ads actually awesome—some of the content you most look forward to. Obviously this already happens: a lot of the Deadpool and Wolverine ads were viral, hilarious, hi quality content on their own; imagine if the incentives were set up such that this was the norm, rather than an outlier?

Bridging

Bridging content for UpTrust is part of the secret sauce we haven’t implemented yet—in it’s first iteration we’re simply algorithmically identifying content that helps synthesize opposing views relative to a given person, and then promoting that more (which iteratingly makes it more valuable so people start to optimize for it, instead of optimizing for attention grabbing via engagement, which doesn’t get weight in uptrust). In Tommy’s first pass, without even including tag-voting, he identified 90 pieces of bridging content (some posts, some comments) out of 1,234 pieces of total content—7%! We think this is a pretty awesome stat for our group since we’re not even putting our thumb on the scale yet by promoting this content, or asking for it directly (which we have cool plans to do). (consider what the internet average is—almost certainly 10x lower, probably much lower in some cases)

Here’s Us

Coming Soon

You’ll see a bunch of new visual updates over the next few weeks and months, like this one

Trump is now…. ..officially a convicted criminal. And he’s still going to run. And he’s probably still going to win.

I’m not quite sure what that says about the state of democracy, the Biden administration, the US and/or our world.

But it strikes me as so utterly absurd, it’s actually kinda hilarious.

I remember 8 years ago, I was so appalled when Trump got elected, it seemed like the end of the world.

But the world didn’t end. And it might be my heartbroken disappointment with Biden’s warmongering-while-virtue-signaling administration or the fact that whoever’s actually in control of the Democratic party seems to just not give a fuck and is willing to run him again when he seems at least half-senile, but this time around I’m like, yeah, OK, Trump again. Fine. Bring it on.

(Insert gif of person eating popcorn ).

This is a big update for me: 50 Niche Social Networks by the numbers. I used to think we were up against a graveyard of failed projects. There’s truth in that, but it obscures the vibrancy of the existing social media landscape:

• There are 30 social networks most of us have never even heard of pulling in 500k+ monthly active users. This isn’t just a fluke - it’s solid proof that focused, community-driven platforms can thrive.
• In addition to the standard dozen billion+ MAU Major Players (Facebook, Youtube, WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok, WeChat; and .5 billion+ Snapchat, X, Pinterest, Spotify, Reddit, Quora)
• plus the foreign heavyweights (Douyin, Kuaishou, QQ, Weibo)
• there are also 19 pretty other huge platforms killing it

This is testament to

• The viability of focused, community-driven platforms.
• The social media landscape is more diverse than it might seem
• The success of niche platforms suggests there’s still room for innovation and growth in social media, especially for platforms that address specific needs or values that aren’t getting met by current platforms
• One option we have is positioning UpTrust in a different category, we’re not directly competing with established giants but rather creating a new space—where our niche is nuanced conversation about cultural landmines that goes well, in addition to kickstarting the trust economy (instead of the attention economy). It’s not about how long we can keep you scrolling; it’s about creating real connections and actually making people’s lives better.

Platforms with 1-5 Million Monthly Active Users

1. AllTrails: (hiking) ~4 million/mo
2. Letterboxd: (film enthusiasts) ~3 million/mo
3. Bandcamp: (music) ~3-4 million/mo
4. iNaturalist: (nature observation) ~3 million/mo
5. Mastodon: (decentralized social networking) ~2.5 million/mo
6. Ravelry: (knitting) ~2 million/mo
7. Tripoto: (travel) ~2 million/mo
8. Fitocracy: (fitness) ~1-2 million/mo (estimate, exact numbers not disclosed)
9. ResearchGate: (academic research) ~20 million total users, MAU not disclosed
10. Untappd: (beer enthusiasts) ~1.5 million/mo
11. Couchsurfing: (travel networking) ~12 million total users, MAU likely much lower
12. Gaia: (yoga and meditation) ~500,000/mo (estimate)

Platforms with 5-20 Million MAU

1. Fishbrain (fishing): ~6-7 million MAU (estimated)
2. Dribbble (design portfolios): ~5 million MAU
3. Depop (fashion resale): ~4-5 million MAU
4. Day One (journaling): 1-5 million MAU (estimate)
5. Patreon: (creators) ~8 million patrons
6. Komoot (route planning): MAU not disclosed, 40 million total users

Big Niche Social Platforms (20 - 180 million MAU)

1. BeReal: (authentic social media) ~25 million daily active users
2. Fandom: (fan communities) ~315 million total users, MAU not disclosed
3. Soundcloud: (music sharing) ~175 million/mo
4. Discord: (community chat) ~150 million/mo
5. Twitch: (gaming) ~140 million/mo
6. Tumblr: (microblogging) ~135 million/mo
7. Strava: (fitness tracking) ~100 million total users, MAU not disclosed
8. Wattpad (storytelling): ~90 million MAU
9. Goodreads: (books) ~90 million total users, MAU not disclosed
10. Etsy: (handmade and vintage items) ~90 million active buyers
11. Nextdoor: (neighborhoods) ~69 million verified users
12. Flickr: (photo sharing) ~60 million/mo
13. Stack Overflow: (programming Q&A) ~50 million/mo
14. DeviantArt: (art sharing) ~45-50 million/mo
15. Houzz: (home design) ~40 million/mo
16. Duolingo (language learning): ~40 million MAU
17. Meetup: (local community groups) ~35 million total users
18. Behance: (creative portfolios) ~25 million/mo
19. Last.fm: (music scrobbling) ~20 million/mo

Religious Community-Focused Platforms

1. YouVersion: (Christian) ~40-50 million/mo
2. Patheos: (Interfaith) ~10-15 million/mo
3. IslamicFinder: (Muslim) ~10-12 million/mo
4. Pray.com: (Christian) ~5-7 million/mo (estimate)
5. Aleteia: (Catholic) ~20 million monthly visits
6. Catholic.net: (Catholic) ~3-5 million/mo (estimate)
7. Al-Muslimeen: (Muslim) ~2-3 million/mo (estimate)
8. Torah.org: (Jewish) ~1-2 million/mo (estimate)
9. Mi Yodeya: (Jewish) ~500,000-1 million/mo (estimate)
10. Mindar: (Buddhist) ~500,000-1 million/mo (estimate)
11. DharmaMatch: (Buddhist/Spiritual) ~100,000-300,000/mo (estimate)
12. Sikh Sangat: (Sikh) ~100,000-300,000/mo (estimate)
13. Hindu2Hindu: (Hindu) ~100,000-300,000/mo (estimate)

Recent Growth Examples:

• BeReal: Grew from 10,000 users in 2020 to 25 million daily active users in 2022.
• Discord: Grew from 56 million MAU in 2019 to 150 million MAU in 2023.
• Twitch: Increased from 55 million MAU in 2019 to 140 million MAU in 2023.
• Pinterest: Grew from 335 million MAU in Q4 2019 to 450 million MAU in Q4 2022.