content curation

Intelligent Talk on Sports, Culture & Life in General. Hi all. My name is Dan Pfeifer and it's great to be on UpTrust. I'm hoping this site works out well for everyone.

I have long lamented the idea that social media algorithms reward attention, not quality of content. When you're driving your car, what gets the most attention: Good, courteous, conscientious drivers? Or the reckless drivers who get into accidents? Good drivers don't cause rubbernecking delays. And yet, on social media, we too often reward the people who cause the car wrecks. 

UpTrust appears ready to try and aim to solve this. My trust in humanity in this current moment is such that I'm not wholly sure it will work. However, I sometimes let my faith in humanity triumph over reason to a fault, so I will allow that to happen again here. 

To understand me is to understand that I like to think deeply about things. Chat GPT tells me I'm "epistemically oriented," meaning I value competence and doing what's best for everyone over rank, hierarchies and fealty to power. 

Here's some background: 

• I am currently piecing together a variety of freelance work to get by. Much of it is organized under the umbrella of my own LLC, Pfeifer Sports, as I do a lot of work in sports media, game operations and in-game entertainment. See more on the Pfeifer Sports website where I talk about my 25 years of experience in sports operations. 
• Up until last summer, the sports work was a "side hustle" to a career of nearly 20 years working with nonprofit data management. I am still doing some contract work in that realm after my most recent full-time role was eliminated. I am a programmer at heart and hold the logic behind programming and high-level computing dear. I fear AI much less than I fear people who choose to use it against others. I don't think that's AI's fault as much as the selfishness of man. 
• I live near Milwaukee. 
• I am a big Brewers & Packers fan. I was born the night the Brewers hired Harvey Kuenn as manager, a change in the middle of the 1982 season that led to their going to the World Series. I like to think Bud Selig said, "Alright, Dan Pfeifer's here, we gotta make some changes for the better." 
• My proudest achievement is being married to my wife for over 10 years after we celebrated that anniversary in May 2025. We met swing dancing, something I did quite actively for 15 years through my 20s and 30s and still occasionally sneak out to do now and again. We have no kids but three cats. 
• Anything that involves depth and intelligence that doesn't go over my head interests me. I like reading The Atlantic and watching YouTube Crash Course videos. I also like writing when I feel I have something unique to say ...
• ... here's a blog I wrote about learning what epistemology is. 
• ... here's a blog I wrote reviewing the movie The Substance. 
• ... and here's a blog I wrote about Tetris and how computers beat it before humans did, written just before AI began to dominate conversations about societal changes. 

As a programmer, journalist and academic at heart, I'm saddened by the fact those fields are all suffering in the current moment. I think social media has a lot to do with that.

Accordingly, I'm excited to see what UpTrust will bring when it comes to raising the dialog we see online and encouraging people to be deeper, more intelligent and responsible. I'm not necessarily optimistic ... but I'm hopeful. 

how do i browse all the conversations? This might be an obvious question but I don't understand....

Is there a way to just see all the threads by date? 

I see the two tabs for Top convos for you and Your Timeline and I also see Your Topics. But are all the threads showing up in one or all of them?

Where should I be on the platform for VP debate content? Hey y’all,

Excited to experiment with this! Doesn’t feel obvious to me where I should be in order to see discussion/content related to the debate. Testing out a post to see what happens. Any pointers?

The VP Debate. Hey y’all,

What we’re up to tonight

Tonight we’re going to have fun, test how UpTrust works with 20-30 people simultaneously using it, and perhaps gain some insight and make some connections.

How to engage

You’re welcome to use the platform however you’d like, and in no way are you restricted to debate topics. We’re using the debate as a launch pad and a orientation of shared experience that we can keep coming back to. Feel free to innovate or do normal stuff, we’re excited to see what we all come up with. Here are some ideas:

• Write longform content
• Do really short stuff
• Speak meta about the process, government, ideology;
• Speak about specific policies, ideas, solutions, possibilities;
• Speak micro / personal / interpersonal about your feelings, your interactions in the moment here, your life
• Inquire into things, asking questions, pondering, inviting reflection and group intelligence
• Be thoughtful
• Be disagreeable
• be silly
• Speak from your heart
• Do whatever feels real, knowing that there’s impact
• Share links or images using Markdown (the formatting guide will show you how)

Disagreement is welcome, and converse like you do in-person

So far in our tests, finding disagreement has been more challenging than the usual social media mishaps. That’s partly why we’re honing in on the Veep debate.

That said, Politics and religion have been polarizing long before social media, so things may get heated. Please remember we are real people, including you of course. We may all get triggered, and that’s OK. We may say something we regret—we can apologize, forgive, and of course we can delete comments. There may be no take-backsies in impact, but there is in visibility :)

Our algorithms mimic how trust and conversation work IRL; however you like to have conversation in person, is probably the ideal way to have conversation here. If you’re empathetic here, fine. If there’s stuff you wouldn’t say in person, don’t say it here. If you want to troll—well, try out one of our Troll Bots, and feel free to post that.

On that note, the bots can be pretty helpful, so try them out and see if it takes your conversations in a new direction.

Known Bugs

We are in active development and there’s a bunch of stuff that is in the middle of being fixed, or even simply improved visually (like the bot promotion look and feel, or topic pages, etc). So sorry, forgive us, thank you, and we love you!

Here are some known bugs that may get in your way:

• Mobile topics—switch to landscape mode (instead of vertical)
• Groups aren’t yet really launched even though it seems like they are
• Sorting and group selection dropdowns sometimes disappear while mousing over
• Occasional posting time weirdness
• Occasional mobile weirdnesses

Please continue to submit feedback

We love all your feedback, seriously, hit that button and let us know.

Not just bugs—also preferences. Here are some requests we gotten and are in the pipeline:
- Various different ways of integrating posts and comments
- Differentiate read from unread content
- Inbox notifications for comments a few layers down
- etc.

Even if we already know it, it may change our priorities if everyone is aligned on wanting or disliking a particular thing.