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.

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)