The Open Question May 13: Should UpTrust have a sabbath? Hey y'all,

I run a social platform, yet I'm not sure we should be on every day. I use a Light Phone so I can't even get notifications!

Almost every contemplative tradition takes a day off. Chick-fil-A closes Sundays and outperforms its competitors anyway. Schools are banning phones (ht Haidt). We all know always-on isn't healthy... so why does every social network, including (currently) ours, encourage users to be one seven days a week?

So this week's open question: Should UpTrust have a sabbath?

It's real question the team has debated over the past few years, that we don't know the answer to. Some specific versions I've been chewing on:

• Should we just turn notifications off one day a week?
• Should we actually close—like Chick-fil-A?
• Should each person pick their own day?
• Is "sabbath" the wrong frame entirely, and the real move is something else? Will we polarize the non-religious?

And a harder question underneath: if we know always-on isn't healthy, and we built this thing, what's our actual responsibility?

Would love your honest thoughts in the thread. We especially want to hear from anyone who thinks this is a bad idea. Live discussion today (Wednesday) at 5pm central.

Lots of love,
Jordan Myska Allen
UpTrust CEO

#UpTrustFeedback grab bag

1. I can't write two posts at once.  It shows a current draft if I try to write a new draft in a new tab.  But also it says "can't post, no content", because somehow it hasn't sync'd properly.  I'm currently getting around this by just posting the first one knowing I can edit it later.
2. You just lost some text that I had drafted as a comment [EDIT: maybe it's still there but I can't find it].  This is a result of two distinct failures in how your app is set up:
   1. You didn't use `onbeforeunload` to keep the page from changing when there was drafted text that hadn't been used. "Are you sure you want to..."
   2. I wasn't intending to change pages! I held the Cmd key while clicking on Home, which, if you use links in an ordinary way, would have caused that click to open the link in a new tab. But you're doing some fancy extra javascript, and so it didn't, and instead it just navigated to Home in the same tab and lost my comment draft.
3. I just now tried to use cmd+[ to de-indent the list item, and this navigated to a completely different screen, which would have lost the text again if you guys weren't pretty good at saving drafts.  Please don't violate standard keyboard shortcut expectations by doing something that looks like it completely loses all of my work!
4. If I put a title, it shows up as small bold text at the top of the post.  But if I put a header in the post, I can make the post have a title, visually.  But the "title" is not it.  This is confusing and weird.
5. In general, there are too many options.  Like formatting is kinda nice but it evokes the idea that we're gonna be all fancy.  As an extreme example, why on earth am I choosing whether a link should open in a new tab?  Just have some sane default and don't present me with so many choices.  (Good sane default is "new tab for off domain, same tab for same domain")
6. The lil icon buttons below the post are too tiny.  Also it's confusing to have the reply count distinct from the button to make a reply. I keep wanting to push the reply count button instead.
7. Why are you summarizing all emoji reactions as eg ♡ 4 ? That's not a very good way to summarize 🤔🤷😤😒.  Pick a non-heart more neutral icon, or show the actual reacji! (I'd recommend the latter, as it's much richer).
8. Don't call what we write or read here "content" 🤮  The word has much of its history in advertising and marketing—it's the thing that's not the ads, around which ads can be placed.  That starts us off with a framing that what we write doesn't matter, it's just stuff that fills the space.  Instead be willing to talk about things as "perspectives" or "takes" or if you don't want to be so bold, just "posts".
9. If you can't edit a post after people have reacted to it (which is fairly sensible!) then it should tell you that when you hit the EDIT button, not the SAVE button (after making said edits)
10. Lots of random other lil things
    1. sometimes the title of the page is stuck on a different post name than the one I'm on
    2. inconsistent use of cursor:pointer when hovering over buttons (notable, it's absent from the profile icon in the top right)
11. no way to follow specific people? maybe this is intentional? you want to magic-algo things?  but it's sad—I see someone say something interesting and I want to like...  not lose track of them. and maybe the way to do it is to updoot more of their bops, but it feels somehow unsatisfying, and annoying if I'm like "cool I'm done gonna sign off for now"
12. if I hit the feed again, either show me something I haven't seen before or say "that's all for today", but don't just show me the same few posts I saw before

Current Session "instructions" (Feb 26): Converse, and see if nudges happen. nudges 

We launched a system where the AI bots can automatically detect intervention points. We need you to make a bunch of comments and new posts to see if they'll engage. So this week we're asking you to engage a bunch, if you can!

It's a little rudimentary at the moment so sometimes you'll get multiple bots responding on multiple posts. We'd love your feedback on which ones you like, don't, when it seemed to miss the spot, anything else you notice. 

Thanks and love yall

J (and the UpTrust team)
p.s. this week I'm at an investor meeting so dara will be with you

# [Optional Zoom](https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86795216050?pwd=TllxSzYrTFFXTW5LRmg3WUQrT04vdz09) with Jordan and Dara at least, for faces, questions, help, etc: