social media platforms

Is UpTrust the new twitter meets Reddit ? Does anyone have big hopes for this platform? Do you guys think that this will gain even more traction , while Facebook is in their driest era and Tik Tok is still owned by the president ??? Is the future bright for UpTrust ??

Uptrusting as Oral Culture. Interesting to explore UpTrust w/ the frame that it's more of an "oral culture" than a "written culture", where it has more of a riff and jazz kind of energy than other internet community sites that I frequent. I think it's looking through the comment sections, with the branching and forking, and I imagine more of "sparking a multi-party conversation" and "ah yes" than traditional writing. LessWrong (another experiment in a new internet forum style) is strongly essay culture, Twitters got a bit of oral culture vibes, but perhaps less collaborative (uncertain).

I wonder how far this lens can go for community or product development.

When I was writing this post, I realized I'd rather have dictated it!

Why you should post more: Everything is a mirror of everything.

We’re all censoring most of our awareness.

Uptrust is a currently curated community where we can actually practice thinking.

The more I post the more direct I’m being with everyone in my life. (I have an embedded belief that if I do anything anywhere then I should that anything in more everywheres…but I still curate).

Post about why you’re not posting.

Post about questions you’re asking yourself.

Post about your anxiety.

Post to express art.

This shit won’t last, this fun safe newborn ward. Use this time now to try something. Create a fake name or another account so you can try it from anonymity.

Huge opportunity to bust out of our norms.

Some integral philosophy/analysis behind TreeView. Forums like Reddit and Facebook are essentially "Orange" interaction paradigms—there's a static "original post" and a fixed hierarchy. Some benefits of this are that you get some sense of coherence to a conversation, and if you're ten layers deep in replies, you can quickly navigate your way back to the original post to try and reclaim some context. Some drawbacks are that really cool content deep in threads hardly sees the light of day. Also, it's really confusing to navigate, and especially confusing as the tail winds up. (Facebook tries to avoid the contextlessness and lostness of orange by imposing a limit of three deep, but this curtails conversational flow which often goes in strange directions to find the good stuff).

Twitter and all of its clones are essentially "Green" interaction paradigms—you get a personally tailored feed of content that comes from anywhere in a given lineage/conversation. The first post you see could be from twelve layers deep in a convo, the next a reply to a post, and the next an original post. Some benefits of this is that deep content gets surfaced—a reply to a reply to a reply to a reply might be the most interesting bit of the conversation, and on twitter it gets to your feed immediately. Some drawbacks are that it often lacks context, and sometimes is purposely removed from context to be more inflammatory. I believe this contributes to the sound-bite post-truth world we're in today, where context, nuance, history don't matter, only quick dopamine hits.

We believe TreeView is the start of a "Teal" interaction paradigm which allows deep content to be surfaced while retaining the context of the conversation it is birthed from. We believe this will integrate the benefits of both hierarchical forum interactions and pluralistic twitter feeds. I say "start" because right now it still leans Orange; we haven't yet built out the bits where whenever you click onto a reply, it becomes the top-level thingy in the TreeView; nor the feature where you can link "original posts" to each other in playlists, or to multiple originals, and see that there's not really such a thing as an "OP" because all of us are proverbially standing on the shoulders of giants. So where we're going is you'll be able to get a relative hierarchy (a holarchy) of what conversational lineage content is nested inside of. We believe this is models more of "in person" conversation actually works than any of the current paradigms. And even just this start has helped me understand longer threads!

Why you should post more: Everything is a mirror of everything.

We’re all censoring most of our awareness.

Uptrust is a currently curated community where we can actually practice thinking.

The more I post the more direct I’m being with everyone in my life. (I have an embedded belief that if I do anything anywhere then I should that anything in more everywheres…but I still curate).

Post about why you’re not posting.

Post about questions you’re asking yourself.

Post about your anxiety.

Post to express art.

This shit won’t last, this fun safe newborn ward. Use this time now to try something. Create a fake name or another account so you can try it from anonymity.

Huge opportunity to bust out of our norms.

COVID Vaccines: is the cure is worse than the disease (these days)? I don’t get COVID vaccines anymore. I did the first round while we were still in lockdown.

I stand by the choice to get vaccinated then. We didn’t know what was happening, lots of people were dying, good statistics were hard to come by (good interpretations even harder), and the virus hadn’t mutated yet.

It wasn’t great for me: two shots separated by a month; 5.5 days after the first I got shingles (apparently thousands of other people also got at that exact time) and then after the 2nd I was sicker than I’ve almost ever been. It lasted about 2.5 days and then was VOOM instantly cleared up. It was weird and felt unnatural. But perhaps when I later got COVID, it would have been WAY worse, without having gotten the vaccine.

Now, I don’t believe it’s worth it. The experience of having COVID is way less. It’s less deadly. There’s not a chance of herd immunity. And I’ve got friends who have awful long COVID from the vaccine. I haven’t done all the research, and anyone who’s tried to tell me about the research has seemed stilted to one side or another that had me take their interpretations with a huge grain of salt.

Session 1 "Instructions": Posts, Comments, and Feedback. Suggestions:

• Start 1 or more new threads.
• Comment on 3 or more other people’s threads.
• Up-trust 10 or more posts/ or comments.
• Submit at least 3 pieces of feedback via the website.

Questions:

• How easy is each of these activities? What features on the site are helpful for these tasks, and what could be improved?
• Making a new thread
• Commenting on a thread
• Following a discussion, reading and exploring the comment tree
• What aspects of the platform were great? What could be better?
• Any other thoughts or feedback you would like to share?