Reneging on the subreddit

Welcome to my weekly newsletter about practical ways to improve our information environment, focused on my own work in that space. I'm Jacob O'Bryant.

So last time I mentioned that I was starting up a TFOS subreddit. However, recent events have made me lose confidence in Reddit's stability. In addition, even though Reddit technically does have support for synchronous chat, realistically I don't think anyone would ever use it, myself included. In contrast, Discord remains a great place for both sync and async discussion, and it doesn't appear to be in danger of implosion, so I think I'll stay put over there. Not having public links for discussions is annoying, but I can always polish up the Discord forum publisher to fix that... at some point.

I've been stewing over what fundamentalish changes, if any, I should make to Yakread. One of Yakread's core features is that it resurfaces old articles from your subscriptions and bookmarks that you haven't read yet; however that only happens on the web app. I think I should put an "In case you missed it" section back into the daily emails, so you can benefit from that resurfacing even if you only interact with Yakread via the emails. Someone brought that up several weeks ago, and I've been noticing myself lately that some days I prefer using my extra reading time to just read books instead of scrolling Yakread. I like the idea of being able to get the full Yakread experience just from the daily emails.

In other Yakread news, I'm also leaning towards making it open-source. I'm going to wait until I've started a new job and have settled into that before I make a decision. But so far I am thinking that putting all my non-job projects under a single umbrella (open-source) would make them easier to manage. The main benefit of keeping Yakread closed-source would be if I really want it to become a full-time business down the road... but honestly, as of right now I'm feeling much more attracted to just making money the normal way, via employment. And I think there's a good chance Yakread would have higher impact as an open-source project.

For similar reasons, I'll probably abandon my Yakstack initiative. I have no energy for growth hacking, as humorous as Yakstack would've been.

My wife and I went to a few open houses today for recently built homes that are on sale. It'll be a couple years at least before we're ready to take on a mortgage (it wouldn't hurt if interest rates go down at some point...), but we thought it'd be a fun date. Those things sure are expensive!

Stuff I've read recently:

• Rereading “Editorial Discretion” [knightcolumbia.org]
• Snowden Ten Years Later [www.schneier.com]
• Shirky: Situated Software [gwern.net]
• A Natural History of Trust & Safety [feerst.medium.com]
• Nextdoor Has an Election-Misinformation Problem [www.theatlantic.com]
• Journalistic Lessons for the Algorithmic Age [themarkup.org]
• The Surprising Power of Documentation [vadimkravcenko.com]