Just published "We need better tools for online speech"

I've officially published the essay that I discussed last week: We need better tools for online speech. There is also a twitter thread version. If you'd like to share and/or retweet those, I'd deeply appreciate it. Thanks!

Besides that, we're partway through some significant algorithm changes (I'd call them "improvements", but you never know until you run the test...). We've also started an A/B test where half of new users will receive The Sample four times per week instead of daily. We may try out something more fancy/adaptive as well (e.g. by default you get it 3 or 4 days per week, and if you're engaged then we try bumping it up to daily. And vice-versa).

When those tests are all running, we're going to do another marketing push so we can measure how engagement and retention goes for new users. We're thinking that this will be the final test to see if we should keep improving The Sample incrementally (and full-time), or if we need to pivot. If our retention still isn't that great, we have more ideas to try (frankly, we'll always have more ideas), but they involve fundamental changes to the product. If we're gonna go down that road... it'd be best to do it part-time while we get some form of stable income from elsewhere.

So keep your fingers crossed I guess!