The Blog
Thinking about trust, identity, and what the internet forgot to build.
You Can Usually Tell
Two members who had never met found each other in a comment thread this week and just riffed, for the fun of it. What struck me was the texture of it. And that texture is what we are losing online, faster than most people realize.
Read essay →Something to Lose
TechRound asked three questions every person who builds for the internet should sit with. Why the Dead Internet became measurable, why CAPTCHAs now work better for bots than humans, and why accountability has never required knowing who someone is.
Read essay →Chirpper Gets Better as It Grows Slower
The race to a billion users was the thing that ruined social media. Growth-first platforms took everyone, which meant bots and bad actors flooded in for free. Chirpper is built the other way: every new member is a vouched-for edge in a graph of human relationships, and that changes what scale means.
Read essay →Reddit's CEO Said the Quiet Part Out Loud
Reddit's CEO is right that communities beat algorithms. But communities alone have never kept the internet human. The question is what makes a community stay that way over time, and the answer is one the industry has been avoiding for twenty years.
Read essay →It Started as a Garden
Chirpper began with a metaphor I was a little too in love with. Seeds, plants, echoes, forests, a puzzle box wrapped around a simple idea. The garden is gone. The thing it was always trying to grow is still very much alive.
Read essay →The Thing Nobody Noticed About the Internet
There is something unprecedented about Chirpper that almost nobody talks about. It is not the invite-only access. It is not even the bot resistance. The thing that has never existed before in the history of social networks is this: for the first time, inviting someone has consequences for you.
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