Chirpper · Articles

ThaBigChirp

Finished writing from ThaBigChirp.

August 15, 20264 min read

You Can Now Sign Up for Chirpper Without an Invite!

Chirpper has always worked one way. Someone already here hands you an invite, and their name stays attached to yours. If you turn out to be great, that reflects on them. If you turn out to be a bot fa

Read article →
July 30, 20266 min read

The name is fake. The record is real.

A member (@rbhead coming through again) asked me a question that I wanted to make sure I answered for everyone.

Read article →
July 28, 20264 min read

Wikipedia Needed Locks. We're Finding Out If We Do.

This week somebody, cough @rbhead, I'd never spoken to created a nest on Chirpper. Nobody asked them to. They just found the button, made a space, named it, and started posting in it.

Read article →
July 27, 20265 min read

Reddit Has Been Fighting Bots for 21 Years

Reddit announced expanded bot labeling and human verification this month. In the announcement, the company mentioned that it has been fending off bots for twenty-one years.

Read article →
July 15, 20262 min read

The Feed Is the Whole Point

A few days ago @thinkfuture asked me a question, "how do you promote this place?"

Read article →
July 8, 20264 min read

Free Entry Is a Design Flaw

Every social network you've loved got worse the same way, on the same schedule. It's not the users. It's what the door costs to walk through.

Read article →
July 6, 20264 min read

Reactive Filtering Is a Dead Architecture

TikTok is cutting hundreds of trust and safety jobs across Singapore, Indonesia, and Dublin, and handing the work to AI. The reaction has been predictable. Moderators and unions say the models make to

Read article →
July 3, 20264 min read

The Login Wall Doesn't Stop Bots. It Stops You.

Reddit announced this week that old.reddit.com will require a login. The stated reason is bots. Abusive scraping and automated traffic, much of it feeding AI training pipelines, has made the logged-ou

Read article →
June 30, 20262 min read

You Can Usually Tell

Two members who had never met found each other in a comment thread this week. One dropped an offhand observation, the kind of aside that usually gets ignored. The other caught it and built on it. Then

Read article →
June 29, 20264 min read

Something to Lose

TechRound sat down with me for a founder interview this week. Three questions came up that I think every person who builds for the internet should sit with for a while.

Read article →
June 25, 20263 min read

Chirpper Gets Better as It Grows Slower

Every social network you have ever used was built to grow as fast as possible. Growth was the product. That growth is also what broke it.

Read article →
June 2, 20264 min read

Communities Don't Keep the Internet Human. Accountable Ones Do.

Steve Huffman is not wrong. After two decades running the largest community platform on the internet, he has watched algorithmic ranking hollow out conversations in ways human-curated spaces have not.

Read article →
June 1, 20264 min read

It Started as a Garden

Chirpper began with a metaphor I was a little too in love with.

Read article →
May 28, 20263 min read

The Thing Nobody Noticed About the Internet

There is something unprecedented about Chirpper that almost nobody talks about, including us. It is not the invite-only access. Lots of things are invite-only. It is not even the bot resistance. The t

Read article →

Want to be part of it?

Chirpper is invite-only. If someone with real skin in the game vouches for you, you are in. Otherwise, join the waitlist.

Request an invite