Sam Liebeskind

Azzin’s answer is simple: “Show them how much we are going to lose if we don’t work together.”

Kin-building is, at its heart, about finding ease and choosing to rest in others. When you have more people in your life, there is less on your individual shoulders to do and achieve. I do wish I had known sooner that it was about people just as much as it was about accomplishments.

In 2019, 21% of Americans had ever met a local reporter, down from 26% in 2016. That’s not surprising given that the number of reporters per 100,000 has dropped a staggering 62% since 2004. That will lead to local news being less trusted.

However, some types of engagement, such as votes and likes, come from controls designed to solicit feedback, while other types of engagement, such as clicks and watch time, are more implicit. In general both implicit and explicit engagement signals provide distinct and useful information to recommenders.

The difference becomes clear in how the feed responds to your behavior. Let’s say you click on a note about climate policy. In the old two-tower system, this single interaction would contribute minimally to your overall profile, especially if climate wasn’t already one of your core subscription topics. The model’s simplistic averaging approach... See more

But the problems of the speech platforms are not ones of bad actors at the fringes. Rather, they are baked into the incentive structures of the platforms themselves, through the kinds of speech they reward and penalize. The platforms are rotten to the core, inducing us all to become noxious versions of ourselves.