Information foraging
Information foraging is a theory that applies the ideas from optimal foraging theory to understand how human users search for information. The theory is based on the assumption that, when searching for information, humans use "built-in" foraging mechanisms that evolved to help our animal ancestors find food. Importantly, a better understanding of human search behavior can improve the usability of websites or any other user interface.
Food, foragers, and folklore: the role of narrative in human subsistence
Narrative is a species-typical, reliably developing, complex cognitive process whose design is unlikely to have emerged by chance. Moreover, the folklore record indicates that narrative content is consistent across widely divergent cultures. I have argued elsewhere that a storyteller may use narrative to manipulate an audience's representations of the social and/or physical environment to serve his or her own fitness ends. However, my subsequent research suggests that such manipulation results from a broader selection pressure which narrative effectively alleviates: information acquisition. By substituting verbal representations for potentially costly first-hand experience, narrative enables an individual to safely and efficiently acquire information pertinent to the pursuit of fitness in local habitats. If this hypothesis is true, narrative should be rich with information useful to the pursuit of fitness. One class of information integral to the accomplishment of this task is foraging knowledge. In this paper, then, I present evidence that foraging peoples use narrative to transmit subsistence information: specifically, I demonstrate how various narrative devices (e.g., setting, description, mimicry, anthropomorphism) are used to communicate foraging knowledge.
The Ratchet: How Preference Standards Erase What They Can't Express - Astral's Blog
The Feed is the Product: Why We Stay in Walled Gardens, and Why We Might Finally Leave for the Open Social Web - Zsolt's pckt blog
We have known this for years. We have known that the major platforms are bad for our attention, our sleep, our politics, our children, and our sense of reality....
🌿 Foraging in High-Dimensional Data
My talk from the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute 2025 on how we can draw from thinking in complex systems science and game design to heal our relationship to the Web.
Semble: Collective knowledge foraging in trail-based social networks beyond feeds (Lightning Talk)
Collective knowledge foraging in trail-based social networks beyond feeds
Sharing insights about moving beyond feeds from building Semble, a community knowledge garden built on the AT Protocol. The World Wide Web is called a web for good reason. We navigate this web of interconnected websites by clicking hyperlinks and opening new tabs in tools called browsers. This kind of browsing experience is defined by its open-endedness and interwoveness; every website we visit becomes a step along a path. With the rise of social media, we lost touch with this vast trail network. Rather than creating a social web where our trails got woven onto a shared map, they were instead paved over by information superhighways: the algorithmic feeds. Hyper-scaled social media platforms reduced the vast web of interconnected pages into a stripped down ad-ridden and attention-extracting monoculture. Our online experiences became reduced to the flick of a finger, the doom scroll. With the rise of open social protocols, like ATProto, we have an opportunity to leave these misaligned profit-driven and ad-based feeds behind and rediscover the magic of shared knowledge trails. what might that look like? In this lightning talk I’ll share insights and lessons my team and I have learned from building [Semble](https://semble.so/), a community knowledge garden built on ATProto. Semble is an open social network based on knowledge trails rather than feeds. I’ll explore what trail-based social networks of the future could look like, grounded in features and use-cases we’ve uncovered while building Semble. In the transition from feeds back to trails, we aim to co-create an open social web that centres the value of human attention and sparks a new era of collective wisdom. This lightning talk is an invitation to co-create this future together. It will similar to a prior [lightning talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptOMKK1lC4Q) we gave at ATmosphereConf 2026, adapted for DWeb Camp. Recorded at DWeb Camp 2026, Open Social Space, 2026-07-10. Schedule entry: https://talx.dod.ngo/dwebcamp-2026/talk/TA3NY7/
Custom Feeds Are Not Communities — A Design Theory of Feeds and Commons - Nightflight
Beginning I learned something from Hamakaze no Ryodan, who has deep expertise in creating Bluesky custom feeds. Feeds collect posts without the poster's co…
A varied ecosystem and terminology. - Nel Ramblings
Building your own algorithm on Bluesky and AT Protocol with Graze
Tom Seeley: Honeybee Democracy
Post by Paul Musgrave (@professormusgrave.bsky.social) on Bluesky — View on Aturi
I don't know, man, can a stochastic parrot take a half-remembered anecdote and systematically refine its internet searching to come up with *exactly* the resour
Serving the For You Feed - AT Protocol
How the maintainer of the popular For You feed serves it from their living room!
Article: Pace Layering: How Complex Systems Learn and Keep Learning
Boris Mann's digital garden and personal site.
About The Other Night... - Graze Newsletter
How Graze is defining the next era of a decentralized, open social attention economy.