How the Substack feed is learning to understand your reading journey

ProbablyFrens, Contextual Feeds and Intent-Based Discovery

It’s that time of the year—ETHDenver is just around the corner! Index will be there, and if you’re attending, we’d love to connect! But that’s not all—Index has been evolving, bringing new experiences to make discovery more intuitive and personalized.Meet ProbablyFrens: The Matchmaker AgentWe’re introducing Index’s Matchmaker Agent, an autonomous connector that helps you find the friendships, collaborations, and conversations that should already exist. Whether you’re looking for thought partn...

Sensors, not just bookmarks [Patterns of Sensemaking #1] - Cosmik Labs

First of a new series on sensemaking patterns we're observing on Semble

Sensors, not just bookmarks [Patterns of Sensemaking #1] - Cosmik Labs

First of a new series on sensemaking patterns we're observing on Semble

From Feeds to Trails

To design the future of social media, rethink the interface before the algorithm.

Chasing RATs: Tracing Reading for and as Creative Activity

Creativity research has privileged making over the interpretive labor that precedes and shapes it. We introduce Reading Activity Traces (RATs), a proposal that treats reading -- broadly defined to include navigating, interpreting, and curating media across interconnected sources -- as creative activity both for future artifacts and as a form of creation in its own right. By tracing trajectories of traversal, association, and reflection as inspectable artifacts, RATs render visible the creative work that algorithmic feeds and AI summarization increasingly compress and automate away. We illustrate this through WikiRAT, a speculative instantiation on Wikipedia, and open new ground for reflective practice, reader modeling, collective sensemaking, and understanding what is lost when human interpretation is automated -- towards designing intelligent tools that preserve it.

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.

Substack Writers Concerned as Subscriptions ‘Plummet’ Due to Follow Feature

Substack writers are expressing their concerns about the platform’s following feature on social media, which some argue is suppressing their subscription growth.

Understanding LSTM Networks -- colah's blog

Humans don’t start their thinking from scratch every second. As you read this essay, you understand each word based on your understanding of previous words. You don’t throw everything away and start thinking from scratch again. Your thoughts have persistence.

Has Substack’s subscription model really “maxed out?”

Scott Carney and Taylor Lorenz posted on Substack about downward subscriber trends they’re seeing. Carney pins it on subscription fatigue and feeling like “The only way to grow is to pillage the paid subscribers from other creators.” Lorenz questions Substack’s direction, saying “more and more like this app is becoming another social media feed.” When we recently wrote about writers who are leaving Substack, they mentioned control, pricing, and the social feature creep among their reasons for choosing competitors like Ghost and Behiiv. [Link: Writers are fleeing the Substack Tax | https://www.theverge.com/tech/927294/substack-tax-ghost-beehiiv | The Verge]

Accelerating dynamics of collective attention

With news pushed to smart phones in real time and social media reactions spreading across the globe in seconds, the public discussion can appear accelerated and temporally fragmented. In longitudinal datasets across various domains, covering multiple decades, we find increasing gradients and shortened periods in the trajectories of how cultural items receive collective attention. Is this the inevitable conclusion of the way information is disseminated and consumed? Our findings support this hypothesis. Using a simple mathematical model of topics competing for finite collective attention, we are able to explain the empirical data remarkably well. Our modeling suggests that the accelerating ups and downs of popular content are driven by increasing production and consumption of content, resulting in a more rapid exhaustion of limited attention resources. In the interplay with competition for novelty, this causes growing turnover rates and individual topics receiving shorter intervals of collective attention.

How Do Bluesky Feeds Work?

Explore how Bluesky's unique feeds work, including Custom, Following, and Discover feeds, for a tailored social media experience.