Read A System for Writing by Bob Doto by [[Ton Zijlstra]] – Interdependent Thoughts

Interstitial journaling predates and may have induced Ryder Carroll's suggestion of using "=" for emotion in Bullet Journaling.

See: https://hypothes.is/a/l12OgFD7Ee-LjAevth_Piw in the piece Carroll mentions interstitial journaling.

How to Spot Emerging Note Clusters Without Alphanumeric Note Numbering? by [[Ton Zijlstra]] in Interdependent Thoughts

I recall Bob Doto had a video at some point in which he used the local graph to show relationships to find bunches of notes for potentially writing pieces or articles as indicated in Tons' article.

One of the biggest issues with digital note taking tools is that they don't make it easy to see and identify chains of notes which might make for articles, chapters, or books.

Surely there must be some way to calculate neighborhoods of notes from a topological perspective? Perhaps if one imposed a measure on the space to create relative distances of notes?

Obsidian is a viewer, each tab essentially a diff one. Putting the two representations each in their own tab makes it possible to work both in the text and visual version of the same file. A combination of the 'flip' that Zsolt's plugin allows plus the tabs in Obsidian.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240920194505/https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2024/09/enjoying-seamless-visual-and-text-work/

nn: visueel en text naadloos naast elkaar maakt visueel makkelijker adopteerbaar.

Wayfinding by Michael Bond by [[Ton Zijlstra]]

Read Sun 9/15/2024 10:10 AM

obviously the "other" Michael Bond (ie, probably not the writer of the Paddington books...)

Een relevant kenmerk van [[PKM]], wat te gebruiken is binnen [[Takeaways beginnende PKM]]

read Thanks to what @zsviczian@pkm.social … – Interdependent Thoughts by [[by Ton Zijlstra]]

This reminds me that I ought to go back and look at Excalidraw's state-of-the-art again. It's been too long.

[[Ton Zijlstra]] in Become a PKM champion for yourself! – Interdependent Thoughts

[[Ton Zijlstra]] in A Free PKM Conference Ticket For a Student – Interdependent Thoughts

and now we have IoT sensing etc.

#openvraag If I would try to phrase what such traces would be now, what would my list be? And what channels/tools would one be able to share them in?

This still very much so. Although with ubiquity of sharing now, as I hoped for then, I think the probability of chance encounters has actually diminished paradoxically. It's hard to find the right signals in endless algo timelines. I'm more likely to find out someone was in the same spot as me after the fact, than during. Beforehand is mostly impossible these days imo.

We def got that since this '06 post, but did we get it in the way I intended here? In my 2012 talk https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2012/07/the-power-of-maps-beyond-the-map/ and in slide 31 of https://tonz.nl/foss4gnl/ 2018 I point to a much more socially annotated hyperlocal awareness. Not the generic ratings of coffee places we now get, but the ratings of people known relevant to me. (which doesn't scale, I know: would I rather have specific or no hyperlocal info than generic 'wisdom of crowds" opinions?)

In https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2012/07/the-power-of-maps-beyond-the-map/ I also mention the different relationship digital 'nomads' are forming to geolocations.

lift out catalyst and infoscape as means towards intentionality (as opposed to timesink and endless scroll that #socmed became) from [[Physical and Information Landscape 20060302150900]]

right, already covered this in my notions [[Physical and Information Landscape 20060302150900]]

I don't mention here the infoscape as overlay, too early I suppose, although Plazes was a start (webprofiles attached to locations). Layer is from 2009?

'06 mention of being online since '89.

An example of contactivity itself, my phrasing showing here how I thought of the Plazes team. Felix was at the first BlogWalk I organised spring '04, and showed me early Plazes, then 2005 I met Peter through it in Copenhagen. In 2006 here it's an established part of my 'long list of distributed self' https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2007/10/the_long_list_o/

March 2006, this is pre-FB (oct 06) and pre-Twitter (I used Jaiku at the time, T from dec 06).

That 80% now easily is 100%m but it sounds right. I think KB/KM Europe (00-02) BlogTalk (03, 04, 06) and Reboot (from 05) made it so, as those contacts were online first. Previous online interaction from '89-'99 was centered on pre-existing contacts and information more I think. From '00 is when [[Contactivity 20051105150458]] rather than connectivity kicked in for me.

I wrote this March 2006, a year before the announcement of the iPhone, and more than two years before the iPhone3G, and it became available first in the Netherlands. When I mention access here, it's not about mobile data (smartphones didn't exist yet), but about internet access in general and wifi in particular.

Is this my first mention of [[Technologie kleiner dan ons 20160818122905]]? I know I used the concept in my talks back then. Need to relabel my note with correct timestamp.

Updated [[Technologie kleiner dan ons 20050617122905]]

The linked Mastodon thread gives a great example of using Obsidian (but could easily have been Tinderbox of any similar tool) for a journalism project. I can see me do this for some parts of my work too. To verify, see patterns, find omissions etc. Basically this is what Tinderbox is for, while writing keep track of characters, timelines, events etc.

I'm curious what terms Ton uses instead of 'parent' and 'child' then - I agree with his idea that parentage implies order of creation but am unsure of a better alternative.

https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2022/12/22660/

• ok

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https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2022/09/10-thoughts-after-100-annotations-in-hypothes-is/

I love that you've got a comments heading for Hypothes.is annotations on your post @tonz! This is awesome.

This is key - exporting annotations via the API to either public commonplace books (Chris A Style) or to a private knowledge store seems to be pretty common.

I've been thinking about this exact same flow. Given that I'm mostly annotating scientific papers I got from open access journals I was wondering whether there might be some way to syndicate my zotero annotations back to h via a script.

https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2022/08/added-hypothes-is-annotations-link-to-posts/

Also... just to show the functionality. (aka: First!)

https://www.zylstra.org/blog/hypothes-is-roll/

A blogroll for Hypothes.is!

Interesting for me to explore and understand too. How does AP compare to micropub which can be used for similar purposes? As far as I can tell it is much more heavyweight

Great metaphor.

Internal re-use along the lines of [[Data wat de overheid doet 20141013110101]] means questions being asked of the data, that BI teams don't think of. (perhaps because of the common disconnect between bi-teams and operational/policy teams?) This is a repeat pattern of what can be observed externally with open data as well. (Vgl CBS open data community in the 2010s)

companies are their own objects of sociality (the work, processes, habits etc.) companies are their own self-formed user group. I am placing companies here on the spectrum of communities of interest/learning/practice. #2007/10/26

After letting professionals in a company have access to their internal BI data, they made it re-usable for themselves by -adding social structures (iirc indicating past and present people, depts etc., curating it for specific colleagues, forming subgroups around parts of the data) -adding context (iirc linking it to ongoing work, and external developments, adding info on data origin) Thus they started socially filtering the data, with the employee network as social network [[Social netwerk als filter 20060930194648]].

Most data in a company is collected for a single purpose (indicators, reporting, marketing). Companies usually don't look at how that data about themselves might be re-used by themselves. Vgl [[Data wat de overheid doet 20141013110101]] where I described this same effect for the public sector (based on work for the Court of Audit, not tying it back to this here. n:: re-use company internal data

This never happened in this way. Another example of how #socsoft became marketing almost exlusively. With the exeception perhaps of async tools like Slack (2013) or Yammer (2008, still exists as part of MS), although filtering is not their point, their users may use it that way. The whole #socsoft for org internal k-work never got much traction. Still a lost opportunity imo. Tools probably need to better fit existing culture/communication styles in org and be internal, but being created as separate place external with its own assumptions.

I wrote this in 2007, just as FB and Twitter took off, so was thinking not of them but other social tools (social software rather than media). One way #socmed turned toxic is because they started filtering for us?

More recently I also have come to see translation as creative work, not just placing it in a different conversation, but as a 'language game' a la Wittgenstein, it has different effects when one translates something. When my notes are mixed language, or when I translate one for a blogpost, that act of translation becomes part of the work of making sense of the notion in the note, it regularly offers new avenues of thought. Due to slight differences in meaning between words in languages, or because of the ethymology of a word in another language offering a new line of thought.

My current practice, reading in multiple languages, seeing myself as participant in different conversations, where I sometimes carry those conversations to another place (in another language). If I blog in another language, it's because of the conversational context I am placing that posting in, it's never an attempt to offer the content here in translation.

Meshing is a useful term

This is still how I approach multilingual settings. Building a chain (my go to example is an early 90s example of a students meet-up in Hungary where a Russian spoke Russian to a Bulgarian who spoke Spanish to a Spanish student who spoke English and put the Russian's words in front of the rest of us.) This is imprecise, but human and forgiving.

I think this is still valid. Enforcing a single language is too rigid. Although for a temporary context may well be the best working solution (say, a single meeting), and centralised translation is only worth the enormous effort if there's a strong need for reliably translated material (such as the EU laws)

We're 19yrs on now from when I wrote this. Things are better but far from perfect. I'm getting good use out of DeepL, but it still helps if you know the other language to help understand what is meant.

After under 3 weeks I had some 140 notes in my conceptual 'garden' (mostly 'recycled' from my own earlier blogposts and presentations), and I report making the first novel connection for myself at 35 notes.

I noticed the same thing. Does hypothes.is work with the Internet Archive in any scenario? I think it's a great tool and concept, but link rot limits it compared to saving pages and annotations locally (my preferred solution for that is Mark-It to turn a page into markdown or SingeFile to turn it into HTML and then adding highlights).

A few months later I blogged about this as being the 'home cook equivalent' of a programmer https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2020/02/i-am-the-programming-equivalent-of-a-home-cook/

Hermans proved that Excel is Turing complete in her thesis.

there is a big opportunity cost to unassisted learning to code: many people will drop-out (in frustration). Again this is how the IndieWeb community quickly drives people away too. the skill level acquired this way is limited (due to absence of Vgl deliberate practice?) the acquired skills do not make following activities more efficient. (Vgl how I usually struggle with the same basic coding issues, no matter how many scripts I try to write).

Still very common to observe as example of such 'coder's ethics'. E.g. IndieWeb community discussion is mostly based on figuring things out yourself and creating one's own code (self-dogfooding), with only generic and hand-wavy assistance most of the time.

The way you learned programming shapes assumptions about how to learn programming.

The fact I self-learned through trial and error without supervision in the early and mid 80s, is common, but not a model for K transfer, and not useful "coder's ethic"

Hermans posits that there is no actual body of work about how to effectively teach programming. In contrast to reading.

Now a professor at VU Amsterdam. In #2019/ we both keynoted NL CoderDojo Conf. and I blogged this beforehand.

An IndieWeb plugin for implementing IndieWeb functionality in WordPress blocks. I have added some IndieWeb functionality to my site, although it does not support it by default. I am curious how it would work on my theme - but I will wait until information about its effect on page speed and its options/database tables (if applicable) are available. Also not keen on its adding two custom post types - I prefer to not tie that to a plugin I may have to uninstall.

IndieWeb POSSE avant la lettre. However I don't point to syndication here, but to services coming to me to fetch the relevant content. Like inbound RSS on micro.blog.

2004 me complaining about silo'd data collections and saying that complaint is routine. This being pre FB and birdsite.

This may nicely fit a need I have with mapping relationships and walking connections. The is a knowledge space that is cutting across three or four organizations with various sponsors of the organizations (with some overlaps) and researcher advisors (which overlap) that I have relationships with. Also connections with universities. Trying to see the overlaps and interconnections, so to find a path to connect and possibly put many of my lenses to use.

I've been turning to The Brain to see this, but it is having to input the information again, which means annotations and updates will likely break at some point.

This focus is exactly why I started blogging some 21+ years ago and why I'm feeling the ache of less frequent postings now.

Sometimes I wonder if it has to be this complicated. mf2 is neat because it allows the emulation of the featureset of 2007-ish era corporate social media, but I worry that it scares off some of the "my ideal social media would be managed in bash scripts" folks who do cool altweb stuff – or the handwritten HTML people who mostly seem to be detoxing from anything frameworky, I presume because of their day jobs.

I wonder if RSS feeds are structured enough to do most of the work. I know it feels like backwards progress to the Real Indieweb folks given the origins of microformats and a preference to not duplicate content, but...

What is the POSIX of the web

I do a similar thing—everything I annotate in Hypothesis (or simply bookmark with Pinboard) is saved in Wayback. I've considered adding a perma.cc subscription, but $170/year seems a little steep for 100 links/month.

Grabbing a local Markdown copy of articles to store locally is an interesting idea...one worth considering; thanks!

I do! 525 annotations since 2012, but I took a long break and only started re-using it late last year. The social part of annotations has been useful for me in a few cases, but for the most part I annotate to get quotes and my thoughts about them into my own Obsidian vault. (I don't use an Obsidian plugin...instead I side-load the Markdown files with a Python script.) I haven't yet added Hypothesis to my blog, but it is on my list of things to do.

I'll second what Colby said in an earlier comment: Peter Hagen's work on annotations.lindylearn.io has been invaluable in expanding the quality content that crosses my screen.

Some other things:

• If I visit https://www.zylstra.org/blog/ and content from e.g. this blog post https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2022/09/10-thoughts-after-100-annotations-in-hypothes-is/ has been inlined, Hypothesis doesn't know how to deal with this—it doesn't know that the annotations that apply to the latter can also be layered onto the inlined content at /blog/. This is a minor quibble insofar as you can measure it on terms of mere convenience. Less minor, however, is that if a user attaches their annotations to /blog/, then it will eventually be orphaned (as more posts are written and the now-current ones get bumped off the page), and will never appear in the correct place on the actual post.

• When people annotate Wikipedia there's a high likelihood that the annotation will become orphaned as the content changes, even though the version that was actually annotated will usually be available from the article history.

public annotations... a vast majority of my annotations are private, as I teach with Hypothesis, have done so for years, and all those comments (with students) are private to groups. and thanks for the shoutout ;)

This was Peter's motivation to create annotations.lindylearn.io.

Public ones, at least.

We are neighbors! (I started my blogroll by copying yours, so I could be fairly be called your imitator)

Many, many, many of my blog posts start their life as annotations that I then cut down or expand. I find that this helps me make sense of the habit of annotation; you make the best use of the tool that's most in your hand.

This is cool. Something I should consider adding to my own sites. Just for the heck of it.

Useful and likely human written texts show the richness of the context it results from, by showing and linking. Not just to/with 1) other texts, but also 2) other actions (things created, data gathering, experiments, tools adapted) and 3) people (that provided input, you look at, interact with outside the text). Even if such things were generated following up those leads should show its inauthenticity.

A text is a result of work, next to itself being work to write it. A text that does not show any of the work that led to writing a text is suspect. Does a text reflect an exploration that it annotates? Does it show social connections, include data points, external examples, artefacts created alongside the text (e.g. lists), references to the wider context/system of what the text discusses, experimental actions.

Relevant links in a text are a sign of the context the text emerged from, and the conversation it is situated in. Lack of such links or references is a potential sign of inauthentic texts (generated or not)

https://web.archive.org/web/20220903134734/https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2022/09/gpt-3-ifying-that-last-blogpost/

This is the wrong way around, positioning the tech corp's perspective as more imporant than society's. It's insulting to position community as a means, similar to talking about users which limits the view one has of people and what they try to achieve to only their interaction with a tool.

The aim of scaling tech is again a tech company's limited view of the world, that should not be adopted by people using a tech tool. Individual acts scale to community to society/culture, but that's a different type of scaling. One through sideways copying and adoption. Not to scale a tool but to amplify/scale an effect or impact. Tech is a scaffold for enriching society, society is not there to scale tech corps.

A tech company's view is often limited to customer audience, and dubs it community. A person's view starts from within the communities they're already part of: how does a tool support (my role in) my communities?

Vgl [[Networked Agency 20160818213155]] wrt having a specific issue to address that is shared by the user group wielding a tech / tool, in their own context.

Vgl [[Open data begint buiten 20200808162905]] wrt the only yardstick for open data stems from its role as policy instrument: impact achieved outside in the aimed for policy domains through the increased agency of the open data users.

Tech impact is not to be measured in eyeballs, usage, revenue etc. That's (understandably) the corporation's singular and limited view, the rest of us should not adopt it as the only possible one.

Things that matter are a combination of things of interest plus sphere of influence/action radius. This can bring macro issues into a place where they can be addressed by micro actions that have meaning locally and contribute to the issue at scale. Contributes to the invisible hand of networks. Vgl [[Invisible hand of networks 20180616115141]]

In general w small things the presumption is that they're stand alone. Small things can have meaningfull settings around them, which make a small things contribute to compounding impact. [[Compound interest van implementatie en adoptie 20210216134309]] waar exponentieel effect in emergentie besloten ligt.

Cathedral building or its more practical and common relative barn raising are expressions of communal effort, and a monument to a community's value/coherence. What a community creates for communal use can be proxy for its meaning. It's a result from community feeding back into community. I've also used the metaphor of mushrooms on mycelium (also comparing orgs to mushrooms)

A process has its own value, is its own intervention. Esp in complex enviro where outcomes are unplannable, rather are observed and then attenuated or amplified. [[Waarde van proces versus uitkomst 20031208161249]] If a result does not embody the values of the process, or the process does not hold the values intended in the result it demeans both.

I say this, but there's a nuance to consider. I read a post by someone creating their company logo with Dall-E by repeatedly changing and tweaking their prompt to get to a usable output. That is definitely above the creativity threshold, with the AI as a tool, not as the creator. Similarly, NLP AI tools can help authors to get to e.g. a first draft, then shaped, rewritten, changed, edited etc., which crosses the human creativity threshold for copyright to kick in. Compare with how I sometimes use machine translation of my own text and then clean it up, to be able to write faster in e.g. German of French, where the algo is a lever to turn my higher passive language skills into active language use. (Btw comment added to see if that updates my original hypothesis annotations of this article in my Obsidian notes, or if it happens only once when first annotated. The latter would mean forcing annotation and thus break my workflow)

https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2022/07/rss-support-for-markdown/

https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2019/03/90-of-everything-is-crap-a-source-of-imposter-syndrome/

The cumulative effect of one's perception of Sturgeon's law may be a driving force underlying imposter syndrome.

While one see's the entirety of their own creation process and realizes that only a small fraction of it is truly useful, it's much harder seeing only the finished product of others. The impression one is left with by availability heuristic is that there are thousands of geniuses in the world with excellent, refined products or ideas while one's own contribution is miniscule in comparison.

Contrast this with Matt Ridley's broad perspective in The Rational Optimist which shows the power of cumulative breeding and evolution of ideas. One person can make their own stone hand axe, but no one person can make their own toaster oven or computer mouse alone.

Link to: - lone genius myth (eg. Einstein's special relativity did not spring fully formed from the head of Zeus, there was a long train of work and thought which we don't see the context of)

Many people treat their blogging practice as an experimental thought space. They try out new ideas, explore a small space, attempt to come to understanding, connect new ideas to their existing ideas.

Ton Zylstra coins/uses the phrase "metablogging" to think about his blogging practice as an evolving thought space.

How can we better distill down these sorts of longer ideas and use them to create more collisions between ideas to create new an innovative ideas? What forms might this take?

The personal zettelkasten is a more concentrated form of this and blogging is certainly within the space as are the somewhat more nascent digital gardens. What would some intermediary "idea crucible" between these forms look like in public that has a simple but compelling interface. How much storytelling and contextualization is needed or not needed to make such points?

Is there a better space for progressive summarization here so that an idea can be more fully laid out and explored? Then once the actual structure is built, the scaffolding can be pulled down and only the idea remains.

Reminiscences of scaffolding can be helpful for creating context.

Consider the pyramids of Giza and the need to reverse engineer how they were built. Once the scaffolding has been taken down and history forgets the methods, it's not always obvious what the original context for objects were, how they were made, what they were used for. Progressive summarization may potentially fall prey to these effects as well.

How might we create a "contextual medium" which is more permanently attached to ideas or objects to help prevent context collapse?

How would this be applied in reverse to better understand sites like Stonehenge or the hundreds of other stone circles, wood circles, and standing stones we see throughout history.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220704195527/https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2022/06/dall-e-mini-siso-stereotype-in-stereotype-out/

https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2022/06/spring-83/

I've been thinking about this sort of thing off and on myself.

I too almost immediately thought of Fraidyc.at and its nudge at shifting the importance of content based on time and recency. I'd love to have a social reader with additional affordances for both this time shifting and Ton's idea of reading based on social distance.

I'm struck by the seemingly related idea of @peterhagen's LindyLearn platform and annotations: https://annotations.lindylearn.io/new/ which focuses on taking some of the longer term interesting ideas as the basis for browsing and chewing on. Though even here, one needs some of the odd, the cutting edge, and the avant garde in their balanced internet diet. Would Spring '83 provide some of this?

I'm also struck by some similarities this has with the idea of Derek Siver's /now page movement. I see some updating regularly while others have let it slip by the wayside. Still the "board" of users exists, though one must click through a sea of mostly smiling and welcoming faces to get to it the individual pieces of content. (The smiling faces are more inviting and personal than the cacophony of yelling and chaos I see in models for Spring '83.) This reminds me of Stanley Meyers' frequent assertion that he attempted to design a certain "sense of quiet" into the early television show Dragnet to balance the seeming loudness of the everyday as well as the noise of other contemporaneous television programming.

The form reminds me a bit of the signature pages of one's high school year book. But here, instead of the goal being timeless scribbles, one has the opportunity to change the message over time. Does the potential commercialization of the form (you know it will happen in a VC world crazed with surveillance capitalism) follow the same trajectory of the old college paper facebook? Next up, Yearbook.com!

Beyond the thing as a standard, I wondered what the actual form of Spring '83 adds to a broader conversation? What does it add to the diversity of voices that we don't already see in other spaces. How might it be abused? Would people come back to it regularly? What might be its emergent properties?

It definitely seems quirky and fun in and old school web sort of way, but it also stresses me out looking at the zany busyness of some of the examples of magazine stands. The general form reminds me of the bargain bins at book stores which have the promise of finding valuable hidden gems and at an excellent price, but often the ideas and quality of what I find usually isn't worth the discounted price and the return on investment is rarely worth the effort. How might this get beyond these forms?

It also brings up the idea of what other online forms we may have had with this same sort of raw experimentation? How might the internet have looked if there had been a bigger rise of the wiki before that of the blog? What would the world be like if Webmention had existed before social media rose to prominence? Did we somehow miss some interesting digital animals because the web rose so quickly to prominence without more early experimentation before its "Cambrian explosion"?

I've been thinking about distilled note taking forms recently and what a network of atomic ideas on index cards look like and what emerges from them. What if the standard were digital index cards that linked and cross linked to each other, particularly in a world without adherence to time based orders and streams? What does a new story look like if I can pull out a card either at random or based on a single topic and only see it or perhaps some short linked chain of ideas (mine or others) which come along with it? Does the choice of a random "Markov monkey" change my thinking or perspective? What comes out of this jar of Pandora? Is it just a new form of cadavre exquis?

This standard has been out for a bit and presumably folks are experimenting with it. What do the early results look like? How are they using it? Do they like it? Does it need more scale? What do small changes make to the overall form?

For more on these related ideas, see: https://hypothes.is/search?q=tag%3A%22spring+%2783%22

https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2022/06/adding-an-index/

Tonz has an index now too!

Ton has asked some good questions about social annotation using @Hypothes_is. I've annotated with some of my ideas. I'm also curious what others' practices look like.

https://twitter.com/ton_zylstra/status/1513219186524368896

Come give your answers in the margins: https://via.hypothes.is/https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2022/04/three-questions-about-annotating-in-hypothesis/

syndication links: - twitter - zylstra.org

https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2022/04/three-questions-about-annotating-in-hypothesis/

Thanks for asking these questions Ton! I've been meaning to spend some time writing up my use cases and methods for this for a while, and your questions have created a scaffold for getting a large chunk of it done in some bite sized pieces. Now I should be able to roll up my answers into an article, do some light editing and be on my way.

This is a great question and I ask it frequently with many different answers.

I've not seen specific numbers, but I suspect that the majority of Hypothes.is users are annotating in small private groups/classes using their learning management system (LMS) integrations through their university. As a result, using it and hoping for a big social experience is going to be discouraging for most.

Of course this doesn't mean that no one is out there. After all, here you are following my RSS feed of annotations and asking these questions!

I'd say that 95+% or more of my annotations are ultimately for my own learning and ends. If others stumble upon them and find them interesting, then great! But I'm not really here for them.

As more people have begun using Hypothes.is over the past few years I have slowly but surely run into people hiding in the margins of texts and quietly interacted with them and begun to know some of them. Often they're also on Twitter or have their own websites too which only adds to the social glue. It has been one of the slowest social media experiences I've ever had (even in comparison to old school blogging where discovery is much higher in general use). There has been a small uptick (anecdotally) in Hypothes.is use by some in the note taking application space (Obsidian, Roam Research, Logseq, etc.), so I've seen some of them from time to time.

I can only think of one time in the last five or so years in which I happened to be "in a text" and a total stranger was coincidentally reading and annotating at the same time. There have been a few times I've specifically been in a shared text with a small group annotating simultaneously. Other than this it's all been asynchronous experiences.

There are a few people working at some of the social side of Hypothes.is if you're searching for it, though even their Hypothes.is presences may seem as sparse as your own at present @tonz.

Some examples:

@peterhagen Has built an alternate interface for the main Hypothes.is feed that adds some additional discovery dimensions you might find interesting. It highlights some frequent annotators and provide a more visual feed of what's happening on the public Hypothes.is timeline as well as data from HackerNews.

@flancian maintains anagora.org, which is like a planet of wikis and related applications, where he keeps a list of annotations on Hypothes.is by members of the collective at https://anagora.org/latest

@tomcritchlow has experimented with using Hypothes.is as a "traditional" comments section on his personal website.

@remikalir has a nice little tool https://crowdlaaers.org/ for looking at documents with lots of annotations.

Right now, I'm also in an Obsidian-based book club run by Dan Allosso in which some of us are actively annotating the two books using Hypothes.is and dovetailing some of this with activity in a shared Obsidian vault. see: https://boffosocko.com/2022/03/24/55803196/. While there is a small private group for our annotations a few of us are still annotating the books in public. Perhaps if I had a group of people who were heavily interested in keeping a group going on a regular basis, I might find the value in it, but until then public is better and I'm more likely to come across and see more of what's happening out there.

I've got a collection of odd Hypothes.is related quirks, off label use cases, and experiments: https://boffosocko.com/tag/hypothes.is/ including a list of those I frequently follow: https://boffosocko.com/about/following/#Hypothesis%20Feeds

Like good annotations and notes, you've got to put some work into finding the social portion what's happening in this fun little space. My best recommendation to find your "tribe" is to do some targeted tag searches in their search box to see who's annotating things in which you're interested.

So far, "Public". I think it is cool that Hypothes.is supports groups, and I get how classrooms or research teams would be good groups. For me, though, not enough of my peers are using Hypothes.is to have it make sense to form a group.

That said, I have gotten into a couple interesting conversations with public Hypothes.is annotations. I followed a couple more people on Lindy Annotations because of it.

So far, no. It might be useful to add a disclaimer footer to the bottom of any Hypothes.is annotation to say that the contents of the annotation might only make sense to me, but so far I haven't found the need to change what is included in an annotation.

To a great extent, Hypothes.is has such a small footprint of users (in comparison to massive platforms like Twitter, Facebook, etc.) that it's never been a performative platform for me. As a design choice they have specifically kept their social media functionalities very sparse, so one also doesn't generally encounter the toxic elements that are rampant in other locations. This helps immensely. I might likely change my tune if it were ever to hit larger scales or experienced the Eternal September effect.

Beyond this, I mostly endeavor to write things for later re-use. As a result I'm trying to write as clearly as possible in full sentences and explain things as best I can so that my future self doesn't need to do heavy work or lifting to recreate the context or do heavy editing. Writing notes in public and knowing that others might read these ideas does hold my feet to the fire in this respect. Half-formed thoughts are often shaky and unclear both to me and to others and really do no one any good. In personal experience they also tend not to be revisited and revised or revised as well as I would have done the first time around (in public or otherwise).

Occasionally I'll be in a rush reading something and not have time for more detailed notes in which case I'll do my best to get the broad gist knowing that later in the day or at least within the week, I'll revisit the notes in my own spaces and heavily elaborate on them. I've been endeavoring to stay away from this bad habit though as it's just kicking the can down the road and not getting the work done that I ultimately want to have. Usually when I'm being fast/lazy, my notes will revert to highlighting and tagging sections of material that are straightforward facts that I'll only be reframing into my own words at a later date for reuse. If it's an original though or comment or link to something important, I'll go all in and put in the actual work right now. Doing it later has generally been a recipe for disaster in my experience.

There have been a few instances where a half-formed thought does get seen and called out. Or it's a thought which I have significantly more personal context for and that is only reflected in the body of my other notes, but isn't apparent in the public version. Usually these provide some additional insight which I hadn't had that makes the overall enterprise more interesting. Here's a recent example, albeit on a private document, but which I think still has enough context to be reasonably clear: https://hypothes.is/a/vmmw4KPmEeyvf7NWphRiMw

There may also be infrequent articles online which are heavily annotated and which I'm excerpting ideas to be reused later. In these cases I may highlight and rewrite them in my own words for later use in a piece, but I'll make them private or put them in a private group as they don't add any value to the original article or potential conversation though they do add significant value to my collection as "literature notes" for immediate reuse somewhere in the future. On broadly unannotated documents, I'll leave these literature notes public as a means of modeling the practice for others, though without the suggestion of how they would be (re-)used for.

All this being said, I will very rarely annotate things privately or in a private group if they're of a very sensitive cultural nature or personal in manner. My current set up with Hypothesidian still allows me to import these notes into Obsidian with my API key. In practice these tend to be incredibly rare for me and may only occur a handful of times in a year.

Generally my intention is that ultimately all of my notes get published in something in a final form somewhere, so I'm really only frontloading the work into the notes now to make the writing/editing process easier later.

Where

My annotations broadly flow into two spaces:

Obsidian

My private Obsidian-based vault is where I collect the notes and actively work on, modify, edit, and expand them if and when necessary. This is also the space where I'm broadly attempting to densely interlink them together for future use and publication in other venues. If I could, I would publish these all on the web, but I've yet to find a set up with a low enough admin tax that I can publish them inexpensively in a way I'd like them to appear (primarily with properly linked [[WikiLinks]]) while still owning them in my own space.

I've been experimenting around with using Blot.im as a solution to display them here https://notes.boffosocko.com/, but at present it's a very limited selection of my extant notes and doesn't include Webmention or other niceties I'd like to add. As it's a very alpha stage experiment I don't recommend anyone follow or use it and it may disappear altogether in the coming months.

WordPress

My main website uses WordPress. To a great extent, this is (now) primarily a back up location and the majority of the annotations are unpublished to the public, but are searchable to me on the back end.

I do, however, use it occasionally for quickly publishing and syndicating select annotations which I think others may find interesting or upon which I'm looking for comments/feedback and don't expect that the audience I'd like these from will find them natively on Hypothes.is' platform. An example of this might be a paper I was reading this weekend on Roland Barthes which discusses his reasonably well documented zettelkasten-like note taking practice. The article can be found here: https://culturemachine.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/373-604-1-PB.pdf with the annotations seen here: https://docdrop.org/pdf/The-Card-Index-as-Creativity-Ma---Wilken-Rowan-upq8g.pdf/. To tip off others in the space, I made a post on my site with a bit of a puzzle and syndicated it to Twitter. A few hours later I posted a follow up with some additional details and links to my notes on hypothesis which got some useful feedback from Matthias Melcher on the Barthes paper as well as on a related paper I mentioned by Luhmann, particularly about German translation, with which I have little facility.

Another recent illustrative example was this annotation on the Library of Congress website about Vladimir Nabokov which was picked up by my website (though unpublished/not public) but which I syndicated to Twitter primarily to be able to send a notification to Eleanor Konik who I know is interested in the idea of World Building using historical facts and uses Obsidian in her work. (The @mention in the tweet is hiding in the image of the index card so that I could save text space in the main tweet.) Several others interested in note taking and zettelkasten for writing also noticed it and "liked" it. Not being on Hypothes.is to my knowledge much less following me there, neither Eleanor nor the others would have seen it without the Tweet.

Nabokov used index cards for his research & writing. In one index card for Lolita, he creates a "weight-heigh-age table for girls of school age" to be able to specify Lolita's measurements. He also researched the Colt catalog of 1940. #WorldBuildinghttps://t.co/i16Yc7CbJ8 pic.twitter.com/JSjXV50L3M

— Chris Aldrich (@ChrisAldrich) April 10, 2022

How

Obsidian

Getting annotations from Hypothes.is to Obsidian is a short two-step process which is reasonably well automated so that I don't spend a lot of time cutting/pasting/formatting.

I start with an IFTTT recipe that takes the RSS output of Hypothes.is and creates text files directly into my Obsidian vault. The results are quite rudimentary and only include the title of the document, the permalink of the Hypothes.is post, the highlighted text, and my annotation. It doesn't include the tags as RSS doesn't have a specification for these.

Second, I've set up Hypothesidian which has a much higher fidelity dovetail with the Hypothes.is API to get all the data and even the formatting set up I'm looking for. A reasonably well laid out set of instructions with a low/no code approach for it can be found at https://forum.obsidian.md/t/retrieve-annotations-for-hypothes-is-via-templater-plugin-hypothes-idian/17225. It allows importing annotations by a variety of methods including by date and by document URL. I've also made a small modification to it so that tags on Hypothes.is are turned into [[wikilinks]] in Obsidian instead of #tags which I only use sparingly.

All the IFTTT annotations will be ported individually into a specific Obsidian folder where I'll process them. I can then quickly use Hypothesidian to import the properly laid out version (using templates) of the notes with just a few keystrokes and then focus my time on revising my notes if necessary and then linking them to the appropriate notes already in my system. Finally I'll move them into the appropriate folder based on their content—typically one of the following: zettelkasten, wiki, commonplace, dictionary, or sources (for bibliographic use). Careful watchers will notice that I often use Hypothes.is' "page notes" functionality to create a bookmark-like annotation into which I will frequently post the URL of the page and occasionally a summary of a piece, these are imported into my system and are used as source/bibliographic information. I also have some dovetailing with Zotero as a bibliographic set up which feeds into this data as well.

This version which I've cobbled together works well for me so that I'm not missing anything, but there are definitely other similar processes available out there both for Obsidian (with plugins or scripts) as well as for other platforms. If I'm not mistaken, I think Readwise (a paid solution) has a set up for note transfer and formatting.

WordPress

As there isn't an extant Micropub client for Hypothes.is I initially used RSS as a transport layer to get my notes from Hypothes.is into WordPress. The fidelity isn't great in part because RSS doesn't include any tags. To get some slightly better presentation I set up a workflow using RSS output from Hypothes.is as input into an IFTTT workflow which outputs to a webhook that stands in as a Micropub client targeting my websites Micropub server. Some of the display on my site is assisted by using the Post Kinds plugin, which I know you've been working around yourself. The details may be above some, but I've outlined most of the broad strokes of how this is done in a tutorial at https://boffosocko.com/2020/01/21/using-ifttt-to-syndicate-pesos-content-from-social-services-to-wordpress-using-micropub/. In that example, I use the service Pocket as an example, but Hypothes.is specific information could easily be swapped out on a 1-1 basis.

A custom stand-alone or even an integrated micropub client for Hypothes.is would be a fantastic project if someone wanted to dig into the details and dovetail it with the Hypothes.is API.

Why

Ideally, I'm hoping that small pieces loosely joined and IndieWeb building blocks will allow me to use the tools and have the patterns I'm looking for, without a lot of work, so that I can easily make annotations with Hypothes.is but have and share (POSSE) my content on my own site in a way that works much the way many IndieWeb sites dovetail with Twitter or Mastodon.

I'm doing some portions of it manually at present, without a lot of overhead, but it would be fun to see someone add micropub and webmention capabilities to Hypothes.is or other IndieWeb building blocks. (I suspect it won't be Hypothes.is themselves as their team is very small and they're already spread thin on multiple other mission critical projects.)

In the end, I'm using Hypothes.is as a well designed and convenient tool for quickly making notes on digital documents. All the data is flowing to one of two other locations where I'm actually making use of it. While there is some social layer there, I'm getting email notifications through the Hypothes.is settings and the data from my responses just gets rolled back into my spaces which I try to keep open and IndieWeb friendly by default. At the same time, for those who want or need it, Hypothes.is' interface is a great way of reading, searching, sorting, and interacting with my notes in public, particularly until I get something specific and user friendly up to do it on my own domain.

As open source as Hypothes.is is, I do wish that it had some additional open IndieWeb building blocks to keep it from being a silo.

Sadly, I've never had the time, nor the technical expertise and facility with their code to implement the pieces, but I have outlined a bit of what might be done to make the platform a bit less silo-like: https://boffosocko.com/2019/04/08/ideas-for-indieweb-ifying-hypothes-is/

Fortunately it is open enough for me in other respects that I can bend portions of it to my will and needs beyond what it offers a la carte.

My first view, even before any of the potential social annotation angle, is that in annotating or taking notes, I'm simultaneously having a conversation with the author of the work and/or my own thoughts on the topic at hand. Anything beyond that for me is "gravy".

I occasionally find that if I'm writing as I go that I'll have questions and take a stab only to find that the author provides an answer a few paragraphs or pages on. I can then look back at my thought to see where I got things right, where I may have missed or where to go from there. Sometimes I'll find holes that both the author and I missed. Almost always I'm glad that I spent the time thinking about the idea critically and got to the place myself with or without the author's help. I'm not sure that most others always do this, but it's a habit I've picked up from reading mathematics texts which frequently say things like "we'll leave it to the reader to verify or fill in the gaps" or "this is left as an exercise". Most readers won't/don't do this, but my view is that it's almost always where the actual engagement and learning from the material stems.

Sometimes I may be writing out pieces to clarify them for myself and solidify my understanding while other times, I'm using the text as a prompt for my own writing. My intention most often is to add my own thoughts in a significantly well-thought out manner such that I can in the near future reuse these annotations/notes in essays or other writing. Some of this comes from broad experience of keeping a commonplace book for quite a while, and some of it has been influenced on reading about the history of note taking practices by others. One of the best summations of the overall practice I've seen thus far is Sönke Ahrens' How to Take Smart Notes (Create Space, 2017), though I find there are some practical steps missing that can only be found by actually practicing his methods in a dedicated fashion for several months before one sees changes in their thought patterns, the questions they ask, and the work that stems from it all. And by work, I mean just that. The whole enterprise is a fair amount of work, though I find it quite fun and very productive over time.

In my youth, I'd read passages and come up with some brilliant ideas. I might have underlined the passage and written something like "revisit this and expand", but I found I almost never did and upon revisiting it I couldn't capture the spark of the brilliant idea I had managed to see before. Now I just take the time out to write out the entire thing then and there with the knowledge that I can then later revise it and work it into something bigger later. Doing the work right now has been one of the biggest differences in my practice, and I'm finding that projects I want to make progress on are moving forward much more rapidly than they ever did.

https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2021/12/federated-bookshelves-update/

This gives me an idea about how I might do this in WordPress.

I like the idea of designing the types of conference experiences that I'd like to have, rather than what participants have come to expect.

I like the idea of Discord as a backchannel but it suffers from the problem that it's a relatively niche app, and no-one is going to install and learn how to use it just for a conference.

I think that Discord would work well for a learning community though.

For me, presentations represent a well-organised set of concepts that I'm familiar with, and that are relatively well-connected to other ideas.

I have a sense of what this might mean but I have a hard time conceptualising how I might implement it.

This is something I still haven't got around to in Obsidian. The only use case I can think of that might help with my workflow is when I'm doing a weekly or monthly review. But it only takes me a couple of seconds to open the notes I need for that anyway.

Obsidian has since released a mobile app, with a paid-for sync service. I was using Dropbox to sync my notes between devices but had paid for the Obsidian sync service to test it. It works well but I hardly do any work on my phone, so it's not clear to me what the use case is. I probably won't renew my subscription and will go back to syncing with Dropbox.

I tried Todoist, which aims to bring the resources into the to do list. It started as a to do list that you can organise into projects, and then added notes and attachments to items. I decided to go all in for a year, paid for the premium service, and put everything into Todoist. But it didn't work for me because my to do list was still separated from the rest of the work I was trying to do.

I use transclusion in Obsidian for my weekly review. The weekly review note (also defined with a template), has a section that gives me an overview of my week.

I only ever diaries for keeping track of appointments, but the concept of a daily note (that I define with a template) has been enormously helpful for me to structure my day.

My project 'overview' note includes headings like: Admin (meeting dates, etc.), people involved deadlines, related notes. Each of these other parts is a separate page, linked to with wikilinks.

I have Project pages in Obsidian, with sub-projects that are separate pages, linked to the main project page with wikilinks. I do it that way so that I don't need to worry about folders. But now I'm wondering if a folder/project would be a way to compartmentalise things.

I agree with this in principle. However, the process of using the core Obsidian plugins to create Daily notes with templates is so simple that you could easily swap out the plugin with a manual plain text alternative.

I've been thinking about this under the frame of, "The more time I spend with a tool, the easier it should be to leave it". What I mean by this is, the more I invest in something (time, cognitive energy), the more reliable it needs to be. Since nothing is completely reliable, I need to choose a tool that allows me to move to another tool without any friction. I don't want the tool I'm using today to be bought out and shuttered by another company, so I have to work in formats that make it easy to adapt.

https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2021/08/working-around-post-kinds-plugin-lock-in/

I have faith in David Shanske.

Dissonance of juxtaposed ideas, and particularly those just at the edge of chaos, can be some of the most fruitful places for learning.

Attempting to resolve these frictions can generate new knowledge.

This is what commonplace books are meant to do. Record this knowledge, allow one to juxtapose, and to think and write into new spaces.

It's also important to look more closely at things that don't cause dissonance. Is it general wisdom that makes them true or seem true? Question the assumptions underneath them. Where do they come from? Why do they seem comfortable? How could one make them uncomfortable. Questioning assumptions can lead to new pathways.

An example of this is the questioning the final assumption of Euclid (the "ugly" one) which led mathematicians into different geometry systems.

This is a solidly comprehensive overview of much of what I'd want in my own personal reader. I'll have to revisit it as I'm reading and using other readers to see if there are any other pieces missing.

Being able to sort by social distance, by community/tags, and by posting frequency and/or post type (ie separating articles from notes from bookmarks, etc) would be some of the bigger must haves.

When this is done with RSS, you have what is known as OPML subscription. Some feed readers like Inoreader let you subscribe to someone's OPML list of RSS feeds which means your feed reader will autoupdate to show you new feeds from the list you've subscribed to.

Ha! I'm noticing you mention it in the next section! :)

Potentially even better, it may be the case that Foam comes up to speed and potentially offers some slightly different but useful functionality using the same data source. Then one could keep the files in one's own space and use Obsidian, Foam, or even other tools to access and work with it.

I really need to delve back into some of the plugins and test out using them more frequently. The workspace one I tried briefly when it first came out, but it had a few problems for me which are now likely fixed.

I was just about to ask you what your system looked like Michael, but then I realized that you've tucked many of them into Hypothes.is at https://via.hypothes.is/https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2020/11/100-days-in-obsidian-pt-4-writing-notes/

Ton delineates his ideas between notions, notes, ideas, and work notes. It's not too dissimilar to the ideas others like Maggie Appleton have written about various smaller pieces being built up from small "seedlings" into larger evergreen pieces within a digital gardens framing.

I do like the idea of emergent outlines he notes over Ahrens' speculative outlines.

Interesting that there is also a silo version of Obsidian called Notion, which is also similar to Evernote. I wonder if this had any influence on your name? This is a reasonable indicator that it's a good name for these.

I love the phrase "elephant paths" (the correct translation?) for maps of content.

I also like the idea of having a set up for doing digital captures of physical notebook pages. I'll have to consider how to do this most easily. I should also look back and evaluate how to continue improving my digital process as well.

I've sometimes noticed this kind of connection in my own thinking, when revisiting an old post and realising that it's connected (sometimes very powerfully) with what's going on with me currently. I had just forgotten that I used to think about these ideas.

This is why I stopped doing something similar i.e. writing short-form comments on posts that appeared in my RSS reader. I suppose it may have served a purpose in that I could have been surfacing potentially interesting information for others, along with a short comment on why I thought it was interesting. But it didn't leave me with much of a feeling of satisfaction.

I hear this completely, as it's something that I've been thinking about as well. However, I went the other way, and decided that including factual information in my system seems reasonable. I thought that I'd end up spending too much time trying to decide what notes should go into which system. Where is boundary between a "fact" I came up with that's true in my context, and a fact that I read in a book? I was worried that this distinction would end up creating an arbitrary boundary between my own thoughts and the thoughts of others, when the only thing I really care about is whether the output of the system (i.e. my thinking) would be enhanced.

This is very useful, thanks. I've been struggling with this myself over the past few weeks, looking at different options for how I might create a public version of my personal notes.

I've been influenced by the idea of learning in public, which is still intriguing to me. But I like this idea that what I publish is an output of what I've been thinking and learning about. More of a product than something where the process is the output.

This is how I use Obsidian as well, but I have a separate vault for this kind of "operational" note-taking, as opposed to "knowledge-building" note-taking.

I know that there's less of a hard boundary between these different contexts than the use of separate vaults suggests, but I've found that I rarely need to switch between them.

I use Zotero for all resources. It also forms the basis for my literature notes (excerpts and responses to the author) that will stay in Zotero but which will inform my permanent notes.

For example, all of these comments and highlights (created in Hypothes.is) will be saved in Zotero, along with this blog post. As I've been working through this post I've also been adding, editing, and deleting some of my permanent notes in response. I'll work through these comments again in Zotero, and do a deeper dive into my permanent notes.

Exactly. I've come to realise the same thing. My reasoning was that I'm becoming overwhelmed with the low-quality (some might even call it noise) sources that I have to spend time on before realising that it's not high-value.

Yes, emergent suits me better as well.

Or, what might also be called elaboration.

I just include these initial thoughts / ideas in the same Obsidian vault as my permanent notes. I think of them as "permanent notes in training" or, as some people have started calling them, seedlings (in the language of the digital gardening crowd).

Lovely. This is such a great insight that I can already see is going to help me a lot.

This is a great idea that hasn't occurred to me before. When looking for non-obvious relationships between concepts (something that I think forms part of creativity), it makes sense to have the graph view open alongside the note you're working on.

This pretty much describes something similar for me:

• Capture an initial snippet of an idea, based on something I've read or heard somewhere.
• I might turn it over in my head a few times, re-read it, find a few links, do a bit more reading.
• Eventually I expand on it with my own thoughts, maybe breaking it up into separate (permanent) notes, with links to the original source.

My equivalent, as best as I can tell, is:

• Permanent notes (atomic, linked concepts) = Notions
• Temporary notes (half-formed thoughts, links, snippets, etc.) = Notes
• Temporary notes initially, which later become permanent notes = Ideas (see later comment about why)
• Admin notes (projects, tasks, meetings, etc.) = Work notes

I might also use Zotero to capture the original resource, with a few notes alongside it to explain why I kept it.

I've started keeping these things (fact-type notes and conceptual-type notes) together, since I sometimes find it difficult to find the boundaries of when one becomes the other. For me, it makes sense to keep this all in the same place (in my case, a single vault in Obsidian).

Similar to how I've come to think of my "admin" or "operational" notes. They're instrumental in that they serve a purpose that is usually about moving some project forward.

Part of me is interested to merge these two aspects; I tend to think of them as "knowledge" and "operations". Knowledge-type work is more networked and connected in nature, while operations-type activities are more structured. However, I don't use a note/folder hierarchy here either.

Having gone through the description below, I can't help but feel that there's an awful amount of manual effort going on here. My own thinking is that task and project management as part of a daily workflow needs to be something relatively friction-less.

When there's too much structure in a system, with too many steps, I feel like I would be spending more time managing the system than doing the work.

One of my goals in my own system is to reduce the number of steps required to complete any single activity.

I used to work from the premise that I have to be able to add tasks to a system that is cross-platform (because otherwise, how could I add that one task while walking between meetings, and have it show up in my work for the day on my laptop?).

But now I've switched to a "working context", which means I'm sitting in front of my laptop. It's where I capture 99% of the work I need to do. If, on the rare occasion I need to capture a task or note, I use Joplin.

Important point to make. I think of this as "Principles before tools", which means that I start with what I want to achieve, and then find tools that help me do that more effectively.

I like the idea of this and the overall structure. It reminds me a bit of Wikity which may provide this functionality plus a bit more. I really need to spin up a version and play around with it to see if it will give me what I'm looking for in terms of a blog linked with wiki-like functionality.

As I read this I can't help thinking about my friend Aaron Davis (@mrkrndvs) a member of the IndieWeb, whose domain name is appropriately https://readwriterespond.com/

This seems to be a related problem to the discovery questions that Kicks Condor and Brad Enslen have been thing about.

This is a key point. Social media and the way it amplifies almost anything for the benefit of clicks towards advertising is one of its most toxic features. Too often the extreme voice draws the most attention instead of being moderated down by more civil and moderate society.