The Reading Room: a summary and some learnings  

I decided to close this down for now. The motivation for starting the Reading Room was simple: I was (and still am) excited to share what I am reading and listening to with my friends, in a place where we can have a kind of intellectual commons. I don’t think the current methods of getting there (social media and my preferred use of text messages) are doing the trick so I tried to make something to get it closer. The ideas was one link per day. Thats all. No comments, no notifications, just read cool things. It was super successful in that about 10 people (all my best buds!) were using it semi-regularly. Every time I read or heard something I wanted to share I was so excited and filed it away and most of all I loved being able to see what all my friends were posting and then be able to talk about it with them.

It was not successful for a couple reasons:

1. The big one I think is that there was no way to get people back in the app e.g. commenting on posts, @ mentioning, notifications or weekly emails with some top posts. So unless people thought to check it they wouldn’t be reminded to. I built it this way with some intentionality of trying not to bombard people but I went too far to the anti-social media edge so people couldn’t even see who liked their post…etc

2. Because I’m a rookie it was hard to login and the design was pretty clunky especially on mobile.

3. No-code builders are still a lot of work. Using Knack and Bubble is only a technical shortcut (though there is still a big learning curve if you don’t know the basics of programming). The hard, hard work of starting anything like this: figuring out what people want and aligning that with your vision are still present.

It’s hard for me to let this go because I believe very deeply that this is going to happen. It is my belief and hope that it is one of the inevitable parts of the internet that we will evolve spaces to be able to share more thoughtfully. That said, I have been considering Kevin Kellys question of ‘what is the unique thing you can do, that no one else can?’ One implication to me is that if someone else can do something, then I should probably let them. That is to say, I’m not the only one who can make this and while I’m sad to not have access to this for myself, I’m not too sad to not be building it.

Thank you to all who used it and for your feedback and sharing and care.