UpTrust: Building a better internet for civilizational well-being 🟣

Some of you know that while Valerie Daniel’s been running The Relateful Company for the past couple years, I’ve been running a tech startup called UpTrust whose mission is civilizational well-being through better conversation online.

The incentives online today lead to the (now well-documented) polarization, fragmentation, ‘post-truth’ meaning-making crises, mental health problems, and deterioration of civil discourse at all scales. (Also problematic: The vast majority of the training data for AI comes from petty and divisive conversations). 

We are creating a different incentive structure that systemically rewards truth and love instead. We're built on better algorithms and relatefully informed foundations about what is and what we’re here for.

I’d like to give all of y’all on this email list an exclusive invite to the beta platform starting in March—exclusive because we’re not sure when (or if ever) we’ll open UpTrust to the general public. Be a part of establishing the culture that can engage humanity's biggest problems and potentials with nuance and compassion, allowing disagreement to be generative. Join us in taking all the incredible insights from fifteen years of Relatefulness and scaling them into the best conversations on the internet.

It'll still be unfinished, with really powerful features still unreleased. We'll want your feedback. But I'm excited because I know that we—the Relateful community—with our ability to truly love an incredibly wide set of human experiences, opinions, and ideas, while also not shying away from difficult or contentious truth—will be an incredible starter culture that can seed the diverse future of discourse everywhere.

The waiting list is not quite ready yet, so against all marketing advice, there's no call to action this week. Today, UpTrust is a really cool thing I’m sharing, which I hope (1) offers some hope in what can feel like confusing and overwhelming times, and (2) shows ways Relatefulness applies in domains like technology that may otherwise seem distant. Next week I’ll speak more about it, and include the exclusive waiting list sign up links. Thanks y’all. I'm very happy to finally be sharing this with you!

With love, Jordan