Are you bored of seeing images of every single meal your friends are having? Are you tired of seeing crappy memes or dumb videos that start playing, even though you don’t feel like watching them? Don’t you feel sometimes, that using social media, is a waste of time and that there is so much crap out there that doesn’t bring a lot of real value? What about seeing your friends taking selfies like 5 times per day in their favourite bathroom? Not mentioning those game requests, that you don’t feel like playing. Don’t get me wrong, all these things are entertaining, and we need some of that for sure, we all like to keep in touch with our friends and see what is happening in their lives, but at the same time many of us want to have this social experience and see more educational content based on their interests, without unnecessary interruptions.
The New York Times study called: “The Psychology of Sharing” examined 2500 social media users who are medium/heavy sharers. The primary motive of this research was to understand why people share content online. What they found out is that: “68% share to give people a better sense of who they are and what they care about”. So what happens when, what you care about is not what your friends or followers enjoy seeing on their feed? You simply get much smaller engagement and very little interaction. For example, on social media, I like to share some interesting thoughts or ideas and articles about science, or metaphysics or on how the system works and etc. but most of my real life friends, are not into that. Even when I share some content, the chance that other friend who would find it interesting, will see it, is small because it will blend with all the other stuff that other people share, like selfies and memes.
Another problem is that many of us have busy lives and there are so many things that we are occupied with. At the same time, more people have shorter attention span these days. Researchers believe that as a result of using mobile phones, our attention span decreased by a third in the last 15 years (source:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/11607315/Humans-have-shorter-attention-span-than-goldfish-thanks-to-smartphones.html)
What if, there would be a social network where people, experts and publishers share, interesting stories, ideas and concepts based on your fields of interest? And all that in a compressed format, where you don’t have to read the full article to get the idea of what is the essence of it? Just reading the best paragraphs so you can learn as much as possible in the shortest time possible. And all that without distractions and irrelevant content. Just pure knowledge all around your interests.
Together with my partner, Bozhidar Genev, we decided to solve some of those problems and came up with solution, it is called Aweditoria and we just released the site to the public. So what are the key ideas behind Aweditoria?
- All is based on interests.
On Aweditoria, it is not as important who shares the content, but what content is shared. You follow topics that you are passionate about and you get a feed of short stories based on your interests. Some of the categories include; science, politics, spirituality, personal development, health, technology and etc.
- Compressed format
You probably heard of the 80/20% “Pareto” principle? That 20% brings as much value as the other 80%? We believe that this idea can be applied to text in general.
The essence is often contained within a small piece of the full text, whether that is an article, story, or book. I.e. most often one paragraph brings the most value and summarizes the idea that the author tries to convey. Think of those brilliant lines that you like to highlight while reading a book, for example. On Aweditoria users share those best text snippets that are not longer than 150 words.
- Annotations instead of comments
On Aweditoria users can annotate small stories and ideas, and explain them further. Imagine having concept that you don’t fully understand and someone who knows the same concept well, can explain it to you in their own words. This is something Aweditoria offers. Bloggers and writers who share the best bits of their content can help others to understand them better.
- No distractions
Aweditoria is purely focused on content, cutting all the crap out, so you can be sure that you will learn something interesting each time with no interruptions.
- Relationships
On Aweditoria you can follow anyone and relationships are build based on mutual interests, perhaps you will discover new interesting ideas, or make connections based on similar passions.
- Content discovery tool
Aweditoria is a great place for publishers, writers and bloggers to share their best paragraphs and text chunks. Users who read these stories can discover new authors and read their full content on the web.
