Following and collections
A list you asked for, in the order it happened.
Follow an author, a subject, an agency or a jurisdiction. Group work into collections and publish them. There is no ranking, no recommendation, no infinite scroll, and no number on a post that can be moved by publishing more of them.
Following here does exactly one thing: it decides what appears in your own list. It does not decide what anybody else sees, it does not make a post more visible to strangers, and it is not a score.
What you can follow
- An author
- Everything they publish, in publication order. Their handle may be a pseudonym; the follow works the same.
- A subject
- Any of the fifty-five subjects in the shared vocabulary — use-of-force, settlements and claims, water systems. New research on it appears as it is published, whoever wrote it.
- An agency
- Everything published from requests to that body, across authors. This is the follow that does the most work: it is how a pattern in how one agency answers becomes visible, which no single request can show.
- A jurisdiction
- Everything filed under one public-records law. Useful when the question is about the law rather than about any one agency.
A follow produces a reverse-chronological list. It ends. When you reach the bottom of what you follow, you have reached the bottom.
Collections
A collection is a group of posts with a title and an introduction, made by a person. Two kinds:
- Hand-assembled. You choose the posts and the order. Sequence is part of the argument — a collection about one agency over three years reads differently in the order the responses arrived than in order of how interesting they are.
- Standing. Defined by a subject, an agency or a jurisdiction, so new matching research joins it as it is published. A standing collection says what its rule is, on the page, so a reader can see why something is in it.
Collections can be published and followed like anything else. A collection made by someone else is a reading list, not a recommendation engine — you can see who assembled it and on what basis.
Someone else’s collection can include your post
Being collected is not endorsement in either direction, and an author cannot veto it — a reading room where the subject of an argument could remove themselves from someone’s reading list would not be much of a reading room. What an author can see is which collections carry their work.
What does not exist here, and why
These are absences by design. Each one is a thing that would be easy to build and that would change what people publish.
Infinite scrollLists are paginated and they end. An interface that never ends is designed to make stopping feel like a decision you failed to make; in a reading room, finishing what you came for is the successful outcome.
View counts, likes or follower counts on a postThe moment a number on a post can be moved by publishing more, publishing sooner, or publishing something more alarming, the incentive stops pointing at accuracy. Records research is unusually easy to farm this way — the most inflammatory page of a four-hundred-page release is always the one that travels.
Trending, recommended, or “others also read”No ranked surface anywhere. Nothing you did not ask for is placed in front of you, and nothing an author does can cause their work to be placed in front of somebody who did not ask.
Algorithmic amplificationThere is no engagement signal in this system, so there is nothing to amplify by. That is not restraint — it is that the signal was never collected.
Reply threads under postsA comment section under records research about named people is a place for third parties to publish the things the redaction scan exists to catch, with none of the review. Disagreement belongs in a post with its own provenance.
A count of published posts on an author’s pageOne number, and it goes up by one when they publish. It is a fact about their record, and it cannot be gamed into meaning something it does not.
A visible record of corrections and removalsOn every author page. An author who corrects their work is showing you something useful about how they work. Takedown →
What this costs
Worth being honest about, because the absence of these mechanics is not free.
- Good work will be read less. Discovery is genuinely harder without a ranked surface. A careful post on an obscure agency will reach fewer people here than it would somewhere with a recommendation engine.
- Authors get less feedback. No counter tells you whether anyone read it. Some people find that clarifying and some find it dispiriting, and both reactions are reasonable.
- Growth is slower. Nothing here is built to spread. The mechanisms that make a platform grow quickly are the same ones that decide what gets published on it.
The trade is deliberate. The alternative is a system where the way to be read is to publish faster and louder than the person doing the same work carefully — and in this subject, faster and louder means less time reading the documents. Which is where the harm is →
Take your readers with you
The strongest answer to “no algorithm will bring you readers” is that you should not need one to. The widget puts your published research on your own domain, so the audience you build is yours and stays yours. The widget →
The shape of the thing
A room you leave when you are done.
Not a stream that keeps going as long as you keep looking. The measure of this place working is somebody finding what they came for and closing the tab.
How this works
0:59 · narrated · captioned · served from this site, and nothing is sent anywhere when you press play. Prefer to read it? The transcript is below.
Transcript
| At | Section | What it says |
|---|---|---|
| 0:02 | What a follow does | Follow an author, a subject, an agency or a jurisdiction, and get a list in the order things happened. It ends. When you reach the bottom, you have reached the bottom. |
| 0:13 | Collections | A collection is a group of posts assembled by a person, with a title and an introduction. Sequence is part of the argument, so the order is chosen, not ranked. |
| 0:23 | What is missing | No infinite scroll. No view counts, no likes, no trending, no recommendations. There is no engagement signal here, so there is nothing to amplify by. |
| 0:35 | Why | The most inflammatory page of a four hundred page release is always the one that travels. A room that ranked by engagement would surface the least careful reading. |
| 0:46 | What it costs | Good work will be read less, and growth is slower. That is the trade, and it is deliberate, because the mechanisms that spread a platform also decide what goes on it. |