Connecting with your readers on Semble [Patterns of Sensemaking #2]

The first post in this series, Sensors, Not Just Bookmarks, was about listening. You save a card to Semble, and it behaves more like a sensor than a bookmark: it sits on a link and routes back to you whatever the network learns about it: what supports or critiques it, and what it should be read alongside.

This post is about the other direction. Not the person receiving signal, but the person sending it: you've written something, and you'd like it to reach the people who would actually want to read it.

What happened

Earlier in the month I got a series of notifications from a new account: @paperpilot.dev, Anthony aka The Paper Pilot. Those notifications lead me to Anthony’s digital garden — a wiki-style site of public notes on philosophy, politics, technology and sociology.

Anthony joined Semble and started using it in a creative new way. He set up an integration that automatically synced his digital garden to Semble, so that each pages links to a Semble card. For example, the page https://paperpilot.dev/garden/open-source is represented in Semble by the card at https://semble.so/url?id=https://paperpilot.dev/garden/open-source

A page in the Paper Pilot digital garden, and its link to the corresponding Semble page.

And when pages in the garden reference things out on the web, the references are made explicit with Semble connections. I started getting the notifications since Anthony was connecting his own writing to cards that were already sitting in my library:

I wasn’t following Anthony and hadn’t even noticed he joined Semble, but I had a reason to once I saw the writing connecting (literally) with my own interests.

Connections: A new pattern for connecting with readers

With traditional social media, the default move for a writer is an announcement post. “New post up, would love your thoughts.”

To get reach requires going viral, and going viral is a hard game to play especially if you don’t have a big audience. Maybe you are new, or writing in a niche space.

Connections offer a new pattern for finding your readers. Add your post to Semble and create Connections between it and the links it references (this can be done automatically pretty easily with the Semble API).

These connections will help your post organically reach the readers already interested in the content you’re referencing.

This pattern also changes distribution in an interesting new way. An announcement reaches your followers, a group you have to work hard to build and maintain. Connection notifications go to everyone holding the card (not just people who follow you), which is a relevant audience and one you don’t have to build.

Citations, reimagined for social media

The pattern has a familiar analogue in scholarly citations.

Academics here will know that when you make a citation, the author you cite will likely see it - plenty of scholars keep alerts running so they are notified when their papers get cited.

But these “citation notifications” are limited in a few ways:

• Citations only work for the scientific record, e.g., research papers. That means they are slow, and they don’t work for grey literature like blogs, podcasts, or posts - increasingly important spaces where a lot of valuable, real-time thinking happens.
• Authors typically only get notified when their own work gets cited, not when content in their reference manager gets cited.

Semble helps address both limitations: you can save any kind of media and receive notifications for everything you save. Citations, reimagined for social media.

Can this scale?

The speed and scale of social media is a double edged sword. On one hand, it’s fun to move faster than the speed of academic citations and see diverse new connections to your work or links you’re interested in. Value also compounds as the network grows: the more links on Semble and the more people saving each link, the richer the distribution channels become.

On the other hand, too many notifications can get overwhelming fast. Furthermore, if we all start bulk adding links with agents and integrations, we could overcrowd the simple chronological feed we currently have.

So Semble isn't currently built for this kind of use case at scale, but there are many ways we can make it ready for scale. One simple fix is batching: bundling activity in the feed and the notification list that, so one account making ten connections in a minute will get bundled as one item rather than ten separate ones.

Further down the line, batching alone won't be enough, and we’ll need more advanced filtering and ranking options. Fortunately, there are a lot of good techniques to address problems of this sort.

In summary, we think these are good challenges to have. A creative new way to use Semble has been found! Supporting this pattern at scale is tractable and will unlock exciting new distribution pathways.

So if you write a lot, rather than just announcing your post on social media, try Semble as a new way to find readers: connect your writing to the links already on the network, and let the connections find your natural audience.

Thanks to @paperpilot.dev for the inspiration!