The term “reading online” really consists of several behaviors: deciding what to read, the act of reading, and what you do with your knowledge after you read.

I was a top 1% Pocket user for about a decade before starting Matter with my co-founder Rob Mackenzie, who was also a Pocket user. Read-it-later has been a core practice of mine for a long time.

the first generation of read-it-later apps don’t have a lot of smarts built into them. For example, they don’t help with prioritization, resurfacing, or decay

Bezos talks about the importance of focusing on needs that won’t change. For instance, ten years from now, customers will still want faster delivery. We know the supply of great content will continue to rise, attention will always be scarce, and the returns to making good decisions about what to read will remain high — and indeed, increase — over time.

Trust is one of the most important factors when deciding what to read, and people trust people.

When we started Matter, we made the decision to elevate writers as first-class citizens in our system.

Good curation is incredibly valuable, especially as a way of finding gems (often obscure, often old) that are overlooked by engagement-based algorithms.

It’s a better experience if you can draw a highlight with a single press-and-drag.

In general, our information consumption is heavily biased toward what’s new. Social media is dominated by the news

but… It’s also the case that 99.99% of the best stuff that’s ever been written or produced was not written in the past week.

What’s new is important but we think the bias toward it is too strong, and we’re designing Matter to serve as a counterweight.

We need to figure out how to deliver them so that they’re relevant and manageable. The design space is large. It’s a fun problem to work on.

It’s the golden age of newsletters! The problem is, your email inbox isn’t great for reading. Most people want to get through their inbox as quickly as possible, not spend more time there. Plus, you can’t highlight or annotate.

Highly reliable parsing is fundamental to the user experience, and we’re beginning to incorporate more sophisticated techniques, like NLP and computer vision, to push our accuracy even higher.

in terms of consumer behavior, audio has become an increasingly important mode of consumption. In part, this rise in “ear time” is driven by hardware that makes listening more convenient

We added a feature called “audio highlights” that lets you highlight as you listen without opening your phone! (Triple-tap your Airpods or press both volume buttons at the same time to make an audio highlight.)

minimaps. If you two-finger tap an article, we show you a miniaturized version, so you can scan headers and quickly navigate. We took inspiration from video games and code editors. It’s neat on mobile, and I think it’ll be even neater on desktop web.

Our core users tend to be what we call “active” readers. Not just in the sense that they read a lot, but in the sense that they’re intentional about what they read and proactively curate their information diets. Often they have favorite writers and subscribe to newsletters. Often they frequent obscure blogs.

Our goal is to increase the ROI of reading. We want to help people get more from the time they invest in reading — more insight, more knowledge, more… thrill