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How the Web Became Unreadable

Backchannel
7 min
From 2016

I thought my eyesight was beginning to go. It turns out, I’m suffering from design.

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What is Refind?

Every day Refind picks 5 links from around the web for every user, tailored to the user’s interests. Picking only a handful of links means focusing on what’s relevant and useful. We favor timeless pieces—links with long shelf-lives, articles that are still relevant one month, one year, or even ten years from now. These lists of the best resources on any topic are the result of years of careful curation.

How does Refind curate?

It’s a mix of human and algorithmic curation, following a number of steps:

  1. We monitor 10k+ sources and 1k+ thought leaders on hundreds of topics—publications, blogs, news sites, newsletters, Substack, Medium, Twitter, etc.
  2. In addition, our users save links from around the web using our Save buttons and our extensions.
  3. Our algorithm processes 100k+ new links every day and uses external signals to find the most relevant ones, focusing on timeless pieces.
  4. Our community of active users gets 5 links every day, tailored to their interests. They provide feedback via implicit and explicit signals: open, read, listen, share, add to reading list, save to «Made me smarter», «More/less like this», etc.
  5. Our algorithm uses these internal signals to refine the selection.
  6. In addition, we have expert curators who manually curate niche topics.

The result: lists of the best and most useful articles on hundreds of topics.

How does Refind detect «timeless» pieces?

We focus on pieces with long shelf-lives—not news. We determine «timelessness» via a number of metrics, for example, the consumption pattern of links over time.

How many sources does Refind monitor?

We monitor 10k+ content sources on hundreds of topics—publications, blogs, news sites, newsletters, Substack, Medium, Twitter, etc.

Can I submit a link?

Indirectly, by using Refind and saving links from outside (e.g., via our extensions).

How can I report a problem?

When you’re logged-in, you can flag any link via the «More» (...) menu. You can also report problems via email to hello@refind.com

Who uses Refind?

200k+ smart people start their day with Refind. To learn something new. To get inspired. To move forward. Our apps have a 4.9/5 rating.

Is Refind free?

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