The Best Articles in Digital Life
The most useful articles and videos in Digital Life from around the web, curated by thought leaders and our community.
Refind focuses on timeless pieces and updates the list whenever new, must-read articles or videos are discovered.
Top 5 Digital Life Articles
At a glance: these are the articles that have been most read, shared, and saved in Digital Life by Refind users in 2024 so far.
Videos
Watch a video to get a quick overview.
why Japan's internet is weirdly designed
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3 ways to defend your mind against social media distortions
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The Dead Internet Theory
The internet is ever changing, but over the past couple of years things have started to change. The proportion of bots in increasing. A theory dubbed “The De...
Everything is a Remix (Complete Updated 2023 Edition)
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How Cell Phones Impact Our Relationships
Are you making others feel less important than a device? + + +Simon is an unshakable optimist. He believes in a bright future and our ability to build it tog...
What is ...?
New to Digital Life? These articles make an excellent introduction.
How to Use Discord: A Beginner’s Guide
Confused by the buzzy social platform? Here’s everything you need to know.
What is Technology Doing to Us?
In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Tristan Harris about the arms race for human attention, the ethics of persuasion, the consequences of having an ad-based economy, the dynamics of regret, and other topics.
How to ...?
How to talk to conspiracy theorists—and still be kind
Experts and r/ChangeMyView subreddit moderators offer 10 tips to debunk conspiracy theories convincingly—and kindly.
How to Check Your Devices for Stalkerware
You deserve privacy. Here's how to check your phone, laptop, and online accounts to make sure no one's looking over your shoulder.
How to make your offline self harder to find online
Keep your personal information personal
«Our goal in this article is to help you condense your attack surface as much as possible.»
How to Dox Yourself on the Internet
A step-by-step guide to finding and removing your personal information from the internet.
How to avoid Amazon: the definitive guide to online shopping
Amazon is now making up to £8,800 a second, while concerns persist about its tax affairs, treatment of staff and effect on small retailers. Here’s how to buy everything from technology to beauty to…
Trending
These links are currently making the rounds in Digital Life on Refind.
The Fitness Wearables Data You Can (and Can’t) Trust
Your fitness tracker promises to give you a lot of information—about your heart rate, your quality of sleep, and even your blood oxygen level. But you can't trust everything it tells you.
Humans Forget. AI Assistants Will Remember Everything
Digital assistants with access to everything you do on your phone can use that knowledge to remember the life details you’d otherwise forget. But with that great power comes great responsibility.
Beeper was just acquired by Automattic, which has big plans for the future of messaging
Instead of fighting the blue bubbles, now Beeper will try to make them irrelevant.
Will Search Engine Traffic Really Drop 25% by 2026, As Gartner Predicts?
Gartner VP Alan Antin on the company’s prediction that search engine traffic is about to fall off a cliff.
Short Articles
Short on time? Check out these useful short articles in Digital Life—all under 10 minutes.
The State of the Culture, 2024
Or a glimpse into post-entertainment society (it's not pretty)
An Apocalyptic Meditation on Doomscrolling
The next time you catch yourself doomscrolling, take it as an invitation to own your own horror.
«Compulsion is key to doomscrolling, which means that, whatever else is going on, we enjoy it.»
The world wants your kids to buy stuff. Here’s how to help them be less materialistic.
Raising kids in our modern consumer culture is challenging. These tips can help.
Time-warped: how modern life shortens our perspectives
Many of us feel the anxiety of living in a time of ‘polycrisis’, but taking a long view will help you cope
«polycrisis, a cluster of related global risks and their effects, and of a permacrisis, the Collins Dictionary’s 2022 word of the year, defined as “an extended period of instability and insecurity”.»
Long Articles
These are some of the most-read long-form articles in Digital Life.
Everyone is on their phones. But is it really phone addiction we’re experiencing?
There is no standard diagnosis for ‘phone addiction’, and a debate rages about whether there should be. But will medicalizing a behavior help or harm those suffering from it?
«In its simplest form, addiction is the tipping point at which compulsion turns into dependency,»
How I got scammed
Today's links How I got scammed (permalink) I wuz robbed. More spec
How China took over the world’s online shopping carts
Chinese e-commerce platforms like Shein, Temu, and TikTok Shop are going global with big ambitions.
The people who ruined the internet
SEO experts got very rich filling the web full of garbage. But are they to blame or is Google?
«Soon, he said, Google results would be even worse, dominated entirely by AI-generated crap designed to please the algorithms, produced and published at volumes far beyond anything humans could create, far beyond anything we’d ever seen before.»
Why note-taking apps don’t make us smarter
Their big promise has fizzled out.
«I have so much information at hand that I feel paralyzed.»
Thought Leaders
We monitor hundreds of thought leaders, influencers, and newsletters in Digital Life, including:
What is Refind?
Every day Refind picks the most relevant links from around the web for you. Picking only a handful of links means focusing on what’s relevant and useful.
How does Refind curate?
It’s a mix of human and algorithmic curation, following a number of steps:
- We monitor 10k+ sources and 1k+ thought leaders on hundreds of topics—publications, blogs, news sites, newsletters, Substack, Medium, Twitter, etc.
- In addition, our users save links from around the web using our Save buttons and our extensions.
- Our algorithm processes 100k+ new links every day and uses external signals to find the most relevant ones, focusing on timeless pieces.
- Our community of active users gets the most relevant links every day, tailored to their interests. They provide feedback via implicit and explicit signals: open, read, listen, share, mark as read, read later, «More/less like this», etc.
- Our algorithm uses these internal signals to refine the selection.
- 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.
Who are the thought leaders in Digital Life?
We follow dozens of thought leaders in Digital Life, including OM, Seth Godin, Mark Manson, zeynep tufekci, Nir Eyal.
Missing a thought leader? Submit them here
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?
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Keep Learning
Learn something new, guided by experts. Deep Dives are carefully hand-curated series of time-tested articles and videos from around the web.
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