Communities connect people around common interests. Healthy communities enforce accountability for logic, honesty, and courtesy, which promotes an environment of learning and trust. The advent of the Internet helped communities grow by enabling them to better enforce this accountability, bridge time and space, and make information easier to retrieve. These communities – bulletin boards, discussion groups, and forums – created the Internet's first marketplace of ideas.
As more of our time shifted online, large companies bought our attention through online advertising and sponsored content. Internet platforms funded their growth by selling inventory that previously went to small publishers, organic content, and communities. Today, the Internet is full of noise. Sponsors compete with each other for our attention and drown out non-sponsored content, making it difficult to know who or what to trust.
Forums are the Internet's oldest and best-moderated communities. More than three decades after The WELL, forums continue to connect people, create valuable knowledge, and build trust. They are also our blueprint for rewiring the Internet: By curating quality information in forums, we are building a model for curating quality information across the entire Internet. We want to elevate discourse that is trustworthy, thoughtful, and respectful, and bring back an Internet that connects us to each other through communities of learning and trust.
A: We charge forums who send more than 25,000 emails per month with Newsletter. We plan to offer additional revenue-generating products in the future that will be opt-in.
A: No. We will only contact your members at your request or to support services we provide on your behalf, e.g., to resolve product issues.
A: We create a cloud index for you, which enables Search and Newsletter. We do not sell or share your data with any third parties, except as needed to support our services, e.g., Microsoft Azure to power image search. You can find more information in our privacy policy, including our Privacy Shield certification.
A: We are supported by long-term, mission-oriented investors who are aligned with our goal of improving quality on the Internet.
A: We have been in business for over three years, with over 1,000 forums as customers. Read the reviews, talk with our customers, or drop us a line.
