Linh Dao Smooke & David Smooke repping Hacker Noon at the Mozilla Fix the Internet Showcase

I joined a panel with awesome fellow founders and builders of Mozilla to discuss the future of "citizen publishing" as a way to democratize the internet.

Massive shoutout to "How to do nothing" by Jenny Odell which informs a lot of my thinking on what is wrong with the internet and how we can began to fix it.

You can watch me from 30:28 and David at 1:23:39.

Transcript of my part:

Question: Also we have with us Linh of Hacker Noon whose team has worked tirelessly to decentralize citizen journalism. Linh - we hear a lot about misinformation.. and big media channels can be worrisome sometimes. How does citizen journalism promise to keep society differently?

Answer: Here at Hacker Noon, I think a lot about the flow of information. If you think about how we traditionally receive information, it's typically via things like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, a group of very prestigious journalists that create the kind of information that people historically trust. Now with the rise of social media, you see an entirely different way "citizens" can receive information (whether or not it's journalism is questionable). But, social media is very accessible, easy to use, and information, trust-worthy or not, spread like wild fires. So here at Hacker Noon, we try to combine the good aspects of traditional journalism as well as the good of social media, making it accessible for everyone, anyone with a keyboard can publish on Hacker Noon as long as they have some kind of expertise on technology. But unlike social media where there's a big question mark about how verified information is (for example, not until the 2016 election that Twitter started to realize the lack of fact-checking necessary for information circulating online), we go above and beyond. We don't think just put a tag on the fact is enough, there always needs to be another set of eyeballs to factcheck the information (what we call the Second Human Rule at Hacker Noon). That human touch guarantees that an editor can always vet whether or not a submission is worth publishing. So to answer your initial question, to combat misinformation, we need accessibility as well as a good verification process. We try to do that at Hacker Noon instead of throwing a towel in traditional journalism or social media.

#fixtheinternet with Mozilla.