Hystoria had an incredible launch with a promising future, but siloed communities are extremely hard to grow organically without a ton of effort. So for now, Hystoria has been shut down. It will soon re-emerge in another form, however, that can make use of momentum from already-established social networks.

It’s the year 2020 and we have the immense benefit of thousands of years of history, literature, and technological progress at our fingertips.

Why does this matter? Because with time comes context. Consideration and reconsideration. Deconstruction and reconstruction. Adaptation, further research, new findings, and new examination. Impact. Consequences. Lessons.

Anything old comes with context. Context is gold. Old is gold.

Context helps us evaluate things thoughtfully. It helps us debate things on their merits. In this way we can become better people—and a better people.

Without time, we lose context. Tweets received within seconds have virtually zero context. So what happens? Things are evaluated carelessly because there is no context for thoughtfulness. People attack each other because they don’t have any merits to debate. We become worse people—and a worse people.

Focusing on the immediate tip of the timeline of history—to this extreme—is nonsensical. Now is the least-understood moment in history. If we’re looking to become more informed, is now really the moment we should be examining to the degree we do?

Now is a tornado of conjecture with little underlying value and much potential harm: hysteria.

I contend that there is more value in understanding the past in order to understand the present. As an experiment, I’m launching Hystoria, a reddit-like website for rediscovering ideas from the past.

I’ll be posting book snippets and other interesting tidbits I find on it as I work on 100 Million Books, and I hope you do too. You can upvote posts and comment on posts, and the best posts will float to the top.

So what’s different about Hystoria?

Only items produced 5 years ago (or more) will be allowed on the site.

Anything else will be removed. My hope is that this medium will harness the competitive, gamified dynamic of social media to resurface the best ideas of the past. Let’s see if that pans out. I’ll also be pointing people to Hystoria for all new book snippet suggestions.

The site is built with a free and open-source tool called Lemmy, and I host the website myself—there’s no “big tech” involvement here. Moderation policies and terms of use will be determined if and when needed. Visit the site with an ad blocker and you’ll notice there are no ads or tracking on it either.

There’s another upside of this site: as you can see by the posting history of this blog, I don’t post very often. It’s been years since I last posted at all, in spite of collecting a lot of stuff worth sharing in the mean time. My excuse is that I have many things to post, and creating blog posts worth reading for each item I find would be a unreasonably onerous commitment. Posting on social media like Twitter or Facebook would be more practical but I don’t like the idea of building a following on those sites for their own sakes. I would much rather use them as conduits for sites I actually own. Hystoria enables that.

So I’ll post more on social sites now too. Follow on Twitter, Facebook, and Telegram.

Visit Hystoria here.