Dear Dig3st Community

Dear Dig3st follower,

Haven’t written here in over 2 years. Currently there’s 31 of you, and that may seem kind of lame…but I think it’s pretty cool. There is something pretty inspiring that for however brief period of time a synapse fired in your brain and said…”neat,” and you proceeded to click the “follow” button. While it may dwarf in comparison to some of your other favorite content channels, I just wanted to share my appreciation for your interest to whatever it was that intrigued you about our little experiment here at Dig3st. With that, I felt it was only fair to share with you why I started this project and why it is important to me so that when/if there are 10,000+ of you, I can be held accountable by our earliest contributors/readers to stay committed and consistent to the cause, which was founded on three basic premises:

1. Impoverished dialogue: While the internet has given an incredible ability to connect and converse with anyone in the world, much of it has caught an illness somewhere between the bots, trolls, fraudulent news, and unsubstantiated opinions. We are committed to maintaining a respectable and credible environment of data-driven dialogue, inspired by and thus monitored by the community.
2. People are smart: No machine, AI, robot, etc. will ever replace the human mind; and our observations are powerful. Furthermore, everyone has them, good ones at that which only each individual can uniquely possess based on their domains, skills, and experiences. Yes a career journalist may have a large repertoire of obscure metaphors just as a data scientist might have a few fancy visualization tricks up their sleeve and these are all wonderful, but it is the insight that matters. Providing a venue where these insights can be shared by anyone in a credible and to-the-point fashion bolsters the wisdom of the crowds.
3. Information overload: There is simply too much shit out there. 90% of the world’s data was generated in the last 2 years alone and the digital reader today has exponentially more access to content than ever before in human history. So the “byt3” (3-minute reads and at least one element of data viz) was designed to add a little more credibility to insights and a little more life to data for the time-strapped inquirer. Cutting through surplus with data-driven brevity is one of the primary goals of Dig3st in order to understand our world a little more efficiently, one byt3 at a time.

So where are we going from here? With the recent emergence of web3 technologies, it has become apparent that the missing piece to the Dig3st model (incentives) is now very much a real possibility for making this a reality again. At the right time, we’re going to be resurrecting Dig3st as a DAO.

Dig3st DAO Schema

The capabilities of DAO infrastructure and a community of OSINT contributors, data viz practitioners, and proliferation of independent writers creates a strong foundation for the future of Dig3st. Our evergreen ask is to contribute or help recommend a contributor who may have an interesting topic to “byt3” about. Bring them on board. Dig3st 2.0 starts today. Join the movement for data-driven independent journalism.