Those Highly people were here
Our team is always exploring how effective different types of signals are in proving an article’s relevance. If someone you trust tweets an article, how likely is it that you’ll find it interesting? How about if it’s on the front page of the NY Times? What if the article text has the name of a company you follow in it 10 times? There are a ton of these little relevance signals that we think about, and I may have just came across my new favorite one.
I’ve long been obsessed with highlighting while reading. Growing up, I’d pull out a highlighter when reading, and the digital world has made this exercise a lot more interesting (you can see all my Instapaper highlights in this Google Sheet). For highlighting text on the web I use a service called Highly.
They have a very impressive Chrome Extension that allows you to highlight the text of any web page and save the snippet. You’re able to access all of your highlights, as well as see the public highlight feeds of other users. The more I use the product, the more I realize just how powerful the curation is in these feeds.
I always looked at highlighting as a private activity, simply trying to remember what I read. I never processed the potential for a social component, but whenever I go to their site, I almost always find something valuable in other people’s highlight feeds.
The more you think about it, it’s about as strong a social signal as it gets, a thousand times a Facebook share. If an article was read by someone who shares this geeky highlighting habit, it’s a huge affirmation that the article is good. People aren’t highlighting with the expressed goal of sharing, they’re highlighting because the article and text is good.
Imagine stripping out all the weird psychological b.s. that goes into a social share and you can get back to the fundamental question: Do I find this interesting enough to want to remember it?
The feeds are intriguing enough, but there is another layer to the product that could be my new favorite signal. If you end up on a site that others have highlighted, it will subtly insert an indicator that allows you to see what others highlighted. At first, I would notice this popping up on articles you might expect, some major new story on WIRED or Techcrunch. It got a bit meta when the notification pops up on a Medium posts about Highly — with highlights from the founder of Highly, using Highly to highlight posts about Highly….
But I’ve started to notice something even more fascinating. Sometimes the extension will tell me there are Highly highlights on much older articles, and even Wikipedia entries. It’s the most fun when it’s somewhere completely unexpected. This really jumped out when one of our team was trying to explain the esoteric idea of Latent Dirichlet Allocation. I went straight to Wikipedia, and, lo and behold, those Highly people had been there!
This feels like the promise of digital serendipity the web was supposed to bring, finally delivered. If you’re going to invest your valuable attention into an article, it’s comforting to know “those Highly people had been here”. It lets you know that someone else who takes their reading seriously, took this article seriously.
Perhaps this product and community are still in early-stage utopia, and if it gets big enough, growth hackers would be highlight-hacking, brands would be sponsoring influencer highlights, and of course, Russian trolls would be propaganda-highlighting. However, until that day comes, if you’re looking for a very cool way to discover great stuff to read, recommended by serious readers who are inadvertently, yet wholeheartedly endorsing articles, go and sign up for Highly (and hopefully they’ll come to Android soon!).
