UpTrust Site Walkthrough
Thank you for participating in the UpTrust Beta! Your participation will help us verify our thesis that a better internet is possible with a better incentive structure. We believe UpTrust and the incentive structure it is pioneering could change humanity and seriously uplevel civilizational well-being. This exploration starts with people like you.
In the following text, you’ll find a short overview of the site and some known issues we think you’ll run into.
Account Set Up
Visit www.uptrusting.com
Click "Sign Up"
Enter your email, password, date of birth, and answer the optional questions if you'd like.
Click to finish—and voila, you're in! If you can't log in after this, let us know at support@uptrusthq.com—we may need to fix your email address on our end.
Bonus: Go to “Settings” and upload an avatar. Seeing real faces helps the site feel more personable and warm.
“Where should I be?” or How to View Content on Uptrust
You can view and post content in two main places for purposes of this beta:
All Content: See all the public posts on UpTrust. Sort this feed by new, trust score, or hot and toggle to the kind of content you’d like to see.
Groups: Find your group-based feeds here. During the beta, you’ll only be invited to one group. Access it through the Groups tab in the left-hand menu or filter the All Content feed to see your group’s posts.
Key Features
Trust Scores
Trust Scores are a dynamic, personalized metric designed to reflect how likely you are to trust or find content credible on UpTrust. These scores are based on your trust network and the topics associated with the content.
By engaging with content—uptrusting, downtrusting in specific domains—you help the algorithm refine your network and provide more accurate scores.
Personalized & Weighted: The Trust Score you see for a post is calculated by the algorithm based on:
Domain-Specific: Trust Scores are tied to specific topics or domains. For example, if a post is tagged with "science" and "biology," your Trust Score reflects your confidence in the creator's credibility within those areas.
Ever-Changing: As you interact with content, trust or distrust others, and build your network, Trust Scores evolve to reflect your shifting perspectives.
Visual Breakdown: Hover over a Trust Score to see a pie chart showing how various users influenced the score in your network. (Note: this is not aesthetically pleasing at the moment)
Global Score: Alongside your personalized Trust Score, you'll also see a global average score. This represents how all platform participants view the creator's credibility across the same domains.
Your direct interactions with the creator (e.g., uptrusting their content).
The trust expressed by people you trust in your network, in relation to the creator.
UpTrust & DownTrust Arrows
The UpTrust and DownTrust arrows are central to how you engage with content on UpTrust. They allow you to express your trust or distrust in a post or comment and are key to shaping your trust network and refining the platform's algorithm. Use the UpTrust arrow to indicate that you find the content or the creator trustworthy within a specific domain. Use the DownTrust arrow when you find content or the creator less credible or untrustworthy within a domain.
Feed Options
Control what you see on the “All Content” feed by toggling “Feed Options.” Here, you can sort content, filter by group, and select if you’d like to see your own content, original posts, and/or comments appearing in your feed.
Context Widget
Hover over the post image in your feed to see which post a comment correlates to.
Tree View
When you’re reading and commenting on posts, you’ll notice the UpTrust comment structure is a bit different than other sites. Tree View organizes comments into branching threads, allowing discussions to flow naturally and “branch out” from the original post. This structure should make it easy to follow complex conversations and explore diverse perspectives. Reply directly to specific comments to deepen an existing “branch” or thread, or alternatively reply to the original post to start a new “branch.”
Topic Search (Global Search Coming Soon)
Quickly find content related to your interests by typing keywords like "politics" or "science." If you search for a topic that doesn’t appear, it has not yet been written about on the site.
Bots
While commenting on a post, you’re encouraged to check out the various helper bots available. These bots can help guide conversations, intensify perspectives, find unity amidst divergent perspectives, summarize what’s transpired in a branch of conversation, or even troll. Bot interactions are private unless you choose to promote the content publicly.
Bridging
Click “Bridge” on the lefthand menu. These comments and posts help synthesize or find a commonality between two people with opposing views. Bridges are unique to you and happen when you’ve uptrusted Person A’s content and downtrusted Person B’s content, but both A and B UpTrust a piece of content. That third piece of content is a bridge.
You’ll find bridges that are for your worldview (i.e. the scenario just described), bridges that you created for someone else, and also bridges helped by you (i.e. where you were Person A or B).
Known Issues
Notifications: You’ll only see a notification if someone directly replies to your content, but not if someone replies to a reply on your content. We also don’t have email or text notifications, so you’ll only know if someone has replied by logging into your account.
Trust Scores in Profiles and Groups are miscalculated: The order of “top trusted” and the list of “trusted topics” are correct, but the trust score associated with them has no been calibrated correctly.
Trust Score Pie Chart: When you hover over the trust score, the pie chart that appears is an accurate display of what other people influence the trust score you’re seeing but the visual itself is busy.