#Thread I had asked people to share 3 good things that they did/happened to them in #2020 on @Facebook @Twitter and @instagram. Totally more than a 1000 people replied, of different ages, different professions, different regions. The comments were full of insights for me.

Lesson 1. The responses were very diverse, but some common things stood out. Most people mentioned ‘spending time with the family’ as one of the top positives of this year. And indeed, #WFH as well as the forced lockdown has made us all look at family togetherness in a new light.
Lesson 2. Most respondents also mentioned focus on wellness and health as a key area saw improvement. Many people shared inspiring stories of weight loss, of starting an exercise regimen, yoga, meditation, practices that helped improve both physical as well as mental health.
Lesson 3. A strong desire to go back to the roots. This virus helped people to slow down and focus on what is really important. Many respondents talked about reading our scriptures, praying mindfully, learning Sanskrit, reading/watching Ramayan/Mahabharat, learning Vedic chanting
Lesson 4. Almost everyone confessed to catching up on reading, improving culinary skills and coming to the realisation that it is not that difficult to manage without eating out/visiting malls/watching movies in cinema halls. Also, a lot of people stressed on mindful eating.
Lesson 5. #WFH liberated many people in the cities from hours of dreary commuting. Many people spent the extra time they saved on doing home chores, gardening, teaching themselves something new from d Internet. Many confessed that they are now more appreciative of domestic help!
Lesson 6. Gratitude. Many respondents said they realised how blessed they are and how their problems were really small compared to what other people were going through. Many also expressed a sincere desire to give back to the society/country.
#Conclusion. I know these responses are self-selecting and an indication of the mindset of the people who follow me, but this year seems to have given many of us profound life lessons that will help navigate our lives in the post-Covid world. Thanks to everyone who responded.

More from Internet

We’ve spent the last ten months building #CitizenBrowser, a project that aims to peek inside the Black Box of social media algorithms, by building a nationwide panel to share data with us. Today, we are publishing our first story from the project. /1

.@corintxt crunched the numbers and found that after Facebook flipped the switch for political ads, partisan content elbowed out reputable news outlets in our panelists’ news feeds.
https://t.co/Z0kibSBeQZ /2

You can learn more in our methodology, where we describe how we did this and what steps we took to ensure that we preserved the panelists' privacy. https://t.co/UYbTXAjy5i /3

Personally, this project is the culmination of years of experiments trying to figure out how to collect data from social media platforms in a way that can lead to meaningful reporting. I’ve described a couple of highlights below 👇 /4

My first attempt was in 2016 at Propublica, when I was working with @JuliaAngwin . We were interested in seeing if there was a difference in the Ad interests FB disclosed to users in their settings and the interests they showed to marketers. /5

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So the cryptocurrency industry has basically two products, one which is relatively benign and doesn't have product market fit, and one which is malignant and does. The industry has a weird superposition of understanding this fact and (strategically?) not understanding it.


The benign product is sovereign programmable money, which is historically a niche interest of folks with a relatively clustered set of beliefs about the state, the literary merit of Snow Crash, and the utility of gold to the modern economy.

This product has narrow appeal and, accordingly, is worth about as much as everything else on a 486 sitting in someone's basement is worth.

The other product is investment scams, which have approximately the best product market fit of anything produced by humans. In no age, in no country, in no city, at no level of sophistication do people consistently say "Actually I would prefer not to get money for nothing."

This product needs the exchanges like they need oxygen, because the value of it is directly tied to having payment rails to move real currency into the ecosystem and some jurisdictional and regulatory legerdemain to stay one step ahead of the banhammer.