“Did You Even READ the Piece?” This Startup Wants to Make That Question Obsolete for Commentors
Let’s be honest: Are you going to read this or skim this?
In a land of feeds, tidbits, and bullet points, readers don’t often get to the end of a piece — let alone absorb each sentence along the way. But what if you couldn’t comment until you actually read the whole piece? (We see you moving toward that close-the-tab button — hold on.) What if there was a gauge in your browser bar recording and showing you how much you’d read of a piece? Would you — or your readers — read more thoroughly?
That’s the schtick of reallyread.it, a startup finishing up Matter’s eighth cohort and developed by Bill Loundy and Jeff Camera. The pair, buddies since preschool with experience in the startup world, were frustrated by the unproductive comments sections they saw attached to news articles. So they decided to create a mechanism for encouraging would-be commenters to truly read a piece before commenting on it. (Imagine how much energy we would save not asking: “But have you read the piece?”)