by Scott Santens | Jul 21, 2014 | News
Scott Santens’ article, “Why Should We Support the Idea of an Unconditional Basic Income?” published on Medium in June achieved the distinction in July of making the Medium Top 100 – a collection of the most-read of all stories each month.
Medium is a social journalism platform created by co-founders of Twitter, Evan Williams and Biz Stone. Its monthly list is ranked by what they call TTR (total time reading) – a metric devised to measure quality of reader engagement. The TTR for this particular article in support of basic income, ranked it at number 26 for the month of June.
Scott Santens, “Why Should We Support the Idea of an Unconditional Basic Income?” Medium, 2 June 2014.
Pete Davies, “Medium’s metric that matters: Total Time Reading” Medium, 21 November 2013.
by Scott Santens | Jul 18, 2014 | News
Scott Santens’ article, “Why Should We Support the Idea of an Unconditional Basic Income?” originally published on Medium has now been made available in audio form through the newsreader app Umano, where popular articles are submitted to be read aloud by professional narrators. The article has been narrated by Larry Rice, of Seattle’s KOMO News.
Scott Santens, “Why Should We Support the Idea of an Unconditional Basic Income?” Umano, June 2014. Read by Larry Rice.
by Karl Widerquist | Apr 24, 2014 | News
[Scott Santens]
On 1 May 2014 at 1200 Eastern Time (GMT-05:00) people across the world together plan to post to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and TikTok hundreds of messages simultaneously in support of basic income in celebration of May Day and International Workers’ Day. Anyone hoping to post on TikTok in honor of this day may wish to contact a service like TokUpgrade for more guidance on how their message can reach a wider audience.
#Mayday! We need basic income.
This action is being organized by the basic income community on Reddit and will be accomplished via Thunderclap, a “crowdspeaking platform” website where people can donate their social media reach on the above major social media platforms to collectively reach a greater number of people all at once than could usually ever be accomplished individually. If this was being carried out on an individual basis, something like Growthoid would probably be used to reach a wide audience, but this way allows for many people to come together collectively. Everyone strives to accomplish a large following, and social media users are no different. Almost all of them will try anything they can to increase the number of followers they have, and if that means trying an Instagram growth service like Nitreo, (https://nitreo.com) to achieve this, then that is what they must do. This means that everything they post will reach a wider audience, then what they would’ve been able to see happen before. This kind of action is referred to as “simultaneous scale” and functions similarly to Kickstarter, where a minimum number of participants are needed to sign up their accounts in order for any of the accounts to send out the message. It is an all or nothing action where if the goal isn’t reached, no messages will be sent. With enough participants however, successfully reached goals make possible chosen keywords to trend on Twitter, which can lead to even greater reach of potentially millions of people. The current record for greatest reach goes to the Thunderclap for the first ever World Humanitarian Day which amplified its message to over one billion people thanks to the donations of their social media reach by celebrities like Rihanna and Lady Gaga, and businesses like Coca-Cola and MTV.
For more information, go to: https://www.thunderclap.it/projects/10928-mayday-we-need-basic-income or the basic income community at www.reddit.com/r/BasicIncome.
Sources:
“Case Study: World Humanitarian Day,” Thunderclap.
Jeff Bercovici, “Thunderclap, A New Tool For Amplifying Your Tweet Into a Sonic Boom,” Forbes, 31 May 2012.
by Karl Widerquist | Apr 23, 2014 | News
[Scott Santens]
Professor Guy Standing, co-founder of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) and author of several books, including The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (2011) will be doing an AMA on Reddit on 5 May 2014 at 1100 EST.
Guy Standing
AMA stands for “Ask Me Anything” and provides the opportunity for someone to choose to answer any and all questions from the Reddit community, one of the world’s most highly viewed websites with tens of millions of users. The /r/IAmA subreddit is one of Reddit’s top ten most popular communities with over 5.3 million subscribers and a history of hugely popular interviews from the likes of Bill Gates to Arnold Schwarzenegger to President Barack Obama to more recently Peter Dinklage of Game of Thrones with over 76,000 upvotes and almost 14,000 comments. A popular AMA on Reddit has the potential to bring a great deal of awareness to anything an interviewee may wish to promote, making AMAs an increasingly popular avenue for successful online promotion. The Basic Income community on Reddit has over 10,000 members. Standing’s AMA will draw interest from and possibly bring attention to that subreddit.
For more information, go to: www.reddit.com/r/IAmA or the basic income community at www.reddit.com/r/BasicIncome.
by Karl Widerquist | Apr 22, 2014 | News
[Scott Santens]
On April 12th, a new milestone was reached by the basic income community on Reddit, aka /r/BasicIncome, with its surpassing of 10,000 global subscribers. On April 12th of last year, the number of subscribers was twelve.
Reddit is among the top most visited sites worldwide, with traffic last year exceeding 731 million unique visitors and 56 billion page views. Self-titled as “The Front Page of the Internet”, Reddit exists for the aggregation of links and text posts, all of which are voted up or down by its global community of registered users, such that popular posts rise and unpopular posts fall, with the additional ability of everyone to comment on everything. Many of the articles, images, and videos that end up being shared virally on the Internet, are discovered hours, days, or even weeks earlier as a popular post on Reddit. Such posts number in the millions and are categorized into “subreddits” which are the areas of interest any registered user can create on the site about anything.
Reddit
The “BasicIncome” subreddit was created on 14 September 2012 where it did not reach 100 subscribers until the following year on 19 July 2013. Since then, /r/BasicIncome has experienced exponential growth, surpassing 1,000 subscribers on 23 September 2013, followed by 5,000 subscribers last month on 4 March 2014. Now with over 10,000 subscribers, it is currently ranked in the top 2,000 of all subreddits, of which there are over 340,000 total and growing daily.
An example of what has made this rate of growth possible is the news headlines Bill Gates recently made when speaking at the American Enterprise Institute. In emphasizing the coming replacement of jobs by technology within the next twenty years and how he believes people are not prepared for that kind of loss of demand for labor, a great amount of discussion occurred on Reddit in multiple subreddits from a multitude of posted links, of which some made it to the front page where a single link can quickly garner hundreds of thousands of views. The resultant spike in traffic produced 745 new subscribers in a single day, /r/BasicIncome’s current single day record, and over 1,500 new subscribers that week.
Reflecting the convergence of political perspectives around the idea of basic income, /r/BasicIncome has written in their rules and guidelines that they are a “non-partisan subreddit” that does not support “any specific policy, political party or ideology (other than basic income).” As their subscriber numbers continue to grow, the /r/BasicIncome community on Reddit is already discussing means of organizing and achieving actionable goals of furthering the global conversation and attaining worldwide awareness of the idea.
For more information, see: https://www.reddit.com/r/BasicIncome.
“/r/BasicIncome Metrics,” Redditmetrics.com, April 10, 2014.
Erik Martin, “Top Posts of 2013, Stats, and Snoo Year’s Resolutions,” Redditblog.com, December 31, 2013. .
Julie Bort, “Bill Gates: People Don’t Realize How Many Jobs Will Soon Be Replaced By Software Bots,” Business Insider, March 13, 2014.
