Native Spaced Repetition
The medium is the message.
Right now, the internet medium enables short-term viral memes as a message, but not much else.
Think about TikTok. Every day, users spend an hour in the app, scrolling through the FYP. But if you ask me what I watched last week on TikTok, I couldn't tell you. Hot trends have a short half-life:
![](https://www.rhyslindmark.com/content/images/2021/10/image-1.png)
This is because memes are optimized for acquisition and transmission, not retention.
![](https://www.rhyslindmark.com/content/images/2021/10/image-2.png)
It's the same with COVID. As Trevor notes below, selection pressure has driven increased transmissibility. Replicators gonna replicate.
![](https://www.rhyslindmark.com/content/images/2021/10/image-11.png)
How Can We Make Memes Optimized For Retention?
i've genuinely come to the conclusion we need cross-DAO fandom-like wikis in order for DAOs to evolve as memory-gathering institutions
— kei 🗝️ (@keikreutler) October 11, 2021
Still, some of the internet is optimized for retention, or what Kei calls "memory-gathering institutions." Archive.org, Wikipedia, IPFS are all good examples.
Meanwhile, this same retention vs. virality tension is playing out in our brains too. Memes need a home to live in. Catchy songs, for example, live in our phonological loop (our "mind's ear").
![](https://www.rhyslindmark.com/content/images/2021/10/image-3.png)
That's just short-term memory though. What about the bottom part of that image above, long-term memory? This memory comes naturally in many ways, but is supercharged by tactics like spaced repetition.
Unfortunately, most of our memetic content is optimized for virality, not retention. If I tried to use spaced repetition for Charli D'amelio's TikTok dance videos, it wouldn't really work. Â
The internet protocol stack is optimized for transport, not for retention. Transport is even the name of one of the layers!
![](https://www.rhyslindmark.com/content/images/2021/10/image-4.png)
We can copy and send information all around the world for free, but we can't remember anything.
The internet needs a native layer for retention, not just transmission. This is where Orbit comes in.
Orbit is a library that allows writers to insert spaced repetition prompts (i.e. notecards) into a webpage. It looks like this:
![](https://www.rhyslindmark.com/content/images/2021/10/image-5.png)
Right now, almost none of the internet has embedded Orbit prompts. But this layer should be built out, just like Stripe/crypto has retroactively built out the payments layer.
In the future, a Wiki page might be full of embedded Orbit prompts:
![](https://www.rhyslindmark.com/content/images/2021/10/image-6.png)
I'm not exactly sure where this battle between transmission and retention will go. All I know is that I'm happy to support the "retentionification" of the internet.
Today, we're starting with a small experiment. We've added Orbit prompts to Marriage Counseling With Capitalism. We're also experimenting with a #LearnToEarn model by selling NFTs to pay for a proof-of-memory pool for readers who study the notecards.
Thanks to Nick Torba for kicking off this line of work!
![](https://www.rhyslindmark.com/content/images/2021/10/image-8.png)
Check out the updated piece and get to studying! For inspiration, here are the days I've studied Anki in 2021:
![](https://www.rhyslindmark.com/content/images/2021/10/image-7.png)