The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 14 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Hardiman: Facebook feed algorithms optimized for engagement, not content quality
“When I was at Facebook and we were focused on news ranking and feed, all we could do was train pieces of information based on an engagement outcome. We couldn't actually train it based on the quality of that piece of information itself.”
Hardiman: NYT's global addressable market is roughly 135 million subscribers
“And what we found was that there are about a hundred and thirty-five million people around the world. We believe are willing to pay for the type of high quality journalism based products that the New York times produces. In the categories of news, gameplay, co…”
Hardiman: NYT will reach 15 million subscribers by 2027
“We want to get to fifteen million subscribers by 20, 27, right? Just over nine million today. And I really think we can do it.”
Hardiman: Scheduled Wordle answer after Roe v. Wade leak was 'fetus'
“We had this pretty crazy moment a couple months ago right when the Supreme Court's draft ruling on Roe v Wade leaked. And an engineer on the games team happened to notice that the wordle solution the next day was fetus, which is just an extraordinarily bad coi…”
Hardiman: Consultants projected NYT would cap at 1M digital subscribers
“And we brought in consultants and they said, you know, maybe over the course of history, you'll get to one million subscribers if you're lucky.”
Hardiman: Facebook historically divided feeds into friends and public content
“And the approach to content on Facebook historically was very binary. You basically had content from friends and family, and then you had public content, and public content could come from anywhere.”
Hardiman: NYT built a public COVID-19 database because nobody else was
“We're going to build a comprehensive public data set of COVID cases. Nobody else is doing it. So we really just started kind of scraping and pulling this together in what was a single spreadsheet at the time.”
Hardiman: The New York Times newsroom exceeds 2,000 employees
“We have a newsroom of over 2000 people.”
Hardiman: Most interactive NYT stories use shared internal platforms
“The majority are on our platforms hands down.”
Hardiman: NYT product teams have no influence over editorial story selection
“Product teams don't have any influence over the selection of the stories. That is what the newsroom kind of retains as editorial.”
Hardiman: NYT acquired Wordle in a matter of weeks
“I mean, the whole thing took place in a matter of weeks, which is way faster than any other acquisition I've been a part of. It was a very amicable process, and we were just super delighted to bring Wordle on board, but it happened in like record speed.”
Hardiman: Wordle had no backend and stored user stats locally
“So when we acquired Wordle, it was a simple web game with no backend. So that meant that people's stats and streaks, which was, you know, like that was the value in terms of like social currency that people were sharing after playing those stats and streaks we…”