In my first post on TruthBear, I talked about what TruthBear is for and how it works. Today I want to get into what it is going to help you with and what it's like to actually use it.

The reason TruthBear exists is to help you understand what's going on in the world.

To do that, TruthBear has a process with three distinct steps. First you decide what matters. Then you gather information on the things that matter to you. Finally you form beliefs based on the information you've gathered. The TruthBear web app is divided up into three sections, allowing you to focus on each step individually. These steps happen in every information source, of course, whether you are involved or not. The difference is that with TruthBear, you think about what you want to see, rather than letting an editor or opaque algorithm decide for you.

Let's look first at deciding what matters. It is very important that this is a separate first step. Your attention is a precious resource and there are too many things going on in the world to keep track of. Most sites show you a smorgasbord of attention-grabbing stories and then measure what you click on most, so they can show you more of that. As a result, it's easy to get distracted - you go in without locking in what's important to you, and find yourself pulled into whatever is most sensational. For me, I usually find myself looking at a lot more cat videos than I'd intended to.

TruthBear adopts a different approach that respects your attention. In the "What Matters" section of TruthBear, you are shown pairs or groups of topics, and asked to select which matters to you more. There are no wrong answers. It's just a quick and low stakes way to determine ahead of time what topics and categories you want to stay up-to-date on. Spending a few minutes a day doing this lets TruthBear keep up-to-date with what you want to see as new events unfold. Of course, as an open platform, all the information about your interests is available to you, and it can be fun to see dashboards that lay this information out, or see how you compare to the community.

Next up is the section where you gather information, which is called "What we know". I want to be clear that the "we" here refers to you and the community, not TruthBear-the-company. In this section, TruthBear organizes links by topic, and you can see this in different ways. If you just want a daily briefing, TruthBear can show you the highest rated links on the topics you care most about. If you want to dig in on a particular topic, then you can see every link, ordered however you want. This section runs on community-contributed links, so if you see an article or post on a topic you care about (or if you write one) then you can submit it here for the community to see.

Finally, in the "What to believe" section, you can see a range of belief statements associated with a topic, and how strong the community's belief or disbelief in them is, on a credibility-weighted basis. By default, we won't show you what other people think until you have registered your own view, to avoid unintentionally biasing you. But you can choose to peek without voting if you just want to understand what the most credible people in your community think.

"What we know" and "What to believe" also let you step outside yourself. The default views use credibility weights personalized to you - people who believe the same as you are more credible to you, and people who believe the opposite are less credible. But you can also look at beliefs using other people's credibility weights, or a blend of them. This lets you step outside your echo chamber, in a comfortable way. No one has a monopoly on the truth, so it can be helpful if you can see what people with different views to you are looking at, and how that supports what they believe, even if it's not what you believe.

You can actually run TruthBear's three step process without TruthBear. For several years, I kept a post-it note at the bottom of my monitor with a list of topics so that I wouldn't veer off course as I visited news websites. What TruthBear gives you is a useful tool to support that habit, and a community to do it with.

Three deliberate steps may seem convoluted when compared to just turning up and clicking, but there is a reason for it. Before information can be consumed, it must be selected - if you aren't doing it, then someone else is doing it on your behalf, and their interests may not be aligned with yours. Your time and attention are limited. The additional structure pays dividends by helping you decide up-front what is important to you, and more importantly what isn't. Keeping this focus means it only takes a small amount of time and effort to have a great understanding of all the things going on in the world that matter to you. And the ability to see the world through other people's eyes will help you gain perspective and - I hope - act to bring us together.