Big Update From The Echo Chamber Club

Today is a pretty exciting day for The Echo Chamber Club. Which is why this picture is of me having a pint – as that’s what I’ll hopefully be doing later!

I had two main objectives when I set up The Echo Chamber Club in June. The first is to see if manual curation is a better way to try and get out of a social media induced echo-chamber (or filter bubble) compared to developing AI technologies and new algorithms. The second was to ensure that I researched a new topic every week. When you have a newsletter with hundreds of subscribers – you cannot let them down.

To do this I hacked together a Wordpress theme, found a colour scheme I liked and launched a very basic front page. By ‘launched’ I mean I posted the idea on Reddit and on my facebook to see what would happen. And it was incredible. After one week I’d already got 160 subscribers – and 80% of them weren’t people I knew. It was clear that this was a service that people were looking for. It was exciting.

Shortly afterwards I figured out a way to fund the project (and myself) and took myself to Berlin (which is cheaper) so I could work on the newsletter full-time. I wanted to gather together amazing contributors, spend some time marketing the newsletter and more importantly – build a great service.

New Features and WhatsApp Notifications

So today is a big day. Today we have a brand new website – and a brand new way to receive our newsletters.

• We have a ‘contributors’ section here. Get in touch if you’d like to curate a newsletter!! And please see our previous contributors here.
• We can finally accept donations. At the moment everything incl. hosting fees, email management and domain management is entirely self-funded by us. Please help us out! You can donate to The Echo Chamber Club here and you will be first in line for our planned members section with members perks.
• We have a section which is all about you! We want to learn more about our subscribers – so tell us what you think here!
• I’m excited about the previous newsletters page – now you can read our newsletters easily online!

We are also offering a new service. We will send you the newsletter via WhatsApp if you ask us to. I’ve heard from many subscribers that they don’t use email all that often, or the emails end up in their spam, or in their promotions folder.

If you would like to receive the newsletter via WhatsApp then take the following steps:

1. Add +44 7342 330 538 to your mobile address book. This is very important because if our number is not in your phone book then we cannot message you.
2. Send us a WhatsApp with your name and your email address.
   • If you haven’t subscribed via email then we will subscribe you there too – WhatsApp may change their rules about broadcasting, and we don’t want you to lose out on our newsletter if that happens.
3. Wait for a message to say you’ve successfully subscribed. N.B. this may take a few hours as it’s a manual process.
4. You’ll receive a WhatsApp whenever we publish a new newsletter with a link to view it on the new website.

This is an exciting step for us. It’s not something we’ve seen other publishers offer – possibly because it’s quite manual – but it’s something you’ve asked us for so we’re going to roll with it!

As ever – let me know what you think. I’m pretty accessible via email, twitter and now… WhatsApp!