Moving to a single anchor system

So we’ve made a rather large architectural change to Briefly that may not be immediately apparent to folks cruising through the application. Until recently, posts had a one to many relationship. You could add multiple anchors to a single post. If you added an article that had significance to Privacy Professionals, Information Security, and EU Data Protection, you could add the url once and then simply add the other anchors to the same post. This means that highlights and comments on the post would be viewable by default across these three anchors.

Now, anchors and posts have a one to one relationship. You can add a url to additional anchors, but this will create separate posts. Highlights and comments will not be viewable by default across these posts.

Why did we do this?

Anchors in Briefly are our center of topical community. They organize content into relevant feeds for people with common interests, but more importantly, they help people with common interests find and curate for each other. Now that we’re starting to see commentary and highlights across posts, we want to make sure that the anchor context of your contributions are totally clear, and don’t spread without your knowledge to additional anchor communities. When you add value to a post, you are adding value for yourself, and for a specific anchor community.

While this change makes it a bit more cumbersome to add a url across multiple anchors, we’re confident that elevating the importance of individual anchors will help develop the individual feel of each anchor. We were also beginning to see some spamming of individual urls across many more anchors than were likely appropriate. A bit of friction will hopefully alleviate this issue as well.

We know have more than 300 anchors in Briefly, including many very specific common interest communities, and we want to make sure that anchors feel personal and socially relevant to people.

Are there additional anchors that you think we’re missing? Let us know!