Here’s the complete roundup for 2016. I’ve changed the format this year and have grouped the roundup by author and medium, to help you discover some of our new contributors and experimental content more easily. We had 8 new contributors, 3 returning contributors, and 2 regulars (Sarah and me) all together contributing 57 posts, of which 42 were longform, and 15 were other media: audio (1), video (4), cartoons (6) and slide decks (4). It was a satisfying growth year, topping half a million visitors for the first time, and growing by between 25-33% depending on which metric you like.
Other highlights this year: a new high-watermark viral hit post that beat the Gervais Principle in single-day traffic, Artem vs. Predator, the first ever ribbonfarm longform blogging course (you’ll see the output in the next 2 months), and the first year when I was not the biggest longform contributor on the site (Sarah Perry had 12 posts, I had 11, not counting my experimental non-longform posts). I did, however, set a new ribbonfarm record for length: King Ruinous and the City of Darkness weighed in at over 14,000 words, nearly twice the previous record of around 8000.
The ribbonfarm map also evolved this year, and acquired a video tour, in Trace of the Weirding. If you’re new to ribbonfarm, this video and map might be helpful as a general overview of what we’re about.
New readers (here is the new readers start page) this year might also want to check out the 2015 roundup, 2014 roundup and 2013 roundup. If you want to do some binge reading further back into the archives, there is a page for the Rust Age (2007-12) with both curated selections and complete roundups for 2007-12.
Anyhow, click on with the roundup.
- New Ribbonfarm Contributors for 2016
- The Strategy of (Subversive) Conflict
- The Cyberpunk Sensibility
- Robert Martinson and the Tragedy of the American Prison
- Startups, Secrets, and Abductive Reasoning
- Paradox and the Origins of Civilisation
- Crowds and Technology
- Welcome to Nixonland
- A Good Name Points to You
- A Framework of Experimental Habit Formation
- Meta-Skills, Macro-Laws, and the Power of Constraints
- The Holy Grail of Self-Improvement
- Productivity for Precious Snowflakes
- Returning Contributors
- Sarah Perry
- A Pseudoethnography of Egregores
- The Origin of Authenticity in the Breakdown of the Illusion of the Real
- The Art of the Conspiracy Theory
- A Bad Carver
- The Systems of the World
- The Theory of Narrative Selection
- Inequalities
- Free Money
- On Some Possibilities for Life as a Joke
- Business as Magic
- Dares, Costly Signals, and Psychopaths
- The Quality Without a Name at the Betsy Ross Museum
- Venkatesh Rao
- The Epic Struggle between Good and Neutral
- King Ruinous and the City of Darkness
- Speak Weirdness to Truth
- Examining the Accidental Life
- How to Take Your Brain Off-Road
- The Principia Misanthropica
- Immortality Begins at Forty
- Human-Complete Problems
- Fat Thinking and Economies of Variety
- The Liminal Explorer of the Adjacent Possible (fiction)
- When Tools Shape You
- Berliners Comic Strip (abandoned)
- Slide Decks
- Video and Audio
- Radical Candor (video)
- Can the European Union Break Smart? (video)
- Mapping Organizational Realities (video)
- Trace of the Weirding (video)
- Podcasts with Longform and Farnam Street (audio)
An excellent showing by all!
2016 was the year I discovered RibbonFarm. Yet another indicator that 2016 was not all that bad. Keep up the great work everyone!
In a world obsessed with 140 characters and TLDRs, your long-form is a tonic for the malnourished.