The Great Discontent: Maria Popova: “My philosophy and the one thing I’ve been strategic and deliberate about from the beginning is reader first—I don’t want anything to tell people how to engage with what they want to engage with. I don’t believe in slideshows, pagination, truncated RSS feeds, paywalls, and all these things that basically punish your most loyal readers. I’m just one person; I can’t optimize everything to be perfect, but I’ve tried to make things as seamless and easy and digestible as possible. At the end of the day, Brain Pickings is about the ideas and content and not at all about the bells and whistles surrounding it.”