The Readup Collective

Readup started in 2016, when co-founder Bill Loundy called up his friend Jeff Camera with an idea: wouldn't it be cool if people could only comment on articles after reading them to completion? They built a free social reading platform where the act of reading was a kind of currency: people would link to articles, and the articles that got read most times to completion would be ranked on Readup's homepage.

The community grew to several hundreds of enthusiastic readers who enjoyed the platform's constraints: readers from around the globe posted articles, and the ones that the platform filtered out were diverse and interesting. Because of the completion requirement, the vibe in the comment section was positive, constructive and vulnerable. So much different from the rest of the internet!

For years, Bill, Jeff, and eventually their first employee Thor, tried to turn this cozy little corner of the internet into a sustainable business. In a last effort, they launched a radical direct reader-writer marketplace in 2021, where readers would pay writers per article completion. Unfortunately, the business failed, and the future of Readup's platform was at stake.

Many readers had spent thousands of hours reading and discovering great articles via Readup, and did not want to lose the platform. The founders decided to return to the free roots of Readup, and make it sustainable. This time, Readup's code would open-sourced, and its development would be supported by a non-profit, community-driven collective of builders. Welcome to The Readup Collective!