9 Years of Work—and the Algorithm Still Doesn’t Know I Exist

R3ciprocity.com - Prof David Maslach: Innovation; Research Life; Striving Towards Happiness · Jul 20, 2025 · 5m

I’ve spent the last nine years building something that matters—at least, it matters to me.

It’s called the Reciprocity Project. It’s a platform I started to help researchers and writers get better feedback, improve their work, and deal with the quiet, brutal struggle of doing hard things in isolation.

I’ve posted nearly every day. I’ve shared thousands of thoughts, built tools, recorded videos, written blog posts, tried to show up in all the ways we’re told matter. And still—nearly a decade in—I get people asking:

“Wait, what is that again?”

And every time I hear that, it hurts. Like… really…