About
A study tool, with a directory attached.
learnthings is somewhere to collect what you are learning and take notes that remember where they came from — a note written during a lecture keeps the second; one written while you read keeps the paragraph. When you have arranged a subject into an order that works, you can publish that order for other people to take.
What we will not do
No affiliate links. Ever.
Not on a path we wrote, and not on one somebody published. Every URL is checked before it goes into the directory, and affiliate tags, affiliate redirectors and link shorteners are all refused by name. This is the whole difference between a directory and a funnel.
We link out. We never mirror.
A path is a map, not a library. Videos and articles stay where their authors put them, and every link opens the original. Reader mode extracts an article for the one person who saved it, on their own device — it is never a public copy.
Private until you say otherwise.
Your topics and notes are yours. Nothing leaves your account unless you press Share or Publish, and both say exactly what travels before they do it. Images, PDFs and frames attached to notes never travel at all.
Yours to take, and to delete.
Export your notes as Markdown whenever you like. Anybody who took a copy of a path you shared keeps their copy — that one is theirs — but nothing of yours stays behind.
Dead links
A directory with one dead link in it is a directory nobody trusts again. Every URL in a published path is checked weekly. Two failures in a row and it is flagged for a person to look at — nothing is deleted automatically, because a link that is briefly unreachable is not the same as one that is gone. If you find a broken path, the report control at the bottom of it goes straight to us.
Publishing a path
Open a topic, switch to Path, and press Publish. Resources only by default — publishing a reading list and publishing your own study notes are not the same act, so the notes are a separate, explicit choice. You can take a path down at any time.