Memos by Brian Swichkow
- The LADWP Bill-Dispute Playbook: How to Cut Your Bill and Claw Back Overcharges
TL;DR The single biggest lever is a formal meter-read/billing-error dispute, because that is the only path that produces retroactive credits. Remote "smart" meters can still fall back to estimated...
- Reddit's ChatGPT Citation Collapse (August 2026)
Reddit's ChatGPT citation collapse is the abrupt August 2026 fall in how often ChatGPT attributed its answers to Reddit — from a stable share of roughly 3.8 percent of all tracked citations to under...
- Why Reddit Dominates as an AI Source
Why Reddit Dominates as an AI Source — Reddit is the most structurally important user-generated content platform for AI, not because of what AI cites but because of what AI ingests. Google pays...
- How Reddit's 'Authenticity Shockwave' Forged Its True Long-Term Value
The Authenticity Shockwave refers to the turning point triggered by Google's September 2025 deprecation of the &num=100 parameter — which stripped Reddit's surface SEO visibility while protecting its...
- The Sentiment-Divergence Test
The sentiment-divergence test is a proposed method for measuring whether AI systems still reproduce community consensus, by querying categories where community opinion and official framing visibly...
- Citation Share as a Proxy Metric
Citation share measures how often a domain appears as an attributed source in AI-generated answers. It is a proxy for influence over those answers, not a measurement of it. The gap between the two is...
- UGC Deprioritization in AI Search
UGC deprioritization is the ongoing reduction in how much User Generated Content major AI systems surface and attribute in their answers, affecting social platforms broadly rather than any single...
- Learning Source vs. Trust Source vs. Culture Source
Learning source, trust source, and culture source name three distinct roles a body of content can play for an Large Language Model (LLM): teaching it how people talk, giving it something to cite, and...
- Dongming Yin
Dongming Yin is an entrepreneur, systems architect, and mathematical modeler working on AI automation and data infrastructure for supply chain and manufacturing. He is the founder of GAIA TECH, which...
- Ari Tuchman
Ari Tuchman is a transactional attorney and the principal and founder of Tuchman Law, APC, a boutique law firm in Los Angeles, CA. The firm, which he launched in February 2026, advises businesses,...
- Claude Design
Claude Design is an Anthropic Labs product, launched April 17, 2026, that turns natural-language prompts into editable visual artifacts — prototypes, slides, one-pagers, mockups, and interactive web...
- My Office Hours
My Office Hours are an open invitation to drop in and chat. They take place virtually in the /citizens Topia world every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from 11 AM to 11:45 AM PST. Are you looking to...
- Function Health
Function Health is a privately held American health-testing company founded in 2021 and headquartered in Austin, Texas. It sells an annual membership bundling a panel of roughly 100 blood and urine...
- Chantle Edillor
Chantle Edillor, PhD is a scientist, geneticist, and microbial ecologist whose work integrates molecular biology, fermentation science, and Systems Thinking. Edillor received her PhD in Human...
- SlutCon
Slutcon is a multi-day sexuality and relationships conference featuring talks, workshops, and community activities. According to its website, it emphasizes “shamelessness” and treats sex as a...
- The Iliad Bookshop
The Iliad Bookshop is an independent used bookstore in North Hollywood, California, which bills itself as one of Southern California's largest and oldest, stocking more than 125,000 books with an...
- Secret Party
Secret Party is an event-management and ticketing platform for independent party producers, combining customizable event pages, tiered privacy controls, guest-list management, and community-building...
- Unddit
Unddit was a web tool for reading Reddit posts and comments removed by moderators or deleted by their authors, and its workflow survives at undelete.pullpush.io, which serves the same purpose today....
- Ranking Opportunities Audit
Ranking Opportunities Audit is a structured agent prompt that uses GSC MCP to surface striking distance queries, CTR ceiling problems, and brand-versus-non-brand opportunity classes for a verified...
- PosiRank
PosiRank is an Annapolis-based white label SEO agency that sells wholesale search, link building, and answer engine optimization services to agencies and resellers who deliver the work under their...