Building lucid.report taught me that information alone doesn't create understanding

Hey Product Hunt, I’m Dan.

I’m a product designer and engineer from Noosa, Australia, and over the years my work has sat across technology, media, and design. More recently, I’ve been building Lucid, a transparency-oriented news platform designed to help people compare coverage, identify bias patterns, and make better-informed decisions.

What the work has taught me is that the problem is rarely a lack of information.

Most people are not starved of content. They are navigating what I once described as “carefully shaped slices of reality” where headlines, ranking systems, editorial incentives, repetition, and platform mechanics all influence what reaches us before we’ve had a chance to make sense of it ourselves. That idea became the basis for The Architecture of Attention.

Building Lucid changed the way I think about product design more broadly.

A few lessons have travelled well beyond media:

First, more information does not automatically create more understanding. People usually need better context, better comparison, and better structure.

Second, trust is not built by making stronger claims. It is built by making systems legible. Showing source material, revealing patterns, and helping people inspect the reasoning matters more than sounding certain.

Third, the most meaningful products do not simply optimise for speed or engagement. They help people orient themselves. They reduce distortion. They make judgment easier, not noisier.

That is increasingly how I think about what I build.

Lucid happens to sit in the news space, but the underlying challenge feels much broader: how do we design tools that help people think more clearly without over-determining what they should think? If you’re curious, the project’s About page explains the mission, and I also published a technical whitepaper for people interested in the system design and philosophy behind it.

I’d love to hear from others building in areas where trust, interpretation, and signal quality matter. Any and all feedback welcome in across the board, too. Thanks people!

(that's me in the middle, Cusco, Peru February 2026)