Purely algorithmic feeds work for TikTok because people want to shut their brains off when they use the app. It's like a drink after work. Copy-pasting that logic to longform text misses the differences in the mediums, and how people interact with them.
When I'm reading, I'm trying to be thoughtful, not titillated. And part of being thoughtful is consciously choosing what to read.
One might say that sites like reddit and hacker news are just archaic versions of the same recommendation engine, but the friction is actually an important feature, and keeps the experience from devolving into lowest common denominator clickbait.
There's social modeling suggesting that simple ideas (anger etc) dominate in overly-connected networks. That's why the friction you mention is important. This has bothered me for a long time, so I made the opposite of Artifact a while back: https://www.recents.cc
You follow a few people, and you get whatever links they post, no algo or frontpage. You repost good stuff, so a link can travel several hops to someone, but it must have been filtered through a friend. Kinda like real life. In the time that I've used it with my friends, I've seen a nice balance of mainstream and niche stuff in my feed.
I think it is more about an exploration-exploitation problem. I think you're focusing on the exploitation aspect too much. Algorithms like TikTok's do well with respect to exploration because there is a low cost for a bad recommendation. The quick content allows the algorithm to update quickly to the users current mood. This isn't going to be true for articles, where you are going to have spend more time and energy on the content being provided. This means that you have to more quickly model a person's mood/energy levels when they are using the app (you can determine this faster with quick content because you are iterating faster). Exploration is an important part of the overall reinforcement strategy because as humans our cost function is constantly changing, we do crave novelty (just in different levels). If you don't have the exploration side, and only have exploitation, then you just end up in a bubble (a bit can be good, but life needs spice). Worse, you'll end up bored.
I tried Tumblr, and it felt like a way better version of Twitter. Had me follow some trending accounts for a few topics. Then I get three feeds, default being those I follow, others being the algo or my tags. I can like, share, or repost stuff. The UI is clean, it doesn't lag my laptop, and signup took me about 1/3 the time vs signing up for Twitter.
So the social difference from Twitter is they kept the chrono following-only feed? It's nice but not what I envisioned for Recents. I wanted to avoid any kind of global "trending" aspect and focus all interaction on reposts. I'm probably reinventing a wheel somewhere, but not one that I've seen.
Can't wait for ActivityPub support so I can control the UX better with a different client.
Come to think of it, this what User Agents were supposed to be, but we just added a few more layers on top (for that sweet sweet ad revenue juice), and now are stripping some of it with the likes of Mastodon.
Tumblr was very close to the perfect social media network. It's a shame it succumbed to corporate greed after the Yahoo acquisition. I really hope someone manages to recreate it as a decentralized protocol
It's no longer owned by Yahoo! but by Automattic (WordPress) now. As for decentralized, they've posted recently about their intent to support ActivityPub.
The problem is not about the broadcast capabilities, they already support RSS.
The problem is about their content censoring. I don't reckon Automattic reversed the "sexually explicit" purge initiated by Yahoo. I'm not interested in a social network that censors ~30% [1] of the global art production. For now Twitter is the better place for relatively free content sharing.
[1]: Number pulled out of my hat, but the human nude being the most popular drawing subject ever, I wouldn't be surprised if this is close to reality.
You might enjoy "Rage Inside the Machine" by Robert Eliott Smith which describes how systems like social networks can be manipulated by introducing a small group of highly motivated, but strategically placed actors (human or algorithmic).
And now, unsolicited UX feedback, Hacker News style™!
1. put the content of "?" in the front page for users who are not logged in, instead of "you're not following anyone"
2. split the 3 key points you mention there into three columns with titles, so the user (no need to do anything more complex, just throw in a flexbox in CSS)
I like the idea of the site, but 1. would make its purpose a bit more obvious/save you some time explaining the idea, and 2. would make the now obvious easier to digest by a new user/scan visually
Thanks for the tips. As you can maybe tell, I'm pretty new to UI dev. A lot of those divs are using fixed pixel sizes calculated by hand in React because I lost my patience with CSS, but yeah I'll put the (?) page into a flexbox.
> social networks can be manipulated by introducing a small group of highly motivated, but strategically placed actors
I should read the book and see if there's anything I didn't think of, cause one of my top concerns was making something hard to exploit.
Someone should one day write a desktop RSS aggregator that finally makes use of <rating> element. (with a website producing the feeds)
It's a bit of a pain figuring out PICS rating and rating services but I think it is a fantastic idea (that found only stupid implementation in parental supervision and porn filtering)
It seems to close to what you describe to not mention it.
This is a great idea. I totally agree. It's the same design we've chosen for the social network in Peergos. Two main differences are we enforce no server-side algorithmic curation by being e2e encrypted, and posts can be anything, text, images, videos, links. If you're interested you can read more here:
Impressive! Yeah, I think this is the natural evolution. Chat apps were the hot thing after social networks, and things are appearing in the middle. Though you're going for ambitious security.
Thanks! The security is partially a defense against future owners/operators of your server. But I'm totally sold on the idea of only seeing things shared by people you follow.
This is basically how I use twitter. I follow a few friends and some stuff I like. I retweet stuff that I like and that I think they might potentially like. They do the same. Add to that some microblogging, and conversations that emerge from that, and you have a great social media. At least for me and them.
Heh, maybe I should've posted the link to follow my own account (hotgril2) on there, but I didn't want to seem too advertise-y. This also makes me follow you back. I post a mix of tech, history, world politics, and music.
I agree with you. While I love RSS and use it frequently, there are two things that I find that could be improved:
1. RSS doesn't help me find new interesting blogs and writers. One of TikTok's few virtues as a platform is giving algorithmic reach to creators who have no social reach.
2. My RSS collections have always been one of either I'm following a highly curated list that leaves me hungering for more content or I'm following a firehose that makes me miss the content I prefer.
I stumbled across a website that does something like what the article describes, but for just tweets[0]. It's surprisingly compelling and gives me the feel of using StumbleUpon. I am eager to see more things like it.
To help with discovery of new RSS feeds I use this mechanism for https://linklonk.com - when you upvote or submit a link, you connect (subscribe) to all users that upvoted and to all RSS feeds that posted that link.
As you rate content you get connected to more and more sources.
The way it solves the oversubscription problem is - whenever a user/feed posts something - your connection to them goes down slightly. As a result you see content from sources with the highest signal-to-noise ratio first.
The differences from Artifact is:
- Artifact uses implicit signals such as read time; LinkLonk uses your explicit upvotes. I think implicit signals are fine for entertainment content, but not for informational content. Time spent is not equal to becoming better informed. I think only you can be a judge of that.
- Artifact uses an opaque AI algorithm optimized to do what they want; LinkLonk uses a transparent algorithm, where each recommendation comes from a feed or a user that you have co-liked items in common.
> My RSS collections have always been one of either I'm following a highly curated list that leaves me hungering for more content or I'm following a firehose that makes me miss the content I prefer.
Filtering helps but "i just like some type of content from that person" seems to be forever problem on every site. Like on youtube, you watched whole three videos of a guy cooking ? I will bomb your feed with random crap from his channel for next month or two!
I don’t think TikTok innovated by merely having an algorithmic feed. Facebook, twitter, YouTube have algorithmic feeds. I think they innovated in giving users what they actually want in the algorithmic feed. My understanding is that TikTok is much better at acting on information from users (ie what they seem to like/dislike).
I don’t know how much of figuring out what users want transfers from many short videos to text. For instance, dwell time seems an obvious metric but I find I ‘dwell’ longest on either things I find enjoyable or on things I find terribly boring. I hope it does transfer well – exposing people to more of the kind of writing they want seems generally good to me.
>I think they innovated in giving users what they actually want in the algorithmic feed.
People underestimate this. TikTok's algorithm makes the app enjoyable to use while most other algorithmic feeds make their respective service less enjoyable. I imagine that is because TikTok factors in other criteria beyond active engagement. At this point we all know it is easier to trigger active engagement through negative emotions. By simply prioritizing any engagement, algorithms like the ones used at Twitter and Facebook end up prioritizing content that delivers us those negative emotions in order to get us to engage. TikTok's algorithm also factors in passive engagement like the dwell time you mentioned. That ends up creating a more positive user experience because it actually learns what we like instead of just what makes us reply angrily.
I wonder if part of this is that TikTok is less focused on engaging with others and more focused on receiving content from others (I don't use TikTok...). When on platform communication happens it can be more personal as it is done through videos rather than text, where it doesn't seem like there's a person on the other side.
I think some of it is just that lots of algorithmic feeds take things like view count as too strong a signal and just promote generic content that has mass appeal rather than more niche content.
Algorithmic feeds have totally destroyed Facebook for me. And are now doing the same for Instagram (suggested posts). These are really the only social media I use. Facebook was pretty good when it just showed my friends on a timeline. When they switched to a feed it became a disaster and I had to leave it.
I don't like user-generated video content so I rarely use YouTube and I've never touched TikTok. But I don't think algorithms really help. I really prefer the user selection here on hacker news.
I miss stumbleupon dearly. I suppose that was sort of the experience Tiktok gives people now; I had no control over what the next site would be, I just clicked a button and got something. My "feed" was largely dominated by nerdy webcomics and I loved it. Eventually, I found the quality was degrading and I switched to reddit in about 2010 or maybe 2011, though it was a while before I actually made an account there.
And TikTok. It really depends what Tok you end up on, but there's plenty of corners of TikTok that are exactly the same mechanics as Twitter: quick bursts of infuriation that activate you and leave you wanting more. I think it's easier for a video-based content network like this (these are not social networks) to have content where you turn off your brain, like TV, than it would be with text. But they both can and are incentivized to do the same thing: titillate.
> there's plenty of corners of TikTok that are exactly the same mechanics as Twitter: quick bursts of infuriation that activate you and leave you wanting more
If you start following tags or certain people you'll visit the dusty corners, but the FYP is remarkably good at filtering out incendiary stuff, at least in my experience. I get basically all good vibes, nothing like Twitter/Reddit, and I'm never angry or high strung after watching TikTok.
I'd argue that text has an advantage over video: speed of skipping past content you don't want. People don't talk anywhere near as fast as they skim headlines
You're right about turning off your brain. But not everyone wants that thing turned off
I'm not sure that's accurate. I used to be a huge advocate of text, but don't forget the whole "a picture is worth a thousand words" thing.
If I see a random blog with text, I have no idea of anything regarding it without first reading (or skimming) it. But within one second of watching a YouTube video, for example, I can know a lot about the video - how professional it is, the "genre" it's in (e.g. BookTube vs Fitness), etc.
Plus, jumping around a video of an explanation on how to do something with the computer is actually fairly easy. It's easy to jump past the "here's how to install the app" part and straight to the "here's someone with a code editor open editing the thing I care about".
Twitter only works because of the character limit. And even then the “for you” page is pretty bad and widely disliked, at least as a stated preference.
That's the idea, of course. But the definition of 'article' is pretty vague, which opens the door for all kinds of garbage content. If you shut your brain off and just let the algorithm feed you, you're going to end up swimming in mindless drivel. Maybe this will be better, but I think of lot of people are just going to find themselves in propaganda echo chambers.
It would be better were that true. But sadly, there's are hair-think veins of incredibly useful discussion happening there as well. I have tried in the past to construct in Twitter a timeline that showed me just the very informative or thoughtful comments but it always ends the same way - my worst interests gratified, my better ones unsated.
i think you're just describing addiction. there's always some elusive "value" that you're chasing.
i don't know about twitter, i've never used it, but i find it hard to believe there's anything "incredibly useful" on there. interesting, i could see, but useful?
I've had pretty good success with Twitter. I am careful to limit my followers to avoid cluttering up my feed with stuff I don't want to see.
I mostly follow the math teacher/early education crowd and regularly get inspired with fun math games and other activities to do with my kids. Plus I've gotten a lot of neat books from the library after seeing someone mention them on Twitter.
So for me it's been a good signal-to-noise ratio, unlike e.g. Reddit where I can definitely relate to that elusive value-chasing you describe. Even on HN, the amount of relevant stuff I learn is low compared to the sheer amount of time I've spent here over the years.
> The app opens to a feed of popular articles chosen from a curated list of publishers ranging from leading news organizations like The New York Times to small-scale blogs about niche topics.
Not Twitter but many of these articles already have headlines catered to a certain method of consumption (aggregation done by Reddit, HN, etc.). I didn't need to read this article to know that Instagram's co-founders are making TikTok for text!
I get that the slot-machine nature of the algorithmic feed is what makes TikTok work, both from a user perspective and commercially. It's nice to shut off your brain and just consume during downtime. But lately I've been thinking that I want the opposite (no, not TikTok for text): Something where I know exactly what is coming next. There is a ton of engaging and useful content on YouTube for example, and I think making it more accessible would be a superpower.
Remember how in the olden days there used to be manually curated web directories? They didn't scale so they were replaced by search engines. But imagine a huge, meticulously curated directory of all video content (maybe sans memes). It would use machine learning to tackle the scale, which was not possible before.
You could be watching a video of a recipe, and then go to variations of the same recipie by different cooks. Or the cook is using a technique like deglasing, and you could go to other videos describing it in detail. You'll be able to drill down to niche content. For example "Woodworking > Furniture Building > Jointery > Ornamental Joints > Butterfly Inlays". Contrast with YouTube where the interesting videos are juxtaposed with clickbaity "I bought this silly tool from Aliexpress, look what happened next" and you are tempted to go off rail all the time.
I mean it is a question of optimizing for clicks and commercial success, versus for usefulness and sanity. The former is heavily incentivized in our economical system, but I really hope that we'll be able to build products that fit in the latter category. Even if they remain in a niche.
I do something similar with youtube. I choose a video from a content creator I like. For example vox or kurzgesagt. Then from the first video I choose I make a playlist with usefull youtube recommendations or search result to similar themes.
What I want to say is to make a curated playlist is something that is made realy fast for oneself.
Spotify had once this killer feature that you could start a radio based on playlists. So i mixed some crazy playlists and the radio did get some interesting results. Something similar for video would be nice
Edit: there is something called couriosity stream. Its a website from some youtube creators. I gave it a try and it was nice. But many content missing
Exactly. The comparison also ignores the distinction that TikTok is user-generated, whereas this sounds like it's leveraging publishers. This is an insanely crowded space with a landscape littered with competitors: Apple News, Flipboard, Post.News, SmartNews, and so on.
Exactly. When the article mentioned that it curates content from popular sites like the NYT my eyes rolled to the back of my head. The last thing I would ever want is to read yet another article from the NYT. They (and hundreds of other similar sites) don’t need boosting, curation, or even more distribution.
>Purely algorithmic feeds work for TikTok because people want to shut their brains off when they use the app. It's like a drink after work. Copy-pasting that logic to longform text misses the differences in the mediums, and how people interact with them.
Twitter seems to get users just fine (before the musking at least).
Hell, people come to "brainless fun" subreddits just fine too
To be fair, there isn't just one type of reading - casual, inspectional, analytical, synoptical and etc. I also read in multiple channels and each has its own merit.
There is a wide spectrum of intents, and you read (text) / watch (videos) with an intent. Some people go on YouTube to binge watch but some people go on it to learn. It all depends on your intent.
I would say that this can help with discovery of content that you're interested in. Similar to hacker news, just an alternative approach.
I'm interested to try it and have joined the wait-list. I'm looking forward to how it differentiates itself from other article curation apps (Feedly, Google news, etc.).
I am skeptical of this line of thinking, even for something like Hacker News. It is the same thing that people say about TikTok, and pretty much every other preceding social network/content distribution app. "Discovery of content" implies to me that there is some kind of search. It implies an amount of self-directed, self-motivated activity. I would think that a PhD researcher or a programmer on stack-overflow or a person in a library is "discovering content"
However, on these algorithmically informed apps, the thing doing the discovering is the app, not you. It is discovering the bare-minimum amount of interest that it can provide such that you don't leave. If the app showed you only things that you are the most interested in right away, that would mean that each new piece of content was less interesting than the previous. You would open it up, spend 5 minutes, and then leave. Instead, it learns how to intermittently reward you with interesting content and figures out how much filler you will put up with without exiting.
At least on hacker news and other forum-based sites, you have the ability to only click on links that you want. I regularly open the site see there is nothing for me and leave within 20 seconds. Facebook is more controlling as you can only see a few posts at a glance. TikTok is completely controlling as there is no realistic 'browse' experience. You can see someone's profile, but since the content is video you can't really preview anything or know what it is going to be like without diving into the one-after-another-no-breaks feed.
The over-all point here is just to remember how passive a process using any of these applications are, and to remain clear-headed about it.
> "Discovery of content" implies to me that there is some kind of search. It implies an amount of self-directed, self-motivated activity. I would think that a PhD researcher or a programmer on stack-overflow or a person in a library is "discovering content"
This confused me until I realized that you're using "discovery" like a lawyer would:
discovery (noun)
1. The act or an instance of discovering.
2. Something discovered.
3. The compulsory disclosure to the opposing party of factual information or documents relevant to a lawsuit prior to trial.
I don't know, curation is hard. I think that 90% of what I read is average at best.
Newspapers quality has been going downhill really fast with the shift to digital first, the pressure to generate clicks and the ongoing move to video content. My few journalist friends lament that they can't do their job properly anymore. Long form is probably the last remnant of genuine quality in the field.
Aggregation platforms tend to work quite poorly. If I'm honest I mostly come to Hacker News to mindlessly waste time and because watching a virtual tally rises feels good to me. Encountering interesting and unexpected links happen but are rarely and I have a hard time remembering the last time I had a trully insightful conversation. Meanwhile, Reddit target demographic skews quite young and the time of life where I enjoyed having long winded discussions with students convinced they are experts is far behind me now.
I think there is a place for a well curated feed. They will live or die by how good it is however and the applications that came before like FlipBoard don't inspire confidence in the viability of the idea.
One might say that sites like reddit and hacker news are just archaic versions of the same recommendation engine, but the friction is actually an important feature, and keeps the experience from devolving into lowest common denominator clickbait.
I'm not certain about this seems like it would depend on the algorithm in question. In any case not certain I understand exactly what the friction you're referring to is, and how it helps devolution.
A form of this that leverages the social graph would be great. Reddit is a little too democratic, any bot can vote.
I'd like a system where the comments are weighted such that I'm more likely to see comments from users I upvote/find insightful. Extra points if the users overall views differ from my own.
Reddit is also ignoring the time that users spend on the content/article itself which is a very important signal.
Idk, I’ve seen some peoples fyp that are primarily text with maybe some background music. So I could see this artifact thing working for those people, and maybe catching on enough to work for others as well
I think “we” might be able to turn off our brains when we consume shit tier media.
For most people, in my most humble opinion, that is the base case and they are now addicted to these apps.
Turning the brain on is hard enough. I know it is for me since I’m not a smart guy. It took a lot of work to get better/disciplined and I know many people like my peers from the past just don’t think this way.
It’s sad really. These tech companies mushed the brains of so many people. This is probably our generations’ opium crisis. Ironic that it was done in reverse to the west.
> Purely algorithmic feeds work for TikTok because people want to shut their brains off when they use the app.
Yes, if I'm half-freezing and my train is like 15min late something like that might actually come in quite handy... but that's about where its usefulness ends for me.
>but the friction is actually an important feature, and keeps the experience from devolving into lowest common denominator clickbait.
This is a great insight, I think you are 100% spot-on here.
There are needs where a focused recommendation algorithm like TikTok can still be helpful. And that is to go through a daily flow of financial news which might or might not affect your portfolio and/or might provide additional opportunities. Yes. it is possible to read all of this through an RSS feed or Bloomberg, or Twitter, or Reddit. But none of the have useful recommendation algorithms that can surface personalized information.
> When I'm reading, I'm trying to be thoughtful, not titillated.
This might not be universal. I read for fun, I guess titillated is fun too. There are certain niche topics on which I don't think I can find tiktok videos. But I still want to know about them and many times there are articles, blogs etc available. Not all reading needs to be about the gung ho race to better yourself. Reading can be trashy too, and I love it.
> Purely algorithmic feeds work for TikTok because people want to shut their brains off when they use the app.
I and many like me are actively engaging our brains while we use TikTok. We are intentional about training the algorithm through all the various signals and use it to bring us the content we want to discover. Personally, I would never use it with my brain shut off.
It could work really well for short-form text. I'm addicted to reading comments. I even read your comment before reading the article. A feed with short articles curated to my interests and attention span would absolutely get me hooked.
How many times has a friend sent you a wall-of-txt, and even though this is your good friend, you still say "aint nobody got time for that" and you dont read it.
This is a stupid, knee-jerk attempt. Lets hope Im proven wrong as an old curmudgeon...
- who may well just sell out to Facebook again after a couple of years[1]
[1] No shade - if Facebook offered me $billions for my user generated content site, I'd be at the bank quicker than you could imagine but I wouldn't expect anyone to trust me with user content again.
Brian Acton who sold Facebook his WhatsApp would like a word.
Ask him why he walked away from his final billion (with a b) dollar payment.
In a long piece by Forbes, Mr Acton refers to himself as “a sellout” despite taking what Forbes journalist Parmy Olson described as “perhaps the most expensive moral stand in history”.
After he became fed up by Facebook’s desire to find a way to squeeze personal ads into WhatsApp, he walked away from the company a year before his final tranche of stock grants vested — a common payment method to reward workers with the ability to cash in shares if they stick around.
But he knew what he was doing. The day he left he took a screenshot of the stock price on his way out the door. The decision to leave cost him about $1.17 billion.
I agree that we should try to be more positive. But for every useful startup there are dozens of quibis, juiceros and many others you mostly don't hear about, but would recognize as dead-ends if you paid attention.
So where do you draw the line? When something looks like BS vs. simply unusual/innovative. PG said that most good startup ideas are counterintuitive otherwise they would have been done a long time ago. But there are also a lot of counterintuitive ideas not worth doing.
I'm in finally. This shit is nonsense. It's just the "for you" tab of really awful systems incorrectly guessing and pushing spam on your in a Google news like interface.
Yeah, but it also makes sense to be a cynic, to be honest. We are overloaded with possibilities; there are many more ”amazing, next big thing” apps out there than we could possibly fit in a thousand lives. Plus, in a competition market, the real good things thrive through the criticism. Finally, why would you give a billionaire an easy time? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a socialist, it’s just that there’s really no reason to do it.
I can understand not wanting to interact with a certain company, but I don't get the phone number thing. There used to be books that listed everyone's phone number.
It removes the ability to interact with the service anonymously. With a phone number, they know exactly who you are, and when your data is sold it’ll be at your expense.
Yea but those books just had your name and maybe address. In the current world your number can have your whole life attached, even whether you use a bum gun. It’s not the same
Also signed up. They can have my phone number. What are they going to do with it? Target advertising at me?
To be honest, I'm a bit past caring about companies selling my data. They've built up enough of a profile of me in my 30+ years of being online, I'm not getting away from that. There's a multitude of my namesakes online who are much more interesting and successful than me and I'm pretty well hidden generally.
This sounds interesting enough to me that they can have my phone number. In 10 years time I'll be living in a forest in a cabin, living off the land and staying well offline.
It really seems like the audience is the tech gentry who cheer on Mike and Kevin to conquer a consumer market they all condescend to. The only reason to sign up is to have a savvy opinion about it.
Remember the Facebook News Feed? Remember thinking, "gosh, they added to this without asking us, and I just wish we could have ONLY that! More News Feed, please!" Well, the Instagram Boys have the thing for you!
Another reason to use RSS. I am skeptical of something whose founders make money by mining users' data. This is yet another attempt to mine your data and reading habits, and there's many successful attempts at that already (Evernote, Pocket, Kindle, etc). I'm tired of these apps who nose around in your reading, and I don't care if it's powered by AI. AI will never replace the serendipitous scrolling I do with my RSS client.
I'm a big fan of RSS but RSS limits you to what you already have subscribed to. I think mining user data has become the unfortunate norm but there trying to provide more relevant content here so that's understandable.
I'm curious to see how well this type of recommendation works in comparison to community based sites like hacker news and reddit.
I'd be interested to see what you already have. If you really want a pile of interesting bookmarks I bet a lot of people here (including me) could give you some and it might be worth making a whole new discussion (vía e.g. Show HN) for it.
Not that much right now, but you can see a small list at the bottom of my company's website (see profile). Look for the text "You might also like ...". It's mostly sites/feeds that were already featured on HN somewhere in the last year.
I was thinking of asking HN for lists of interesting bookmarks (or even OPML files) to share. I guess a lot of people here have interesting hobbies other than tech!
Yet way to find what you like is nice. Youtube for all its mess did let me discover a bunch of channels I now watch often, even tho most of my browsing comes from me subscribing to YT channel's RSS feed
If an organization making a product has to choose between
(A) mining user data; hyper-optimizing their algorithms for relevance and user engagement; and maximizing revenue
(B) not mining user data; having not-as-engaged users; and having lower revenue
I think the organization should choose option B. If there isn't sufficient incentive generally for organizations to choose option B over A, then the larger question is how can we structure our world to incentivize that? That is what I was driving towards with my earlier comment.
On the consuming side, it might actually be a good thing to sometimes stay bored, to not have relevant content lighting up your face all the time. But that depends on the person's preferences and needs though. Here too, how can we structure the world so that people don't think it crucial to be able to find engaging content when they open an app.
Unfortunately I have seen that past success is not a measure of future success when it comes to consumer driven networks. So I am willing to bet a farm that this will be hyped by the tech community who are their friends but then it will slowly fizzle out.
> Yet, this team is one of the few that have succeeded at all of these challenges before.
Don't underestimate luck, it causes you to overestimate your own abilities. Thousands of other startups with seemingly great ideas, equally smart founders and equally "sound" business plans all failed. Some of the survivors of these competitions will have won due to their savvy, but plenty will have won from sheer dumb luck (survivorship bias).
Don't under estimate all the bad luck that happened to them as well. Your point is 100% valid all those startups look great on paper and fail. That also means startups that do NOT sound sound might be the next big thing.
Agreed! That's why we have the saying of something being "ahead of its time", an idea that failed at its time but later succeeded when circumstances were more favourable.
They're fundamentally B2C because the hardest part is getting the consumer virality engine running. Once the consumers are there, the B2B part (eg the ads engine) is relatively easy. I won't say trivial, but I would guess literally 2-3 orders of magnitude easier if you have a large and engaged audience. B2C success is the rate-limiting step.
> fundamentally B2C because the hardest part is getting the consumer virality engine running. Once the consumers are there, the B2B part (eg the ads engine) is relatively easy
Social media is neither. Ben Thompson's aggregator aside from the B2C/B dichotomy shines in this example. Snap and Twitter notoriously struggled with ad sales, for example.
Twitter was doing $5 bill pa of ad sales... Snap is doing over $4 bill pa. Twitter was sold for ~$40 bill, Snap is currently at $18 bill market cap.
That isn't notoriously struggling. The statement that the ad component is relatively easy is borne out by the facts. There are zero companies doing lots of ad revenue with very few users, and practically every service with hundreds of millions to billions of users spending their time looking at said service is doing significant ad revenue.
The only way one can think they struggled is if compared to the two wildly outlying, greatest ad revenue machines in the history of the world.
I think the struggle is people don't respond (convert) on those platforms for whatever reasons that are inherit to their audiences or the app itself. If users don't convert then businesses aren't going to spend on ads. I work in marketing and Twitter has always been hard to have any sort of positive return on. Big brands can afford that but the millions of smaller businesses can't.
I'm going to go against the grain here and say that this isn't a bad idea. Mobile Chrome has a similar feature that shows recommended articles on the new tab page, and it is surprisingly good at learning the topics you are into (from searches obviously). I often find new and interesting articles on there, similar to how TikTok manages to know what you like but also tries to give you new topics occasionally. This could introduce people to a lot of content that they otherwise wouldn't discover.
I think calling it "TikTok for text" is the bad idea. Sounds like it's focused on traditional long-form writing not short-form content. The only part of TikTok they're trying to emulate is a recommendation algorithm that doesn't suck (and which every social media site should be trying to do).
I always get clickbait Medium articles and SEO garbage on my Mobile Chrome homepage. There's interesting content sometimes, sure, but the signal-to-noise ratio is very bad. I try to teach the algorithm by dismissing those low-quality posts, but they keep appearing.
Is it common at all for people who happen to hit gold with one app to actually come back and have other hit apps? I see it all the time that things are advertised as being the next hit app from this or that person and, as far as I remember, it almost never works.
While it might be (way) less popular, Skype still exists. [1]
Also:
> Microsoft Teams is based on a number of Microsoft-specific protocols.[50] Video conferences are realized over the protocol MNP24, known from the Skype consumer version. [2]
I guess the enormity of the challenge is modulated several factors, including if you are trying to invent an entirely new product category, implementing a solution to known problem for lot of users, or "just" creating a new title in an established genre.
Jack Dorsey with Twitter and Square. Richard Branson has started a bunch of successful Virgin businesses. Elon Musk, even without Tesla, there's still Zip2, PayPal, SpaceX, etc.
> A personalized news feed driven by artificial intelligence
Right!
Then “enter your phone number”.
These people are probably jumping on the next bandwagon? I recently saw something like this — I think it was post.news or so. Is it a new trend these days?
The difference is every time you login into twitter and see your feed was set to algorithmic, you groan and switch it back to chronological. This app won’t let you switch it back.
How on earth do you come out with "Algorithmically curated news feed" in 2023 and think it's a good idea? We didn't know these things were doomsday devices back in 2012, what's their excuse today?
I agree. They’re not even acknowledging the total horror show that public social media has become. Instead they’re leaning into AI and basically telling us that the reason we’re not happy is because of inefficient recommendation systems – a misreading of the room at levels only Bay Area execs can achieve. People’s contempt for these platforms rose proportionally to the amount of agency that these opaque recommendation engines removed.
If you want to innovate in this space, you have to change the game entirely. Perhaps it means exposing the parameters for “discovery” to let the users be in control. Perhaps it’s finding alternative revenue sources, so that the users become customers. Perhaps it’s about changing fundamentally how moderation, visibility and trust works. Taking an idea from 2010 and putting a GPT sticker on it ain’t it.
I think they are hoping to moderate content more strictly and select a metric to optimize which (hopefully) better aligns with the individual.
> “One of the issues with technology recently has been a lot of these companies’ unwillingness to make subjective judgments in the name of quality and progress for humanity,” he says. “Right? Just make the hard decision.”
> Artifact will also remove individual posts that promote falsehoods, he says. And its machine-learning systems will be primarily optimized to measure how long you spend reading about various subjects — as opposed to, say, what generates the most clicks and comments — in an effort to reward more deeply engaging material.
But I guess we’ll see if they can pull it off. I think the funding model they settle on will inevitably play the biggest role though.
I read this article immediately after reading Corey Doctorow's The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok [0]. It's a useful juxtaposition if you're interested in thinking about how Artifact is likely to develop if it gains traction.
>Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
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https://youtu.be/mlh24BnhKmo
Just read the comments even if you don't watch it. I watched the ad for fun. He makes a video against addictive games sponsored by raid shadow lol.
> TikTok’s innovation was to show you stuff using only algorithmic predictions, regardless of who your friends are or who you followed. It soon became the most downloaded app in the world.
Artifact represents an effort to do the same thing but for text.
Ummm, one huge glaring difference - TikTok's content is user generated, Artifact's is not. Why this is being compared to TikTok is beyond me...
Bold move to get into news aggregation. Silicon valley is littered with the carcasses of companies that’s tried to make that a business.
I’m not really sure enough people care to switch from their existing de facto aggregators, to make it pay through advertising. And news is a free commodity, so there’s not much of a reason for a user to pay for it.
Why not? It allows the company to easily tailor its algorithms and content towards a user's political/religious/geographic views. Surely that would never be abused! /s
Really? That's crazy. At least at one point, spinning up phone numbers was significantly harder and much more deterrent against account generators than was email addresses. What has changed to make phone numbers easier to generate and email addresses harder?
> The app uses algorithmic predictions, which Kevin Systrom sees as ‘the future of social.’
I see this as the anti-future. All I want from social (e.g. Facebook and Instagram) is a chronologically ordered list of things I chose to follow. That's it.
You know that joke that facebook is an over-engineered birthday reminder app? I would make the point that social media are also over-engineerd news feeds.
The vast majority of people get their news from some kind of feed. Be it Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Twitter, whatever. Scrolling a feed is what gets news to most people. I can see the purpose of making an app that does just that, instead of having to also live with 3000 social features i don't care about (and all the noise and pointless posts they bring to the feed).
I also don't agree on the chronologically ordered list of things i choose to follow. I tried to do that and as soon as you put any kind of news outlet it's going to flood your feed of things you don't care about. I want to follow TechCrunch, Ars Technica or The Verge, but you can be sure that I don't want to see every article they post. I just want to have them on my radar for that more noteworthy stories. And I also want to discover new things, trending articles or topic that might have nothing to do with what i specifically follow.
That's why i also go on HN or reddit for news, because there's some kind of user curation where only the interesting articles ends up on my feed. I get to disover things that i don't already know and follow, plus i get curated news selection that should filter the noise while letting me know what's the hot topic of the week.
But if the articles are selected by upvotes, then we have echo-chambers and both this site, reddit or any other social media are prime examples of this. You really get only a narrow and often biased slice.
An app whose sole purpose is to give you news and articles you find interesting might have an incentive to do so without trapping you in a filter bubble. Or maybe not, only time will tell.
This approach is fine if it works for you and I'm sure many people want the same, but it's definitely not what I or the GP want. Facebook's hostility to chronological ordering was one of the big reasons I stopped using it way back when and I haven't used news feeds much over the years for the same reason.
I have a collection of bookmarked news sites that I check regularly, which show their articles without any personalized algorithmic reshuffling or hiding. Knowing that I see the same content as other visitors do is a plus for me. I don't need to worry about missing stories I care about because some AI decided the opposite, and I feel like it helps me avoid filter bubbles and clickbait.
This isn't to say that one approach is right or wrong, just that this is what works for me and some other folks.
I know the dubious security claims turn many off of it, but I really, really, really, really like the way Telegram handles lists of content.
You don't get a big pile of all of your subscriptions in a list, like a twitter feed. You get a list of all of your subscriptions, like a list of IM chats. Selecting one of them gives you a chronological list of posts from that channel.
I think the downside is there seems to be a limit to the number of chats a human can keep track of. Algo feeds let you subscribe to thousands of things without thinking about it too much, that would get overwhelming with how Telegram does things.
Democratic design instead of authoritarian design is the future of social media to me. I am long on Reddit because it allows you to subscribe to specific subreddits. I am long on RSS - which has seen a resurgence - because of the control it gives you over what you see.
If only there was a "reddit for video" where I could see categorized videos instead of the garbage the YouTube algorithm gives me - of which I have almost no control over.
Devil's advocate, I'm going to guess you do not want exactly that and you'd be happier with a quality alg.
There is far, far too much information out there, and the things outputted from the things you follow is a 'decent start' but it's not what you want.
Systrom is exactly right and better algs is what we need.
TikTok is a great social medial platform, it's fun, irreverent, and the alg allows you to find niches in content that would not exist otherwise. I've found this guy who does videos on his sheep herding dogs, it's so fun to watch.
Applying a great filter to all of my youtube/news feeds is one of the most meaningful ways to improve my content feed.
Yes - we want to make sure people have the option to follow exactly what they want and hopefully to adjust the feed parameters ... but I would love to get rid of the fuzz in my feed.
This is decent innovation and it could affect a lot of people, it's fine to be a bit sus but I don't think we should be cynical.
I guess this is my pessimism about an algorithm really ever working well for me. On FB and other social sites, I'm hesitant to engage any one-off content because my feed becomes flooded with it. I guess if I had more fine-grained control to say that I don't like something and WHY I don't like it, I'd have more confidence that this could be useful .
I mean, Instagram has a “not interested” menu item (behind …), with the additional option 'don’t show posts from ${account}' and “this post makes me uncomfortable”.
They also additionally introduced chronologically sorted “following” and “favorites” feeds. I haven’t had a Facebook in a decade, but after hardly using IG for years, I’ve started using it again. These features have honestly improved my opinion of Meta significantly, you can at least utilize it as a tool now.
My issue is that the controls aren't fine-grained enough for me. I'm not a heavy IG user, so that doesn't matter as much to me. (DISCLAIMER: The only reason I even have IG is because I worked at FB and my team made a couple components used in IG)
Makes sense. They are different use cases as well. On FB, I'm interested in people, not "content", whereas TikTok is about the content, which does require some means of discovery.
> I'm going to guess you do not want exactly that and you'd be happier with a quality alg.
I'm going to guess that it's possible, if not likely, for me to have higher engagement with an alg while being less happy. A simple way to find out is choice. I like that Twitter has both modes.
You might like Mastodon, then? That's exactly what it offers.
(That it only offers a chronological feed is the main thing I don't like about it, to the point that I wrote my own client to implement rudimentary prioritization)
It depends on how they choose to tune their algorithms. If they tune for "engagement" with an infinite scroll that the user doesn't have any control over, then it's probably going to be another thing that makes the world worse while making them wealthier.
If they tune for quality, have a scroll that bottoms out when the next article no longer meets some high bar, and gives the user some control over the sources and presentation, then it could be decent.
That's what I want as well, and the Fediverse (Mastodon, etc) and RSS seem like the main things that fit that criteria. I don't use RSS for articles as much as I would like but I do use it for podcasts, of course, and the fediverse has been a fun experiment for me.
So true. It's really what killed Facebook for me. The timeline was great. The feed was horrible and still is.
I don't care about discovery unless it happens naturally, eg I go looking for something or a friend recommends it. Same with the HN feed, I basically consider most of your friends so it works really well. An AI that has a purpose of just making sure I stick around in the site as much as possible? No.
I've gone and found news sites that were the exact same: chronological content in text format. Hacker news is like a role model for websites for me.
(Personally, and maybe this isn't great, but I use through social media when I'm bored and want to see something semi-interesting. Ordering by an estimate of interestingness seems like a no-brainer in this scenario.)
That’s cool. The engagement metrics show more usage and ad clicks when the feed is ML-driven, so that’s what they’re gonna give you. Thanks for playing.
Agreed. One of my issues with Mastodon is that I cannot see content from people I don't subscribe to. Even if all of my follows like/favorite a toot, I won't see it. This is a flawed design. This is the main reason Twitter is better than Mastodon, IMO. It makes my Mastodon feed pretty calm, but it also feels a bit dead, which makes me wonder why I opened the app at all.
Also, since 4.0 you can follow hashtags. Currently a restriction on this is that you only see posts that made it to your instance because someone else on your instance is following the author. So it works better if you are on an instance with many users or users with similar interests to yours. It works very well for my use cases, most of the content I see is through hashtag follows.
I love this about Mastodon. I hated that Twitter showed people who follow me what I was liking today, and I hated that Twitter constantly showed me stuff people I followed were liking.
If I want my followers to see something, I have to consciously make a post that says "hey check out this thing". It's great! I open Mastodon, look at what the people I'm following are saying or pointing at, and then I close it and get on with doing something else instead of spending half an hour being distracted by Shit Twitter Thinks I Might Like.
I don't think this is true. I see "Boosted" posts in my feed from people I don't follow. Maybe this is a server specific feature? I am using Hachyderm.io.
This is a standard Mastodon feature. You will see post that people you follow "boost", but not things they only "favorite".
My understanding is that the Mastodon devs are trying to separate "increase the distribution of a post" from "give positive feedback to the post author".
yeah people can boost posts on mastodon (essentially a retweet), but you don't see the asinine algorithmic things like replies to people you don't follow (unless you go look for them)
I do like that there's no reply component to boosts though. You boost it up or not. No sniping.
> “Throughout the years, what I saw was that every time we use machine learning to improve the consumer experience, things got really good really quickly,” he said.
Here we can see their concept of quality..
> Systrom also told me Artifact will take seriously the job of serving readers with high-quality news and information. That means an effort to include only publishers who adhere to editorial standards of quality, he told me. For now, the company won’t disclose every publisher in its system, but you can search for individual outlets within the app.
Here they say they will make an effort to maintain quality. Which means: over the roof engagement and sales of advertisement.
How about just Hacker News, expanded with some machine learning to determine the topics I would be interested in. My 'friends' or connections don't supply me with nearly enough of the posts and news items that catch my interest, whereas I trust HN to float up things of interest (and not pure trash), so can I just base my feed on your posts?
Maybe you could use all the HN links you comment on and upvote as signals, classify the links into categories, then surface new links from those categories in a "for you" personalized HN feed. You probably need more signals to make it work well, like how much time you spend looking at those links.
This could be cool if they source articles and blog posts from random places across the web, like StumbleUpon but with the modern ML that "works scarily well". Could be great for discoverability of smaller sites.
Hopefully at some point they'll let me sign up with an email address though because I refuse to sign in with a phone number on principle.
Just to add context for anyone who doesn't know the history - Bytedance's first product was Toutiao, which means 'headlines' [0]. Douyin/Tik Tok grew out of that.
The concept works well one a relatively homogeneous Internet like the one found in China, but I can see a lot of reasons why Western users who are used to more control via search and full data access wouldn't like it.
>a great proven model that the lagging west took ages to adopt.
I’d be careful with this type of thinking. Sometimes things can just be different.
Take KOLs/live-streaming e-commerce for example. Works in China for a lot of reasons (they’re the worlds most populous time zone for example), but it comes off as a negative utility interaction for Westerners (why is a pretty girl begging me to buy tires?).
Again, a lot of the differences are culture, especially in terms of China’s relatively controlled internet vs. the West’s relative free for all.
This was also said before about microtransactions in games and here we are. My take - it's just lagging execution due to much less competition in the west. Yeah, this may sound crazy until you actually see the number of companies in China competing in every niche.
Eg, in the west there was just Periscope/Meerkat. In China there were dozens of apps doing that with a much wider set of features. Same with electric scooters - I recall in Shanghai many years ago when this trend just started to boom, they had literal huge piles of scooters on every corner from like 10 different companies in the first or second year of this trend. And the fact that Onlyfans is the dominant player in the space in the west is just simply ridiculous.
So my takeaway is: west is generally slower to adopt with less competition and slower execution. Human nature is pretty much the same. Cultural norms shift and quickly given enough incentives.
I mean feel free to have a different opinion than me, but I don’t really understand the point you’re making?
Twitch is the US’s dominant streaming platform and it predates (as Justin.tv) all the China players. It’s had less of an impact because for the most part, the West isn’t into as into live-streaming as China (we can post videos without worrying so much about censorship, so the “live” component matters less).
OnlyFans is not a live-streaming platform and does not have even a remote comparable company in China.
On the scooter front, again, China has more bicycle/scooter infrastructure, so it works in lots of places there, but barely in the US.
Id argue all of those examples are things that work in China but not elsewhere, though I guess you assume scooters/live-streaming are still on the upswing in the West and will have a bigger impact as time goes on (if you really hold that belief, I’d recommend monetizing it with Amazon and Bird stock, both of which price neither of those trends in)
By then it already had 25m DAU and next year its revenue was 1b already. So yes it's content agnostic, but it started and rapidly grew as a text based aggregator with a strong recommendation system. From what I heard, TikTok's recommendation system is based on that and that was used to explain its ballistic growth.
The feed is one of the most dangerous inventions of modern times and now we're making it even more addictive. I really hope we stop to think about this at some point and realise we need to break away from this consumption format.
Do we do this with regulation? Or education? Trusting businesses to not do whatever they can to make money isn't a plausible strategy.
People who can avoid social media will surpass their peers who are logging hours of mindless screen time. That will ultimately encourage even more inequality as people (especially kids) who aren't actively guided will easily fall into the social media trap and get left behind.
Is the future just a bunch of narcissistic high achievers accumulating more and more wealth over a bunch of perfectly pacified low income workers?
> Is the future just a bunch of narcissistic high achievers accumulating more and more wealth over a bunch of perfectly pacified low income workers?
That's past, present, and future, though the pacification is never quite perfect, because the separation between groups isn't. Achievers and pacified overlap in the same pool, which is why I think generally we should all piss in it less.
Over the past month I've started using RSS through a combination of ReadKit and Feedibin for everything I possibly can. YouTube videos, Reddit, Twitter, News Websites, Blogs, Newsletters. All of it, RSS. And it is absolutely fucking awesome. Some pertinent points:
- My news addiction has dramatically declined in less than two weeks. I have a Feedbin action which automatically sets everything from Reddit, Hacker News, and news websites as read. I also utilise the Smart Folder functionality of ReadKit to exclude the same websites from the Today folder. This means I can click on these feed and have a look through it at my leisure but there's no pressure to 'get caught up' on everything.
- As a result of the above, I am a lot more focussed and present and I am getting more shit done. I am wasting way less time mindlessly browsing low quality content and doomscrolling.
- I no longer have to deal with a bunch of ads, cookie requests, email subscription popups and whatever else junk that is bringing the internet to the point where it's unusable.
- Managing my email is now a joy. The only thing that goes there is correspondence, invoices and important account information. I've been unsubscribing to everything else as it comes in and keeping subscriptions to the newsletters I want to keep using the email address provided by Feedbin.
- I use hnrss to handle hacker news and have a feed set up for replies to my comments which means I engage with people on this site better. I also have Front Page, Ask HN, Best Comments, Active etc all under one HN tag in Feedbin. I'm finding scrolling through this a better experience than just checking the Front Page, or the tabs separately.
- I'm reading way more varied and better quality materials from individuals, blogs and specialist magazines rather than mainstreams journalists pushing politics and agendas.
- As a result of all the above, the internet is FUN again. It feels like I've time travelled back 20 years to when the internet was full of unique and quirky webpages and you never knew what you was going to find. In reality it's been there the entire time, but social media, mainstream media, search engines and other massive corporations have pushed it out of site and sent me to sleep in order to earn money and purse their own agendas. Well, I am awake again and I will not be going back. And hopefully comments like this will help wake up others.
You have to spend a little bit of time setting everything up and a few minutes each week tweaking things to keep it organised but it is absolutely worth the effort and the extra cost for the services.
Cool, I'm in the process of doing the same. The 'regular' social media is already out of the window, but Youtube is pulling hard on me. Time to transfer some channels to my RSS reader, I guess.
First, it was hard. My daily dopamine shots ended abruptly while browsing purely through RSS feeds. One thing I wish more sites/feeds did, was adding images to the posts. I started practicing what I preach by building dedicated 'photo feeds'.
Tiktok's features expand faster than other sites can copy them (successfully at least). In the past few months image slideshows (often heavy with text) have become a popular format on TikTok. I see no reason why TikTok wouldn't be the TikTok for text.
I thought about building a text-only social network recently. The trouble is that engagement comes from getting people to keep scrolling, and this is much easier with videos and photos than text. I wish them the best of luck, and hope that they can build something that encourages more thoughtfulness.
I also hope they don't become too censorious...
> Both left- and right-leaning publishers were included; you’ll find Fox News there, for example. But Systrom isn’t shy about the fact that the company will be exercising its own judgment about who belongs and who doesn’t.
Oh, the irony! The real “TikTok for text” is Twitter, which anyone who’s clicked a link to a tweet and ended up lost in randomness for 10 minutes can attest. Twitter is also the product on which these guys staged a vampire attack to seed Instagram, which is part of why Twitter crippled their API.
Why don’t they do the world a service and try to hijack users out of Instagram to something more balanced and healthy? If you’re partly responsible for causing cancer, you might want to work on fixing that before moving on to loftier pursuits.
Wow, I guess PT Barnum was right about never losing money on underestimating the intelligence of people but this really is a new low. If TikTok is selling a video snippet app like smallpox infected blankets to Native Americans then I guess this is putting the smallpox onto whiskey barrels for them. The one thing olds like me still use the Internet for, reading things I want to, why not spend more of my day moving my eyes back and forth over words carefully chosen by machine to trigger dopamine spikes in my head?
Despite all qualms about privacy, ai manipulation, walled gardens etc (concerns which obviously dont carry much currency in certain circles) it would be a positive signal if this catches on.
It would disprove the hypothesis that social media have gained popularity by increasingly dumbing down the main type of content. Long form text definitely would be a reversal of that trend.
it's just a private beta currently(https://artifact.news/), but i'm curious about details around privacy. I have a feeling that given their success selling instagram to facebook they'd lean into data harvesting. maybe i'm being pessimistic though.
I was feeling very good about this idea until I read -
"Systrom also told me Artifact will take seriously the job of serving readers with high-quality news and information. That means an effort to include only publishers who adhere to editorial standards of quality"
Maybe I'm missing something or not understanding how the app actually works, but restricting publishers by quality standards seems like the opposite of TikTok's approach. TikTok's appeal for creators is that it's very easy to grow an audience. For the consumers - one appeal is that you're seeing "real" or amateur content, not the produced mainstream thing. Put another way - I can already consume mainstream outlets, I need a better to get independent voices.
In my view they should ban racist and hateful stuff, because that would be a huge turnoff to most users, but other than that - try to be hands off in terms of moderation.
> Artifact will also remove individual posts that promote falsehoods, he says.
They just never learn. This will not scale! But they refuse to hand over any control to users for choosing what they want to consume, or providing negative feedback.
They're going to make the same mistake that all these platforms have made, which is to treat all content as if it's in one giant bag and hope they can ML their way through. There's no way to subscribe to a "feed" of related content, so your best bet is to follow some creators and hope that The Algorithm gets the message. How do I choose that I want to read more about science today? Or culture? Well, my only option is to hope that their ML team is good enough to maintain a reasonable ontology of subjects and good at classifying content automatically. But I'm completely out of luck if I have niche interests.
So it's actually no like TikTok. It's like Jinri Toutiao, or Today's Headlines, which is the algorithmic news app that came before tiktok and where bytedance built the recommendation engine used in tiktok.
It is quite amazing that with the experience people like these co-founders have that they put that to use creating things that, on the face of it look like fairly obvious flops.
It really does highlight just how many people get lucky with one good idea.
In addition the AI side of things is enough to turn me off. We've supposedly got AI based recommendations on YouTube, however despite me never showing any interest I still get videos of someone holding up a product with their mouth wide open like a carp, or random minecraft content that I've repeatedly marked as being not interested in.
The appeal to TikTok isn't just that it zeroes in on my attention, it's that the content is mixed and matched and cross-referenced with each other. So it feels like a special place where you can only find that content.
Aggregating news seems, to me at least, not special, and something Google News already does. It "magically" knows what my current interests and shows me lots of sources of that.
For everything else, I enjoy the Reddit model.
Zeroing in on someone's attention for long form content that looks legitimate also scares me as that's how conspiracy theories spread.
Will be interesting so see how they plan to tackle the issues of factuality and bias in the articles they feed users (if they plan to address that at all).
Another mobile-only product, like Instagram used to be.
I get I must not be the demographic, so I guess I don't matter... but... why? Why do this?
I've seen this pattern a few times with things that intend on being new Facebook or Twitter replacements. Product managers / designers making this choice to exclude non-mobile. I not only won't use them (barely use my phone), but I distrust the motives.
I wish it would give me a good curated news feed from dozens of sources, and adapt based on feedback. I badly wanted to love it, but no matter how much I tried it ended up looking something like a mix of Buzzfeed and Murdoch propaganda.
Happy to see the idea is not dead and new companies are giving it a shot.
The value of my feed comes from the reputation that those people have with me. I trust the things most of them share more than I trust twoots from the broader internet, and if they abuse that trust, I unfollow them.
If I want a curated list of posts and thoughts from people who don't have a specific reputation with me, I come to HN :-P
Twitter works, because I read information that is NOT distilled by "big media outlets". I wanna hear the voices of indie devs, doctors, researchers etc. I don't need a fancy RSS reader with a sorting algorithm. Unless they make user generated content a priority, this will not succeed.
This is what drives me nuts about nearly any social media platform: Give me the stuff I follow in chronological order. If you wanna let me discover new stuff put it in small somewhere to the side.
On instagram basically every 3rd post/story is someone who I am not following, who I don't give the slightest shit about or advertisements. This seriously makes me consider leaving the platform all together, just give me one more reason and I am gone.
I really wonder if it is possible to develope a decent public platform of any kind under capitalism or if everything is just bound to turn into this.
So this is a newsfeed? I think Hacker News has been doing a good job without AI. You simply need a community. I am not sure turning Facebook's news feed feature into a product is really that innovative. How many reputable news sources are there to supply their feed?
Good thing: new app, that might be fun to use (like instagram was)
Bad thing: after a year or two, it will be sold to meta/google/someone_like_that and only show ads with a sprinkle of your friends' content inbetween (like instagram is)
It's hard enough to be selective with your choices of media. Having an algorithm shove media down your throat in a way that teaches blindly ignore the source seems like a bad idea...or a good idea, depending on who you are.
So this is twitter but you can only post articles that contain advertisements? And it even gives you an inbox? Maybe the magic is in the algorithm but I am currently not inspired and I really like twitter.
There is a YC startup named Artifact. I wonder if the founders will defend the name like Instagram did with people using ‘gram’ in their name. That would be some nice karma.
I'm still baffled at how that game got almost rebooted and then just abandoned. The game wasn't perfect, the business model was a failed experiment, but it's something they absolutely could have built into something fun, instead of flushing it all down the drain.
Online card games are huge. Valve was almost there.
Yeah, a real shame. I'll admit though, I'm in the camp that preferred the older version (except for the godawful monetization scheme) to the reboot, but with more development time it probably would've convinced me when it got more polished.
But hey, at least you can still play it and all cards are free! now if only they had released the apparently almost finished second set of cards....
If an algorithm controls what I read then I will end up reading nothing but what I've read before and puff pieces to validate my preexisting opinions. Fuck that.
I'm excited about this. Kevin and Mikey are 2 of the most talented product builders out there. And, I miss having a really great go-to news reader app.
I'm curious to see how this plays out. I signed up.
That said . . .
> a personalized news feed that uses machine learning to understand your interests and will soon let you discuss those articles with friends
Am I the only one who sees these platforms that curate content based on existing interests as a dangerous trend for our society?
Here's what I mean: I used to be somewhat of a far-leftist. I'm far from that now, but looking back, I think one of the reasons why I held some of the unreasonable/divisive views I held was due to the invisible bubbles I was stuck in. These bubbles were powered and reinforced by my social media networks (especially Facebook). These platforms effectively help turn so many of us into ideologues rather than critical and independent thinkers. It's been many years now since I last had an active social media account and I lean more conservative now, but I'm very fearful of bubbles. I think they're dangerous and hold folks captive to one-dimensional perspectives, not to mention enabling extremism on all ends of the political spectrum. Because of this, I intentionally make sure my circle of friends is as diverse as possible (including everything from socialists to libertarians to hardcore conservatives). Even though I'm conservative now, I still study the leftist perspectives of different issues to make sure I come to what I consider the best conclusions possible without being subconsciously coerced into any conclusions due to being stuck in a bubble.
Absolutely: ideas reinforce if you're around them long enough. I don't think it was Facebook's intention for echo chambers to occur, but it was too profitable for them to stop it once it had.
Someday they'll cut creation out of the loop and just train a model to consume your list of liked Tweets and generate more tweetlike text objects that resemble them. Then you'll just an endless feed of complete trash you can scroll down for the rest of your life.
So much negativity for this in here. Is it a flop? Maybe? Most things are. Can we know it without trying? I don’t think so. Why not just let it run and see the results?
My apologies to the team who I'm sure worked very hard, for sounding very sour. But I just had this visceral reaction to this:
Come on guys, all of you smart people working at these places, doesn't anyone want to tackle a problem that might actually be difficult and meaningful to humanity rather than "how can I come up with novel ways to get people to be stuck on their phones for longer?"
Sigh, at least Google in its heyday created the moonshots and was tackling real problems that mattered, self-driving, energy generation, robotics. Not just regurgitating the same old tired "___ but with text" "___ but with 6 second videos" ideas.
News consumption and news media in general is a major societal problem right now. Building a new way of consuming news is not as vapid a pursuit as it may seem at first glance.
That may be true, but going towards even faster news and shortening our attention spans even more doesn't seem like the step in the right direction. More like just exacerbating the problem.
People who "identify misinformation" used to be described as "censorious." I don't want anyone defining misinformation and deciding what to show me. I have no idea what the plans for this app are - the landing page is not exactly rich in detail.
But I'm open to trying any app that gives me more control over my informational input streams, without the noise of blogspam, ads, paywalls and all the other nuisances that come with modern day news reading.
I appreciate that Gmail filters spam for me, but only as long as I can open the "spam" folder and see for myself which emails were marked as spam. I would not appreciate a service that "filters" my news without offering the same level of transparency.
“Stop paying attention to things that aggravate you unless (a) they concretely affect your life AND (b) you can realistically do something about them. Start by ceasing to follow national and world news.”
Actually, facilitating other people to communicate in novel ways in turn facilitates more people doing difficult and meaningful things across more mediums.
It may as well be an economic model because demand of communication platforms is bringing out a supply of efficiency and not just addiction.
Can you please describe how the ponzi scheme works? Seems you can just download open source software and use it without buying any tokens… and even if you did buy tokens, where is the ponzi?
Many startups are “almost” ponzi schemes, where money from later stage investors keeps propping up a business that has negative unit economics, offen no revenues. Twitter made zero revenues when it was valued at $100M. Who paid the bills? Twitter has been losing money when Elon’s group bought it. Who’s paying the bills?
On the other hand I am giving away software for free, that took 4 years to write, that I paid hundreds of thousands to a team I work with, and took jobs to do it. I give it away for free, you don’t even LOOK at it and call it a ponzi.
Yep, my description is accurate. The grandparent commenter asked:
doesn't anyone want to tackle a problem that might actually be difficult and meaningful to humanity rather than "how can I come up with novel ways to get people to be stuck on their phones for longer?"
This is why. Capital talks. And capital is invested mostly in bullshit that can produce hype, not open source software that can change the world. People don’t look at substance, they follow trends. I give away software for free that solves the very problems many people on HN are hired to solve for years and people can’t be bothered to look unless there is hype around it first. You have your answer right here.
Sure that's all well and true, though you somehow missed the part where web3 fits the "bullshit that can produce hype" description perfectly. What separates your app from thousands others that pretend to do something profound but end up rugpulling in a few months? I suppose the part where you actually need to get people's money before running away with it...
The entire industry is so tainted by bad actors that only complete hacks are still interested in doing anything in it, which will only continue to reduce the percentage of legit projects until there are none at all.
> Seems you can just download open source software and use it without buying any tokens… and even if you did buy tokens, where is the ponzi?
All crypto fundamentally works on the principle. Prices are based on popularity and demand alone, or hype as you call it. There's nothing of actual value there. Just because you're a side participant doesn't make it any less that. Like buying a Herbalife drink or something.
> Many startups are “almost” ponzi schemes
That's entirely correct, and so is most of the stock market (non-dividend paying stocks) and practically all pension systems worldwide pretty much. It's all an unsustainable trainwreck in the long run.
What separates your app from thousands others that pretend to do something profound but end up rugpulling in a few months? I suppose the part where you actually need to get people's money before running away with it...
Have you even clicked the link and given the description a cursory look? It isn’t one app, it’s many. What separates them is that they are built to be used by entire communities, not peer to peer. There is documentation, there are interviews with regulators. And all you have to do to use it is press a button and it costs you nothing. It is altogether different than the scams that have hype and no product.
Prices of what, exactly? Your comment reads exactly like a cookie cutter generic cargo cult comment where you didnt even look at what is specifically being discussed.
Ah yes "but but the community!" You crypto bros really just repeat yourselves over and over.
> where you didnt even look at what is specifically being discussed
Because I don't really care about yet another pointless web 3 project that will at best achieve nothing and at worst lose a lot of people's hard earned money. How much gas fees are you paying to make any of it work? I'd rather not even know.
So you're against communities having software? You think centralized server farms owned by Big Tech is the only place where their software should run? Another pointless centralized VC-backed proprietary silo which "captures" a market and extracts rents, at best does nothing and at worst wastes a lot of people's time and makes them addicted, anxious, more antisocial, and work like sharecropper slaves to contribute content that's milked for "eyeballs"?
More likely, you still haven't looked at anything in the link. Allow me to make some statements about it then:
Someone else told me also that I’m using the wrong fonts and colors. They said once they saw Comic Sans used in a text bubble they instantly closed the website and didn’t look any further.
Tomorrow I am supposed to interview Noam Chomsky again, with David Harvey. I wonder how many people have said “Noam speaks in such a slow and boring way, I tuned out immediately.” Guess what… he is famous so people don’t say that :)
I enjoy getting these reactions because later on when we finally turn on the hype I will have a collection of how people react to substance rather than superficial things and hype.
to your point, i believe Google also funded 23andMe, which some understandably view as amassing private genetic information but which also surfaces huge-dataset-based actionable health insights for those using the service.
Allow me to be a bit nihilist: Nothing we do matters. In fact, if you ask why enough you'll realize meaning has no definition that is independent of an observer. So entertainment, as something humans value in and of itself, is perhaps the most worthy cause you can devote yourself to.
Oh but we have the technology for that already. We can nuke each other to extinction which may increase suffering momentarily, but will reduce it to zero in the long run ;)
Judging by the emerging visceral hatred from society for people like Bill Gates and Elon Musk who have that stated goal of working to make a better world with their wealth and power and make a better present and/or future for humanity, why bother sticking your neck out like that?
Keep your head down and give the masses more of the opiate that they keep demanding. /s
Even though I (and many others) have deeply respected Musk for all that he’s done the last decade, he’s gone and screwed it up with this idiotic distraction that is twitter. And in the process he’s totally messed up his legacy.
The visceral hate for Musk’s actions in the past 6 months feels warranted. I’m annoyed as a Tesla owner that he’s distracted with these silly things instead of staying his original course. Meanwhile Tesla as a company has completely stagnated.
> Bill Gates and Elon Musk who have that stated goal of working to make a better world with their wealth and power and make a better present and/or future for humanity
This might be hard to believe, but sometimes billionaires say things they don't really mean if it will get them more power.
I'm so tried of people building junk to shove random content into people's faces every second of the damn day
it's like reading/discovering/studying isn't supposed to be relaxing anymore but noisy and always yelling at you I hate it and the drivel fades from memory to quickly
> and the collapse of Twitter under Elon Musk has created an opportunity for a team with genuine expertise in this space to take a run at text-based social networking again.
In what way has Twitter collapsed? This sounds highly political. Which of course it is, because “a feed of text posts” is in no way innovative. The innovation is in the selective censorship. Orwellian.
There's Twitter. There's Tumblr. There's Gab. There's Truth Social. There's Parler. There's GETTR. And we now have a decent Mastodon! Enough is enough! Stop fragmenting!
Oh, the irony! The real “TikTok for text” is Twitter, as anyone who’s clicked a link to a tweet and then ended up lost in memes and randomness for 10 minutes can attest. Twitter is also the product on which these guys staged a vampire attack to seed Instagram, which is part of why Twitter crippled their API.
Why don’t they do the world a service and try to hijack users out of Instagram to something more balanced and healthy? If you’re partly responsible for causing cancer, you might want to work on fixing that before moving on to loftier pursuits. Or are they still in denial?
When I'm reading, I'm trying to be thoughtful, not titillated. And part of being thoughtful is consciously choosing what to read.
One might say that sites like reddit and hacker news are just archaic versions of the same recommendation engine, but the friction is actually an important feature, and keeps the experience from devolving into lowest common denominator clickbait.