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.
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
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:
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
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.
HN is great too, but it's a niche.
This is exactly how Tumblr works, and is a big part of why Tumblr is actually a great social network for the people who have stuck it out there.
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
https://peergos.org/posts/decentralized-social-media
I'm glad more people are coming around to this idea.
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.
[0]: https://mood.surf (no affiliation)
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.
Twitter.
This, if I understand correctly, is for articles.
> 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!
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.
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
I have the feeling that there is much much more content out there that I would enjoy, but youtube is doing a really bad job at letting me find it.
E.g. I have 2-3 repair youtubers that I like to watch. What if there are others like them out there and I just can't find them?
Twitter seems to get users just fine (before the musking at least).
Hell, people come to "brainless fun" subreddits just fine too
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Dead Comment
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.
https://www.news.com.au/technology/online/social/im-a-sellou...
It's easy to be a cynic
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.
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.
I've received terrible targeted ads so either they're good at fooling me they're bad or they're actually bad.
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!
I'm curious to see how well this type of recommendation works in comparison to community based sites like hacker news and reddit.
Not if every website with a feed also shares their subscribed feeds. Like with an OPML file, which was already used as a feedlist exchange format.
I aim to create this with my Really Social Sites software. And I'm always curious to scroll through someone else's meaningful lists of shared links.
So if anyone cares to share their OPML file or list of interesting bookmarks, please reply.
Yet, this team is one of the few that have succeeded at all of these challenges before.
I'm excited to watch how they build this business. Success is uncertain, but observing their actions will be a case study in growth tactics.
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).
B2C people expect perfection for free and will balk at the slightest complication.
There is even a Quora question about it I'm 2014: https://www.quora.com/Why-have-most-personalized-news-startu...
There was one pretty big one that failed, anyone remember the name?
I don't think the tech changed that much, also were using bunch of machine learning recommendation algorithms at the time.
If anyone can pull it off its probably them, good luck to them.
https://www.quora.com/Why-have-most-personalized-news-startu...
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.
But I have little faith in an "AI" rss reader.
But indeed, I don't think it happens that often.
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?