Death by a thousand likes: Facebook and Twitter are killing the open web

Re:Death by a thousand likes: Facebook and Twitter are killi... by declan on Thursday November 12, 2015 @03:49PM (#10556006)

>I wonder if anyone is building an app that recommends articles that provide a variety of perspectives different from your own.

When building Recent News (https://recent.io/) we considered adding the options of seeing news from perspectives both similar to and different from your own, at least as we understand them based on your usage.

We didn't do that. It turns out in early testing that users liked seeing a broad range of articles. For instance, a pro-2A voter might want to read a Salon.com article talking about how firearms should be banned--just to share it to argue how wrong it is! Or an anti-2A voter might be interested in a Fox News article talking about repealing anti-gun laws, if only because it reinforces how nutty those conservatives can be. (It also added more complexity when our goal was an MVP.)

The current version of our iOS+Android app includes a personal tab that is unique to you based on what we believe your interests to be, and a Hot News tab that is not unique to you. Neither filters by perspective, and not one person has requested that feature in the weeks since we launched--the feature requests have included things like dark theme, offline mode, text resizing, etc. instead.

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Re:Death by a thousand likes: Facebook and Twitter are killi... by ducuboy on Thursday November 12, 2015 @04:05PM (#10556116)

Recent News is quite interesting. How is it different from Prismatic?

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Re:Death by a thousand likes: Facebook and Twitter are killi... by declan on Thursday November 12, 2015 @04:37PM (#10556325)

Thanks for your interest! Prismatic made a beautiful app but took a very different approach toward recommendation. They tried to build, as I understand it, their own social commenting layer on top of news--an effective competitor to Twitter and Facebook--and encouraged linking with social networks. We experimented with the latter in an early version of Recent News but discarded it in favor of a user-focused approach that doesn't require social linking (and isn't as prone to bad recommendations if your friends' interests are different from yours).

In any case Prismatic is no longer updating or supporting its iOS and Android apps. Techcrunch reported in July that Prismatic pivoted to B2B and is trying to make money like Dataminr by selling access to its APIs.

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Re:Death by a thousand likes: Facebook and Twitter are killi... by ducuboy on Thursday November 12, 2015 @05:05PM (#10556476)

Thank you for the insight!

I'm very interested because (as I mentioned several times here already so sorry for the plug again) I'm building http://svven.com. It's also about recommendation but instead of AI I'm betting on the intelligence of the people - a social approach to relevance.

I will sure try Recent News to compare the results.

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Re:Death by a thousand likes: Facebook and Twitter are killi... by declan on Thursday November 12, 2015 @06:34PM (#10556975)

Thanks! Good luck with Svven. It's an interesting approach and different than the path we've taken with Recent News.

I just went to the site and was about to try it but saw Svven wanted permission to: "Post Tweets for you."

Is it possible to use Svven without granting you permission to post on my Twitter timeline? I have a policy of not granting apps or services such permission, so I stopped without testing it. :(

If there's a way to tweak the permissions I'll give it a shot!

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Re:Death by a thousand likes: Facebook and Twitter are killi... by ducuboy on Friday November 13, 2015 @03:35AM (#10558645)

Oh yes sure, Svven doesn't post tweets for you or anything like that.

Thanks for pointing this out, I'm thinking about changing the Twitter app settings to read-only. All it does is parse your home timeline to get the tweets so read-only is enough for Svven.

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