jonathancai

I hear your concern, and we had a similar thought when preparing to post on HN. We made sure to display women and poc on the front page, but I admit, we can and will do a better job of highlighting diversity. Even if the industry is currently extremely homogeneous in that regard. Thanks for bringing this up.

It’s completely custom and in-house. u/iMuzz is just a unicorn designer/engineer. Not sure how else to put it.

We use daily cron jobs that fetch from various RSS urls for blogs, and use the Twitter API. We also have data contractors that do some manual work to aggregate the content.

Our service is not entirely scalable yet, as there is still quite a bit of manual work being done behind the curtain.

But the other larger concern is that many large accounts don’t necessarily post much original content. Or rather noisy content. Or they’re an organization, and not a person.

We want to do quality control over who gets indexed, at least initially.

Oh this is interesting, although I’m not sure how much our current audience would rather see push notifs or texts for the more long form content alerts we mainly have right now

Who wouldn’t?

Are you suggesting that we’d inevitably place ads in our emails alerts?

Yeah this is an awesome suggestion. It can be pretty easy to predict who someone would enjoy reading if they follow related people within their domain.

Thanks - will add them to the queue of people to consider indexing

Again, like stated in my other comments, we initially started out with these people because they were the people we mainly read, but we plan on expanding outside of the bubble.

Let me flip it back on you - which types of people would you want to see?

Yep, we do need to improve our onboarding flow a bit. We plan to include that Twitter followers list integration, and also suggest you people based on your interests. Thanks for the feedback.

Who are the two people if you don't mind me asking?

> Like will this be useful for someone who is following thought leaders in MMA fighting, Pornstars, DIY Guns and Drugs?

We haven't quite been considering the latter folk for obvious reasons, but we have been pondering the general question of "which types of people should we index?"

I think this is an interesting question to consider.

One framework we've been using to try to answer this question is the old vitamins vs. painkillers line of thought. Where is the need for a product like this the greatest? Or "where is the consequence for missing out on a piece of content the highest?"

This line of thought leads us towards the finance folks, where a single piece of information/alpha from a thought/industry leader can lead to 100+x returns, and missing out on those returns can be financially painful.

But I'd love to hear others thoughts on this question.

Yep. We've been meaning to change that for a while, thanks for reminding us.

We are definitely looking to expand beyond the tech/silicon valley scene. We only started in this space because it's the kind of stuff we read, but we're looking into which spaces make the most sense to scale into, and we index new people every day.

Which areas/use-cases would you be interested in seeing?

Probably like a lot of you on HN, in my downtime, I closely follow people that I think are high-signal in their various domains (science, computers, startups, longevity, philosophy, cryptocurrencies, etc).

Once I find someone, I consume all their content obsessively, reading all their books, tweets, essays, and watch their videos/podcasts.

But I noticed a few problems: 1. A person's content is scattered around the web on multiple platforms. 2. Twitter is too fresh and noisy. It's hard to find someone's most seminal work across the years. 3. It's unusually difficult to be told/notified every time they release something new. People don't always like to self-advertise all their podcast appearances, or panels/interviews they've done.

So we built alias to address these issues - we've indexed all the content on some of the best creators in many fields, for you to subscribe to, which means you get an email whenever they release content.

For info on how this is built - Some of the indexing is done by cron jobs that fetch from RSS feeds, utilizes the Twitter API, and scrapes the web, but also some of it is manual, performed data contractors.

We'd love to hear your feedback and also - whose profile would you like to see on the site next?