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Maybe I'm in the minority, but I take an interest in the latest software/tech/ideas for dealing with the hard problem of moderation, and I had never heard of Sm
by danso 8y ago
Maybe I'm in the minority, but I take an interest in the latest software/tech/ideas for dealing with the hard problem of moderation, and I had never heard of Smyte, until now (which made me think TC was being literal with its "Twitter 'smytes' customers" headline).
Apparently, they were a dominant player in this space, such that its shutdown impacted such a wide array of significant-sized companies, from ZenDesk to TaskRabbit to Meetup. Even more surprising is that they were part of YC (W15), and yet from what I can tell, have only had one significant mention on HN from 3 years ago (65 upvotes, 11 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9758464 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9758464
I would've guessed that Smyte would've been the kind of Silicon Valley business that was made for media hype (what with all the attention/criticism given to fake news and Google/FB/Twitter moderation). Then again, it does seem that content moderation -- important as it may be -- isn't a field as sexy as AI/deep-learning and other forms of automation.
- bsimpson 8y agoThey were also noteworthy for their founder Pete Hunt, who is largely credited with instigating the open sourcing of React. (As I recall, it was internal Facebook tech that he extracted into a separate library when he moved from FB to Instagram after that merger.)
- dacox 8y agoWhich is funny because they were actually dabbling in some AI/ML.