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(FYI looks like Needgap is down right now; Cloudflare is showing me a 521 response) There are a few reasons. The biggest one is distribution. I came up with th

(FYI looks like Needgap is down right now; Cloudflare is showing me a 521 response) There are a few reasons. The biggest one is distribution. I came up with the idea for The Sample because I was working on an essay recommender system[1] and I was trying to figure out how to incentivise people to share it. I've built a referral system[2] into The Sample, and whenever someone submits a newsletter, I send them a referral link. If they share the link, their newsletter gets forwarded more often. So far it's been promising; last I checked, about 15% of our subscribers came from referral links. As The Sample gets larger, the referral system will become more compelling (network effects). I've used a fair amount of paid advertising to get things going, but after some threshold, I think it will grow extremely fast with just the referral system. The next reason is implementation-related. I prefer to use collaborative filtering as much as possible, falling back to content-based filtering only when there isn't enough rating data for collaborative filtering. But for collaborative filtering, you need long-lived items. If you're recommending news articles, by the time you collect much rating/interaction data, the article will be stale and you won't want to recommend it more anyway[3]. Recommending newsletters is IMO an excellent way to combine ML with human curation: humans figure out what news is good, and ML helps readers find curators who are good/relevant to them. [1] https://essays.findka.com https://essays.findka.com [2] https://jacobobryant.com/p/an-algorithm-for-driving-newsletter/ https://jacobobryant.com/p/an-algorithm-for-driving-newslett... [3] Unless perhaps you're a large news site and can collect lots of interaction data quickly. An interesting thing about my situation is that I'm trying to bootstrap a recommender system from the beginning, whereas most recommender systems today were built as an add-on for another product, after it already had lots of users.

Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
It does make business sense to deliver newsletter vs news directly as the former is B2B. The implementation related decision sounds interesting, I need to think more about this as I wonder whether news in newsletters are anyways going to have limited lifespan. Moreover investment of time on user side for newsletter delivering news increases with each newsletter vs One newsletter delivering what I want. Congratulations for the launch, I feel recommendation systems need innovation and so I support your endeavor. > (FYI looks like Needgap is down right now; Cloudflare is showing me a 521 response) Sorry for that, It's been resolved now. You're welcomed to join the discussion on 'Get me the news I need, not the news I want' by explaining what Sample does to address that problem.
- jacobobryant 5y ago
  > Moreover investment of time on user side for newsletter delivering news increases with each newsletter vs One newsletter delivering what I want. You might be interested in this article[1] and the discussion of subscribed vs. filtered sources. It'd be nice to have a convenient way to assign different priorities to newsletters/content sources. So for a few, you'd get every issue, and for the rest, they'd be combined together in some way. > You're welcomed to join the discussion on 'Get me the news I need, not the news I want' by explaining what Sample does to address that problem. I'm not sure I have much insight about needs vs. wants, but you might be interested in The Factual.[2] [1] https://jacobobryant.com/p/the-pros-and-cons-of-algorithmic/ https://jacobobryant.com/p/the-pros-and-cons-of-algorithmic/ [2] https://thefactual.com/ https://thefactual.com/
  - Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
    In the words of the bayesian investor[1], > Do you want to focus your attention on problems that are most likely to hurt you? That's the difference between want vs need. I may want to read all the news posted on HN, But only a fraction of it might be what I need in terms of what I need for betterment of my well-being, career etc. [1] http://www.bayesianinvestor.com/blog/index.php/2021/06/13/avoid-news-part-2-what-the-stock-market-taught-me-about-news/ http://www.bayesianinvestor.com/blog/index.php/2021/06/13/av...

Abishek_Muthian 5y ago

It does make business sense to deliver newsletter vs news directly as the former is B2B. The implementation related decision sounds interesting, I need to think more about this as I wonder whether news in newsletters are anyways going to have limited lifespan. Moreover investment of time on user side for newsletter delivering news increases with each newsletter vs One newsletter delivering what I want. Congratulations for the launch, I feel recommendation systems need innovation and so I support your endeavor. > (FYI looks like Needgap is down right now; Cloudflare is showing me a 521 response) Sorry for that, It's been resolved now. You're welcomed to join the discussion on 'Get me the news I need, not the news I want' by explaining what Sample does to address that problem.

jacobobryant 5y ago
> Moreover investment of time on user side for newsletter delivering news increases with each newsletter vs One newsletter delivering what I want. You might be interested in this article[1] and the discussion of subscribed vs. filtered sources. It'd be nice to have a convenient way to assign different priorities to newsletters/content sources. So for a few, you'd get every issue, and for the rest, they'd be combined together in some way. > You're welcomed to join the discussion on 'Get me the news I need, not the news I want' by explaining what Sample does to address that problem. I'm not sure I have much insight about needs vs. wants, but you might be interested in The Factual.[2] [1] https://jacobobryant.com/p/the-pros-and-cons-of-algorithmic/ https://jacobobryant.com/p/the-pros-and-cons-of-algorithmic/ [2] https://thefactual.com/ https://thefactual.com/
- Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
  In the words of the bayesian investor[1], > Do you want to focus your attention on problems that are most likely to hurt you? That's the difference between want vs need. I may want to read all the news posted on HN, But only a fraction of it might be what I need in terms of what I need for betterment of my well-being, career etc. [1] http://www.bayesianinvestor.com/blog/index.php/2021/06/13/avoid-news-part-2-what-the-stock-market-taught-me-about-news/ http://www.bayesianinvestor.com/blog/index.php/2021/06/13/av...