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Congrats on the raise :) I just tried Prismatic, and while it seems interesting I don't think I would become a regular user. Though I may not the target audien

by hpvic03 14y ago

Congrats on the raise :) I just tried Prismatic, and while it seems interesting I don't think I would become a regular user. Though I may not the target audience. I'm usually satisfied with Hacker News and The NY Times, though occasionally I'll look at other mainstream news sites like CNN to make sure that I'm getting a well rounded idea of what's going on in the world. I have Reddit blocked on my computer, but I'll look at it on my phone for comedy & interesting news. After integrating with Facebook and Gmail, these are my current Prismatic headlines: * The Huffington Post: Release Of Cult Sandwich Slated For Dec. 17, McDonald's Announces (Bad) * RollingStone: On the Charts: Alicia Keys' 'Girl on Fire' Leads Lukewarm Week (Bad) * Webmonkey: A Look at the Future of CSS (Okay) * Complex.com: Inside Johnny Depp's New $17.5 Million Home in Nashville, Tennessee (Really bad) * Skysports: Graeme Smith determined South Africa maintain momentum against New Zealand (Really bad) The problem I see is that (a) my Facebook likes aren't necessarily representative of what I want to read about, and (b) even if they were, your system doesn't know what priority to give each like. The result looks to me like a page full of linkbait. My experience may not be representative, but I thought I'd share it with you as it might be helpful in fine tuning your product.

aero142 14y ago
Agree, but let me ask you this. Do you want a personalized news feed of only things you are interested in? They are working on making that and I'm not aware of anyone else trying. It's not there yet but I like the idea.
- hpvic03 14y ago
  I don't really see how news can be "personalized." News isn't personal, it's just "what happened." It can be separated into categories and sub-categories ad infinitum, and I could subscribe to those categories, but I can already do that by going to the news site I want, clicking on the sub-category that I'm interested in, and adding it to a feed reader. Thus, personalizing my news by auto-subscribing me to sub-categories that the system "thinks" I'm interested in doesn't really solve any problems that I have. The harder problem of news, in my opinion, is determining what's important and interesting and what's not. Time-weighted voting systems like on HN and Reddit do this very effectively. For example, I am generally more interested in the "Most Popular" articles on NY Times than whatever the editors chose to put on the front page. I would be more interested in a startup that tried to create a HN for another vertical, like the movie industry.
  - aero142 14y ago
    There is certainly news I'm more and less interested in. I still think there is room for improvement over general voting systems like Reddit and HN. Something like weighting votes based on voting similarity between users. I don't know whether Prismatic will succeed but I think they are working on the right problem. I want the product they are trying to build, even if they aren't there yet.
    - hpvic03 14y ago
      I get what you're saying -- you could assign a level of importance or interesting-ness to an article that would be different than other people's. I think adding a collaborative filter to HN or Reddit based on what you vote and view could actually work really well - that's a great idea. Maybe we could get Reddit or HN to try it. Any Reddit employees here? I'm assuming PG is too busy to add that to HN, but maybe he could open up the codebase to an ambitious programmer.
- mnicole 14y ago
  > Do you want a personalized news feed of only things you are interested in? They are working on making that and I'm not aware of anyone else trying. Over the years a lot of services have tried to do this exclusively, but Flipboard is the only one that has bridged the gap between "stuff I definitely want to read" and "stuff on the fringes I wouldn't have actively sought but am happy I found."
grayrest 14y ago
I seeded it off twitter, which I primarily use to keep tabs on developers and software projects I care about. I've been happily using it for 5 (?) months now and find it to generally be the highest signal to noise aggregator of tech news that I've used. For comparison, my first few headlines: * Opponents of Egypt's Morsy continue protests (CNN) * Facebook snubs 'Subscribe' button in favor of Twitter-esque 'Follow' on all profile pages (Verge) * Extra-terrestrial life: Closer to encounter (Economist) * node-webkit « Another Word For It * Rethinking Mobile First (avc)
- hpvic03 14y ago
  That's interesting. So it seems that Twitter integration provides the best content. I'm don't use Twitter very much, so that's not an option for me. If my experience is the same as every other non-twitter user's, then it's likely that Prismatic's user base will be limited only to twitter users, unless they can improve their product.
  - grayrest 14y ago
    It's not the service you base it off of, it's what the people you're following on the service share. If you're friends with a bunch of people on facebook who share hollywood/pop culture stuff, that's what you get. If you follow a bunch of geeks on twitter, you get the topics that show up on HN.
jsnell 14y ago
That matches my experience pretty well. The initial sets of results after seeding from my Google social graph / reader subscriptions were mostly about the petty internals of US politics, US professional and college-level sports, unimportant local news from different parts of the US, CSS, and random celebrities. That's about the least interesting thing I can think of, and I can't imagine how it ended up with that kind of article selection from my personal data. But worse, after 15 minutes of mostly dismissing these kinds of articles (and clicking on anything even remotely interesting), it was still mostly giving results in these kinds of categories. Is this the wrong way to use the site? I have no idea, since there are no usage instructions anywhere. Right now it needs to be way more aggressive about early negative signals, and introduce more variety rather than try yet another pro-sport article to check whether I'd be more interested in that than the previous 10. Because it's hard to believe that a lot of users are going to persist if the initial results are persistently bad, no matter how pretty the typography.
- mikeklaas 14y ago
  For those trying out the automatic start, I'd be curious to see how your experience compares with Zite's auto-twitter/google reader/fb startup, if you're willing to give it a shot.

by hpvic03 14y ago

aero142 14y ago

Agree, but let me ask you this. Do you want a personalized news feed of only things you are interested in? They are working on making that and I'm not aware of anyone else trying. It's not there yet but I like the idea.

hpvic03 14y ago
I don't really see how news can be "personalized." News isn't personal, it's just "what happened." It can be separated into categories and sub-categories ad infinitum, and I could subscribe to those categories, but I can already do that by going to the news site I want, clicking on the sub-category that I'm interested in, and adding it to a feed reader. Thus, personalizing my news by auto-subscribing me to sub-categories that the system "thinks" I'm interested in doesn't really solve any problems that I have. The harder problem of news, in my opinion, is determining what's important and interesting and what's not. Time-weighted voting systems like on HN and Reddit do this very effectively. For example, I am generally more interested in the "Most Popular" articles on NY Times than whatever the editors chose to put on the front page. I would be more interested in a startup that tried to create a HN for another vertical, like the movie industry.
- aero142 14y ago
  There is certainly news I'm more and less interested in. I still think there is room for improvement over general voting systems like Reddit and HN. Something like weighting votes based on voting similarity between users. I don't know whether Prismatic will succeed but I think they are working on the right problem. I want the product they are trying to build, even if they aren't there yet.
  - hpvic03 14y ago
    I get what you're saying -- you could assign a level of importance or interesting-ness to an article that would be different than other people's. I think adding a collaborative filter to HN or Reddit based on what you vote and view could actually work really well - that's a great idea. Maybe we could get Reddit or HN to try it. Any Reddit employees here? I'm assuming PG is too busy to add that to HN, but maybe he could open up the codebase to an ambitious programmer.
mnicole 14y ago
> Do you want a personalized news feed of only things you are interested in? They are working on making that and I'm not aware of anyone else trying. Over the years a lot of services have tried to do this exclusively, but Flipboard is the only one that has bridged the gap between "stuff I definitely want to read" and "stuff on the fringes I wouldn't have actively sought but am happy I found."

grayrest 14y ago

I seeded it off twitter, which I primarily use to keep tabs on developers and software projects I care about. I've been happily using it for 5 (?) months now and find it to generally be the highest signal to noise aggregator of tech news that I've used. For comparison, my first few headlines: * Opponents of Egypt's Morsy continue protests (CNN) * Facebook snubs 'Subscribe' button in favor of Twitter-esque 'Follow' on all profile pages (Verge) * Extra-terrestrial life: Closer to encounter (Economist) * node-webkit « Another Word For It * Rethinking Mobile First (avc)

hpvic03 14y ago
That's interesting. So it seems that Twitter integration provides the best content. I'm don't use Twitter very much, so that's not an option for me. If my experience is the same as every other non-twitter user's, then it's likely that Prismatic's user base will be limited only to twitter users, unless they can improve their product.
- grayrest 14y ago
  It's not the service you base it off of, it's what the people you're following on the service share. If you're friends with a bunch of people on facebook who share hollywood/pop culture stuff, that's what you get. If you follow a bunch of geeks on twitter, you get the topics that show up on HN.

jsnell 14y ago

That matches my experience pretty well. The initial sets of results after seeding from my Google social graph / reader subscriptions were mostly about the petty internals of US politics, US professional and college-level sports, unimportant local news from different parts of the US, CSS, and random celebrities. That's about the least interesting thing I can think of, and I can't imagine how it ended up with that kind of article selection from my personal data. But worse, after 15 minutes of mostly dismissing these kinds of articles (and clicking on anything even remotely interesting), it was still mostly giving results in these kinds of categories. Is this the wrong way to use the site? I have no idea, since there are no usage instructions anywhere. Right now it needs to be way more aggressive about early negative signals, and introduce more variety rather than try yet another pro-sport article to check whether I'd be more interested in that than the previous 10. Because it's hard to believe that a lot of users are going to persist if the initial results are persistently bad, no matter how pretty the typography.

mikeklaas 14y ago
For those trying out the automatic start, I'd be curious to see how your experience compares with Zite's auto-twitter/google reader/fb startup, if you're willing to give it a shot.