So why a News Feed?

78 points by tokenadult 3 years ago | 57 comments

xwowsersx 3 years ago |

> Remember when social media was fun, introduced you to big ideas and cool people, and actually made you smarter? Remember when it didn't waste your time and make you angry or sad? When you could disagree with someone without being threatened or insulted? We want to bring that back with Post.

> We believe that all humans are created equal, endowed with unalienable rights that include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, regardless of their gender identity, religion, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, or beliefs.

> If you do not agree with this principle, Post is not for you. We believe in freedom of speech and will oppose any government's attempt to censor speech on our platform. However, we have rules, which we plan to rigorously enforce via content moderation, with the help of our community.

These all seem like lofty goals, as they themselves characterize it, but how exactly is any of this going to be accomplished? This is just a list of want-to-haves. Having these goals doesn't make you unique. What tech, tools, and processes you have to make them a reality is what makes you unique. What exactly are those here?

paxys 3 years ago | |

I remember a time when social media was like they describe. It was when I was in college and we used it to share photos of each other drunk at parties. It turned into a disaster the moment people decided it was also a good place to discuss news and politics.

If you want to recreate "fun social media", focus on the things that made it fun in the first place and remove everything else. And you'll be too late, because plenty of apps (TikTok the most notable one, and others like BeReal, Gas, Snapchat) are doing that very well today.

If the goal is to create a "fun" political discussion forum, well then best of luck with that. They are going to need a lot more than just goals and prayers.

INTPenis 3 years ago | | |

>It turned into a disaster the moment people decided it was also a good place to discuss news and politics.

Nail on head right here.

I was never big on social media, got into StatusNet (later ActivityPub) back in 2017 because it seemed cool technically.

So for years it was a very nice place where people mostly discussed very niche topics like computers and art.

Then Elon decided to stir the pot by trying to buy twitter and two huge waves of twitter users came over in 2022.

Now it's toxic, and I honestly believe it's because of the political and news discussions. Well they go hand in hand because people link to the news about what's going on in politics, and this is the catalyst.

JakeAl 3 years ago | | |

I disagree. People use social media for different purposes. One is to post about yourself, my least favorite, another is to post links to information and knowledge of interest to those with similar interests. People posting about themselves do nothing to up the IQ and awareness of the population and lead to mental health issues as well as feed narcissism. News and information can lead to learning and debate and all those great things that came out of classroom discussions in college. It only goes bad where there's a culture clash or people are unsophisticated, ideologues, or lack critical thinking skills. For rational and curious minded people, it's great though.

j45 3 years ago | |

It wasn’t lofty. It was real and existed that way. For some time too.

Maybe the scientific approach to manufacturing and maintaining adoption and the ways to do it was part of the issue.

Experiencing this early way expanded your mind and viewpoints, instead of feeding your more on the track you are to keep you scrolling. It wasn’t as much as everything was new, only that there were so many different things being experienced by others.

Unfortunately, things went towards depth instead of breadth and folks doubled down instead of discovering and being often to viewpoints and things they didn’t know anything about.

Still, maybe there’s a path forward to have a better self discovery service that’s focused on growing throw exposing to new ideas instead of doubling down on what you are today and cementing that in place.

The primacy effect is powerful for good things as much as not.

Nimitz14 3 years ago | | |

It existed that way when you yourself were younger and knew less and there were was a high prob that whoever you were talking to could teach you something.

teenagers still experience it the same way.

watwut 3 years ago | | |

Arguably, a lot of early radicalization happen because folks are open to accepting viewpoints and things they know nothing about, more and more toward extreme.

annoyedthrowawy 3 years ago | |

> We believe in freedom of speech

That just isn't possible. If you try and "oppose any government's attempt to censor speech on our platform" you'll just be arrested on terrorism charges and face 25 years in jail unless you take your site down or give backdoor access.[0]

I fucking HATE these people with zero experience coming along and saying "oh we're free speech", you can bet your ass they'll cave on the first DMCA/GDPR/takedown/door kicked in notice they get.

Note. I'm not in anyway condoning "hate speech" or any other abuses of free speech, but I'm just annoyed that these kind of people shit out these meaningless words without any understanding of what "true" free speech entails. And there's a lot more bad than good in actually supporting it.

[0] personal experience

mr_mitm 3 years ago | | |

> [0] personal experience

Uhh, can you elaborate?

jug 3 years ago |

They haven't even launched yet and are already talking of The Personalized News Feed and the old discussion about a chronological feed is already going in the comments.

No thanks. I already see where this one is going. Chronology and non-personalizing has become a good litmus test over the last decade of social.

I'll get my news, viral and not, on Mastodon instead. It's such a relief to be there. Like being able to breathe fresh air, not a stale echo chamber that is built for me.

mccorrinall 3 years ago | |

In all honesty, Mastodon feels like a bigger echo chamber than Twitter. At least for me.

The people on the server are somehow all like minded people. There is rarely any disagreeing going on. The missing exposure to diverse perspective makes mastodon boring to me, and is the reason why I stopped using it.

Maybe I used it wrong ¯\(°_°)/¯

CaptainFever 3 years ago | | |

That’s what I found too[0]. Made me realise that algorithms aren’t to blame for echo chambers and outrage; it is us humans that are at fault with this.

Examples of echo chamber behaviour on Mastodon: all differing replies are labelled as “replyguys”, but agreeing replies are allowed. Defederation is common due to drama between administrators. Debates are discouraged and free speech is commonly villianised.

Examples of outrage behaviour on Mastodon: Check out the Fediblock hashtag (don’t), which has a big “outrage of the week” tone, everything from Hive to Raspberry Pi to journalists.

I’ll try to add a bit of value to my comment. The way I’m resolving this is to recognise this and filter them out actively. This is one place where algorithms do indeed make it harder (because it can “sneak back in”). Particularly, I filter out all political posts and any anger posts, especially anger posts about an out-group (“us vs them”).

Is this creating an echo chamber as well? Maybe. But I can try rationalising this by saying that an echo chamber of neutrality is better than an echo chamber of a particular side, political or otherwise.

[0] https://mastodon.social/explore

nindalf 3 years ago | | |

The penalty for wrongthink on mastodon is banning. This ensures ideological homogeneity within each instance. For many people, this is a feature not a bug.

college_physics 3 years ago |

People pay for a place to live and almost every amenity therein except the air we breathe. We pay for the electricity that moves bits around. For telephone lines. For computing hardware. For connecting to the internet. For getting information in print.

But for a certain type of software and information retrieval / news exchange, that builds on all this stuff we pay for, hurrah, we dont have to pay, not with money anyway, we just have to relinquish a bit a value (become a transparent, monitored and manipulated object).

Spot the odd business model. A business model that combines obvious amorality and social regression with economic shortsightness: You cannot build the digital society solely on monetizing personal data.

Yes, people will have to pay for journalism in the digital age, just like they have to pay individually for everything else that is not a public good paid collectively via taxes.

How we get there is not so important. No, people cannot be bothered to subscribe to hundreds of individual sources. We need decent intermediares (many of them and competing) that will (for a fee, lets say €10 per month) provide access to a basket of newspapers, journals etc.

The idea is an old one but executing it is difficult when you have to compete against above said aberrant business model. Sometimes politicians and legislators need to grow a spine or otherwise the very system that empowered them will collapse

clnq 3 years ago |

I agree with the ideas in this post but I am skeptical about their implementation.

Users are shown a headline, an associated picture, and first 2-4 sentences of an article. Then they can buy the rest for ¢1-5. It feels like something that could be very easily exploited by clickbait. Although it currently does not seem to be.

I do like the current assortment of news. It's not like other social media sites where news content is personalized to the user's likes and dislikes, or biases. Unfortunately, it looks like Post. are looking into news personalization. I just really miss the time when facts like what's relevant in the world were not "personalized".

clnq 3 years ago | |

Looks like the Fortune Magazine is experimenting with ¢25 articles now.

pohl 3 years ago | |

Been on there since before the “dohicky” days and I have yet to see a post behind such a paywall. I know they want to enable this, but you don’t actually see it in the wild.

clnq 3 years ago | | |

On the main page, there are three tabs - "Following", "Explore" and "News". At least that's what I see.

chrisco255 3 years ago |

When should an app do a wait list? Almost never. I get so annoyed at wait lists I never bother to participate or come back. Clubhouse infamously had this gated access thing on its launch and I don't think they had opened it up before Twitter launched Spaces.

How can you expect to build a presence in a world with infinite options if you make people wait some indeterminate time to use your app?

Sorry. Might as well not launch until you're ready to take the load. And if moderation is the concern, it's better to build a reputation system that unlocks features over time rather than block it out altogether.

charcircuit 3 years ago | |

It's marketing strategy.

Would you rather be a 1k user app where no one is excluded or would you rather be a 100k user app while excluding 5k people.

dubatax21 3 years ago | |

Robinhood launched with 1mm people on their waitlist - it was insanely successful

tqi 3 years ago |

> We want Real People to access Real News the way they want to, in their feed, alongside the rest of their content. People should be able to interact and share through Civil Conversations.

Implying what, that other companies don't?

People think social media was freeloading off of newspapers, but the reality imo is that the internet killed classifieds and consolidated the market around a handful of national papers (NYT et Al). News and especially political news is one of main things that make social media so miserable, so if anything platforms would have preferred to have less of it.

JakeAl 3 years ago | |

Some don't. Since the rise of gamification design has in many cases been to promote clicks for ad revenue.

pessimizer 3 years ago |

The reason for the drop in newsroom employees is consolidation a order of magnitude greater than was legal before Clinton's Telecommunications Act.

hsn915 3 years ago |

The text on the landing page is odd. It reads:

I remember no such thing. The only difference between the old and the new internet is in the new internet, the platform company tries to decide what's allowed and unallowed discource, whereas in the past you could find all sorts of unorthodox and heretical discussions in lots of places! They still exist, but incredibly more difficult to find because they are drowned out by the mainstream which has gotten a lot bigger.

pohl 3 years ago | |

Could you give a few specific examples of unorthodox and heretical topics you wish you could find?

tiffanyh 3 years ago |

So what’s the revenue model and how are these publishers benefiting (it’s not their platform and not their reader)?

alxmng 3 years ago |

I might be the odd one out, but I don't want diverse news sources and perspectives. I want a source I trust to inform me about things that matter from a shared perspective and ideology.

headsoup 3 years ago |

Another attempt to basically recreate forums at scale again, just like them all before.

If you can't moderate against your policies at scale, you'll be no more successful. Even using 'clever' AI and algorhythms is useless vs a manageable community size and good moderators.

You can't be a social platform for all and have it both ways in opening free speech up on all topics but with easy moderation.

There's a very good reason most internet forums had/have specific rules against discussing politics and religion, and here we are trying to include them at scale. Ha. This is especially hard if you want it to be publicly open for all on all topics.

notatoad 3 years ago | |

is it though? it looks to me like this is the opposite of trying to scale policies - they're picking premium news that can be trusted to not need their moderation policies, and highlighting that.

the riff-raff can be subject to moderation policies, but there's no need to hire moderators to watch over reuters or propublica.

scarface74 3 years ago |

> the tech platforms refuse to share revenue with publishers.

This sounds like the same talking point that Rupert Murdock used to convince Australia to pass a law that basically forced Facebook and Google to give him some of their revenue.

https://www.cjr.org/business_of_news/australia-pressured-goo...

But every time that Facebook and Google say “okay instead of us paying you, we just won’t put you on our site”, publishers start whining

jdminhbg 3 years ago |

Yes, it was before the journalists found Twitter.

anticodon 3 years ago |

"Investigative journalism", yadda, yadda.

Journalism is dead. There is only propaganda (2-3 kinds of propaganda). Or maybe it was always the case only that I never noticed that.

There are 8 billion people in this world, close to 200 countries. Every second, there are millions of different events happen everywhere. Someone is born, someone dies, someone is killed, someone is promoted, some building is built, some building is being demolished.

There is simply no way to describe all this in any newspaper. The more I live, the more I see that every paper, TV channel, blogger, carefully selects tiny percent of facts out of billions of facts that happen every day. Only those facts that push the agenda or fits existing view.

There's no independent news and can't be. I don't know even what happens in a district which is 5 km away from my house. Thinking that I'm perfectly aware of what happens in some country that is 1000, 2000, or 6000 km away from my home is insanity.

procinct 3 years ago |

Sounds very similar to what Blendle were trying to achieve?

aag 3 years ago | |

It does. I'm a happy Blendle customer.

https://blendle.com/

holler 3 years ago | |

Yep people have talked about using micropayments for news for at least a decade.

d23 3 years ago |

I’ve been wanting this sort of business model to take off for the last ten years. I hope this works out for them.

jamesgreenleaf 3 years ago |

I'm impressed that they've managed to clone both Twitter's app, and their old culture.

mostlysimilar 3 years ago |

I can't figure out how to access the desktop version of the site, I'm stuck on the mobile. Any ideas?

tokenadult 3 years ago | |

To access Post on my desktop computer, I just any browser to navigate to Post [dot] news. It's just a website. I have stored cookies on one browser I use, and I typically start up that browser with Post as one default tab. I have another browser I use for testing websites that shows me what Post looks like to users who have never logged in.

https://post.news/

staller 3 years ago | |

they are doing a mobile first approach, there is no desktop version.

tokenadult 3 years ago | | |

Post is currently a progressive web app. There is no immediate plan to build dedicated mobile apps for Post.