Slashdot Mirror
CmdrTaco Launches Trove, a Curated News Startup
jigamo writes "The Verge reports on a new app from Slashdot co-founder Rob Malda, a.k.a. CmdrTaco, which aims to provide a user-powered and -curated stream of news. It's called Trove, and it's currently available on the web as well as iPhones and iPads. From the article: 'Trove basically lets users opt in to feeds of stories that align with their interests. Users are encouraged to curate "troves," collections of stories that relate to a particular theme.' You can also read CmdrTaco's announcement post."
Rob says, "At its simplest, Slashdot combines editor quality control and insight with crowd-sourced harvesting to cover the 'News for Nerds' space. Trove uses automated harvesting and machine learning to simplify a workflow for curators interested in ANY topic. The idea is that this opens up non-nerdy subjects. This will let us maintain a strong signal/noise ratio for casual users less interested in expending effort to get their news across diverse subject matter."
It's nice looking, laid out a little different, and puts slightly different rules down, but fundamentally, it's a reddit clone. I don't like reddit, and I can't imagine this doing much better for me.
So, he forked reddit?
That wasn't true even when Taco was around. Not even close. :-P
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
it will be better than slashdot
Next thing you know, you'll do a dead tree edition.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
He can't even get rid of dupes and have proper grammar and spelling in story summaries. What makes us think that he'll actually do any better?
This will let us maintain a strong signal/noise ratio for casual users less interested in expending effort to get their news across diverse subject matter."
We're just gonna put the most popular shit on the page to generate the most hits so that we can make the most money on ads.
Cut to the chase people. Just go all Talk Radio - just do really emotional content: abortion, gay marriage, Creationism, and other bullshit that gets the public's blood boiling. It IS funny though that it's pretty much ALL religious related in one way or another.
In the meantime, I'm gonna start Popcorn-FuckYou.com. PU - for short - is for folks who want to sit back and watch everyone else argue and fight over bullshit.
My customers will watch politicians, media dipshit manipulators - like Hannity and everyone else on Fox News and Talk Radio, and the echo peanut gallery that this website and all others have become.
Trove
The best news stories picked by people who share your interests.
There's the problem, right on the launch page.
"align with their interests"
I know most people want this - but I get the feeling we would all be better off if we paid more attention to news that doesn't necessarily interest us.
No inline summaries. Less linkability than pinterest. Lame.
aims to provide a user-powered and -curated stream of news.
Uhm...good idea, I guess.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
No it doesn't.
It sounds like this may be summed up as "news for everyone, stuff that may or may not matter."
In other words, pretty much the same as modern /., amirite?
In seriousness, though, it seems like the big difference is a "filtering system" (even though it works not by computerized filter, but by a thousand foo-obsessed types manually sorting new stories into foo and non-foo, the net effect for the "normal" user is that they can pick any of those human filters) so that nerds could filter it down to classic /. type stuff, arts guys can filter it to their stuff, etc..
That's great and all, but the big reason I started spending time on /. back in the day, and the only reason I eventually registered a nick instead of leaving when I got fed up with the AJAXy mess that is unregistered users' only option, is the discussion system. For all its problems (groupthink etc.), it's still way better than most of the net.
So I guess whether I end up spending much time on Trove will depend immensely on how the discussion system works in practice. Of course that's a function of both the discussion system itself, and what sort of user base it attracts -- after all, a high enough concentration of trolls and assholes can overwhelm any technical measures.
Okay, so say I want to 'follow' a 'channel' on Trove.. but I have no interest in using the website. I know, I know.. using the website is what's actually desired - the same applies to Twitter and facebook and google+ and etc. - but nonetheless I set things up so that I can 'follow' people on them anyway by using either...
1. The feed provided for me, which means I can just get posts in any feed reader, including my custom one.
2. The API they make available - even if they do make me jump through hoops with OAuth and a ton of other things that have everything to do with 'posing on behalf of a user' crap when really all I want is read-only access to already public things - so that I can include it in my custom one.
3. Yoink whatever data source they're using, sometimes having to impersonate the site or prior access because they got wise to people using that data source, didn't want them to, and put up artificial roadblocks.
4. Scrape. Yeah, that's right, Google. You don't provide a feed, you make the API limited to just a few dozen queries per day, while serving the desired content to a bajillion people every day? I'll just waste bandwidth and scrape.
So, where does Trove fit in? I'm not seeing a feed anywhere in the page source, I'm not seeing anything about an API (read-only or otherwise), I see I can grab the datasource through e.g. http://trove.com/me/channels/C... and get a tidy little json packet - but maybe Trove frowns upon doing so, or I could scrape (but would have to use the js-enabled scraper and boy do I ever not want to do that).
Please tell me the Trove developers know better.. or at least plan to know better with an announcement of API/feeds 'coming soon' .. or an official "developers: grab the json datasources if you just want read-only access of public data, that's cool with us - peace out."
Here's example links to the "actual site" that doesn't require you to sign in:
Tech News: http://trove.com/me/channels/1...
U.S. News: http://trove.com/me/channels/1...
Once you get addicted to money, it's hard to stop craving even more of it. Even most billionaires can't stop.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
editor quality control
I see we're having truthiness issues.
requires javascript, still refused to load past a "loading" circle with javascript enabled for main website. OS and browser also spoofed to similar.
How about just a website? iOS is nice and all, but why should I bother with a site that requires a specific app for it to function?
Sorry, no sale. If the apps were iOS, Android, and I could access it via a PC and a Web browser, I'd pay a subscription fee. Otherwise, it has no use to me.
Taco has demonstrated that he will sell out for the right price. After that it's only a matter of time before you start seeing featured ads in your news feed.
Taco supposedly personally made between $40-50 million from slashdot. I'm not sure he even needs to work anymore. He is probably just doing it for fun now.
Really? IIRC, Slashdot sold for $1.5M with a few million in additional cash and stock over the next few years.
http://www.salon.com/1999/09/1...
Did Andover do so well that he eventually earned 10X+ the selling price of the site?
There is no "Login with Slashdot?".
Or "Log in" with Slashdot?
Page title uses "Log-in". Any other permutations?
You can have my SIG when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
I think that's "combines" as in "runs through a combine harvester".
Well that's news to me. We have quality control here?
Liberty in your lifetime
What can you do? You can ignore them or try to explain why their arguments are nonsense -- just like we do with the much larger number of much better funded climate deniers whose rejection of science is much more profound and much more dangerous.
You got that far? My stopping point:
If your website needs a dedicated app on mobile platforms, you're either doing something wrong or doing something unethical.
I never really understood the beef with the American slant. It's an American website. It's read mostly by Americans, and has been since the day it launched. It covers international issues in somewhat approximate measure to the participation of international nerds, but it's never been a website which specifically attempted not to have an American slant. It is what it is and it has always been that.
Any site that comes up with a list of a dozen or more sites that I have to permit requests (RequestPolicy) and scripts (NoScript) to function screams we're more interested in tracking you than providing a usable site. Next.
Looks like the great founder of slashdot knows picks iOS over Android. What does the "omg Apple suuuuxxxx" community think of that?
Well, there were typos and dupes, so the 1.5M got modded up.
rewriting history since 2109
Is it unfair for slashdot to be "American slanted"? I've always thought of it as an American site. Does the fact that it is available in other countries obligate it to give them a proportional share of the news?
Evidently, the key to understanding recursion is to begin by understanding recursion. The rest is easy.
Are you kidding me? I'd say at least 50% of the web sites I visit these days have a "download our app" link. I'd say over 90% have a "like us on Facebook" or "Follow us on Twitter" link.
Now, I believe this precludes neither wrong nor unethical (or both), but it seems the marketing weenies have decided that "ZOMG, we need teh app".
Me, I don't know why people don't just use the web -- though, that becomes perilous when they decide "I see you're on a mobile device, so let me redirect you to our shitty mobile website so it's not possible to find the link you were following".
In my experience, every mobile web site I've been redirected to is complete crap.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Who the fuck reads /. for the articles?
We read for the comments and the community.
We may not be as homogenous a community as we were 10 years ago, but we're still nerds. And the comment system here is the best that anyone's come up with yet. Reading at +5 threshold is always insightful. Reading at -1 is often inciteful.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
You're launching iOS first, rather then Android. What is this, 2012?
Might as well tag the article as flamebait.
No Android client. Less editors than Reddit. Lame.
Orange whip? Orange whip? Three orange whips.
VA Linux bought Andover.net in cash and stock for over $1B a year after the IPO. So yeah, I'd say that Rob probably made out in the $40-50M range depending on when/if he sold those options...
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-236456.html
...another site, like Slashdot, that will be behind other sites in news....
"...The idea is that this opens up non-nerdy subjects."
Great. Another porn aggregator.
Let me fix that for you:
"Slashdot used to combine editor quality control and insight with crowd-sourced harvesting to cover the 'News for Nerds' space."
.
ML is the way to go, the trouble is that it's really really hard to do. I like the idea of having users categorize items so that you can use the hand-classified data to train on and then scale up with machine learning, but that's only a part of the puzzle. It's more difficult to properly curate what is and is not headline-worthy without catering to a basic popularity contest. Good luck with that, and may you continue to be optimistic!
I've always hoped that Slashdot itself could use ML to extend comment moderation: allow five points for human moderation, two for meta-moderation (given enough reinforcement), and three for a third system based on ML (trained by meta-moderation-confirmed moderation). Average the direct moderation (-1 to 5) and the indirect moderation (meta+ML, -1 to 5), adjust by +1/-1/-2 for AC/karma/user-conf, and round up or down based on achievements. Alternatively, make it a ten point system and add them rather than averaging them (fold achievements into karma). I'd start with the ML system as a moderator within the current system, then once it's proven, migrate to the averaging system, then migrate to the ten point scale.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
"Slashdot combines editor quality control and insight with "
This is a joke, right? Some sort of mockery?
If Trove killed Slashdot.
#DeleteChrome
"Slashdot combines editor quality control and insight with crowd-sourced harvesting"
but... there is little to no editor quality control on Slashdot. At least Rob got the advertorial feature of Slashdot used to his personal benefit.
Slashdot combines editor quality control and insight with crowd-sourced harvesting to cover the 'News for Nerds' space.
God, I wish the editors were like that here ;)
But will it support UTF-8?
...the first article in Tech News is a Bitcoin article. What did I expect?
I was expecting to see perhaps a news aggregator. Instead I was directed to some flash-based advertisement for Apple devices. What gives?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
At its simplest, Slashdot combines editor quality control and insight with crowd-sourced harvesting to cover the 'News for Nerds' space.
BWA HA HA HA HA! Apparently CmdrTaco's new career is in comedy.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
I only want stories about ponies!
But on a more serious note... wtf? get money from Apple much? no android? And web sign on is spacebook or twitter only? Not.
Are you kidding? The non-citizens scream about how the U.S. sucks and most of us citizens are ashamed of our own government, around here at least.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Very few sites I visit have an app that I actually use. The ones that do I use for a reason. Example the sportscenter app from ESPN. I use it because it will give me notifications of when teams I enjoy to watch are playing. Sure I could just go to the respective websites or even good the teams and it will show the next game for me. But getting a notification when a game starts I find to be very useful. Other than that I pretty much prefer the web versions over the app versions for everything else.
The only good reason for an app over the web IMO is when you actively want push notifications
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Or are you saying that it has the perspective of the U.S.? Because IT'S A U.S. WEBSITE, for the thousandth time!!
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
A glance at the trove page source reveals login services from wapolabs, which is Washington Post. Please tell me that Slashdot is not in bed with these wingnuts.
You can have my SIG when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
If you are not managing an archival collection, you are not a curator. Get over yourself and find an appropriate descriptive term. meh
As someone who was using Trove.
As someone who visited Trove every morning to find articles about topics of interest (channels).
I am really unhappy.
They broke everything.
Dave Barnes 9 breweries within walking distance of my house
Was the new game coming from Trion Worlds...
Yeah, like Trove.
So I created an account using an email address (which is very well hidden compared to the big twit and FB buttons).
It's interesting, but it has a ways to go.
I selected a few "troves" to follow but I still received things from troves I am not following in my home page feed. (with gray trove name instead of green) Could not figure out how to get rid of those, nothing in the preferences that I can find. You do need to manually refresh after you add or remove troves it seems, to update your home page.
Will keep an eye on it as things improve.
Well, there were typos and dupes, so the 1.5M got modded up.
I thought the $40-50 million was in beowulf clusters of hot grits futures? Once Netcraft confirmed they were dead, the market deflated to a measly $1.5 million.
"At its simplest, Slashdot combines editor quality control and insight"
You're fucking joking me, right? Do you even read your own website, Malda?
Your editors have no quality control (and given the few stories posted daily, that's inexcusable) and obviously have no insight to try fixing errors or missing links or anything until AFTER they get bitched at and the relevant things are posted in the comments section, instead of doing proactive editing before posting.
I could do the job of your entire editorial staff. DICE should save themselves some money by firing all of them, and just hire me instead.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Taco logged onto godaddy, but load.com, crock.com, and digg.com were taken
Well, just saying you have quality control, quality is controlled for the good. Makes me wonder if the lack of quality *is* the desired effect.
Meanwhile at Dice Headquarters...
Tim Lord " Wait! that sentence makes sense and there are only two misspelled words and no run on sentences! Quick change it to an ambiguous split infinitive in the Passive voice!"
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
... has become the anti-nerd site for certain topics like politics unfortunately, it's all hugely american slanted and there is tonnes of ignorance and rejection of science. Slashdot today is nothing like the slashdot of years ago.
Like we really need the European slant? 60 yrs ago they were being consumed by a German with a tiny mustache. It was America who saved their ass. Oh and science is the discovery of new ideas. Problem is people have turned Evolution into a religion and don't want it disproved. Check out the polystrate fossil tree controversy. Or the fact that normal winter (like that of the sixites and seventies) reappeared this year.
No, America didn't save our asses. The Soviets did. You yanks came along for the ride.
Now, in the pacific theater, you yanks actually did accomplish something useful.
I'm not going to bother unless his site lists a UID so I can be some of the hipster first then complain about all the 7-digit young-ins and reminisce about the days before it got popular.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Good apps have superior layout and better UI built for the phone/tablet. So, put me down on the other side of the ledger; I use my phone/tablet much more than laptop or desktop and would rather use the app than navigate the webpage on a small screen. If the app sucks however, well that's a different story.
sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
This sounded interesting, until I went to the site. I don't own any apple devices and I don't use facebook or twitter. I see a small link to create an account with an email address...but I get the sneaky suspicion that this site is less about news and more about harvesting user data to sell.
Oh well. I might be wrong.
"a thousand foo-obsessed types"
Sounds like a place for you, foobar bazbot . . .
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
"Taco has demonstrated that he will sell out for the right price"
That just means he's intelligent.
No, I'm not talking about Slashdot and Trove. I'm actually referring to this part in the summary:
Users are encouraged to curate "troves," collections of stories that relate to a particular theme.
And this Technology News channel as an example.
It looks like Trove has the potential for dozens or even hundreds of channels with the same overall theme. As a non-curator, it looks like you'll have to browse through these channels and decide which ones are worth following. And I already see about a half dozen tech-related channels just attached to the stories listed on the above channel, which means there's going to be a lot of duplication.
I'm not sure how that's useful or convenient, but we'll just have to see...
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
This is a joke, right? /. editors?
Or do you mean limiting the quality of
I've signed up and selected two "troves" to follow (Technology News and Science News). But, on the home page (which I'm assuming is your personal feed when logged in), I'm seeing stories that aren't tagged as being in either channel. I'm also seeing stories on my feed that are tagged as being in that channel, but which do not appear on the page for that channel.
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
Seriously if i see another over-designed piece of shit site drenched in blood orange i will fucking scream. ENOUGH ALREADY!
The dot.com boom made LOTS of people multi-millionaires on paper, but in the form of stock options they couldn't sell for a decade. The bubble burst long before most could even potentially have cashed-in.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I'm not a big fan of those auto-selecting-stories-we-think-you-will-like services. There's too much danger of them making a bubble around you, only showing you the news you agree with anyways, and shielding you from the different and strange and sometimes disagreeable reality.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
So you smash together Tumblr, Google+, and Reddit, and we have... this? Hopefully the Web 2.0 bubble bursts soon, it's getting out of hand.
Who gives a fuck?
I mean really? outside of internet dork-land, who cares?
Hmm looks interesting, Let's go look! (muses some kudos to CmdrTaco for stepping up & creat...
WHAT!?! Umm, we must sign in just to see the news? No CmdrTaco, bad boy. NO!
BitCoin? There's a whole channel for that linked right from the home page:
http://trove.com/me/channels/1...
I looked forward to trying it out, but it required iOS 6. :-( My poor old iPad isn't supported by iOS 6.
At least, I think I did. Where is the UID listed on this new version of Slashdot? :)
Agreed that /. is better then digg, 4chan, reddit, or any of those other emo-news sites. /. could be great if they actually fixed their broken 'ecode' tag, their lame lameness filter, and ,b>if the editors actually did their freakin job. When I think how bad /. is I always go visit another site only to find out it is even worse! Such as no user comments, you can only log in with fazebook of twitter, no moderation, group-think, excessive ad hominem, etc.
--
Redditard: your typical whiny emo reddit teen who down-votes simple because they can; they lack basic critical thinking and their myopic brain is unable to grok, let alone see, a different perspective (POV) no matter how well your argument is laid out. Shame too, because some of the sub-reddits are actually quite good; the problem is that the vast majority of reddit has "mob rule" group-think mentality. This vulgarity spills over and degrades the rest of the site. See: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds#Failures_of_crowd_intelligence
The world is changing. I've been doing "year in review" stuff with clients websites the past month. A trend I am noticing is that mobile users are now half or more of all traffic to many of the sites I manage. One in particular it's 2/3's of the traffic and increasing with almost half of all visits from iOS users. It is getting to the point where we're sitting down next month and drawing up requirement docs for building an iOS and hopfuly Android App by the end of the year.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Mission Control We Have A Problem.
Like a shit load of programming and coding and plagiarism and confidentially and Transparency and FCC and DoJ .... fuck there is no stopping to TROVE.
So CmdFucker, I want to create a TROVE of "Obama Butt Fucks Daughters!" think that will get posted ... SHIT NO LAME GAY FUCKER.
LOL
I'm sure it's great and all but in Australia, you might as well mail the data to me in individual bits per envelope, for the speed that Vimeo buffers down here...So pretty much at that point, I lost interest and decided this is basically Pulse or Flipboard.
What is ML?
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Machine learning.
But with such gem as "make it a ten point system and add them rather than averaging them" (what would it change?), it is hard to take the parent post seriously...
http://trove.nla.gov.au/
Find and get over 385,550,734 Australian and online resources: books, images, historic newspapers, maps, music, archives and more
I thought it was Dice's job to introduce me to non-nerdy news?
It's called Trove, and it's currently available on the web as well as iPhones and iPads.
If only the rest of the web was also available on iPhones and iPads... oh well.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Rob says, "At its simplest, Slashdot combines editor quality control and insight
Really? When was the last time you saw evidence of either of those two things from an editor?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
= No looky
Yes I know I could use chromium/chrome etc but seriously NO.
I have to make an account? I haven't even bothered to make a Slashdot account, and I've been lurking for 10 years!
Machine Learning.
a learning computer.
"...automated harvesting and machine learning..."
Not sure what is being harvested and learned by machines, but I bet it isn't good. At best it will be picking biased news stories about the abused downtrodden computer masses, at worst some sort of arrangement using humans as batteries...
Jeez, some mod had a pretty narrow understanding of what is on topic. Is it really "off topic" to discuss Slashdot in a news story about a news website started by the same man who started Slashdot?
with such gem as "make it a ten point system and add them rather than averaging them" (what would it change?), it is hard to take the parent post seriously...
It would preclude the need to round and introduce a slightly finer resolution to filter by. Presumably, something else could come of Achievements rather than rounding, though perhaps that would merely be a feature of the machine learning.
"Slashdot combines editor quality control and insight [...]"
So basically it's failing on every front.
I don't believe that you believe that and I don't feel like assisting your jest.
Trove already exists as an academic forum does Cmdr Taco know this
http://trove.nla.gov.au/forum/forum.php
I am quite sure of it in fact, we all know there is a lot of money flowing to campaign contributors that run green companies, a lot of whom go out of business after a lot of fat paychecks.
You've been had, you are just far too stupid and prideful to admit it until WAY after the fact, In a decade or so you will understand, all too late... or more likely you never will. Sigh.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
> So I guess whether I end up spending much time on Trove will depend immensely on how the discussion system works in practice.
For me, it's whether I can get it to look readable in Stylish.
The latest style of web design seems intent on making you actually move your head to look around at the content. And that line spacing, yeesh.. the trend had gone beyond "a bit more spacing makes reading easier" to "MOAR SPACING!"
How can you start a website in 2014 with only iOS apps? What the hell?