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?
No inline summaries. Less linkability than pinterest. Lame.
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...
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?
Logan's Run?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Well that's news to me. We have quality control here?
Liberty in your lifetime
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.
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.
Well, there were typos and dupes, so the 1.5M got modded up.
rewriting history since 2109
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?
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
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 crowd-sourced harvesting to cover the 'News for Nerds' space.
God, I wish the editors were like that here ;)
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
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.
It's the reason why the internet has been such a double-edge sword for politics. Rather than a world-wide network enabling us to reach and appreciate a far wider range of topics and beliefs, we've instead been largely enabled to find the most comfortable echo chamber to reinforce all of our crazy without having to listen to neighbors who might not agree with our increasingly detached beliefs.
Not that that's always a bad thing, if you're a persecuted minority, for example. But I think the edge facing us does more cutting than the other side of the sword most of the time. Just look at how partisan things have gotten.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
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
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.