The Rise and Fall of Venture-Backed News Readers in One Chart | Hacker News Reader

The Rise and Fall of Venture-Backed News Readers in One Chart

cbinsights.com

47 pointsprostoalex28 comments

UBC's Zite (after sufficient training) was consistently excellent at surfacing high-signal content from a variety of sources. It declined after acquisition by CNN and has become nearly invisible after incorporation into Flipboard's "Cover Stories". Now that Flipboard has turned off the backend which powered the Zite app, the next best options are:

  - manually curate Twitter lists for reading in Flipboard
  - manually curate RSS feeds

In the age of burgeoning AI and powerful clients, it is tragic that we have such little investment in automated filtering where all data is private to the endpoint and portable between devices. Or public sharing of training data for news algorithms. Where is the GPL-equivalent for data at risk of being orphaned?

We need standardized legal clauses for startup founding engineers to deter "Orphan Software Works". E.g. source code is escrowed at the time of each acquisition, and if the acquired technology disappears from the market because all acquirers have closed or abandoned the product, it must be released to the public as open-source, with or without patent grants or training data.

Code and learning from dead startups can fertilize research fields for future crops, instead of disappearing into legal black holes.

I didn't realize just how much I relied on Zite until it was gone. I tried to launch it several times a day in the week after it was turned off.

If anything, Flipboard has taught me that the UI of flipping pages is best left to physical magazines, where each page can have enough information density to make it worthwhile. Maybe the flipboard flip action works better on a tablet; but on a phone I can't bring myself to use it, no matter how much of Zite's technology they fold in.

Flipboard has sadly hidden the Zite per-article training options in "Up Arrow" -> "Tuning Options" which is the last menu item under the Share menu. What was one Zite click (up/downvote) is now Flipboard's click, swipe, click, click.

It brings you to a dialog which offers:

  More Like This
  Less Like This
  Mute Site
  Report Site

Gone is the Zite option to whitelist/subscribe to a site, which was the equivalent of following an RSS feed. Tragic. At least medieval cathedral builders would leave behind ruins to remind future generations of what was attempted. Software just vanishes.

Note to News App Developers: read Claude Shannon on the role of surprise in information theory. If your app shows the same articles being regurgitated in every other app, there is no surprise, i.e. news or information. Zite excelled at surprise.

Flipboard is something people actually use?

I recognize the name as some crapware pre-installed on my Samsung phone.

It's useful on tablets when combined with Twitter lists. Each list becomes a Flipboard magazine, you can then flip through meta-pages with substantive link previews, surrounded by tweets. This gives the benefit of Flipboard's UX with Twitter's manually curated content. This use case is buried:

  Profile
  Following
  Accounts
  Service Name (e.g. Twitter)
  Your Lists
  List Name

Before it was turned off, Zite allowed their users to migrate their data (topics, white/blacklist, votes) to Flipboard. For longtime Zite users, there were thousands of data points. Sadly, that data has not resulted in a Zite-like filter of Flipboard's content.

This is literally the worst chart I have ever seen in my life.

W|hat|'s wr|ong w|i|th i|t?

It is a particularly bad instance of (non) data visualization. The effect on my eyes was scalding and my initial reaction was to bounce right back out. In absence of insightful format, just basic bar charts would have sufficed.

Not to be a debbie downer, looking at this chart hurts my head. I am sure there are many other ways to present this information in a much more elegant and clean way.

Like Twitter's Labella, perhaps!

http://twitter.github.io/labella.js/

Even a cursory Google search will show this data is inaccurate. See circa total raised. Here it says 1.7m but googling "circa investments" Angel list shows several rounds and closer to 5m raised.

Makes the insights hard to believe.

I regularly use Pocket, and I think it'll keep growing in an age where you're constantly being blasted with interesting content and have to save it for later. I also see it having more potential than the other apps, with the new recommendations service and opportunity saving other media.

I wouldn't call it a "news reader" though, and don't think it belongs in this chart.

I also find I put stuff in there only to never take it out again.

A better designed product wouldn't let me shoot myself in the foot.

I agree. It should have a better way of making sure the "best" content for you floats to the top of your list, rather than going by recency.

I'm intrigued by the new recommendations feature though, which might actually be a reasonable way to leverage the social aspect of article sharing. But I continue to lament the lack of a good way to have real discussion.

I used to love Pocket and used it since it was a tiny extension in Firefox. They actually introduced a great feature which turned your list into a magazine format with the highest rated articles at the top.

Sadly they canned it not long after. Pity since I found Pocket very useful with that particular feature.

Actually it isnt ranking. I need it to not be an infinite sink.

Either limit total, push old to email, implement some kind of snooze, inject content back into sites it came from, etc.

These news and reader apps have so much high value audience interest data that they should be very valuable (in theory), given enough engaged users, especially on mobile. Are they struggling to leverage the data to monetize for fear of alienating users? What's the disconnect here?

My theory is that it's a problem with the very nature of "news" with human psychology.

In short it's that The News is about sensation, what's new, what's uncommon. It's not essential for any of us to read the news every day ultimately. If someone important happens we will hear from it on our other channels incidentally. I suspect that none of us actually enjoy reading the news or watching tv news.

So - a news startup which needs mass appeal to take off has to appeal to all the same users that currently consumes news, right? But, given the opportunity on the internet people tend to avoid the normal sensationalist news if they are getting it somewhere else, why should I want to go to a news aggregator?

I believe there to be the disconnect because it's about targeting the mass market - but it seems as if more niche sites with niche audiences tend to be more successful.

I also suspect that news aggegrators pitch by saying "look at all this news! See how many sources the news comes from! Witness how our solution makes it easier to consume" without addressing why someone consumes the news.

> why should I want to go to a news aggregator

Why are you here? Admittedly, HN is about 40% news and 60% links to interesting tech stuff. But who said a "news aggregator" has to be 100% news?

(edits because xmas)

HackerNews is not mass market, HackerNews is niche. HN is also not "The News" that one would read in these VC backed startups.

So I am here because this is a successful niche site which is not a VC backed mass market site :-)

This is interesting. Anyone have any insight concerning interest in Flipboard? Its total funding is an order of magnitude higher than all the others.

Was there something fundamentally different about their approach?

For what it's worth, I wasn't sufficiently impressed with any of the services mentioned to regularly use any of them, except Pocket, which I only use because I feel like it's the least-worst option.

What's interesting is that I knew about 90% of these services when they were launched, so it wasn't a marketing/reach problem.

The fatal flaw in all of these startups was they just aggregated content. None of them solved the real problem of distilling the overwhelming amount of content online into the few thing(s) I should read.

That's probably fair. The quest for personalized news predates most people being on the Internet [1] and I think it's fair to say that no one has really come up with top-notch, personalized curation that blows people away. In practice, it's easier to let social media, RSS readers, and sites like this one provide you with a river of potentially interesting content that you skim and dive into as appropriate.

I'm also not sure how much people would be willing to pay even for really good content curation even if such a thing exited. And the reality is that curation is hard because my interests on a given day depend on so many factors from how busy I am to my mood to some event that piqued my interest.

[1] http://news.mit.edu/1994/newspaper-0309

I found that Zite did an incredible job of presenting high-signal content for me. I became so reliant on it that I would have paid a significant amount to subscribe, probably on the order of a spotify subscription. But that was after years of use and training; I can't imagine anybody selling me on a curation service at any price without that experience.

I pay for curation -- it's my subscriptions to the economist and the nytimes (for which I only read the front page).

This right here is the reason. It's fulfilling to get to the end of an RSS feed, but currently all solutions are just lists of articles. None of the technologies really do any significant filtering for you with the exception of possibly Facebook. And even then, it seems like the Newfeed degenerates into awful click bait.

Why on earth would they make the chart at subject a compressed jpeg?

Unfortunately for them, Yahoo may have stopped acquiring companies, but otherwise I would imagine HRH Marissa Mayer would have brought flipboard for $2B+. I know they try buying everything shitty.

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