Ask HN: Are there companies out there building innovative, new newsfeeds? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are there companies out there building innovative, new newsfeeds?

The Facebook Newsfeed is now widely acknowledged as 'past it', but I haven't seen much in the way of bold innovation in the area of newsfeeds. There's the Smartnews app, but I used it and found it to be pretty standard, like Google News or Apple News. It's been successful, but I still would say it's vastly inferior to Hackernews's user-based ranking.

Toutiao is a Chinese company that's worth billions, but that appears to predominantly an app for pushing clickbait.

Is anyone out there trying to redesign the fundamentals of newsfeeds: ranking, filtering, social, information vs. misinformation?

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Quiet HN: A version of HackerNews without the comments. It's good because it "forces" you to read the news first and then read the comments, avoiding bias.

Reddit: Not exactly a news feed and you need to search for a bit to find a good subreddit with the information you need. In my case, it's good because I usually find new stuff every day.

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I've currently been working on this as a side project when I have time. It's still in early infancy, but my plan is to try to innovate in lots of those areas. Specifically by not implementing complex algorithms for ranking or filtering and instead building a complete user-suite of preferences that individuals can fine-tune. The other portion is to change the news feed to be a single source at a time, forcing users to focus on one thing at once and avoid infinite headline scroll.

Like I said, it's still early, but I'd love to hear other people's thoughts.

Both of those things sound great. I think user controlled tuning and filtering is a no-brainer from a user happiness perspective.

Powerful filtering tools are a must if users are going to be able to surf the long tail of interesting internet content.

There's https://newshound.co/editions/en-us/ which does some useful filtering by grouping articles from different sources on the same topic together. It also highlights how often newspapers all just republish the same material they got from an agency.

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