Show HN: Alias – Google Alerts for your favorite people | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Alias – Google Alerts for your favorite people

alias.co

153 pointsjonathancai86 comments

Probably like a lot of you on HN, in my downtime, I closely follow people that I think are high-signal in their various domains (science, computers, startups, longevity, philosophy, cryptocurrencies, etc).

Once I find someone, I consume all their content obsessively, reading all their books, tweets, essays, and watch their videos/podcasts.

But I noticed a few problems: 1. A person's content is scattered around the web on multiple platforms. 2. Twitter is too fresh and noisy. It's hard to find someone's most seminal work across the years. 3. It's unusually difficult to be told/notified every time they release something new. People don't always like to self-advertise all their podcast appearances, or panels/interviews they've done.

So we built alias to address these issues - we've indexed all the content on some of the best creators in many fields, for you to subscribe to, which means you get an email whenever they release content.

For info on how this is built - Some of the indexing is done by cron jobs that fetch from RSS feeds, utilizes the Twitter API, and scrapes the web, but also some of it is manual, performed data contractors.

We'd love to hear your feedback and also - whose profile would you like to see on the site next?

I have mixed feelings about this as someone that creates a bunch of content across different platforms. I intentionally spread it out across platforms as different platforms have different groups of people that follow me and engage with things differently. This is a nice idea but feels like it could be used for stalking. It would be nice if there was an explicit opt-in for creators having their feeds associated here instead of them being aggregated somehow and put there through some heuristic.

Appreciate the feedback here /u/xena —

> This is a nice idea but feels like it could be used for stalking.

So we make sure to only aggregate publicly available information that the creator released and never include pieces about them or from someone else. We also make sure not to aggregate any gated/paywalled content.

The problem with having every creator opt-in is that that we'd never be able to launch the profiles because there are so many creators. But maybe we could have an opt-out? We actually have the ability for creators to claim their profiles as well and make changes/edits. So in theory, a creator that doesn't want to be indexed could hide all the content on their profile.

Does that address the concern? open to any other ideas you might have!

I think most stalking is simply aggregation of totally public data.

As such, I think "stalking" is a bit of an overblown term for it, but it remains the fact that in the common usage one could engage in this so-called "stalking" consuming only publicly available data.

Well that's a fair point!

We're trying pretty hard to not come off as professional stalkers while still building something useful :)

Maybe ""stalking" is a bit of an overblown term for it" as the term for what they are doing..

however when this is done for nefarious purposes it's called doxxing (sp) by some - and that is usually done with the intent to defame and to push others to do other harmful, often offline things, with the combined info.

Which is worst than stalking imho / in most cases.

Luckily it seems that this service is not doxxing everyone on the internet -

I hope it will not have a field where people can enter a name and have it auto-dox people - and there would be some tripwires for when people may add porn stars / onlyfans / cam girls - stuff like that or example.

I guess it could also get nasty if certain (right/left) wing people were combined with ill intent - especially if you could trick the system into adding some things that were not true.

random thoughts, not completed.

I have a semi-old business idea that could use the tech stack this is putting together that would be helpful and easy to monetize - not huge scale like twitter, but certainly could be pop enough to make recurring money without much human hands on.

Speaking of doxxing (on a tangent of course, nothing bad going on here I quite like the idea of a customized webcrawler feed as-a-service) , there is some great coverage over on Motherboard about MAID data brokers and PII matching [1] and it's ability to fall in to the wrong hands [2] :

[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/epnmvz/industry-unmasks-at-s...

[2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkbxp8/grindr-location-data-...

> The problem with having every creator opt-in is that that we'd never be able to launch the profiles

So... I feel that's a somewhat disingenuous perspective. You've created a problem for others (e.g. xena's concern that their deliberate efforts to distribute their output and mitigate stalking) while suggesting that your need to "launch" is more important.

I see that you've asked for suggestions for alternative models, but did you consider asking this before launching?

A cynical perspective might be that you're aiming to exploit popular content without the hassle of attracting authors to your platform. Perhaps you want to take on substack while avoiding the hosting responsibility?

You suggest you might deign to allow authors to "opt out". What about the reverse: given the choice, why would they opt in?

Sorry to be so negative, but this really looks like a land-grab. Maybe I'm wrong.

I actually really like the idea of "everything in one place", but an RSS aggregator and some curated social media feeds surely work just as well?

> The problem with having every creator opt-in is that that we'd never be able to launch the profiles because there are so many creators.

This is only a “problem” if you take “this service should exist” as axiomatic.

Thinking about the strategy you outlined: wouldn't a real stalker, by definition, put in the extra effort to seek you out on all the various platforms, whereas a normal user wouldn't?

You're effectively decreasing the chances of your users finding more of your content, without actually mitigating stalking activity, which sounds like a net loss for you.

If you want to keep your identities separate, then use different identities (hopefully Alias will not dox you). If you want people to have to manually find your different public profiles and not use a tool to do so, that sounds unreasonable.

Have been following Alias for over a year now and am truly impressed by the amount of progress that you guys have made in such a short period of time!

One quick feedback that I have is on the homepage when you click on "Show More", maybe display more than just 1 row (3-4 would be idea) so I don't have to click it multiple times! :D

Thanks! Agreed — and simple enough for us to fix. :)

5 years ago we scraped the itunes podcast database to do exactly that. matching was a PITA though.

Then we emailed the creators and got some interesting answers out.

punchline: creators wanted better opportunities for appearing on other high-value podcasts.

Your approach is different. I hope you find success in it. It’s definitely great product development!

I like the concept. But I found myself thinking "who that I follow is prominent enough to be listed". I'd love to say "this is my Twitter account, tell me who of the people I follow is listed on your service". Note that you shouldn't need to make me link my Twitter account or give you any permissions to do that; the list of people I follow is available to anyone with a Twitter account.

Yep, we do need to improve our onboarding flow a bit. We plan to include that Twitter followers list integration, and also suggest you people based on your interests. Thanks for the feedback.

Useful for tracking citations of your favorite white papers.

Or in one extreme case of mine, to monitor for that obituary of a certain folk who refuse to sell their rusted classic car on their property. (Because, I covet it).

we sincerely hope you get that car of yours!

Why do you want that guy to die? Kind of messed up.

It’s a polite way of waiting for the car and hopefully first in line.

Although it can get problematic for those who do this technique if he gets murdered.

Not so much wanting the other to die, but knowing / wishing it will be the only / first opportunity to make a bid / acquire the object.

People have been doing this since forever to buy real estate too.

This is all very Silicon Valley navel gazing, assuming that I want to follow the key thought leaders in growth marketing or something. Searched for Ken Jennings and Usain Bolt and found nothing.

Awesome stuff. A couple years ago I built my own bespoke service (which I won't plug here) to do exactly this, but in a generic way. In retrospect, it would've been far more useful to build around this idea of following online creators, rather than letting people figure out the use cases on their own.

Have you thought about expanding this beyond just the people here? There are more casual use cases like following specific creators across Twitter/YT/Patreon are also be valuable imo.

We are definitely looking to expand beyond the tech/silicon valley scene. We only started in this space because it's the kind of stuff we read, but we're looking into which spaces make the most sense to scale into, and we index new people every day.

Which areas/use-cases would you be interested in seeing?

I think fitness and marketing experts could be interesting.

I have a question:

How do these way early startups put together such animated, great looking website / landing pages?

Are one of you founders just brilliant front end designers? Is there some kind of easy/cheap service I’m missing out there? Did you just spend some crazy money on getting the page custom done for you?

This isn’t just some theme that was altered for you. The graphics, animations and layout are all matching to your message in a customized way in both copy and content.

What did you do?

It’s completely custom and in-house. u/iMuzz is just a unicorn designer/engineer. Not sure how else to put it.

You know how everyone shouts learn to code? To coders/founders I say learn to design. Or give more of your equity than you think you should to a designer. The nice thing about design is its pretty easy to see examples and references and most designers would actually be happy to work at a start up from the beginning as part of the founding team, its just that in a lot of the tech world designers aren't viewed as integral until after the fact and really the track record of design-led startups and your reaction to ones that are polished out of the gate should indicate otherwise. Contrary to what OP said /u/iMuzz isn't really even a unicorn designer, there's plenty just like them, you've just got to decide its important and find a way to invest time, money, or effort.

I wanted to follow two people who are not super-famous. They have written blog articles and been interviewed on podcasts. But I could not find them in your search.

The folks who you recommend are pretty famous, so their stuff comes across my Twitter feed from multiple sources anyway.

Who are the two people if you don't mind me asking?

Emailed you

I was surprised Jim Keller and similar giants in hardware wasn't on there. Cool idea though!

Thanks - will add them to the queue of people to consider indexing

"For your favourite people"

For some of my favourite people. There are many, maybe niche, personalities I can't see listed. I was hoping that I could put anyone's name in there, not just predefined ones.

Yes, I'm not sure if I really feel the need to use something like this anyway, but none of the names I searched for were listed.

This looks super useful! I was curious who I might be able to follow on Alias, so I checked out the list. I saw that an overwhelming majority of the people are white. I know this partly reflects the state of many of these fields right now, but it strikes me that Alias could do a lot of good by seeking out more people of color to follow. Visibility isn't everything, but it does matter. Alias could play a role in challenging the structural racism that has led to an over-representation of white folks as CEOs and thought-leaders in tech -related fields.

I hear your concern, and we had a similar thought when preparing to post on HN. We made sure to display women and poc on the front page, but I admit, we can and will do a better job of highlighting diversity. Even if the industry is currently extremely homogeneous in that regard. Thanks for bringing this up.

You've got a great platform to work with in this regard. Good luck!

I'd avoid "Google Alerts". Once they get people used to getting "Alerts", there will be ads in them. Can you imagine Google not doing that?

Are you suggesting that we’d inevitably place ads in our emails alerts?

Neat, but "Google Alerts for famous people" already exists. It is called..Google Alerts. Maybe sell it as "a better Google Alerts" or something.

Google Alerts has a bad reputation. https://www.gwern.net/Google-Alerts

That's irrelevant. My point is you can't advertise your service as "X for Y" when X already does Y.

How is it different from, well, Google Alerts?

It actually works! I've found Google Alerts to be extremely noisy and alert me for content about certain people.

Alias only notifies you if the person actually participated/appeared on it vs. being covered.

We're also deeply indexing folks and their content so you'll be able to do conditional alerts.

Example: "Notify only me when Elon talks about battery prices" or "Notify me when Stéphane Bancel (Moderna CEO) talks about Delta Variant".

Hope that makes sense!

Sorry, but Google Alerts fucking blow.

Let's say I want to "subscribe" to Malcom Gladwell, how do I get all his brand new ORIGINAL content, without it Google Alerts pulling every time he is quoted or mentioned?

I had to unsubscribe from Google Alerts on my own name because it was overwhelming junk, and I wouldn't qualify as even a Z List Internet Personality.

Yup that's exactly right. Alerts are only sent out when original content is released.

Mentioned this in the earlier reply but you'll soon be able to do conditional alerts as well.

Some Examples:

- "Notify me when Elon talks about battery prices"

- "Notify me when Stéphane Bancel (Moderna CEO) talks about Delta Variant"

- "Notify me when Gladwell releases a new a book." :)

Who are some people you think we should add? We're looking to add more people every day :)

This looks amazing, probably features like discoverability and recommendation of creators is in the list?

If I follow n of these people, this person x would be a good creator to follow? Something like that. I realized I don’t know so many of the creators at all.

Yeah this is an awesome suggestion. It can be pretty easy to predict who someone would enjoy reading if they follow related people within their domain.

Nice idea. I won’t use it though because for me personally I don’t like following people in a firehose fashion, creating an endless stream of what are in effect todos.

I prefer to have a problem then find the book (or other help) that’s the solution.

Looks awesome and the concept is great.. One comment, the first person I clicked into, ralph-merkle, the most recent content is dated October 1st, 2021 then when clicking the link shows a paper dated from 4th Quarter 2008.

Ah, thanks for the heads up. Our scripts still mess up the dates sometimes. It's harder than you'd think to pull dates from papers.

Just fixed. Thank you!

Definitely understand, parsing and converting dates/time is tricky.

Are you ..... me?

This is such a dream product. I hope that it can be useful and a big success outside our tiny corner of the internet.

Like will this be useful for someone who is following thought leaders in MMA fighting, Pornstars, DIY Guns and Drugs?

> Like will this be useful for someone who is following thought leaders in MMA fighting, Pornstars, DIY Guns and Drugs?

We haven't quite been considering the latter folk for obvious reasons, but we have been pondering the general question of "which types of people should we index?"

I think this is an interesting question to consider.

One framework we've been using to try to answer this question is the old vitamins vs. painkillers line of thought. Where is the need for a product like this the greatest? Or "where is the consequence for missing out on a piece of content the highest?"

This line of thought leads us towards the finance folks, where a single piece of information/alpha from a thought/industry leader can lead to 100+x returns, and missing out on those returns can be financially painful.

But I'd love to hear others thoughts on this question.

So I followed over 1,000 people on Twitter because I valued them for "some field" or other, but that may have been years ago. And I did a terrible job organizing my follows into lists.

So now my Twitter is full of somewhat useful people, but I can't really use it quickly populate a list on your site.

I'd like it if your signup process included easy access to suggested lists on topics like "longevity" or "virtual reality". I see a lot of the people I want on your home page, but I can't really use that during signup without two windows open.

Hey this is great feedback. We should definitely make it easier to come up with names and suggest more folks for you to subscribe to based off of topics

This perspective is about delivering maximum value, which is a worldview primarily of silicon valley and finance folks. Which is fine and a totally legitimate play for a limited set of high value subscribers. But if someone knows that value can be obtained by following someone, then they should already be doing so on the platforms where they are most prolific. Which means that this platform is not adding the entire value of 100+x gains, but rather the marginal value which probably wasn't worth capturing previously. Then the primary value of your service comes from convenience and discovery - but my impression is those two features are strongest when your service has a large number of diverse subscribers.

Something I've been wanting for some time but have been too lazy to implement myself is a similar system targeted towards utility rather than value. That is to say, targeted towards entertainment. Something like your favorite guitarist has a new side project, Patrick Rothfuss finally released Doors of Stone, your favorite director is releasing a new movie. Unfortunately most databases for this information seem to be either proprietary or inaccurate.

I just looked up 5 of the "people I care about", only to find that none of them had entries. They were fairly popular podcasters too, so I guess I don't know what your target is here?

Hey, who are those people?

We’re indexing new people every single day and I can try to bump them up the queue!

Looks pretty good. The icon for the Essays category on the alias page for Paul Graham looks like the Medium logo to me, even though he is publishing his posts on his own site not hosted on Medium.

Yep. We've been meaning to change that for a while, thanks for reminding us.

Seems to be heavily biased in favor of silicon valley personalities.

For now, but we're trying to not be! Who are some folks you think we should add? I'd be happy to get them indexed.

Again, like stated in my other comments, we initially started out with these people because they were the people we mainly read, but we plan on expanding outside of the bubble.

Let me flip it back on you - which types of people would you want to see?

Can't you build workflows for auto addition? This way, your platform would have exponential more content and therefore interest

- if more than x ppl searching for a person then add

- if more than x followers on twitter

- if more than x citations on google scholar

You get the point.

Our service is not entirely scalable yet, as there is still quite a bit of manual work being done behind the curtain.

But the other larger concern is that many large accounts don’t necessarily post much original content. Or rather noisy content. Or they’re an organization, and not a person.

We want to do quality control over who gets indexed, at least initially.

We do a bit of the first 2. The third we never considered.

That's a great idea.

Personally, I would find academics and researchers more useful, especially if they could be tagged by keywords

It would be awesome if you somehow could notify the person: hey, you are this guy/gal favorite person.

Seems a bit stalkerish. Why not just use standard tooling and check at healthy levels instead of feeling the need to be notified of everything they do.

This is epic! Just subscribed to a few of my faves!

Not sure if I want more alerts in my life, but i absolutely LOVE a picture of Paul Graham with anime eyes!!

Who wouldn’t?

Great stuff! Loved using alias to find interesting essays on crypto and videos on some other topics!

I really like this website design especially on mobile - how did you make it?

hey thanks! Nothing special just plain old CSS. :)

As far as our overall stack — we've been pretty happy with NextJS/TypeScript on the frontend and Hasura to power the backend. We use a combination of Vercel and Heroku for hosting!

The first video under PG, is a random guy commenting on PG's essay.

Looks amazing, great job!

cool service! you might want to checkout courier.com, would be a great service to offer alerts across different channels

Oh this is interesting, although I’m not sure how much our current audience would rather see push notifs or texts for the more long form content alerts we mainly have right now

Stalking, but pretty!

Good work Alias team.

Can't wait for this to take off!

I had a little scare that I wouldn't find Peter Thiel in the list, but I did and now I am subscribed ;) The concept is awesome actually, for the exact reasons you are mentioning: content is scattered, I might not use or be on some of the platforms, etc. Now my question for you is: how do you make sure you don't miss any of their contents? thanks anyway and good luck!

We use daily cron jobs that fetch from various RSS urls for blogs, and use the Twitter API. We also have data contractors that do some manual work to aggregate the content.

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