Hacker News Reader

Comment by faizshah | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, why do these news apps like this one or Prismatic in 2014 not work in the english speaking market but in the Chinese market Toutiao was a massive success for bytedance? What is the difference that makes it so hard for news apps to work in the English market?

View on HN

This is purely from my experience with friends/family/coworkers so it may not be the real reason. I've experienced that most people in America focus on one news source (this is primarily the older market), or they are fully agnostic in their sources and get their news from social media and Twitter/X (the younger market).

Services like Artifact, which show news articles from a variety of sources do not mesh well with either of these larger markets. An older market who prefers their singular news source does not want to read news from anyone they don't trust. And the younger market aren't fans of specifically just reading news. It's usually peppered in with posts from friends, or it's trending and has a large discussion on Twitter/X.

So the market becomes limited to people who get their news from various sources and prefer absorbing their news at specific times and in specific ways. In the American market, I believe it's just too small of a market to become profitable.

I bet China makes it really easy to sell to a big, unified market since the levels of social repression and form-fitting are much higher compared to other parts of the world. It's easy to sell the party bulletin when nothing else is allowed to circulate :^) Also, the anglosphere consists of many diverse groups of people due to its role as a universal second language. That might make a generalized approach fail with a lot of customers.

You don’t really know anything about China. Unless you are directly criticizing the government it’s just like anywhere else.

Directly criticizing the government is basically the national sport in most western countries.

You are so correct. The only thing different about China is government oppression and nothing else. You cannot make omelets without cracking a few fake eggs.

And what does “anywhere else” mean here?

Thank you for mentioning prismatic! It was awesome. They just couldn't monetize it, if memory serves.

They made the unconventional choice of using Clojure: https://github.com/plumatic

Because China leapfrogged over the early internet era. In the West traditional publishers have strong brands and independent digital presences, mentally everything is a 'website' not a 'app'. It's also why traditional search is much more popular in the West than in China. In the West the internet is an open protocol where independent institutions publish their own information still. Things are indexable, locatable, and so on.

Chinese users grew up on everything being app content, traditional media is just an input like any other that agglomerators consume and then present algorithmically to users, everything is completely mixed between user generated content and news stories and there's no particular notion of news or journalism as a distinct entity.

Because the state of news sites on the English web in 2024 is that they’re ad-infested garbage experiences that introduce themselves by begging for your email address and requesting permission to set tracking cookies, or they’re paywalled, or they do all of the above!

You can aggregate as much shit as you want but unless you’re using it to manufacture fertilizer it’s still just shit, and that’s before even going into the content of what passes as news nowadays.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com