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Prismatic gets $15 million in Series A Funding

techcrunch.com

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Re: Prismatic gets $15 million in Series A Funding

#51

Post by hpvic03 »

aero142 wrote: post #49
hpvic03 wrote: post #48

Congrats on the raise :) I just tried Prismatic, and while it seems interesting I don't think I would become a regular user. Though I may not the target audience. I'm usually satisfied with Hacker News and The NY Times, though occasionally I'll look at other mainstream news sites like CNN to make sure that I'm getting a well rounded idea of what's going on in the world. I have Reddit blocked on my computer, but I'll…

Agree, but let me ask you this. Do you want a personalized news feed of only things you are interested in? They are working on making that and I'm not aware of anyone else trying. It's not there yet but I like the idea.

I don't really see how news can be "personalized." News isn't personal, it's just "what happened." It can be separated into categories and sub-categories ad infinitum, and I could subscribe to those categories, but I can already do that by going to the news site I want, clicking on the sub-category that I'm interested in, and adding it to a feed reader.

Thus, personalizing my news by auto-subscribing me to sub-categories that the system "thinks" I'm interested in doesn't really solve any problems that I have.

The harder problem of news, in my opinion, is determining what's important and interesting and what's not. Time-weighted voting systems like on HN and Reddit do this very effectively. For example, I am generally more interested in the "Most Popular" articles on NY Times than whatever the editors chose to put on the front page.

I would be more interested in a startup that tried to create a HN for another vertical, like the movie industry.

Re: Prismatic gets $15 million in Series A Funding

#53

Post by grayrest »

hpvic03 wrote: post #48

Congrats on the raise :) I just tried Prismatic, and while it seems interesting I don't think I would become a regular user. Though I may not the target audience. I'm usually satisfied with Hacker News and The NY Times, though occasionally I'll look at other mainstream news sites like CNN to make sure that I'm getting a well rounded idea of what's going on in the world. I have Reddit blocked on my computer, but I'll…

I seeded it off twitter, which I primarily use to keep tabs on developers and software projects I care about. I've been happily using it for 5 (?) months now and find it to generally be the highest signal to noise aggregator of tech news that I've used.

For comparison, my first few headlines:

* Opponents of Egypt's Morsy continue protests (CNN)

* Facebook snubs 'Subscribe' button in favor of Twitter-esque 'Follow' on all profile pages (Verge)

* Extra-terrestrial life: Closer to encounter (Economist)

* node-webkit « Another Word For It

* Rethinking Mobile First (avc)

Re: Prismatic gets $15 million in Series A Funding

#55

Post by curveship »

I just tried Prismatic, and was perplexed when it started giving me lots of news about central England. Huh?

Then it hit me: I live in Durham, NC. I hadn't told it that, but it probably deduced it from my IP. And somewhere in its great NLP brain, Durham, NC and Durham England are being mixed up.

Ah, the perils of AI.

Re: Prismatic gets $15 million in Series A Funding

#56

Post by jsnell »

hpvic03 wrote: post #48

Congrats on the raise :) I just tried Prismatic, and while it seems interesting I don't think I would become a regular user. Though I may not the target audience. I'm usually satisfied with Hacker News and The NY Times, though occasionally I'll look at other mainstream news sites like CNN to make sure that I'm getting a well rounded idea of what's going on in the world. I have Reddit blocked on my computer, but I'll…

That matches my experience pretty well. The initial sets of results after seeding from my Google social graph / reader subscriptions were mostly about the petty internals of US politics, US professional and college-level sports, unimportant local news from different parts of the US, CSS, and random celebrities. That's about the least interesting thing I can think of, and I can't imagine how it ended up with that kind of article selection from my personal data.

But worse, after 15 minutes of mostly dismissing these kinds of articles (and clicking on anything even remotely interesting), it was still mostly giving results in these kinds of categories. Is this the wrong way to use the site? I have no idea, since there are no usage instructions anywhere.

Right now it needs to be way more aggressive about early negative signals, and introduce more variety rather than try yet another pro-sport article to check whether I'd be more interested in that than the previous 10. Because it's hard to believe that a lot of users are going to persist if the initial results are persistently bad, no matter how pretty the typography.

Re: Prismatic gets $15 million in Series A Funding

#59

Post by aero142 »

hpvic03 wrote: post #51
aero142 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree, but let me ask you this. Do you want a personalized news feed of only things you are interested in? They are working on making that and I'm not aware of anyone else trying. It's not there yet but I like the idea.

I don't really see how news can be "personalized." News isn't personal, it's just "what happened." It can be separated into categories and sub-categories ad infinitum, and I could subscribe to those categories, but I can already do that by going to the news site I want, clicking on the sub-category that I'm interested in, and adding it to a feed reader. Thus, personalizing my news by auto-subscribing me to sub-catego…

There is certainly news I'm more and less interested in.

I still think there is room for improvement over general voting systems like Reddit and HN. Something like weighting votes based on voting similarity between users. I don't know whether Prismatic will succeed but I think they are working on the right problem. I want the product they are trying to build, even if they aren't there yet.

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