Smashing
Stay on top of articles your interests
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Otis Chandler

Smashing - Read smarter: stay on top of articles in your interests

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Smashing
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Smashing is a new app that transforms curious users into smarter readers. It helps you stay on top of all your interests and easily discover articles personalized to you. Follow your industry, companies you track, your favorite sports teams or celebs.

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Otis Chandler
Maker
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I decided to build Smashing because I believe the ways we discover things to read online are broken and do not serve readers well. I’ve been waiting a dozen years, ever since Google Reader died, for someone to step up and build a truly great content discovery app for the web. I spent a lot of time after I stepped down from Goodreads in 2019 playing with every article and news product I could find and was ultimately dissatisfied—I knew that with today’s technology something better could be built for avid readers. I was deeply influenced by Tristan Harris’ notion that Time Well Spent, not popularity, is the right metric for content. However, despite the huge advancements in LLMs and AI, the only way to know if an article is in fact worth your time is to ask knowledgeable readers who have already read it. Thus was born the Worthwhile Vote, the core way of curating on Smashing. And not all votes are equal—reputation matters in curation. This was something I learned at Goodreads and have started to build into the design of Smashing. That brings us to Smashing—a way to discover worthwhile articles, curated into your interests. A place where the community decides what is Worthwhile, and an AI helps match the right content to the right reader. A product that if successful will help, I hope, everyone be more informed about their interests. I think it is a recipe for something special, and this is only the beginning. Knowledge is power, and power is best shared among readers.
AnnaHo
@otown Smashing is an exciting app that empowers users to become smarter readers by curating personalized content!
Porush Puri
@otown this is too good, congrats on the launch, looking forward to smash it with smashing
Nancy Le
Congrats team! Seems like it could make reading more relevant and enjoyable. Nice work on putting this together! 😊👍
Jan
Great idea and well needed nowadays!
Marcos Ciarrocchi
Congrats to the team on launching! I love the idea of blending curation + AI, feels like a fresh approach. Any fun challenges the team ran into on getting AI and human curation to work smoothly together?
Otis Chandler
Maker
@mcia_ honestly that's been a lot of the challenge! We've been refining the algorithms for months now and I think have found a good balance. Basically the AI whittles all the content in the world published each day down to a set that the user is likely interested in based on semantic topic matching (AI embeddings). Then human curations helps order that. But timeliness is hard - some people only want recent news whereas others are open to blogs or posts from days or weeks ago. Depends on the category too. So we have more work to do!
Marcos Ciarrocchi
@otown super interesting challenges! excited to see the product evolve :)
Kane
Congrats on the launch! 🎉 How do you handle content supply in the app?
Otis Chandler
Maker
@blueeon We are crawling the web for all RSS feeds of blogs and publishers that we can find. If we are missing one just upvote that publisher in the app and we will go crawl it.
Laura Bokobza
Smashing is a fresh take on curation - and the value of human curators. I’ve been testing, reading, curating, inviting fellow curators and enthusiasts and I’m thrilled to see it going further!
Alex Koo
android planned?
Mike Mraz
Yes soon! @alex_koo
Otis Chandler
Maker
@alex_koo Yes of course but will take some time. In meantime there is a (in beta) web app smashing.xyz/sign_in
Shushant Lakhyani
Regular readers would love using this
Jackie Ro
Love this app. Have been testing it out the past 6 months and it’s quickly become my #1 source for news and entertainment. The new Smashing AI prompts are genius!
Erin Fox-Ramirez
It has been great using Smashing as a beta user. The team is smashing is very thoughtful about the curations, and the type of environment they are trying to create. We are in the golden age of information, but with that comes pitfalls. Inaccurate information, misleading information, and even bad actors. Smashing is a place where you can trust the human/AI partnership to curate your news, and other content to make you an more informed consumer and citizen.
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