Thanks @joostschuur for hunting us!
Just a bit of background. The whole idea of Forereads is very simple:
Who better than noted experts to tell us which articles really matter? They have to track all that — their expertise requires it — and they know what is noise and what is genuinely interesting.
And what if we could even find out when several experts share the same piece of content? Isn’t such consensus the proof it’s an important read?
All this is available on Twitter. Once you know who the experts are in a specific field, and once you know how to filter their most important posts, you get the best curation mechanism possible (no wonder so many journalists are on Twitter!).
But if you are not a Twitter user, or only a casual one and you don’t know where to start… there’s Forereads. Everything is done automatically for you. It’s like becoming a Twitter power user instantly!
Forereads is both a web app, and a newsletter. Choose the one you prefer :-).
On a personal note, I just wanted to thank the people from the @producthunt community who agreed to take a look at Forereads prior to launch and gave me tons of feedback and a lot of encouragement: @chrismessina, @nbashaw, @tzhongg, @ourielohayon, @joescarboro, @golsong, @mgsiegler, @ahussein, @shaneleonard121, @marieouttier, Natasha Lomas and the tireless @rrhoover (I am POSITIVE he has a clone). Thank you so much guys, it meant a lot!
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is there any control for political bias, social bias or other variables that we might normally use to calibrate news sources? the real risk in curation of any kind is development of an echo chamber.
@passingnotes Thank you David. I think it’s a great, but very difficult question. Curating means “choosing” and it opens the door to bias. I was conscious of this when I built the system and I tried to address it:
1- by relying on not just a few but many independent curators, I am hoping the “sheer number” will limit the impact of personal biases.
2- by using experts whose reputation is one of their key assets. As such, I am hoping their propensity to voluntarily share biased content is limited
In addition, it’s one of the reasons a lot of time went into emphasising the experts’ comments on a specific piece. Sometimes they will share something that is biased and they might be overtly critical about it. In a link-only aggregator, you might miss this. Forereads is trying to make sure you see it.
But like I said, tricky one :-). Do you have any thoughts on how to address this?
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@cam_pj it's a tough nut to crack. intelligence agencies are known to use manual evaluation of sources and you can see this in OSINT guides and resources...and contrary to what you state above, experts appear more likely to present bias, particularly where it supports their expertise (hey, just listen to our own fed bank chiefs and look at the studies they cite)...and even where one succeeds in this codification, he must then expose the filters or tools to consumers - that's why we see entire news publications replete with op-eds that are left, right, centrist and so on (ditto for the echo chamber of experts in think tanks, the list goes on) - they never say, "hey, we're a left leaning news source," instead we just know it or figure it out...for now, I'll just stick with the bbc news or the guardian ;)
@passingnotes I understand. I think there are two "categories" of news though. The more "scientific" ones (don't know if it's the best adjective to describe them): tech, AI for instance. And then those that are more opinionated, e.g. politics, finance.
There is some permeability between these two groups, but in general the latter is more prone to what you describe.
My impression is - having used Forereads for a while - when an expert is showing some obvious bias, another one quickly jumps in to balance things. So maybe some experts taken individually will show some bias, but multiple ones will create a natural balance. That’s in fact something I find really powerful with the tool.
Anyway, don’t get me wrong: I am an avid BBC and The Guardian follower :-).
@joostschuur Great to see this on Product Hunt! I've been trying it for about a week or so. I like it because it gives you a really short focused/curated list of stories to read, with interesting points of view from industry influencers.
I get the daily emails which give a very short summary of stories up front. This lets me know if it's worth reading further down the email with the detail. I don't feel overloaded with info. It's a bit like a high-class restaurant that presents a few select high-quality dishes.
I've been finding most of the stories interesting and relevant. And they're presented cleanly so they're easy on the eye too. Well done @cam_pj. I think you're onto something really good here.
@prattarazzi@justschuur Thank you so much Eddie. It means a lot.
The daily email is doing really really well actually. Open rate is around 75%, which - I think - is really encouraging.
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I've been using Forereads every day for several reasons:
1) it provides content from sources (often unexpected) that I don't follow on any other news service - I follow thousands of pubs on my Feedly and Apple News, yet Forereads regularly provides me with fresh not-seen-before content/sources
2) it structures things into a succinct format, which I can choose to double click into based on my level of interest (as opposed to showing me a chopped up RSS summary)
3) relying on spheres of influence of the sharer, as opposed to that of the publication of the article, means a) a more democratic 'daily briefing' model and b) a more holistic/complete picture of what real experts are saying without the publisher's bias*
*granted, the influencer sharing on twitter could have their own bias, but I can ignore their commentary and focus solely on the article at hand.
This is a fantastic product. Huge props to @cam_pj for building it.
I've used them all from RSS readers like Feedly to Nuzzel and Apple news. Well congrats to @cam_pj for pulling this one, because it really tops the category in helping me get the content I WANT to read.
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hah - we could discuss this all day! all news is opinion aside from the occasional reporting of facts...and the science-tech-engineering-math (STEM) are just as partial and opinionated - just ask stripe, Apple and PayPal about the best way forward for secure mobile payments, or travel back in time and ask the microkernel OS guys what they think of UNIX...and you can imagine the contention within the world of drug delivery systems, urban infrastructure or fracking...it never ends. imho, no curation tool will ever be objective, nor any content creator - but good luck! it can still be incredibly useful and interesting stuff (I like to imagine that Reddit is curating the entire internet)
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