IAMA founder of NewsTilt, a YC startup trying to reinvent journalism.

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/bwrew/iama_founder_of_newstilt_a_y_combinator_startup/

by pbiggar • 16 years ago

39 18 16 years ago

Volscio3• 16 years ago

I've got to say that I think as far as online news reporting goes, the major weakness right now is forums and comments. If there were a better way to collate ALL the comments on a specific incident or even on a general topic, and then filter them out according to anecdotal relevancy, it would add so much more to the ability for people to find out what's actually going on.

So, for example, for the Arizona immigration story, I bet there are comments on a bunch of news sites and personal blogs that give fascinating anecdotes about run-ins with the Maricopa County Sheriffs, or about seeing illegal immigrants passing through some rancher's property, or about some local leader's opinion on the new bill.

But one comment may be on Huff Post, one might be on some small regional news site, another might be on someone's personal blog.

Those comments get buried and no one will ever find them.

Volscio3• 16 years ago

Oh, also, anything that gets FAR more people to comment with their own stories would be better. For any given event, all those spectators could have something interesting to add, but few people are trained/interested in being sensors or reporters. Most lurk.

pbiggar5• 16 years ago

We (NewsTilt) are actively encouraging all the journalists to comment on their own stories. If you ask them a question, they'll give you an answer. Try it - http://newstilt.com

blehn• 16 years ago

The problem with aggregating comments is that it degrades the quality of discussion, and therefore, the community. There's no depth, no flow. Backtype does the aggregation thing, but I find it just looks like noise.

Maybe there's a better way, but I've yet to see something better than the type of 5-10 level deep conversations that happen on reddit/HN.

Volscio3• 16 years ago

I agree with you. But maybe the aggregation isn't for more conversation (people like to do that within their trusted communities), but to enable better filtering. That is, you could have a rough total count of interest in a topic. Then you could label comments different things like "funny", "anecdote", "primary source", "trolling", etc. So if I just want to read the funniest comments, I could. If I wanted to get more context from on the ground, I could select "primary source" or whatever. Not sure why this isn't done already...I'm sure enough random commenters would categorize comments on their own to make it useful.

zandorg• 16 years ago

What's IAMA/AMA? I am a founder? Or am I missing something?

kaddar• 16 years ago

I-am-a .... Ask Me Anything, this is a subreddit for community interviews with the person who is whatever they are claiming (the star means verified)

ivenkys3• 16 years ago

From the IAMA thread : "Yes, Facebook is required to add comments."

Reducing irrelevant comment noise by linking it to FB Connect is not a solution. This is not for me then.

Edit: Just noticed this : "On reddit, anonymous accounts add a lot to conversation. So we intent to add semi-anonymity, where no-one but us can tell who you are." - Again, not sure , how that will be a solution.

pbiggar5• 16 years ago

We'd love to hear a solution that makes people using their real name without using Facebook Connect.

The point about anonymity is that we'd like to allow some sort of anonymous comments, because they can sometimes add to the conversation.

ivenkys3• 16 years ago

May be i am not getting the whole story here but if you do allow anonymous comments or "some sort" of anonymous comments then how different is it to the other existing authentication schemes ?

For e.g. on HN i can easily look-up certain nicks and i know what their public persona is via their blogs, websites etc. Does that add value to their comment ? May be. Is that what you are aiming for ?

"We'd love to hear a solution that makes people using their real name without using Facebook Connect." That is a hard problem , more incidental complexity than anything else.

Edit: edited for grammar.

pbiggar5• 16 years ago

I should point out, this is the biggest problem that people have. We're really just trying to encourage good comments. We'd take a better way if there was one.

ivenkys3• 16 years ago

I understand where you are coming from , i like the idea of what you guys are doing but i am not on Facebook and will not join FB to be able to comment on newstilt, hence my point about its not for me.

danudey• 16 years ago

When was the last time a startup 'trying to reinvent' something actually succeeded? Most of the successes were accidental, by companies who tried to do something neat and stumbled onto something powerful. Most of the failures were companies that set out to 'reinvent' the way things work.

Maybe these guys will succeed, but it seems like hubris to me.

pbiggar5• 16 years ago

We started down a different path too. We were making a Disqus clone for newspapers. We definitely stumbled onto this path, because we were talking to so many journalists and feeling their pain.

lisp123• 16 years ago

Is it true that 80% of YC startups use Rails?

jon_dahl• 16 years ago

Not the OP, but: probably not. Ruby is big, but Python is pretty big too. In the latest class there is even PHP, .NET, and backend Javascript.

rokhayakebe• 16 years ago

I think by now YC is big enough that you will find all sorts of technologies being used by the companies.

pbiggar5• 16 years ago

I meant 80% of the winter 2010 YC batch. It might be an over-estimate, but it certainly seemed that everyone we talked to about their tech was using rails. We started using Django, and almost no-one else used it - they were all on rails.

IAMA founder of NewsTilt, a YC startup trying to reinvent journalism.

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