CmdrTaco Launches Trove, a Curated News Startup 221
jigamo writes "The Verge reports on a new app from Slashdot co-founder Rob Malda, a.k.a. CmdrTaco, which aims to provide a user-powered and -curated stream of news. It's called Trove, and it's currently available on the web as well as iPhones and iPads. From the article: 'Trove basically lets users opt in to feeds of stories that align with their interests. Users are encouraged to curate "troves," collections of stories that relate to a particular theme.' You can also read CmdrTaco's announcement post."
Rob says, "At its simplest, Slashdot combines editor quality control and insight with crowd-sourced harvesting to cover the 'News for Nerds' space. Trove uses automated harvesting and machine learning to simplify a workflow for curators interested in ANY topic. The idea is that this opens up non-nerdy subjects. This will let us maintain a strong signal/noise ratio for casual users less interested in expending effort to get their news across diverse subject matter."
Nice CSS/Javascript on your reddit clone (Score:3, Insightful)
It's nice looking, laid out a little different, and puts slightly different rules down, but fundamentally, it's a reddit clone. I don't like reddit, and I can't imagine this doing much better for me.
News for everyone, stuff that may or may ! matter? (Score:5, Insightful)
It sounds like this may be summed up as "news for everyone, stuff that may or may not matter."
In other words, pretty much the same as modern /., amirite?
In seriousness, though, it seems like the big difference is a "filtering system" (even though it works not by computerized filter, but by a thousand foo-obsessed types manually sorting new stories into foo and non-foo, the net effect for the "normal" user is that they can pick any of those human filters) so that nerds could filter it down to classic /. type stuff, arts guys can filter it to their stuff, etc..
That's great and all, but the big reason I started spending time on /. back in the day, and the only reason I eventually registered a nick instead of leaving when I got fed up with the AJAXy mess that is unregistered users' only option, is the discussion system. For all its problems (groupthink etc.), it's still way better than most of the net.
So I guess whether I end up spending much time on Trove will depend immensely on how the discussion system works in practice. Of course that's a function of both the discussion system itself, and what sort of user base it attracts -- after all, a high enough concentration of trolls and assholes can overwhelm any technical measures.
Re:Nice CSS/Javascript on your reddit clone (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Nice CSS/Javascript on your reddit clone (Score:3, Insightful)
Isn't Reddit a Digg clone? And wasn't Digg was a response to Slashdot to "give the power back to the people"?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... [youtube.com]
iOS shouldn't be mandatory... (Score:3, Insightful)
How about just a website? iOS is nice and all, but why should I bother with a site that requires a specific app for it to function?
Sorry, no sale. If the apps were iOS, Android, and I could access it via a PC and a Web browser, I'd pay a subscription fee. Otherwise, it has no use to me.
Re:No Sign-in (Score:4, Insightful)
That layout looks like the stuff I skip over when I go to any news linked news site. If it had an unscrollable fixed background it would be twitter.
Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Who the fuck reads /. for the articles?
We read for the comments and the community.
We may not be as homogenous a community as we were 10 years ago, but we're still nerds. And the comment system here is the best that anyone's come up with yet. Reading at +5 threshold is always insightful. Reading at -1 is often inciteful.
So tired of pompous, inappropriate use of "curate" (Score:5, Insightful)
If you are not managing an archival collection, you are not a curator. Get over yourself and find an appropriate descriptive term. meh
Re:Nice CSS/Javascript on your reddit clone (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:No Sign-in (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Nice CSS/Javascript on your reddit clone (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, that's not completely true. I imagine if it's a clone of Reddit and the commenter hates Reddit, then it would absolutely impact it's usefulness to him.
We are approaching the news singularity, where everyone curates news for everyone else and it all comes down to a bunch of press releases.
Not that Malda has a bad idea, but the Internet is on the verge (get it?) of moving beyond news. It is quickly becoming just another mechanism of control and marketing. People want to read about stuff they already know about, and products they already like and things which reinforce their already-existing world-view. And "curated" news sites are just a way to get to that reinforcement faster.
Anything to avoid something that challenges our preconceptions. "User-created" and "curated" are a nicer way to say, "group-think".
Re:No Sign-in (Score:4, Insightful)
Noscript makes this site unusable, unless I also enable a random looking cloudfront server scripts as well. Yeah, I did that to peek and no I refuse to enable google-analytics. Not as bad as slashdot with scripts, but still.
Lol, Sooner or later you guys who obsess about disabling scripts are going to realise the part of the web you are still able to use has shrunk to the size of compuserve.
Javascript and AJAX drive the modern web and I really don't see that changing any time soon so if you want to post here every time there is an announcement about some great new thing that you guys can't use because you choose to run NoScript then you might want to get a stock post done so you can just copy and paste it :)