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.
Re:Nice CSS/Javascript on your reddit clone (Score:5, 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".
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Posting to un-do a mod. I modded a negative troll post as funny and it went to 3 Informative. Huh? Obviously this was not my intention.
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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:iOS shouldn't be mandatory... (Score:5, Informative)
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It does look like you need to set up an account and can't browse anonymously, so sorry AC.
I signed up and it did not require an email confirmation. You can use any name & email account. Anonymity is alive and well on Trove.
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I signed up and it did not require an email confirmation. You can use any name & email account.
But the default settings for an account are:
- Send me my top headlines
- Send me news alerts for big stories
- Send me tips for using Trove
Signing up is signing up for spam, ladies and gentlemen. Unless, of course, you use a non-existent email account (or one that belongs to someone else).
Where does it say "Send me info on products or services from special partners" or "Send me special offers" in your list? "My Top Headlines" you want. "Big News Stories" is questionable as nowadays Justin Bieber's new haircut qualifies as "big news". "Tips" on how to use an iOS app that undoubted does not come with a manual or any sort? That's not spam, either.
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If those are settings, you could always try setting them to a non-default value.
Re:iOS shouldn't be mandatory... (Score:5, Informative)
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I agree that the notion of news feeds filtered by interest is essentially the same as reddit. But I'll take this opportunity to bicker with you about /. vs reddit.
What annoys me most about /. is the poor quality of many of the submissions that make it through, despite (or because of) the fact that it's curated. Sure, there's the almost mandatory trope of closing a summary with a rhetorical question. But often the whole summary, or even the news story, is crap -- FUD, nonsense, or obviously loaded rhetoric t
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But . . . but . . . . but . . . . but . . . . Cmdr Taco says "Slashdot combines editor quality control and insi
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But . . . but . . . . but . . . . but . . . . Cmdr Taco says "Slashdot combines editor quality control and insight"
It must be true!!!
I definitely gain insight into the control of quality editors on /. -- but I'm not sure I'd want to brag about it.
Emacs!
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I wonder how many times he gagged and choked while writing that line?
Re:Nice CSS/Javascript on your reddit clone (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Nice CSS/Javascript on your reddit clone (Score:5, Funny)
Wait a while, I'm sure beta.trove will be along shortly.
We have one of those already. (Score:3)
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Re:We have one of those already. (Score:5, Funny)
If it has less BitCoin articles, I'll take it.
Re:We have one of those already. (Score:5, Funny)
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As long as you're not in /r/bitcoin I haven't seen a bitcoin problem there, unlike say Wired for example.
Whoosh! (he was referring to Slashdot)
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For all its faults, at least Slashdot isn't a tired circle-jerk of callous libertarians, militant atheists, hysterical feminists, misogynist MRAs and general contrarian white suburbanite american kids who are the very soul of aggressive pig-headed impatience.
I'll take slashdot any day.
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I'm a callous libertarians, militant atheist, hysterical feminist, misogynistic masculist, generally contrarian, white, suburbanite, American child who likes to masturbate in a circle with others, you insensitive clod!
More bitcoin articles than you could coment on. (Score:2)
BitCoin? There's a whole channel for that linked right from the home page:
http://trove.com/me/channels/1... [trove.com]
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I feel like targeting that demographic with a new techy website is a plan that's doomed to failure. But I'm judgmental, and certainly am capable of being wrong.
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But it's not? It's a reddit clone?
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How about calling it AOL*Lite?
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reddit is still nerdy. This is for non-nerdy news nitwits.
Well, that just went from LITTLE reason for me to go there, to NO reason for me to go there. I guess there is some value in having a reddit for people who like to talk about the Kardashians and such, but it's not the kind of neighborhood where I'm going to build a house.
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And with a userbase of 2^22 /. likely has less than 2^16 that contribute useful (nerdy) comments.
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Sounds like Scoop.it to me.
CmdrTaco's Trove? (Score:5, Funny)
No inline summaries. Less linkability than pinterest. Lame.
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No inline summaries. Less linkability than pinterest. Lame.
After reading about a "taco trove" I'm left disappointed. And hungry.
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.
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Sounds like a place for you, foobar bazbot . . .
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Agreed that /. is better then digg, 4chan, reddit, or any of those other emo-news sites. /. could be great if they actually fixed their broken 'ecode' tag, their lame lameness filter, and ,b>if the editors actually did their freakin job. When I think how bad /. is I always go visit another site only to find out it is even worse! Such as no user comments, you can only log in with fazebook of twitter, no moderation, group-think, excessive ad hominem, etc.
--
Redditard: your typical whiny emo reddit teen who
Feed? (read-only) API? (Score:5, Interesting)
Okay, so say I want to 'follow' a 'channel' on Trove.. but I have no interest in using the website. I know, I know.. using the website is what's actually desired - the same applies to Twitter and facebook and google+ and etc. - but nonetheless I set things up so that I can 'follow' people on them anyway by using either...
1. The feed provided for me, which means I can just get posts in any feed reader, including my custom one.
2. The API they make available - even if they do make me jump through hoops with OAuth and a ton of other things that have everything to do with 'posing on behalf of a user' crap when really all I want is read-only access to already public things - so that I can include it in my custom one.
3. Yoink whatever data source they're using, sometimes having to impersonate the site or prior access because they got wise to people using that data source, didn't want them to, and put up artificial roadblocks.
4. Scrape. Yeah, that's right, Google. You don't provide a feed, you make the API limited to just a few dozen queries per day, while serving the desired content to a bajillion people every day? I'll just waste bandwidth and scrape.
So, where does Trove fit in? I'm not seeing a feed anywhere in the page source, I'm not seeing anything about an API (read-only or otherwise), I see I can grab the datasource through e.g. http://trove.com/me/channels/C... [trove.com] and get a tidy little json packet - but maybe Trove frowns upon doing so, or I could scrape (but would have to use the js-enabled scraper and boy do I ever not want to do that).
Please tell me the Trove developers know better.. or at least plan to know better with an announcement of API/feeds 'coming soon' .. or an official "developers: grab the json datasources if you just want read-only access of public data, that's cool with us - peace out."
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Somebody hasn't been paying attention to how content is actually 'consumed' for most of these services.
Where are tweets mostly read? At people's private clients. Be that an official twitter client, or a great number of other clients that interface with the API. Where next? probably twitter.com directly. After that? A whole ton of websites that include a
No Sign-in (Score:5, Informative)
Here's example links to the "actual site" that doesn't require you to sign in:
Tech News: http://trove.com/me/channels/1... [trove.com]
U.S. News: http://trove.com/me/channels/1... [trove.com]
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.
Re:No Sign-in (Score:4, Insightful)
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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 :)
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I do allow scripts, as is true with most people that use NoScript. The reason to use something like NoScript is to control where you allow scripts to run from. If there was no desire to run any scripts I'd use a browser without JS support.
If you blindly trust everything on the web, that's your issue.
News to me (Score:5, Funny)
Well that's news to me. We have quality control here?
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Don't be hard on this "Taco" guy... I think he's new here.
Overdesigned (Score:5, Informative)
Any site that comes up with a list of a dozen or more sites that I have to permit requests (RequestPolicy) and scripts (NoScript) to function screams we're more interested in tracking you than providing a usable site. Next.
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I thought the interest in tracking was obvious when the giant Connect With (Facebook|Twitter) buttons got plastered on my face in the login page*. The logo-riffic Partners page [trove.com] does not help. It's clear that Trove is already in Slashdot's current milking-it stage, as a marketing tool for themselves and the logo'd companies. Taco's lost what's left of his way.
*and again, when I looked the create-account page**.
**which makes you have to click again to sign in with an email address if you're a normal non-
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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.
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No Android? (Score:2)
cheap shot (Score:2)
No Android client. Less editors than Reddit. Lame.
LMFTFY (Score:5, Funny)
"Slashdot used to combine editor quality control and insight with crowd-sourced harvesting to cover the 'News for Nerds' space."
.
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"Slashdot used to combine editor quality control and insight with crowd-sourced harvesting to cover the 'News for Nerds' space."
No it didn't. My sig for years was a protest at the idea of paying for Slashdot when the editors couldn't go a month without a dupe.
Congrats, Rob. ML is the way to go (Score:3)
ML is the way to go, the trouble is that it's really really hard to do. I like the idea of having users categorize items so that you can use the hand-classified data to train on and then scale up with machine learning, but that's only a part of the puzzle. It's more difficult to properly curate what is and is not headline-worthy without catering to a basic popularity contest. Good luck with that, and may you continue to be optimistic!
I've always hoped that Slashdot itself could use ML to extend comment moderation: allow five points for human moderation, two for meta-moderation (given enough reinforcement), and three for a third system based on ML (trained by meta-moderation-confirmed moderation). Average the direct moderation (-1 to 5) and the indirect moderation (meta+ML, -1 to 5), adjust by +1/-1/-2 for AC/karma/user-conf, and round up or down based on achievements. Alternatively, make it a ten point system and add them rather than averaging them (fold achievements into karma). I'd start with the ML system as a moderator within the current system, then once it's proven, migrate to the averaging system, then migrate to the ten point scale.
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What is ML?
You know what would be funny? (Score:2)
If Trove killed Slashdot.
editor quality control? (Score:2)
"Slashdot combines editor quality control and insight with crowd-sourced harvesting"
but... there is little to no editor quality control on Slashdot. At least Rob got the advertorial feature of Slashdot used to his personal benefit.
This new Slashdot site sounds great. (Score:5, Funny)
Slashdot combines editor quality control and insight with crowd-sourced harvesting to cover the 'News for Nerds' space.
God, I wish the editors were like that here ;)
Where's the news startup? (Score:3)
I was expecting to see perhaps a news aggregator. Instead I was directed to some flash-based advertisement for Apple devices. What gives?
Subjects suck. (Score:2)
At its simplest, Slashdot combines editor quality control and insight with crowd-sourced harvesting to cover the 'News for Nerds' space.
BWA HA HA HA HA! Apparently CmdrTaco's new career is in comedy.
Ponies! (Score:2)
I only want stories about ponies!
But on a more serious note... wtf? get money from Apple much? no android? And web sign on is spacebook or twitter only? Not.
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
Very unhappy (Score:4, Interesting)
As someone who was using Trove.
As someone who visited Trove every morning to find articles about topics of interest (channels).
I am really unhappy.
They broke everything.
I thought that Trove (Score:3)
Was the new game coming from Trion Worlds...
Yeah, like Trove [trovegame.com].
Initial check out (Score:2)
So I created an account using an email address (which is very well hidden compared to the big twit and FB buttons).
It's interesting, but it has a ways to go.
I selected a few "troves" to follow but I still received things from troves I am not following in my home page feed. (with gray trove name instead of green) Could not figure out how to get rid of those, nothing in the preferences that I can find. You do need to manually refresh after you add or remove troves it seems, to update your home page.
Will ke
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This could possibly replace Google News for me, we'll see. One thing I don't like right off the bat is a lot of the fonts don't render correctly on Chrome. Like lowercase "e" doesn't have the horizontal bar and looks more like a "c".
Not interested if no UIDs (Score:2)
I'm not going to bother unless his site lists a UID so I can be some of the hipster first then complain about all the 7-digit young-ins and reminisce about the days before it got popular.
Sounded interesting at first (Score:2)
Oh well. I might be wrong.
Fragmentation and duplication (Score:2)
No, I'm not talking about Slashdot and Trove. I'm actually referring to this part in the summary:
Users are encouraged to curate "troves," collections of stories that relate to a particular theme.
And this Technology News [trove.com] channel as an example.
It looks like Trove has the potential for dozens or even hundreds of channels with the same overall theme. As a non-curator, it looks like you'll have to browse through these channels and decide which ones are worth following. And I already see about a half dozen tech-related channels just attached to the stories listed on the above channel, which means there's goin
A bit confusing... (Score:2)
I've signed up and selected two "troves" to follow (Technology News and Science News). But, on the home page (which I'm assuming is your personal feed when logged in), I'm seeing stories that aren't tagged as being in either channel. I'm also seeing stories on my feed that are tagged as being in that channel, but which do not appear on the page for that channel.
bubbles (Score:2)
I'm not a big fan of those auto-selecting-stories-we-think-you-will-like services. There's too much danger of them making a bubble around you, only showing you the news you agree with anyways, and shielding you from the different and strange and sometimes disagreeable reality.
Got my 4 digit UID! (Score:2)
Video in Vimeo. Not watching any further (Score:2)
Not original name =( (Score:2)
http://trove.nla.gov.au/ [nla.gov.au]
Find and get over 385,550,734 Australian and online resources: books, images, historic newspapers, maps, music, archives and more
Dice Holdings (Score:2)
I thought it was Dice's job to introduce me to non-nerdy news?
AND iPhones and iPads? Wow! (Score:2)
It's called Trove, and it's currently available on the web as well as iPhones and iPads.
If only the rest of the web was also available on iPhones and iPads... oh well.
Editor quality control and insight? Where? (Score:2)
Rob says, "At its simplest, Slashdot combines editor quality control and insight
Really? When was the last time you saw evidence of either of those two things from an editor?
My CPU is a neural net processor; (Score:2)
a learning computer.
"...automated harvesting and machine learning..."
Not sure what is being harvested and learned by machines, but I bet it isn't good. At best it will be picking biased news stories about the abused downtrodden computer masses, at worst some sort of arrangement using humans as batteries...
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Taco has demonstrated that he will sell out for the right price. After that it's only a matter of time before you start seeing featured ads in your news feed.
Taco supposedly personally made between $40-50 million from slashdot. I'm not sure he even needs to work anymore. He is probably just doing it for fun now.
Really? IIRC, Slashdot sold for $1.5M with a few million in additional cash and stock over the next few years.
http://www.salon.com/1999/09/1... [salon.com]
Did Andover do so well that he eventually earned 10X+ the selling price of the site?
Re:Slashdot users know better (Score:5, Funny)
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VA Linux bought Andover.net in cash and stock for over $1B a year after the IPO. So yeah, I'd say that Rob probably made out in the $40-50M range depending on when/if he sold those options...
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-236456.html
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The dot.com boom made LOTS of people multi-millionaires on paper, but in the form of stock options they couldn't sell for a decade. The bubble burst long before most could even potentially have cashed-in.
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There is no "Login with Slashdot?".
Or "Log in" with Slashdot?
Page title uses "Log-in". Any other permutations?
Logan's Run?
Re:The point where I stopped reading (Score:4, Funny)
You got that far? My stopping point:
If your website needs a dedicated app on mobile platforms, you're either doing something wrong or doing something unethical.
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Are you kidding me? I'd say at least 50% of the web sites I visit these days have a "download our app" link. I'd say over 90% have a "like us on Facebook" or "Follow us on Twitter" link.
Now, I believe this precludes neither wrong nor unethical (or both), but it seems the marketing weenies have decided that "ZOMG, we need teh app".
Me, I don't know why people don't just use the web --
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The on
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The world is changing. I've been doing "year in review" stuff with clients websites the past month. A trend I am noticing is that mobile users are now half or more of all traffic to many of the sites I manage. One in particular it's 2/3's of the traffic and increasing with almost half of all visits from iOS users. It is getting to the point where we're sitting down next month and drawing up requirement docs for building an iOS and hopfuly Android App by the end of the year.
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Well, just saying you have quality control, quality is controlled for the good. Makes me wonder if the lack of quality *is* the desired effect.
Meanwhile at Dice Headquarters...
Tim Lord " Wait! that sentence makes sense and there are only two misspelled words and no run on sentences! Quick change it to an ambiguous split infinitive in the Passive voice!"
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Is it unfair for slashdot to be "American slanted"? I've always thought of it as an American site. Does the fact that it is available in other countries obligate it to give them a proportional share of the news?
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Are you kidding? The non-citizens scream about how the U.S. sucks and most of us citizens are ashamed of our own government, around here at least.
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Or are you saying that it has the perspective of the U.S.? Because IT'S A U.S. WEBSITE, for the thousandth time!!
Re:Opinion bubble (Score:5, Informative)
It's the reason why the internet has been such a double-edge sword for politics. Rather than a world-wide network enabling us to reach and appreciate a far wider range of topics and beliefs, we've instead been largely enabled to find the most comfortable echo chamber to reinforce all of our crazy without having to listen to neighbors who might not agree with our increasingly detached beliefs.
Not that that's always a bad thing, if you're a persecuted minority, for example. But I think the edge facing us does more cutting than the other side of the sword most of the time. Just look at how partisan things have gotten.