

Ask HN: AI service proposes content to share based on merit – would you use it? - mercurialshark

What would it have to offer for you to pay for it?<p>Thanks
======
cpa
What's merit in this context? What NLP/ML algorithms would you use? I can't
think of any that are suited to or good enough for any definition of merit.

~~~
mercurialshark
Substance is more accurate than "merit". You're right, not meritorious but
substantive to pre-selected subject matter of interest.

Using K-nearest neighbor (among others) against training documents to classify
content, in areas you designate as interest. If they meet a predetermined
relevance score and sufficient length range - they would then be considered
for recommendation to the user.

~~~
cpa
That's basically what last.fm does, so that's doable and not too hard. As
somebody with a formal training in ML, I'm not convinced by the quality of the
results (as much as I'm not convinced but last.fm recommendations…) but it
looks like there's a good business case to make.

~~~
mercurialshark
Well, it certainly would depend on the use case and the quality would be
influenced by both the scoring threshold and extent/quality of training
materials. Using large data sets, with a particularly difficult lowest
sufficient score, could produce a small quantity of highly relevant and
substantive content. If the purpose is to discover a handful of articles in a
specific subcategory (ex. theoretical physics) that a user could confidently
share to social media - then there is a significant utility to the service -
not just a business case.

What would this service have to offer for you to actually pay for it? Of
course you could say you wouldn't pay for it, simply curious...

------
dfc
I do not understand what is meant by "proposes content to share." My best
guess is that I would visit [http://proposer.ai](http://proposer.ai) and I
would be presented with a list of things that I should tweet/like/submit-to-
hn? Why would I vouch for / share something that I had not read myself?
Accumulate magic internet points? I hope my interpretation is wrong because it
sounds like a product that supports and tacitly condones shallow, insincere,
attention seeking behavior on the internet. I realize that sounds harsh but I
am really perplexed by the use of "recommend content to share" versus
"recommend content to personally consume." It seems that in order to make good
decisions about what to share the site would not only need information about
me but also information about my social graph.

More than anything it sounds like a wonderful tool for astroturfing campaigns.
Corporate PR departments would love to re-brand advertising as "AI based merit
recommendations."

~~~
mercurialshark
And what's wrong with magic internet points?

I over-simplified the premise. We want to identify interesting and unique
content, produced by individuals/publications that may not have any real
visibility. This would serve as a win-win for the creator and sharer. Obscure
content - that isn't fortunate enough to be on HN or some equivalent - needs a
way to be identified and considered for digestion besides popularity. I never
said users wouldn't read it before sharing it. While companies could certainly
abuse it, that's not the purpose. If I had a smarty-pants blog, but no blog
followers, I'd be happy that a deep-learning service classified my theoretical
physics blog for consideration/syndication somewhere based on substance of the
posts...

~~~
dfc
I am extremely suspicious of the continued emphasis on "sharing" instead of
"consuming."

~~~
mercurialshark
Ok, I'll baby step my logical jump, people would share things they have
consumed first...

1\. Identify stuff you would not have known about. 2\. Much wow - mind
imploding 3\. Share something that is different and substantive because I
happen to hate most shit on social media (not required, but in reality
sometimes people share stuff they get excited about) 4\. Make the world
slightly smarter, expose smartguy's blog to others

------
lauradhamilton
If it were better than existing content/news aggregators, sure.

