

IAMA founder of NewsTilt, a YC startup trying to reinvent journalism. - pbiggar
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/bwrew/iama_founder_of_newstilt_a_y_combinator_startup/

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Volscio
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.

~~~
blehn
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.

~~~
Volscio
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.

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ivenkys
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.

~~~
pbiggar
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.

~~~
ivenkys
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.

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danudey
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.

~~~
pbiggar
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.

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

~~~
kaddar
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)

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lisp123
Is it true that 80% of YC startups use Rails?

~~~
jon_dahl
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.

