389: ‘Two-Legged Stool’, With Gabe Rivera

This podcast episode delves into the origins, evolution, and challenges faced by Techmeme, a prominent news aggregation platform in the tech industry. It discusses its prioritization of clarity and attention to its readers, its ad model and challenges in educating potential sponsors, its algorithm for ranking news stories, and the decline of RSS and rise of paywalls. The episode explores the challenges faced by publishers in the digital age, the decline of blogging and rise of Twitter, and strategies to maintain quality in the face of financial pressures. It also examines the evolution of microblogging, potential of new social media platforms, and the impact of algorithms on user experiences. Takeaways • Techmeme prioritizes reader experience, clarity, and respect for attention. • Techmeme's aggregation algorithm uses link citations and recency to rank stories, facing challenges due to reticence among media outlets to link to each other. • Increased paywalls and the shift away from RSS pose challenges for content gathering, requiring crawling and scraping websites. • Blogging declined with the rise of Twitter due to its frictionless interface and ease of use, leading to the usurpation of commenting sections by tweets. • Twitter's initial focus on user experience deteriorated with attempts to change the platform, underscoring the need to balance profitability and integrity. • AI presents both challenges and opportunities in news aggregation, requiring careful curation of content and building trust networks to combat false context.