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Charlie — Meet your new, personal journalist
What if the news was written just for you?
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Meet Charlie - a balanced, stress-free way to understand the news stories that matter.
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Meet Charlie - a balanced, stress-free way to understand the news stories that matter.
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Replies
@nickhowland Amazing, thanks Nick! As the days go by you should find that Charlie starts to learn more about what you're missing. Let me know how it goes!
... so one of the super important things about building Charlie is being as transparent as possible from the outset.
So, if you're interested:
➜ all of our stats are public (thanks @markosaric, @ukutaht & Plausible Analytics!) -- Our Web Stats
➜ loads of other metrics are public - see our Open Stats page and the image I hope I've added to this comment.
If you have any other questions you'd like to ask me or the other makers - or stats you'd like to see, just let us know!
If you have any other questions you'd like to ask me or the other makers - or stats you'd like to see, just let us know!Hi folks,
I'm Jim 👋 - founder of Charlie.
Please ask me, @onesub_lor and @jason_scott2 anything you like. 💬
We're building Charlie as a way to take the stress & anxiety out of reading the news.
We're on a mission to help people get a balanced perspective of the world around them... and Charlie is our way of delivering on that mission.
🤖 What is Charlie?
Charlie is new way to read the news. A pro-active personal assistant with a deep understanding of the current news cycle, Charlie works to bring you a culturally and politically diverse sample of the day's news.
🤷♂️ Why do I need Charlie?
Most people today read news in one of three ways:
1️⃣ They only read a few publishers.
2️⃣ They let a social media algorithm feed them articles.
3️⃣ They just don't.
People in the first two categories miss a great deal of what's happening in the world, while believing they know what's happening. Perception is skewed by what the publishers - or social algos - choose to focus on. Whole perspectives are lost because important stories don't reach the top of a daily news cycle.
Charlie's approach is different.
Because our algorithm really understands the news - and what what's previously been discussed - Charlie is able to let you know where there are gaps, where you're reading too much on a particular topic or where you're only seeing one side of a debate.
And because you're having a discussion with Charlie, your decisions to dive deeper can be lead by calm, genuine interest - not by loud headlines, flashy photography and the content priorities of those who are really just trying to feed you adverts.
🏆 Does Charlie pass the Turing Test?
Charlie is still extremely young and has a lot to learn about how you want to communicate, what you want to ask and how to answer all of your questions.
While you can ask anything you like, Charlie won't always be able to answer with the alacrity we might expect from a real journalist.
If you get lost, please know that Charlie's understanding is improving every day and just by asking new things you're helping their growth.
🙌 Is that everything?
Absolutely not. There's SO much I could tell you about how Charlie works, what our aspirations are for their future or what social impact we hope to achieve in the long term.
Why not take a quick look - and then come back here to ask me what's on your mind. I will be around all day to answer questions.
Thank you so much for taking a look - and thank you @chrismessina for sharing Charlie with the Product Hunt community.
@deephdave absolutely! To manage our underlying costs, we don't have a huge amount of coverage for publishers in India at the moment... but we 💯 plan to add support.
For now, you can chat to Charlie on the web at charlie.news - to get a sense of how they work. Do you want to give that a go and let me know how you get on?
@deephdave I've had an idea (or @rahulchowdhury has given me an idea) Deep...
If you like, you can download & play with the beta versions (currently identical to what's in the AppStore) - They should both open in all regions:
➜ Android
➜ iOS
@andrew_berman Thanks! Did you spot Jim's making a cameo? 😁 We're a remote team now, but mostly based in the beautiful south west of England ;)
Looks really interesting as someone who consumes their daily news from highly curated sources in flipboard and reddit (working on it since 2015 I think) this might be a good alternative to clear the mind from asking is this reliable?
will definitely try :)
@mustafa_yilmaz Thanks Mustafa. We'd be fascinated to know what you make of Charlie after a few days. Their ability to track evolving stories over time should give you an intriguingly different experience to Flipboard (which I've loved for a long time) & Reddit. What's your first impression?
Been following this app for a while now and Charlie is a great app if you like to follow news about a and b without the noise. Congrats on the launch @jimbomorrison.
Congrats on the launch!! The concept looks super interesting, wondering what kind of work (if any) you're doing on fake news and verifying sources.
@antonio_autiero Thanks. Thanks a *REALLY* interesting question.
For the moment we're focused on building a great product for the end user - something that takes the anxiety & stress out of staying informed, while making sure nothing important is missed.
In large part this approach is defined by the constraints of being a ~boostrapped*, 3-person team start-up...
... so what we're doing at the moment is ensuring that content we recommend is originally sourced from what we understand as being reputable sources (see below) that operate under some level of national legislative oversight. It's risk mitigation, not a solution.
We rely a lot on the relationships we've built up with academics, research from the Reuters Institute, research work we've done with NESTA and others to cross-check and validate this approach.
Now, Charlie may appear quite facile at the moment. You can see, from our stats (shared here, just now) that they don't understand plenty that people ask them...
.. but underpinning Charlie's conversational layer is an increasingly advanced modelling engine which is really concerned with "thing that have happened" - a lower-level construct than just headlines & copy.
When we look at things at that level of abstraction it actually becomes easier to identify anomalous assertions. If 99 historically "reputable" sources state and cross-corroborate an event and one source states the opposite, that becomes quite interesting.
Of course everything is always more nuanced... but hopefully you see what I mean.
One aside (sorry, I don't do quick answers) is that we don't *just* pull data in from our public sources. We're also always looking at a second set of data from places we consider to be less reputable, for research purposes, and .. we also have a Chrome Extension which has a much broader scope of domains on which it will operate and analyse content.
The Chrome extension, even with it's moderate little install-base, gives lots of data for research purposes too.
Links, if they're useful:
➜ Our Publishers
➜ Our Chrome Extension (under the OneSub brand, fwiw)
*bootstrapped: technically we raised GBP~106k in ~2019 - but as you can imagine, that doesn't go very far when people (and servers) have to eat... We feel bootstrapped anyway! 😆
@antonio_autiero @jimbomorrison There's a list of all the publishers we've sourced news from over the past 7 days here, too :)
https://onesub.io/open/publishers
@antonio_autiero @jimbomorrison @laural It's great that you list your sources, how much you get from each, and where they are based. People can then decide for themselves whether the mix is balanced from their perspective. It also gives credit to the journalists who write the content: many even risk their lives to cover wars and disasters around the world.
I like this idea quite a bit. I've tried following IRL journalists that attempt to accomplish similar goals on social media, but the push vs pull and the single source have left me unsatisfied.
I'm thinking about distilling multiple sources' biases into Charlie's bias. Do you have any plans to demonstrate the breadth of the political spectrum the user is consuming?
@adam_janower Great question Adam, thanks.
Short answer - yes, 💯
Long answer - Charlie calculates and understands your reading history across ~500,000 topics in real-time and for ~14 days (after which we delete the data, though we plan to add a paid-tier if you want to keep the data for longer).
That data should be available to the inquisitive user in detail, on demand, and nudged to the less inquisitive user when particularly germane.
You can get a sense of where we're heading from the slides on our Product Hunt page - in the carousel, to the right of the video...
Aside:
Interestingly, journalistic bias takes two particularly interesting forms - one we talk about and one we don't, so much.
The first - the obvious one - is "how" a publication portrays certain people, events or opinions.
The second - the less obvious one - is "what" a publication choses to even mention. In the UK as you will see in the US, we'll have whole stories, running for weeks, that some major publishers will barely mention... while other papers are obsessing about those topics to the exclusion of things the first group are discussing.
Of course this second pattern is amplified geographically; where we are all a bit too self-interested in domestic affairs at the expense of understanding the cultural perspectives of the vast majority of humans that don't live in whatever country we live in.
One of the things therefore that I like about Charlie (and OneSub, Charlie's older sister) is that I see a broader spectrum of news - not just both sides of the debate, but loads of debates that I might otherwise miss.
Sure, it's a nascent little product with a tiny team and long way to go - but we've broken the back of the underlying technology and for us it's all spit & polish from here in. Quality control, broadening our publisher input, tweaking the comprehension and above all, improving how we communicate our flavour of hyper-personalisation to and audience inured to advertiser-lead dopamine hacking.
Finger crossed we can get it right! 🤞
@jimbomorrison Thanks for the thoughtful response. Best of luck in what's next! I'm checking out the slides now.
Great product. I just started chatting with Charlie in the browser and I noticed there's an additional "the" here.
Otherwise it looks impressive! Congrats on the launch.
Otherwise it looks impressive! Congrats on the launch.
I tried downloading this in the Play store from India, but it says the app isn't available for India yet. Interesting product. :)
@vishal_kothari1 yes, sorry. We're a tiny UK-based team so we've focused on the markets we're familiar with to get Charlie ticking along happily. We'll be working to add new territories as soon as possible.
I love the premise — getting news that's informative and personalized to you, without the hyperbole and doomscrolliness is so needed in today's hyperconnected, 24-7 livestreamed world. Whether it's a pandemic or the verging on the precipice of World War III, we all need to take a break while still staying informed.
@jimbomorrison — tell us about your journey to getting to launch today!
Thanks @chrismessina! 🙌
It's been such an epic year building Charlie. I'm so excited to show them to the world and let people discover a better, calmer way to read the news.
You're a gem - thanks again for your support. 💎
Panrobe