Alex Fink

Otherweb — A smarter way to be informed

Featured
212
Read the news, discover podcasts and search the web - without clickbait, eye catchers, auto playing videos, paywalls, partisan echo-chambers, or whatever else digital marketers can come up with next.

Add a comment

Replies
Best
Alex Fink
Hello Product Hunters! Last time you gave us a lot of love, so we decided to launch something even cooler this time. Android and iOS apps! Look, it's really simple. The internet is full of clickbait, eye-catchers, autoplaying videos, fake news and other forms of digital junk. It is hard to avoid. All major search engines, social networks, news aggregators and streaming apps are full of this rubbish. We're all drowning in it. So we are creating the one place where you can just.. be informed. * We aggregate news, opinion columns, podcasts, research studies, and many other sources of information - in one place. * We apply heavy filtering to remove all the junk. * We give YOU the tools to customize your feed with complete transparency, so you can consume high-quality content and get informed as quickly and as efficiently as possible. The end result is a mobile app that allows you to read, enjoy, and.. that's it. There's no anger, no frustration, no desire to shout at the sky or bang your head against the wall. No staring at the clock and wondering where 2 hours have gone. No regrets. Only pure, pristine information. Please join us and help make the internet sane again! Yours, A.
Alex Fink
@fares_aktouf thanks Fares!
Alex Fink
@fares_aktouf we really appreciate your support! As a token of appreciation, we want to offer you a special bonus - besides web and mobile, you can also consume the Otherweb as a free newsletter: https://otherweb.news/bonus ; it's a daily selection of the top-10 articles of the day, sent to you each morning. Cheers!
Chetan Natesh
@otherweb Congratulations on the launch Alex 🙌 2 questions, -Is there scope for user generated content? -what is your business model, if I may ask?
Alex Fink
@chetan_natesh hi Chetan, 1. For now only the "comment" feature under each post, kind of like what Google Reader had back in the day; we plan to add local bloggers and other more niche sources, but either way the content entering the platform is currently aggregated, not user-generated, because that allows us to apply heavy filtering and strip the junk out. 2. In the current app there is none. Over time we may experiment with ads on the search results page (when you search within the app) since that would likely not affect the user's experience too much, but for now it's just free, ad-free, and we don't even collect any user data besides your settings.
Sergey Kuznetsov
Congratulations, Alex! Great improvements since last launch. These mobile apps were really lacking because usually I'm reading news on my mobile, not PC. And now I have it :) I definitely like these news and op-eds feeds. This summary text feels very convenient than reading a lot of unnecessary noise. By the way, these feeds is a great tool to find new news sources without the need leaving the app. Few my wishes for a further functionality: - add more customization options for the feeds. Current functionality is enough to start, but sometimes I really want to see something specific. - add more news categories. Personally I'm missing games and movies, but I don't mind to see more categories - I like to find for new stuff. - add something like discussions. Sometimes I want to read discussion about current trending topic, and sometimes I want to participate in this discussion. By the way, have you ever considered functionality like user news? So that anyone can join and start writing their own news and op-eds. Something like mix of personal blog and discussions. I know it is usually not related to news, but still it looks interesting for me to read articles of ordinary users. Anyway, great success! Keep going, I'm looking for more interesting stuff from you in future. Best wishes, Sergey.
Alex Fink
@new_user_191d987f0c Sergey, thank you for the detailed breakdown! Yes customization options and more granular categories/topics are definitely next on the roadmap!
Alex Fink
@new_user_191d987f0c we really appreciate your support! As a token of appreciation, we want to offer you a special bonus - besides web and mobile, you can also consume the Otherweb as a free newsletter: https://otherweb.news/bonus ; it's a daily selection of the top-10 articles of the day, sent to you each morning. Cheers!
Karina
Awesome! I can get all information what I want to take in one place, especially news feed is wonderful, no rubbish, I am now able to get news from my interests without any junk. Great!
Alex Fink
@julius_dev thanks Karina! I really appreciate it. The news feed is where most of our users spend their time, it's the key feature.
Alex Fink
@julius_dev we really appreciate your support! As a token of appreciation, we want to offer you a special bonus - besides web and mobile, you can also consume the Otherweb as a free newsletter: https://otherweb.news/bonus ; it's a daily selection of the top-10 articles of the day, sent to you each morning. Cheers!
Dmytro Kriher
@julius_dev Thank you!
Omotoso Abdulmatin
Congratulations 🎉 I really love the idea of getting a glance of what of is happening around the world without noise, listening to podcasts, searching for books and courses, and having the ability to selectively pick the type of content to search on Wikipedia, all in one place. This is really a whole game changer
Alex Fink
@omotoso_abdulmatin thanks, gathering it all in one place is exactly what we tried to do. There's really no reason why people have one app or news and another for podcasts - all the feeds can be in one place.
Alex Fink
@omotoso_abdulmatin we really appreciate your support! As a token of appreciation, we want to offer you a special bonus - besides web and mobile, you can also consume the Otherweb as a free newsletter: https://otherweb.news/bonus ; it's a daily selection of the top-10 articles of the day, sent to you each morning. Cheers!
Андрей Залищук
Hey, this is really cool. How do you define "quality" exactly? What do the scores mean?
Alex Fink
@new_user_068d72574b410 thanks! We have ~20 different NLP models, each one measures something specific (like how clickbaity the headline is, or how subjective the language is); the quality score is an aggregate (linear combination) of the partial scores. Ping me separately, I can send you a link to where the models can be audited/tested (they're source-available).
Alex Fink
@new_user_068d72574b410 @kriherdmytro we really appreciate your support! As a token of appreciation, we want to offer you a special bonus - besides web and mobile, you can also consume the Otherweb as a free newsletter: https://otherweb.news/bonus ; it's a daily selection of the top-10 articles of the day, sent to you each morning. Cheers!
Great to see this as a mobile app now. Don't know about others but 80% of the news I consume is from my phone!
Alex Fink
@florin_biro that's the feedback we got last time, and.. we listened :) If you have any feedback on this one now, we'd love to hear it!
Dmytro Kriher
@florin_biro Thank you!
Alex Fink
@florin_biro @kriherdmytro we really appreciate your support! As a token of appreciation, we want to offer you a special bonus - besides web and mobile, you can also consume the Otherweb as a free newsletter: https://otherweb.news/bonus ; it's a daily selection of the top-10 articles of the day, sent to you each morning. Cheers!
Aditya Rajput
@otherweb Amazzzzzzzing! I am loving it already. No noise, only information, that's very noicce! :P More power to you! Hope it stays free forever. 😂 🤞
Alex Fink
@adityasinghrajput thanks Aditya! We'll do our best :)
Alex Fink
@adityasinghrajput @kriherdmytro we really appreciate your support! As a token of appreciation, we want to offer you a special bonus - besides web and mobile, you can also consume the Otherweb as a free newsletter: https://otherweb.news/bonus ; it's a daily selection of the top-10 articles of the day, sent to you each morning. Cheers!
Valeriy Zagrebin
Sounds super convenient, but will there be a built-in VPN?
Alex Fink
@veex thanks Valeriy, what would the VPN be for?
Valeriy Zagrebin
@otherweb Although yes, I went too far, since you will collect news yourself anyway, then VPN is not needed😅
Dmitry Fink
Finally, yes! I really like the product but since I do most of my news consumption on the go, I was really missing the mobile app experience, as much as the web version was already optimized for mobile, I still prefer the app experience. Now the main question is how can I make it replace my default news source (Google news suggestions on android). Just swiping right in the launcher when I have free time for news is much easier than remembering which app, locating and launching it.
Alex Fink
@finikk Thanks brother! Yes I wish we had the same prime real-estate that google news has.. for the time being, all we can do is produce a better news feed than they do. hopefully that's enough :)
Dmytro Kriher
@finikk Thank you!
Alex Fink
@finikk @kriherdmytro we really appreciate your support! As a token of appreciation, we want to offer you a special bonus - besides web and mobile, you can also consume the Otherweb as a free newsletter: https://otherweb.news/bonus ; it's a daily selection of the top-10 articles of the day, sent to you each morning. Cheers!
Anastassia Fink
Finally! 99% of my content consumption happens on the go and there is an app for everything these days, so I've been waiting for this product to become available in app store to get the best and most enjoyable experience when getting my daily news. Congratulations on the launch!
Alex Fink
@anastassia_fink thank you! Yes we're trying to cover all the bases - web, mobile, and we'll even have a newsletter soon :)
Alex Fink
@anastassia_fink @kriherdmytro we really appreciate your support! As a token of appreciation, we want to offer you a special bonus - besides web and mobile, you can also consume the Otherweb as a free newsletter: https://otherweb.news/bonus ; it's a daily selection of the top-10 articles of the day, sent to you each morning. Cheers!
Vladimir Amov
Excellent work, congrats guys! I've been looking for something like this for a long time.
Alex Fink
@new_user_ff684a94d3 thanks Vladimir! Let me know what you think once you use it - any comments / feature requests would be appreciated!
Alex Fink
@new_user_ff684a94d3 @kriherdmytro we really appreciate your support! As a token of appreciation, we want to offer you a special bonus - besides web and mobile, you can also consume the Otherweb as a free newsletter: https://otherweb.news/bonus ; it's a daily selection of the top-10 articles of the day, sent to you each morning. Cheers!
Пётр Смирнов
What happens if an article is just false? Do you fact-check too?
Alex Fink
@new_user__3112022d75a1422e6eaf705 if you say there's a lion in your kitchen, we're not going to go to your house and check :) So our general approach is to make sure evidence is provided along with the claim, but we do not verify the substance of the claim - that task is unsolvable in the general sense.
Alex Fink
@new_user__3112022d75a1422e6eaf705 @kriherdmytro we really appreciate your support! As a token of appreciation, we want to offer you a special bonus - besides web and mobile, you can also consume the Otherweb as a free newsletter: https://otherweb.news/bonus ; it's a daily selection of the top-10 articles of the day, sent to you each morning. Cheers!
Павел Филимонов
Ok, so I tried to look at a few nutrition labels, and mostly it's on point. But sometimes it ranks good articles pretty low. Any ideas why?
Alex Fink
@filimonov9 would love to see some examples. I think usually this happens to articles that are good but very opinionated, like op-ed columns. Our algorithms are fine-tuned on pure news items, so they penalize opinionated language pretty heavily. We plan to create a separate scale for op-eds in the near future.
Alex Fink
@filimonov9 @kriherdmytro we really appreciate your support! As a token of appreciation, we want to offer you a special bonus - besides web and mobile, you can also consume the Otherweb as a free newsletter: https://otherweb.news/bonus ; it's a daily selection of the top-10 articles of the day, sent to you each morning. Cheers!
Zakhar
So you're scoring Reuters in the 90s but Fox News in the 50s, how can you claim there is no political bias?
Alex Fink
@zakharnikitin5 these two outlets score different because of how their articles are written, not because of their political stances. You might also note that CNBC scores about the same as Reuters and MSNBC scores about the same as Fox - so politically the scores are symmetric.
Alex Fink
@zakharnikitin5 @kriherdmytro we really appreciate your support! As a token of appreciation, we want to offer you a special bonus - besides web and mobile, you can also consume the Otherweb as a free newsletter: https://otherweb.news/bonus ; it's a daily selection of the top-10 articles of the day, sent to you each morning. Cheers!
Wojtek Andruszkow
Interesting idea, I really like that I can customize my feed. I wish you best laucl the launch! 🙌
Alex Fink
@wojtek_kowal thanks Wojtek!
Dmytro Kriher
@wojtek_kowal Thank you!
Alexandr Hacicheant
Looking forward for your app. Good luck!
Alex Fink
@disc thanks Alexandr!
Dmytro Kriher
@disc Thank you!
Alex Fink
@disc @kriherdmytro we really appreciate your support! As a token of appreciation, we want to offer you a special bonus - besides web and mobile, you can also consume the Otherweb as a free newsletter: https://otherweb.news/bonus ; it's a daily selection of the top-10 articles of the day, sent to you each morning. Cheers!
Mikl Derygin
This looks awesome. i would love to try this out soon.
Alex Fink
@miklgraf thanks Mikl! Let me know what you think, I'd love to hear your comments/suggestions.
Dmytro Kriher
@miklgraf Thank you!
Alex Fink
@miklgraf @kriherdmytro we really appreciate your support! As a token of appreciation, we want to offer you a special bonus - besides web and mobile, you can also consume the Otherweb as a free newsletter: https://otherweb.news/bonus ; it's a daily selection of the top-10 articles of the day, sent to you each morning. Cheers!
Александр Савва
Congratulations on the launch. Awesome stuff.
Alex Fink
@new_user_175a64f782 @kriherdmytro we really appreciate your support! As a token of appreciation, we want to offer you a special bonus - besides web and mobile, you can also consume the Otherweb as a free newsletter: https://otherweb.news/bonus ; it's a daily selection of the top-10 articles of the day, sent to you each morning. Cheers!
Frankie
How is this different than twitter feed?
Alex Fink
@new_user_db9cbf64cf twitter feed is essentially unfiltered, so most of it ends up being junk. We try to be as quick as twitter (by scraping sources in real time, including twitter itself), but we apply heavy filtering to everything to make sure only quality articles make it through.
Alex Fink
@new_user_db9cbf64cf @kriherdmytro we really appreciate your support! As a token of appreciation, we want to offer you a special bonus - besides web and mobile, you can also consume the Otherweb as a free newsletter: https://otherweb.news/bonus ; it's a daily selection of the top-10 articles of the day, sent to you each morning. Cheers!
Nikolay Paratyne
Trying it now, looks pretty good so far. What other features do you plan to add?
Alex Fink
@nikolay_paratyne You've probably noticed that we have news, podcasts, research studies, books, online courses, etc. We think the "holy grail" is to be able to navigate these layers seamlessly, to explore the same concept across the information space - zoom in, zoom out, peek sideways etc. That's our next step!
Alex Fink
@nikolay_paratyne @kriherdmytro we really appreciate your support! As a token of appreciation, we want to offer you a special bonus - besides web and mobile, you can also consume the Otherweb as a free newsletter: https://otherweb.news/bonus ; it's a daily selection of the top-10 articles of the day, sent to you each morning. Cheers!