Save Them All, Let the Algorithms Sort Em Out
Smartly serving up content amidst information overload
Every day is exactly the same. Even before the COVID lockdowns, in a sense. Each day, when I have a moment, I scroll through various feeds of information and save articles to read later. I’ve been doing this for years at this point. And every day really is the same in that, at the end of the day, when I sit down to read those saved articles, I never get through them all.
And it’s actually worse than that. Because the ones I do get through happen to be the ones I most recently saved. This means that for years, I’ve probably read substantially more articles posted at, say, 4pm than say at 9am. And it’s all just random luck of the reverse chronological draw. This seems… less than ideal.
Honestly, this all annoys me greatly. Both because I’m a completist at heart — Pocket Zero! — but also because I know that the only real solution here is to… save fewer articles. I mean, sure, but it’s not like I’m saving articles I don’t want to read. I’m saving articles I want to read and just hope the feed gods will surface them later.¹ They rarely do. Because they’re stupid.
That’s the real solution here: to make these feeds smarter.
I think an ideal product would let me save as many articles as I wanted to read later, and then would serve them up to me in an intelligent way. Maybe it knows that I like to read sports articles before bed. Or maybe it knows that I want to read everything about Apple. Or maybe it knows that I saved a ton of articles about the Peacock launch and it should bucket those all together to serve up to me to make sure I get to them. Or maybe it even knows that I’m walking around and may like to listen to some articles. Etc.
I say all this, admittedly, as a power user. Most people don’t save nearly the number of articles that I do. And that’s fine. Maybe my power saving can help those people in some way as a signal for what’s interesting. Or if those users never find anything I save of interest, that’s a signal too. Ditto for other power users. Or just users in aggregate.
With the recent hubbub about TikTok, the most interesting element of that service has been highlighted: it’s not the network, it’s the algorithm. They are very, very good at serving up the content you want. As is Netflix on the longer-form side of the equation. But whereas video services are good at this, text-based ones have seemingly never nailed this. Even though Google News and the like have been around for nearly two decades at this point. Perhaps that’s why News Break — another app with Chinese connections, mind you — is doing so well of late. It’s the algorithmic feed of articles which allowed TikTok parent Bytedance to become huge in the first place, with Toutiao.
But those are slightly different products than what I’m talking about. I don’t want or need another general news app that serves up content to me.² I want a service that takes the things I’ve chosen to read later and serves those to me on an algorithmic platter. I do the picking, they do the sorting, as it were.³
Let’s save them all, and let the algorithms sort them out.⁴ Which is also the way I think about photos these days. I take pictures of almost everything and rely on Apple and Google to serve up highlights to me later on. I feel like this is going to become a normalized behavior for more and more things in our ever increasing age of abundance.
¹ I should note that my situation is so insane at this point that I use not one, not two, not three, not four, but five separate read-it-later services or features to try to hack my way into serving up good content. Pocket. Instapaper. Reeder (which recently added a save-for-later feature). The Economist. Medium. And those are just the ones I regularly use. There are others like the NYT app. And then there are some newer entrants, like a new service called Matter which may be getting closer to what I’m talking about…
² Though I am looking forward to the attempt by Apple News+ to serve it up in audio form — if it’s good, I’ll probably even pay for that — well, maybe!
³ This is one thing I’ve always appreciated about Instapaper — the “shuffle” functionality which shakes up the order of the articles you’ve saved. (Pocket has a random button too, but it’s extremely buried and only serves up one random article at a time.)
⁴ This is a pretty obscure and strange movie reference. But it popped into my head for whatever reason.
