Trove tries to tame news overload with curation
When it comes to news, one of the big issues that many users face is noise. There are so many news articles, reports, videos and images out there that it has become difficult to filter interesting ones from those that are of no interest to you.
It may work well on a site that is focused on a specific topic, but once more than one topic is covered, you may have to ignore some articles to read only the ones that you are interested in.
This is true for blogs like Ghacks, news aggregators such as Reddit or Digg, and even sites such as Facebook.
The thing that comes closest to a pure news stream of articles of interest is RSS in my opinion. If you like our articles on Firefox for example, you can just subscribe to those, and ignore the rest of the site. And if a site does not offer those options, good news readers do.
As far as news aggregators go, Reddit is following a similar concept with its groups concept. Some groups there may be too broad though, technology for instance, but that is where hundreds of other technology-related groups come into play.
Trove is a new project -- or better rebuild project -- that aims to change news overload in a different way. It is a news aggregation service on first glance.
The name "trove" refers to a collection of articles covering a subject. There is the Mozilla Firefox trove, covering Firefox news, a politics trove, or one about boxing.
All these troves, at least in the very beginning, are nothing more than filtered news articles from around the world. What makes trove different to many other sites is that people can curate troves. If you are an expert on Firefox -- or not --, you can curate a Mozilla Firefox trove so that only stories that you add to it appear on it.
The main idea here is that curated troves are maintained by people who love the subject, or are at least interested in it, so that the articles are relevant and interesting to other users who are interested in the same subject.
While this may be the case at times, it does not necessarily have to be the case. First of all, since anyone can create troves -- provided that they use the iOS app right now, as it is the only way to do so -- it does not necessarily mean that they have to be experts on a topic, or interested in it at all. While this may be sorted out by social means, it can also lead to issue number two.
A second concern that I have is that people abuse the power of being a curator. If you look at the introducing blog post over at the Trove website, you notice that some troves mentioned explicitly on the page are maintained by companies, organizations or people who operate in the field.
That does not necessarily mean that you will find bias here, or hidden advertisement for company products, but that is something that needs to be monitored.
The third concern that I have is that the unmoderated troves are just like news listing on news sites. The Firefox trove for instance listed ten articles, of which half covered Firefox OS, a The Next Web article about Internet Explorer that mentions Firefox only in the "read also" part of the article, and just one or two articles that I consider a good fit here.
Last but not least, it saddens my heart that Ghacks is not one of the sources that the site uses. Trove is only supporting the "usual" suspects and nothing else, something which I do consider mainstream news.
Verdict
So, is Trove a news service that I will be using from now on? No, it is not. Its concentration on mainstream news sources is problematic, there are virtually no information about curators other than their name, and the lack of an Android version are all issues that need to be sorted out before I'd give it another shot.
For now, it may work well for you if you are interested in mainstream news. If you are not, then this is not for you.
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Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?
Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.
I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
http://www.google.com/saved
@Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!
@Martin
The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/
Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.
Omg a badge!!!
Some tangible reward lmao.
It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.
With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.
This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)
Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.
And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.
First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[
Yes. Please. Fix the comments.
With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.
Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.
The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.
If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.
And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.