What if "feed" is a really terrible product design for news?
Like, feeds of content are the result of long ago engineering conventions, not really related to how we consume content. It's just really easy to get stuff by its "last modified" date and database systems will return your queries in date order and so we got time sorted feeds.
And then algorithmic feeds came out of the assumption that improvement was needed at the ordering level, as opposed to how content was presented.
But we don't manage ideas or concepts or even really conversations IRL like feeds. They are priority sorted persistent headings w/information falling underneath them. News makes makes a lot more sense as a kanban board than as a feed, though even that isn't a perfect convention
Like even a basic Twitter conversation will end up branching, but explaining complex concepts means you end up with deep multi branched concept maps that look more like your tabs after an hour on Wikipedia.
Mind maps are likely a conceptually good format, but the current designs are two unordered and unorganized for anything but power users. Kanban boards feel like a good suggestion towards a format, but need more tools than they've got.
If this weekend has made me realize anything in regards to news products it is how ineffective they are at showcasing the larger picture or systematic problems.
*too
I had thought the breadth of the internet would make the news hole larger, but feeds have made it smaller than it was pre-web.
I don't have an answer, but the questions at hand reveal that we need a very different set of solutions than what we're currently getting.
Some good ideas:
And
This is a good thought, though I wonder if we need to get a lot more specific then categories or even topical tags.
This is a really good point.
This doesn't surprise me, but I think it also points to the need for something in-between.
This also reminds me of something that @jarroddicker has been talking about recently - that curation of talent is an underused news org strength.
Which makes me think a lot about playlists as a potential design, topics that can be drilled into, that don't receive feeds, but selected and ordered curation.
A playlist can be both narrow or broad in how they are focused; and that we can come back to in order to see the latest updates, while having important things pinned to return to around the updates.
I very much agree here, so much of this comes out of the limitations created by engineering, which we could overcome, or we could focus work in different directions. But we haven't yet.
I really like this idea, a feed that uses outline and tree structures and links to give context and depth alongside the stream.
A lot of people noting how important a print edition or a news product that can be completely read is to the process of sanely consuming news. But we have editions and you can buy print. I agree the logic is worth considering though.
This is such a great point as well, when feeds moved algorithmic they stopped being about traditional 'discovery' of new things and pushed more towards reinforcing your existing way of thinking
This is another great point about what discovery could mean vs what it does right now.
I am definitely going to have to explore Redef some more.
Exploring reading the news as a habit for readers rather than a hole they need to fill is a good point on which to shake our thinking up a bit, I agree.
Someone else noted that designing differently is difficult when news org resources are limited, but also Jarrod makes a good point here that the focus is split and that is part of the problem.
Yeah, feeds really make the most sense for information that can become quickly obsolete. This also makes me think of the Dat/Hyper approach which can assemble feeds but also handle information replacement and versioning - another underused design concept.
This is a great point also, news orgs who attempt to compete on algo-based feed building are putting themselves in a bad situation.
