That's a really good frame of reference, I think. Thank you for that.
I consider our service like Wikipedia - there is a small collection of people who are just abnormally fascinated by the news - the 1% of news junkies who want to see what's happening, vet it, and tell you if it's wrong. The biproduct of that is that the 99% of "normal people" get a news digest that contains only the most important info, that's easily digestible.
So the current website is for news junkies, just like the "talk/edit" part of Wikipedia is for... encyclopedia junkies? The daily email and coming read-only stuff is what I hope is appropriate for 99% of people, including someone like Swartz.
A vetting process seems like a useful filter, but it's not a sufficient one. Vetting doesn't necessarily affect stories that are factually accurate but irrelevant.
What is your definition of "important"? Or, more importantly, what definition of "important" does your community of "news junkies" apply? Because almost by definition, those "news junkies" have a different idea of what's important than other people do.
There are two main functions on the site. One is a fact-check, the other is an upvote. People are told to upvote the most important info - we define "most important" as "having the most affect on the citizens of the world."
Of course, that's very difficult to quantify, and there may be some bias of the news junkies, but I think the end product is pretty great (though not perfect yet). Of course that's just me, and I'm probably biased as well, but there have been times when I have said the news coming out of grasswire is complete shit, so I'd like to think I'm at least trying to be honest with myself.
I consider our service like Wikipedia - there is a small collection of people who are just abnormally fascinated by the news - the 1% of news junkies who want to see what's happening, vet it, and tell you if it's wrong. The biproduct of that is that the 99% of "normal people" get a news digest that contains only the most important info, that's easily digestible.
So the current website is for news junkies, just like the "talk/edit" part of Wikipedia is for... encyclopedia junkies? The daily email and coming read-only stuff is what I hope is appropriate for 99% of people, including someone like Swartz.