@j_nimrodi Super important question - thanks for asking. We’re discovering talent all the time, and keep it totally open to anyone. With the built-in camera on the app, anyone can film a video delivering a headline. Our algo takes into account views, shares, followers, and some other factors (and some soon-to-come factors like comments and likes) and bumps those into the Featured Feed. So if you are not at all famous, but are interesting, smart, funny, or even just passionate, you can grow a real following.
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Interesting. How do you ensure reliability of news?
@sarthakgh Thanks for asking! This relates a lot to the question @bentossell asked yesterday, so I'm happy to address it more fully (and wax philosophical about our vision of news consumption).
Getting anywhere in our community is based on building up credibility. We fundamentally believe that the news of the future is social, unscripted, crowdsourced, and collaborative, and we built the platform on that philosophy. To do that, we rely on community monitoring: people who post inaccurate videos don't get followed or shared, so their headlines aren't surfaced. By contrast, our Featured Feed (the one you land on when you open the app) is made up of people who have proven themselves as informative, accurate, entertaining sources of news; they have that status at stake every time they post. We also plan to add in a text commenting ability in an upcoming build, which will allow for other users to correct inaccurate videos. Overall, the experience is akin to getting news on twitter or facebook - it'll be accurate for the most part because posters have social capital at stake, and if it isn't, the community takes care of it.
@bentossell@sarthakgh great thought, that's something we are definitely incorporating. The personal profile pages will be much more developed, and will have links to users' other social profiles. This serves two purposes: first, as you pointed out, it ups the stakes for them to create compelling and accurate content. Second, and equally important, a lot of our early content creators so far are young, aspiring parody news comics and writers and other kinds of performers, and helping them create a robust profile that links to other platforms helps them gain exposure and grow a following on Headliner. A big part of what we do is talent discovery - finding people who should be delivering news (because they are the right combination of smart, entertaining, informative, interesting, funny, and passionate) and it's important to us that our talent be able to grow their fan base on the app and bring in their existing follower base on other platforms to see their on-app work.
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