What @Flipboard is doing here -- federating magazines -- is incredibly important. Read @mike's post to understand better how they're approaching it and why it matters.
@dangillmor@Flipboard@mike Lost me at "Russia-Ukraine Crisis." Can't take seriously, and especially trust content curation choices of someone who calls the Russian invasion of Ukraine a "crisis," as if it "just happened" and not a planned and deliberate decision of one country to invade and erase another.
Federating magazines is a great idea. I'll have to wait for someone other than Flipboard to try it. Someone who recognizes Ukraine's right to exist, and cares about compensating writers too.
@angdraug@dangillmor@Flipboard Dmitry, are you saying that Euronews and/or Flipboard does not recognize Ukraine’s right to exist? As far as Flipboard is concerned I can tell you that we have always viewed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a monstrous and abhorrent act of unlawful and evil aggression. Accordingly we’ve worked hard to curate reporting from many sources around the world who are giving people a raw look at what has been happening there.
As far as this Euronews magazine is concerned, it looks like they started curating this magazine well before the invasion occurred and they’ve posted more than 1.600 stories since then. Their reporting seems very fact based and clearly they believe this is both a horrendous and unjustified invasion as well as a global crisis that gets at the very foundation of modern civilization. Take a look at the stories in their magazine and let me know if you disagree.
@mike Thank you for responding, and for your unambiguous position on Ukraine.
I know Euronews very well. I grew up in Belarus, and after Lukashenka regime shuttered independent press in early 2000s, Euronews was one of the handful of major news organizations that provided coverage of events in my old country.
Unfortunately their coverage was selective and biased to favor Russia then, same with their coverage of Ukraine now. Yes, even fact-based reporting can be skewed.
@mike This is not surprising when you consider that Russia's state broadcaster VGTRK owned a stake in Euronews since 2001. The name they chose for their magazine about the invasion is just the most obvious example, as someone who follows the war closely I can see the same bias in their selection of stories, favoring topics that are divisive and dispiriting for Ukrainians, or encouraging for Russians. Please consider onboarding a Ukrainian news org instead, e.g. Kyiv Post.
@mike While I hopefully still have your attention, can you elaborate on your plan for how writers and curators of the content shared via Flipboard are getting compensated?
How is this better than Arc Browser that @caseynewton rightfully called out as exploitative?
@angdraug@caseynewton@dangillmor@Flipboard So far our primary focus has been to drive lots of high quality traffic to the publishers and bloggers featured on Flipboard which in turn enables those content creators to monetize with whatever combination of ads, paywalls or memberships they choose. Our commitment to helping content creators get their content discovered, visited and monetized has been a longstanding goal of ours and is the foundation for the thousands of partnerships we have maintained with publishers around the world for over a decade now. Today Flipboard is typically one of the top 5 traffic drivers on the Internet and sometimes we rank in the top 1-3 referrers for smaller sites. We are particularly helpful for independent content creators looking to get discovered and build audience within an interest area.
All that said, I think we can do more here and our work in the fediverse will set the stage for us to build new and more flexible ways for both content creators and curators to be rewarded with revenue and loyal community members that they actually own (via ActivityPub) rather than rent (via a proprietary walled garden). Stay tuned for a lot more to come on this topic later this year.
And for the record, I too think the Arc Browser is exploitative.
@mike Ah, so Flipboard provides curated content discovery, but no integrated content consumption. I see now how it leaves it up to content creators to build and manage relationships with their audiences.
What do you think of the Scroll.com model? I don't know how much of a shot it had to become viable, but it was a huge disappointment when Twitter acqui-buried it. Wish I could have all my news under a single subscription and readable in Pocket/Ephemeral.
@angdraug@caseynewton@dangillmor@Flipboard Yes I was a fan of the scroll model too. There have been a number of attempts at this but they are very, very hard to execute in a way which delights both users and publishers. I think this is an idea that will eventually happen in some form and I hope we can help. Ultimately the situation on the web is not durable. The user experience is disastrous and the monetization is falling off a cliff so everyone is losing. A high quality user experience combined with a simple to understand and affordable monetization model that doesn't disintermediate content creators in the process (I'm looking at you Apple) is very much needed right now.
@angdraug@caseynewton@dangillmor@Flipboard The cool thing is that ActivityPub solves the disintermediation issue. Content creators can now build direct relationships with their followers that they can own forever independent of whatever tools or platforms they use for distribution or monetization. This is a HUGE step forward and if something like scroll or Patreon were to happen on ActivityPub with a few other tweaks to that model I bet it'd be far more successful.
I'm optimistic this will eventually happen and that it will lead to a far more functional, useful, authoritative and beautiful web than what we have now.
@angdraug@dangillmor@Flipboard Further to the Euronews discussion, I do see a lot of content they have written which harshly calls out Russia for their lies and propaganda. Here's an example I saw in their magazine recently:
@angdraug@dangillmor@Flipboard Well that's a shame to hear and given your local knowledge I think this is valuable feedback. I am CCing my team here @NewsDesk and I have already removed this link from my Medium post while we look into this more.
In the meantime, here is a link to the magazine Flipboard's curation team has been curating about Russia's invasion of Ukraine that you may find useful: @ukraine
This magazine includes posts from a variety of US and other sources including the Kiev Post, The Moscow Times and the YouTuber Denys Davydov. Let me know what you think of these or if you have suggestions for additional sources you trust on Ukraine that we should be curating.
@angdraug@ukraine@timkmak Excellent. I have been following Timkmak for a long time now and am grateful for his posts as I deeply care about what is happening in Ukraine and follow the events there daily. CCing @NewsDesk
@Tengrain@dangillmor@Flipboard That's very kind of you to say. I'm really excited about the power of curated feeds to improve how social media works for people.
@JustinH@dangillmor@Flipboard I love hearing that and I especially love your magazine. I just followed it from Flipboard and will soon follow it from my Mastodon account.
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