Why chase engagement? If policy is slow-moving then people can visit weekly. Or make an RSS feed. Unless you're planning to go ad monetized or worse...
replyThere's nuance between wanting to build something people use regularly vs "chasing engagement". Even if he decides to run this as a non-profit, individuals are more likely to donate to something they use regularly and institutions are more likely to fund something with active usage. I would assume that the costs to make all these LLM-API costs are not insignificant. I agree with the previous comment that the policy is the differentiator though and hopefully there's a way to drive usage without devolving into a just another news aggregator.
replyThat doesn't make sense to me. I don't need to "engage" daily with MSF to feel like my donation is valuable. I can go days or weeks at a time without using or even thinking much about the Internet Archive, Wikipedia, or my local classical radio station. I almost never hear or see anything about my local food bank/drive organization except when I begrudgingly check a local Facebook group and happen to scroll past a post showing off whatever community dinner they just did.
replyThere is no legitimate reason for a project like this to prioritize a general newsfeed, as opposed to a very specific newsfeed focused on legislation, regulation activity, and court cases. I can think of many interesting and useful ways to integrate the news into a government activity tracker. Yet another slopfeed of whatever nonsense is trending in the news, is not one of them.
It's a shame because I love the idea, but I can't say I trust the creator much at all. I guess now with AI it's easy enough for me to go whip up my own.