Fixing information overload

Why we are building Tailor

Information overload is the biggest issue of our time. We are building Tailor to fix that.

I’ve talked with hundreds of folks from different backgrounds and cultures. I asked them how they consume news and information. Everyone told me some version of: I feel I can’t keep up with everything. I’m supposed to be updated with the news of my city. With stuff regarding my job. With general information regarding my country. With the sports I like. And all I get is clickbaity stuff. It’s emotionally draining. It’s overwhelming. I noticed it negatively affected my well-being. My mental health.

Some folks even told me that they are tuning out everything. They made the conscious decision not to read, listen, or in general consume anything related to what is happening in the world or around them. They just chat with friends, that’s it. Some people made a parallel: It’s like living in a cabin in the middle of the mountains. A digital cabin. Isolated. I fully understand that.

What is so wrong with the current state of things? Why does more access to information and news mean that we are informed less and less every day? Emanuele Capparelli and I started to break down the problem.

The problem

We think that there are 3 main reasons why:

1. The outrage machine

Outrage brings the highest dollar amount on social media. That translates into a constant stream of sensationalistic content, geared towards creating the strongest possible emotional reaction for any given fact. This constant outrage machine is emotionally draining and not sustainable. It’s a big factor in why people tune out.

2. Too much noise

If you compare the news with every other way to spend your time on the internet, the news is much noisier. The amount of promotional content, sponsored content, and listicles is overwhelming. You are not consuming content, you are fending off attacks until you find what is actually relevant and interesting.

3. Echo chambers

Another consequence of the need to optimize for strong emotional reactions is the incentive to create echo chambers. In an echo chamber, the outrage is amplified by the community, making it more profitable to produce content for a smaller, engaged echo chamber than it is to produce content for a wider audience. Given that, increasingly more content is produced specifically to cater to echo chambers.

That means that you have a choice. First choice: You can embrace an echo chamber and accept everything in the echo chamber as indisputable. The majority of people don’t want that.

The second choice: a lot of work. You have to navigate different echo chambers, weighting and balancing out everything you consume. You have to sift through the content “manually,” which is exhausting.

These three problems — constant outrage, high levels of noise, and echo chambers — make consuming the news very demanding in terms of mental energy. No wonder everyone feels overwhelmed and frustrated.

This is what we want to fix with Tailor. We don’t want our society to descend into two groups: The rabid fans and the digital monks, retired in their isolated cabins. We can fix the issues above and re-align things.

Meet Tailor

The first version of Tailor is pretty simple: You tell it what your interests are. Tailor provides a curated summary of what is happening, personalized to you, daily. It also turns it into a newsletter and a podcast.

If you try it out, you will notice that Tailor attempts to fix the issues that affect our current state of information:

1. Tailor helps you make sense of the noise

2. Tailor deeply personalizes your news

3. Tailor streamlines facts first, and then lists the opinions

1. Tailor is personalized to you

Tailor does not rely on making you enraged but on deep personalization. Tailor is not only summarizing but also creating content specifically for you: a newsletter, a podcast, or a bullet-point summary. Everyone gets their own deeply personalized daily digest.

The best example of this is: Tailor allows you to specify how long you want each daily digest to be. If you commute for 10 minutes every day, you can choose 10 minutes. If you need a 3-minute digest, you can pick 3 minutes. Tailor will adjust and make sure that you will get the most important information across in the time you have.

This is just the start in terms of personalization. For example: We envision a future where Tailor knows how deep of a subject matter expert you are, and is able to tailor sources and content based on that.

2. Tailor helps you make sense of the noise

We’ve trained custom A.I. models that allow us to identify low-quality content, such as promotional content. Tailor is also great at summarizing and filtering out stuff that is not relevant to you. Not only that, Tailor is great at finding patterns and aggregating different pieces of information — be it news articles, podcasts, or videos — and extrapolating the common pieces of information. It always references the original source, so you can read it yourself. If you try Tailor once, you will see that it gives you a sense of control over the noise.

3. Tailor streamlines facts first, and then lists the opinions

Full disclosure: This is the hardest issue to fix, and we are just getting started on this front.

Tailor will be able to streamline facts and outline them plainly. Tailor will then list the different points of view it found over the internet on the particular subject, and let you know those as well. We envision a future where Tailor is able to articulate the facts, the more controversial points, and the different points of view expressed. This way, you won’t have to navigate the echo chambers: Tailor will do that for you, automatically.

Join the journey

Knowing what is happening around you, in the world, and in your professional space is super important. If everyone starts to tune out there is no way to get, collectively, to a better place. There is no way to address the collective problems we are facing. For example, there is no way to talk and address climate change.

We have big ideas but we are a small and mighty team. And we are just getting started! If you want to try out Tailor, you can sign up for free here. Let us know what you think, your feedback would be invaluable.

---

Fixing information overload was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.