'You're not going to come to Pocket to see who won the election or who won the game,' says V.P. Matt Koidin. 'But you might come to understand why.'
The internet we have today is the one we unknowingly asked for over the past decade and change: Since the introduction of the Facebook like in 2009, we’ve been inputting countless likes, retweets, views, and various other nudges to prompt algorithmically-driven platforms to give us more of what we want. Or, at least, what wewe want.
About this time 11 years ago, we had one of those lunches. It was at the American Grilled Cheese Company, right down in SoMa [South of Market, San Francisco]. Nate had started talking about maybe raising some money. I remembered I liked working with Nate, so the people part was there. The product was something I used. And then once he added in the vision, I went home and I told my wife, “I have to quit my job and go work with Nate. I’ll sleep on it but I gotta do this.
I actually was. My setup was to have all my feeds going into Google Reader, and then the things I was actually actually interested in, I would save to Pocket. That kind of speaks to this idea of “save versus click.” A save has a lot more meaning. But we never thought of Pocket as a direct competitor to Google Reader—we didn't want to be an RSS reader. It wasn’t about managing the feed but about spending quality time with content itself.
Do you remember when there was all this hand-wringing in the early 2010s over whether the internet was going to kill longform content? Do you have any evidence, from a Pocket exec point of view, on whether that was definitively overblown? It doesn’t mean that stories can’t be relevant right and timely. You’re not going to come to Pocket to see who won the election or who won the game. But you might come to understand why. I think we should be driving toward more of that “why.” I think that would be good for the state of where content is today. [
Ah, yes. I feel like those purely machine-powered recommendations are so hugely responsible for what’s so crazy about content online. This false dream that AI will know what you want.
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