In addition to the extensive research that informed my initial design decisions, I was fortunate to have had the opportunity to conduct crit sessions with a few industry-leading experts in news design. These people were able to provide a fresh and informed perspective on the challenges they anticipated in launching this platform, and informed me of existing technologies and solutions that could determine future development.

Here are a few key insights I extracted from these sessions:

Moderation and Guardrails

One of the key concerns posed during these crit sessions was the extent to which users would be moderated on the platform. Because of the community-centric nature of the platform, it becomes essential to have a firm understanding of how different users may leverage the social structure to accomplish their own needs or serve an agenda. One particularly memorable piece of feedback I received from Eben was that users with an agenda are not an edge case if your platform is built to support them as your primary user base. Product designers that build community platforms tend to be conscious of the “1, 9, 90” rule that estimates 1% of platform users are creators, 9% are augmenters, and 90% are consumers. It then becomes critical to build for the majority but be conscious that the 1% may have conflicts of interest that impact the experience for the rest of the user base.

Preflight Nudge

One option suggested by Adam to explore low-touch automated moderation for commenting was to introduce a “preflight nudge”, an emerging moderation technology that warns users if their comment may violate platform guidelines before they post it. This saves readers the embarrassment of having their posted comments removed or disputed and enables readers to self-moderate before posting based on automated feedback from the platform itself. Products like Perspective API are leading the pack with implementing this technology and measured a 40% reduction in toxicity during testing.

Traceability

One strength of Troubadour highlighted by a few experts was its improved accountability and traceability compared to similar platforms. When quotes are pulled out of context, they can deep link back to their context, headlines always link to the full story, and related articles offer richer perspective on a topic than any single story can. Paul compared Troubadour’s traceability to Wikipedia’s link structure, enabling readers to dive deeper into topics and branch out to related ones.

Platform Relationships

A few experts voiced concern for how this platform can grow in an extensible fashion that fosters a mutually beneficial partnership with its first party publishers. Paul explained that there’s 2 primary strategies that aggregators use when it comes to publisher relationships. In the case of Apple News, Apple has agreed partnerships between all of its partners and pays them commissions based on subscription and readership. On the other hand, platforms like Artifact and Google News establish a direct relationship between readers and publishers with features like an individual subscription manager for each platform. The benefit of Apple’s “brokered” approach is an integrated experience that isn’t hampered by a large number of individual subscriptions. The downside is that this business model may not be sustainable for all publishers, which leads some (like The New York Times) to withdraw or others to surrender significant revenue to the aggregator.

Aggregated Headlines and Storyline Ownership

Another question raised by experts was whether storylines would have aggregated headlines that could be either user generated or machine generated. On one hand, this establishes the visual hierarchy needed to rapidly absorb information about a given package, but on the other hand raises ethical questions of how aggregated headlines offer a neutral perspective on the issue at hand. For aggregators with editorially curated content, a team of trained editors chooses topic names for given storylines, but this platform might place that type of control in the hands of users. Eben also emphasized that packages with clearer visual hierarchy will be more appealing to readers and possibly perform better.

Credibility

Eben spoke extensively about his experience designing the Facebook News product and recounted Facebook’s approach to determining publisher credibility by paying attention to factors like whether publishers “steal news” from others without fair attribution, whether they correct errors, and whether they deliberately publish misinformation. Compared to its standard social feed, Facebook’s News product more thoroughly vets key voices since credibility is largely assumed by news aggregator readers. He explained that to build an extensible platform, it would be necessary to look more closely at guidelines for the types of people and content that can make it onto Troubadour

Onboarding

Yuri expressed his curiosity about what the onboarding flow for the platform could look like since this can make or break first impressions for so many platforms. He explained that he enjoyed Artifact’s onboarding process by offering more specific topics to follow as you began to indicate your preferences, but also expressed that their topics were narrowly suited for its primarily tech industry user base. In order to provide the personalization algorithm the context it needs to effectively recommend content, an onboarding flow for Troubadour would need to explore a range of topics and ensure that readers interests are met with the right level of specificity.