Read smarter: stay on top of articles in your interests
Smashing is a new app that transforms curious users into smarter readers. It helps you stay on top of all your interests and easily discover articles personalized to you. Follow your industry, companies you track, your favorite sports teams or celebs.
I decided to build Smashing because I believe the ways we discover things to read online are broken and do not serve readers well. I’ve been waiting a dozen years, ever since Google Reader died, for someone to step up and build a truly great content discovery app for the web. I spent a lot of time after I stepped down from Goodreads in 2019 playing with every article and news product I could find and was ultimately dissatisfied—I knew that with today’s technology something better could be built for avid readers.
I was deeply influenced by Tristan Harris’ notion that Time Well Spent, not popularity, is the right metric for content. However, despite the huge advancements in LLMs and AI, the only way to know if an article is in fact worth your time is to ask knowledgeable readers who have already read it. Thus was born the Worthwhile Vote, the core way of curating on Smashing. And not all votes are equal—reputation matters in curation. This was something I learned at Goodreads and have started to build into the design of Smashing.
That brings us to Smashing—a way to discover worthwhile articles, curated into your interests. A place where the community decides what is Worthwhile, and an AI helps match the right content to the right reader. A product that if successful will help, I hope, everyone be more informed about their interests. I think it is a recipe for something special, and this is only the beginning.
Knowledge is power, and power is best shared among readers.
About Smashing on Product Hunt
“Read smarter: stay on top of articles in your interests”
Smashing launched on Product Hunt on October 25th, 2024 and earned 230 upvotes and 27 comments, placing #6 on the daily leaderboard. Smashing is a new app that transforms curious users into smarter readers. It helps you stay on top of all your interests and easily discover articles personalized to you. Follow your industry, companies you track, your favorite sports teams or celebs.
On the analytics side, Smashing competes within News, Newsletters and Tech news — topics that collectively have 51.5k followers on Product Hunt. The dashboard above tracks how Smashing performed against the three products that launched closest to it on the same day.
Who hunted Smashing?
Smashing was hunted by Otis Chandler. A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
For a complete overview of Smashing including community comment highlights and product details, visit the product overview.
Otis Chandler