Startupy

This is in some ways the most similar-looking idea to myhub I've seen since launching in 2020: "you can think of startupy as a modern version of del.icio.us meets Roam... a searchable, interconnected repository of the most insightful content on the Internet...", which is a nice pitch, for those who remember delicious and know roam.

Even better: "Our favorite analogy for startupy is that it’s like a pair of noise canceling headphones for the Internet... Our curators scour the internet for the most insightful [content]... add it to their startupy profile and connect it to other relevant topics, ideas, people, or companies... Our goal is to break free of the internet’s recency bias, and shine a spotlight on the ideas that will stand the test of time."

So they appear to be going in the same direction set out in A Minimum Viable Ecosystem for collective intelligence, with interlinked thinking tools, curation, etc. Some differences:

• they're starting multiplayer, linking content together between accounts. That's on my roadmap, but only when I can build a proper backend
• On the other hand they don't even have a browser extension yet (interestingly, myhub's doesn't work on their help content, built using Notion, so I'm manually creating this)
• features: "Each entry on startupy also includes key highlights and takeaways, right in the app...
• business model: similar to myhub, they're not using ads, but "After going deep down the tokenized ownership rabbit hole ... we hit a dead end on a token as a viable, legally compliant path for sharing financial upside with our community... [so we're] 100% supported by membership... premium membership = $120/year or $1000 for lifetime access" (!!). Also, they have funding.

No mention of AI in their help files, but via their newsletter: "here's a crazy cool thing we built... an AI-powered search engine of the startupy hivemind", and I just realise now that the founder wrote this piece on boutique search engines which I reference in the social knowledge graph ecosystem post. Key points:

• using "LLMs to summarize an article... helping you decide whether to read something, but ... removes some of the “magic”." - and, imho, your best opportunity to actually learn anything useful from the source material. "So instead of building a chatbot, we focused on using embeddings to return semantically similar quotes." - cf my wireframe in my AI ecosystem post
• Is this the end of human categorisation? Been asking that myself! "Human tagging is messy and suboptimal ... [but] a search box and millions of articles is the wrong UI ... help you find what you are looking for. But they don’t help you find the things you didn’t know you were looking for...
• ... there is a lost art to having the right things near each other... drawing associations between things in a way that feels personal is still a deeply satisfying muscle. ... a concept or theme in mind... = a magnet for anything that relates to the subject of your obsession... curating, collecting, and listmaking help us turn the web from a place of mindless consumption to a place for mindful sensemaking...
• While she agrees that tagging articles manually, as I currently do on myhub, "should be done by machines... there is a difference between ... generic keywords and more meaning and taste rich concepts... Deciding what can and should belong in these collections requires human taste, judgment, and the ability to integrate knowledge in unique ways." - echoes myhub's Categories and Service Pages (soon to be merged into (Zettelkasten) Overviews)
• So manual curation is "a beautifully human and useful way to navigate information and encourage lateral discovery... [so] How can semantic search coexist with keyword search?" She, like me, is still working on it.