what's the dream?
Clustrs is a crowd-sourced aggregator that gives you the six best pieces of content on the topics that interest you.
Let’s say you’re an Adele fan who’s studying architecture and considers herself a feminist. You can join the Adele clustr, the architecture clustr, and the feminism clustr. Whenever you log in, your dashboard will display the six items of content in those clustrs, ranked by votes. In the Adele clustr, you might see a magazine profile of the singer, or her most recent video. In the feminism clustr, you might find an article on the Hollywood pay gap, or a collection of feminist GIFs from BuzzFeed. By joining a clustr, you’ll also be able to upvote content, and contribute content of your own.
what's the reality?
Right now, Clustrs only exists as a very rough prototype, built in Django. There are only two working clustrs, &trump and &feminism, and the social components of the site (contributing content, upvoting, etc.) don't work yet. But you can see it (kind of) running at http://clustrs.cfapps.io.
why make this?
I came up with the idea for Clustrs to solve a problem I'm constantly struggling with: finding good things to read and watch on the Internet.
This sounds like it shouldn't be all that challenging, but it is! Unless it’s your job to be on social media all day, it’s a headache to sift through all those feeds to find what you want. When it comes to discovering good and relevant content, the signal-to-noise ratio of things like Twitter and Facebook just isn’t very favorable.
The first problem is relevance. Your content stream is cluttered with material that doesn’t interest you: an article about fly-fishing shared by your weird cousin, or Swedish death metal videos posted by a distant acquaintance. The second problem is volume. If you have a thousand Facebook friends or Twitter follows, you’re constantly being bombarded with more content than you can possibly absorb--and of pretty variable quality.
Clustrs fixes both problems. First, you don’t follow people--you follow topics. You fill your dashboard with content that matters to you--not the content that matters to the second cousin of your roommate’s ex-girlfriend. Second, since each clustr can only hold six pieces of content at a time, you’re only getting so many things to read and watch.
what's next?
I'd like to keep building it out and give users the ability to upvote and contribute content. But I've also got some doubts about whether something like this will ever work, because it relies on a pretty committed and diligent user base to keep adding and curating good stuff to the site. I'm also not sure how long the items within each clustr should last: should the clustrs be refreshed every day, every week, or not at all? There's a part of me that wants to just make the clustrs permanent: after all, a brilliant magazine profile of Trump from the 90s will stay brilliant. And what's wonderful about the Internet is that nothing ever dies.