Smashing, a new app curating the best of the web from Goodreads co-founder Otis Chandler, is now available to the public. Like Goodreads, the app aims to create a community around content. But this time, instead of books, the focus is on web content — like news articles, blog posts, social media posts, podcasts, and more. In addition, Smashing is introducing an AI Questions feature that allows you to engage with the content being shared in different ways, including by viewing a news story from different perspectives or asking the AI to poke holes in the story, among other things.
By viewing different angles of a story, you can see how both the political left and right view the subject. Or, in the case of a company’s stock, you might be presented with both the bull and bear case.
There are a good handful of AI prompts available at launch, notes Chandler, and not all will make sense to use on every news story or piece of content. For instance, there’s a silly “make it funny” prompt, and others that can simplify the story, display a timeline, or introduce “unconventional” takes that may involve thinking outside the box, helping you weigh ideas you hadn’t considered yet. You can also ask your own questions, if you prefer.
“I’ve been having fun, for instance, asking it to write me a podcast script, and then plug that into Notebook LM, then listen to it in the car,” Chandler says.
On the app, users are able to create multiple interest feeds to stay informed about the topics that matter to them, like politics, investing, parenting, health and wellness, and more, or even narrower interests like specific companies, sports teams, crypto, climate change, or other subtopics.
The app also leverages AI to surface content from around the web and then match it to an individual reader based on what articles they tend to read, what subtopics they like, and what’s already popular in the community, as determined by upvotes and downvotes. Combined, the signals tune Smashing to a user’s particular interests.
As part of the AI Questions feature, Smashing is also introducing AI-powered Story Overview pages, which offer grouped articles, blog posts, and social media posts all about the same story.
Since announcing plans for Smashing this summer, the startup has signed up more than 2,000 people on its waitlist and has a few thousand or so testing the beta version. Since then, Chandler says, its AI algorithms have “vastly” improved, thanks to fine-tuning, a better user experience that lets readers mark if things are interesting or not, a larger community of curators, and overall improvements from the rapidly evolving LLM models available.
Smashing is initially available in iOS and has a web version in development. The startup is backed by $3.4 million in seed funding from True Ventures, Blockchange, Offline Ventures, Advancit Capital, Power of N Ventures, and a number of angel investors.
