263 karma · joined April 4, 2017
https://twitter.com/RichardSocher
youChat will get a lot better in the coming months
I think it would be wonderful!
Richard from you.com here.
For now, you can read about all the answers on of FAQ site: https://about.you.com/ - which will soon get a design overhaul also... The joys of a startup.
# Richard from you.com here.
We hope to grow this new kind of search engine/portal together with the community and then incorporate chat+apps+links into a new kind of experience.
Yea. These are valid concerns. We care a lot about privacy and are making public statements and commitments to it.
Technically any privacy-focused business (proton, ddg, etc) could pivot and change their mind but the hope is that by starting with those commitments potential future shareholders would understand that the erosion of trust would hurt the brand and not push for it?
We want to stay free and open to everyone so we will explore private ads (not user dependent, only based on query, not tracking, similar to DDG) and useful monetized apps like youWrite or youImagine (ie stable diffusion).
If there's enough interest, we can also open up a paid account without ads.
It does seem like the biggest failure cases of chat are happening when we have not yet incorporated one of our apps (like weather or directions).
Richard from YOU here.
We are seeing a lot of growth and retention with developers on https://you.com/code You can vote on which search-apps you like and soon block or pin them completely. You will also be able to submit your own search-apps soon. We believe in an open platform for search.
What audit would you suggest for us to prove that statement? It would be great to have a some independent party verify this.
Giving users control over their search results is a big part of fighting SEO spam.
you.com
(founder here :)
(richard, ceo of you.com here)
For 1) we have an open app platform that allows everybody to collaborate on that first entry of the web
For 2) We let people decide the sources they want to see and if they don't like a source or app, they can downvote it and see it less in their ranker.
We will try to decentralize more over time though it's a big effort to make it fast enough still.
I have done a lot of research in AI and it can certainly do a lot of things implicitly but some oversight and explicit user feedback is useful also.
So, I started rolling out new features of our search engine on Twitter, Slack, etc instead of here.
Users vote on their own preferences... not on other users' preferences. so i dont see how it will be gamed unless we start incorporating user preferences into global ones - which we would only do if we thought it worked better and isn't being gamed.
Full disclosure: I'm the CEO.