Our Mission
Our mission is to help readers find and share the most insightful and accurate information on topics they are interested in.
Our Tenets (Core Beliefs) For Building Smashing
We believe that:
The process of discovering interesting things to read on the Internet is too hard.
Most people are largely not reading content that is Time Well Spent (aka worthwhile)
People want to read articles that are relevant to their interests.
People want to feel better after reading content, not worse.
Human curation is necessary to find great content, especially taking into account reputation of the curator.
It’s important to get your information from more than one source.
Things are only going to get worse with the proliferation of generative AI.
Customers want control and transparency over their information and algorithms recommending them content.
A letter from Cofounder Otis Chandler
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.
My wife and I cofounded Goodreads in 2007, and in my 14-year journey building it I learned a lot about building community to drive discovery of content. We actually named it “Goodreads” and not “Goodbooks” because we were hopeful to one day expand to articles. However, it turned out books were a big enough space, and we appropriately kept Goodreads focused on long-form content. And yet, this left me with an itch to scratch.
I am a reader and a learner, and when I left Goodreads I went on a learning journey across several topics and which took me across books, podcasts, and lots of articles. And I was quickly dismayed—it was a TON of work to find good content in the things I was interested in. Social media was a poor solution because it was designed for conversation, not for content discovery. I found gems, sure, but usually by asking smart people or following smart curators.
In my research I realized that almost every app uses popularity as their main metric for ranking content. These apps are designed to ensnare our attention, and their focus on popularity often leads to less than great content rising to the top. This has left all of us reading articles that play on our emotions, leaving us more distracted, less happy, and increasingly divided. I view this as one of the largest challenges facing society today.
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.
Otis Y Chandler
Smashing is being built with love by Daily Reader Labs, and was cofounded by Otis Chandler, Dan Barret, Greg Veen, and Mike Mraz.