Spotify for Readers: How Tech Is Inventing Better Ways to Read the Internet

The more Springwater and Mackenzie thought about it, the more they thought they could build a better way. What they built became an app called Matter, a combination of a read-later app and a discovery engine for great content. Ultimately, Springwater said, it could be even more. "Reading right now is really simple," he said. "It's text on a page. B... See more

After all, what does Spotify do? It takes a corpus of stuff (music) and finds endless new ways to show it to users. Users can save the stuff they know they like (a library), explore things curated by other users (playlists) or turn to the app's machine-learning tools for ultra-personalized recommendations (Discover Weekly and the like).

Users are slowly beginning to turn away from social media as a source of great content; a recent Pew report found that about 48% of people get their news from social media, which is a huge number but still down 5% from even a year ago. More creators are forging multi-platform, independent careers, which can make it hard for audiences to find them. ... See more