The Skinny
In mathematics a Lemma is a helping theorem - a stepping stone to proving a lager proposition.
Lemma is a conversation platform that will transform news from just consuming content to chat based dialogue.
Lemma’s goal is to help people not just know information but understand the world better.
This platform will break the Google-Facebook distribution network duopoly, giving news organizations a whole new pie of advertising revenues.
The future of news won’t be built inside Google or Facebook, but by a startup working hand-in-hand with technologically progressive news organizations.
The Duopoly
The Problem
Competing with the distribution platforms
The Google-Facebook duopoly takes the lion’s share of the advertising revenues, leaving a very small piece of the pie available to news organizations.
But news organizations are beholden to these two distribution platforms since they are like the traffic cops that direct users’ attention.
The larger problem with this scenario is that as news organizations try to get a bigger audience, they push more articles at users, and in the process the line between information pieces, oped pieces, and opinion pieces blurs in the eyes of the users.
Trying to compete with the distribution platforms like Google and Facebook has pushed news organizations deeper into the hole.
The Disruptive Idea
A Conversation Platform
We think news is not just a one way flow of information from journalists to readers, but rather a two way dialogue between users and journalists.
We think news organizations should create a new conversation platform to disrupt the Google-Facebook duopoly. This platform will skip the distribution networks and it will be a conversation platform between users and journalists.
Lemma - A Helping Theorem
In the world of mathematics, there are absolute truths - axioms - and then there are propositions or theorems that can be proved starting from axioms. A lemma is a helping theorem that starts from a certain axiom and is a stepping stone to proving a larger proposition.
Borrowing from mathematics, we think that the concept of helping theorems to help people understand a larger perspective can be the basis of the new conversation platform.
News with no homepage
No Homepage - Just Chat
Journalists post articles, opinion pieces and op-ed posts in the form of chat messages which are broadcast to all the users who follow them. When a user opens Lemma, he/she sees relevant chat messages in his/her feed from journalists of interest.
Topics of interest
Alternatively, the user can select his/her topics of interest. Over time the algorithm fine tunes which other topics a user may be interested in based on previous topic selections and chat interactions with journalists.
Lemmas for each perspective
Each topic presents several perspectives - lemmas - to the user. The user selects which path he/she wants to go down so the lemma can help him/her understand the larger topic better.
Constructive and vibrant debate
Each Lemma is a chat thread between the journalist and the user on a specific perspective. If the user writes hate messages or messages that are off topic, the ML algorithm filters out such messages. As there are more users and more chats, the ML algorithm increases in its accuracy.
ML + Human Solution
Lemma makes thousands of concurrent chats with journalists possible by making use of a combination of ML and a team of conversation leaders assigned to each major topic.
Whenever a new article or opinion piece is written, conversation leaders are assigned to specific Lemmas relevant to the larger topic touched upon by the article. Further, guiding notes are written by a collaborative effort between the journalist who wrote the base article and the team of conversation leaders.
