Detour is a mobile app that gives you a personalized selection of five long-reads and slow-news every day. All the good and none of the bad: no login, email, or any personal information required for a great personalization experience.
Hi! I am the CEO and co-founder at recsyslabs, the company behind Detour.
With the large amount of content out there, finding what is right for each one of us is not easy. Currently, in exchange for a personalized experience, we are often coerced into allowing our information to be collected excessively and for unknown purposes. And even after giving up our privacy, we are oftentimes dissatisfied with the current state of personalization.
We are purposely staying away from breaking news, we do not want to give you more of what you can find elsewhere. Instead, Detour’s focus is on long-reads and other articles that will keep your information diet balanced and interesting.
Detour enables you to discover content you love, without the need to login nor give up your personal information. Every day you will be shown five curated articles from a variety of sources and topics and, depending on the ways you interact with such articles, Detour will learn about your interests - not about your identity - and adapt so that the next day your experience will be even better and more tailored to your taste. You can always go back to check your history and you can also bookmark articles. Not liking the sort of articles you see? Just go to settings and start over :) we will learn from, and adapt to, your taste as many times as you like.
More sources? More topics? Yes, we are not done yet. We are working on including sources and topics to cater for everyone. It is still a work in progress, but I am really happy to bring Detour to you and hear your thoughts. We are here to answer any questions you may have :)
At recsyslabs (www.recsyslabs.com), we are working hard to shift paradigms. We know that recommender systems and personalization technology can be done right yet still offer people a great experience without violating their privacy. All the power of privacy-preserving personalization is packaged behind the scenes of Detour.
---
There are two options to start using Detour right away:
Option 1 – PWA: https://bydetour.com/ this will launch Detour as a Progressive Web App (PWA) in your mobile using your browser. Tip: using "Add it to your Home Screen" option in your browser helps to keep it at hand
Option 2 – Android App on Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/ap...
Awesome idea. One of the challenges I think you'll find with this is sifting through all the BS news.
Basically anything that is published on a major ad $ driven site at this point is utter garbage. Medium is slowly transitioning into mostly low quality self promotional stuff as well.
@siamohajer Definitely. We have experienced this while curating sources to include. We are working toward exclusively including high quality and privacy-respectful sources that, like us, care about their readers. Thanks very much for your comment :)
@michaeldoucette1 Happy that you like it! Although at the moment the app is only available for install on Android, you can use the Progressive Web App (PWA): https://bydetour.com/ and have the exact same functionality in iOS :) Tip: using "Add it to your Home Screen" option in your browser helps to keep it at hand
Detour
Detour
Detour