Show HN: Wriber – Idea Generator (opens in new tab)

2 cents from the CEO of a content marketing company:

One thing that humans will continue to be better at than machines for a very long time is creating interesting stories for other humans. There is no machine that has nearly written a Faulkner novel, or even written up anything more complex than a baseball game (which is itself impressive, though the template is not much more complex than a complicated madlib). When you read machine written stuff, it stinks of the machine that made it. The wriber software is little different at this stage, as evidenced by some of the mangled "ideas" it's generated for others on this thread.

Software and data absolutely have a place in any good editorial strategy, but presuming an algorithm can furnish ideas that will perform better than humans armed with data-driven insights is a mistake in my opinion.

Our content strategists are armed with boatloads of social data, they identify trending topics, top performing articles from competitors etc., and all of that informs the human decisions they make as the editors of their brand publications about what gets written.

At the end of the day, though, I'm going to leave the decision making (and a good part of the ideation) to the talented humans that make up the L&T Co. team.

I'm more compelled by software that helps my team come to data-driven insights themselves than by software that purports to "do the hard part" for them.

Tried 'waterless car wash', and got some incoherent and grammatically erroneous results like:

- Which organization will make their car look?

- Did dry Wash help someone to clean their car without using water?

- Explore what sort of organization green Shine is?

- Explain how Eco Auto Clean is back at it Again Hey there waterless car wash fans.

I'm guessing its using NLP and some knowledge graph and picking top terms. But still needs work.

Hey, just had a go at this for five minutes, and here's what I thought. I'm probably not your 'target customer', but here's my feedback anyway!

First impression: I'm not really sure what the site does.

The first thing I see is the logo, and I don't really know what 'Write better content' means. It's too vague.

I'm then asked to 'Enter three keywords for better content creation'. I still don't know what this means, or why I'm doing this, but I do it anyway, because I want to see what happens.

I searched for 'free online education', at which point it spent a bit of time loading, before coming up with ideas for blog posts (I think!). However, some of these were a bit nonsensical, e.g. 'Whose the inclusion of links to items do not reflect their importance', 'May students also search for courses by subject, language, and institution?', 'Did a few other universities offer online textbooks?'

Conclusion: I don't mind that the algorithm is a bit iffy at the moment, becuase some of the ideas for blog posts were fairly sensible. But the messaging on the site is unclear.

Just my opinion, of course -- and one that doesn't seem to be shared by others here!

What I really need at the moment is a service that tells which of my ideas is the least stupid.

I'd pay a lot for that.

Works fine for me. Pretty impressive results (I used the pre-populated query; "peanut butter alternatives").

Curious about the tech behind the site...

I am really confused on what excatly it does. Does it generate ways to solve a problem?

I would personally would like to know how many other people have searched what I was looking for. Say I was allergic to peanuts and looking for alternative and I find out there are so many other guys are searching for the same thing....then I know its a common problem.

Cool tool. Worked pretty well for a specific niche that I am in. Might want to better identify why someone would want a demo? Are there additional features? Is there something that costs money that does more than the free version? Is there a way to sign up without getting the demo?

I kind of upvoted this in principle, but I can't try it. Look forward to when it gets a little later.

"data literacy education"

Waiting since last 5 mins :(

And.... its down

So I had to retry my search after five minutes, but was really impressed with the results. I searched "Roguelike Game Development." About a third were meaningless, a third were meaningless but made me think of something useful, and a third I could probably use as interview questions when talking to a game developer.

Any chance of an API? I'm working on a head mounted display software system that could integrate something like this, not as a writing prompt, but as a conversation prompt with someone.

Our servers are blowing up right now. Fixing.

I like it already. I typed in some words related to my startup and it proposed some really good prompts I could turn into articles. Other content-generation sites have given terrible results and suggestions, usually in a Buzzfeed style "6 things you'll never guess about art!".

This site I could take a few of these and go write a few paragraphs about off-the-cuff. Looking forward to playing more when the site comes back up.

Wow, this was very impressive. I tried "inverse document frequency" since it was related to the report I'm working on and it came back with surprisingly good questions on the topic albeit a little broken ("How did the number of times a term appear?") in some places.

I tried with some niche content and got some weird combinations, but it still gave me a good ideia on how to write something about it in bullet points, which is really nice. Keep it up, I'll definitely keep checking.

Not working for me. Maybe we gave it the HN hug?

Wow, this tool is really... smartdumb? I don't mean that as an insult, it generates ideas that are 90% complete and requires you to fill in the rest yourself. It's almost like a mind-mapping tool: start with a central topic, and branch out to related material.

Not working for me. Sounds interesting though, make a beta signup for notification till it is down?

Pretty cool. Returned some gibberish, and some solid sparks for topics. I wonder if you could tweak it to rank the relevance somehow. Maybe have users train it by clicking/removing crappy results, or some such. Not really my specialty - just thinking out loud.

I was skeptical, but it really works. It is going to help a lot of folks with content marketing.

Would be useful if there were more examples of what to search for on the landing page. I'm stumped for ideas of what to enter. I saw there was one example in the textbox but I need more for context.

Love it. I would love to know how this works.

'Generating your ideas'.

This copy made my future hurt.

i thought this was a joke, it is not.

Super duper shit mate. You should definitely have a beta signup or some other form for folks who either visit and its down or don't want to demo right away?