I wanted to take a moment to expand on why I am creating Scaffold and trying to put it out into the world. Aside from the shoe-in fact that I just plain love programming, learning new skills, and building software.
My core motivation to build Scaffold and not something else is because I want to facilitate the digestion of journalistic articles that are information-rich. The internet is a glorious slip-and-slide for gliding through swaths of research sources. Unfortunately, the majority of the sprinklers are lubricating the ride with terrible journalism. More specifically, I'm hung up on the plethora of articles (even from overall respectable institutions) that are composed of:
- a single [quote/fact/event/conclusion from "a study" ] nugget. Possibly two nuggets if lucky.
- rhetorical questions
-hype-forward implied correlations to unrelated but more intriguing topics
-a heaping scoop whatever the most recent overly-used adjectives are
For individuals performing research that requires a variety of sources, I want it to be easier to ignore these articles before they waste their time reading them. And frankly, some information-rich articles simply suffer from a non-representative title that make the reader believe that their topic will be covered more significantly than it is. Some sites will beta-test several article titles before choosing one permanently. Click-through counts are worth more than actual article relevance.
My goal is to minimize the amount of "easily-digestible" sources that users conducting topic research are forced to rely on due to time being wasted. If someone has thirty minutes to find a source and spends it reading a multitude of technically-relevant and easy-to-find but crappy sources then at the end of thirty minutes it becomes a matter of settling on the least crappy source. God forbid if they also have to spend a portion of that time parsing through the article to present its contents.
I'm not here on the grounds of journalistic integrity. I'm building Scaffold because my time while performing topic-research has been wasted by unhelpful text articles and it bothers me to have my time wasted when the world is full of perfectly good CPUs that can be instructed to solve problems for me. I want Scaffold to specifically be an easy-to-use webapp because the nineteen years of my life that occurred before I learned how to program was when the majority of this wasted time occurred.Which is to say that non-technical persons deserve the benefit of technically-driven tools because their time is also valuable.
Frankly, if I can expand the abilities of the app and save the time of the journalists producing Scaffold's target input content, I hope it means that it's easier for them to do the research necessary to produce quality articles. Thus allowing me, a person not experienced in conducting journalism to have the benefits of well-researched journalism. Which is kind of an idealist synergy-obsessive fever dream for the moment. But I stand by it.
Bearing that in mind, Scaffold doesn't verify facts or provide any kind of clarity as to whether the information found in the articles has been considered in a thoughtful way or given appropriate context. Scaffold doesn't pull out purely qualitative specifics even if they are objectively true.
Whenever I talk about what I am creating Scaffold for, I feel negligent if I don't emphasize the fact that it would be dangerous and inappropriate to confuse the presence of quotes/statistics/dates and times/specific citations to places and people etc. with a trustworthy source. Articles can cite studies that are inaccurate or outright shams. Partial quotes can be taken out of context. Date and times need meaningful and verifiable events attached to them in order to have worth. Mentioning the names of every board member that showed up to a key meeting doesn't guarantee that the upshot of that meeting and the role of each individual will be accounted for. What I will say, is that rarely do informative articles lack all of the features that Scaffold aims to isolate.
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