This is a Pando writeup on Grasswire. Go check it out yourself. Create a log in. Look around. Kick the tires. Then come back and discuss.
I myself am kind of heartened by the idea, but not entirely sold on the presentation.
My first impression is that it looks like all the usual "news" links on reddit (which means that mashable is in the mix) with pictures from twitter thrown in. Sure, there is a "confirm" and "refute" mechanic, but it still uses upvotes. I mean, it has a ticker on the side that says who is upvoting what in real time. Also, it seems like the site assumes that users will know how to fact check things and that individuals will fact check against each other. That presumes a lot (probably too much). The site looks slick though.
It looks like at the moment it's a bunch of twitter users who have found it, what with all the FirstnameLastname usernames. I also have not found any discussions. Basically it looks like tumblr for select news stories. Their slogan could be, "ride the wave of the future . . . quietly".
I said it looks slick. Consider also that I mentioned user fact-checking (the confirm and refute mechanic). Generally, if all that a person has to say about something is some version of "well, it looks nice" with no mention of function or value, that is a polite way of dismissing it or saying that it's not quite living up to its potential.
It's an interesting concept and one that could probably be successful if done right. However, I don't think this is done right. 1. Damn...that load time. Hopefully it's because there is a mass of people due to it making rounds online, but it may have something to do with the Twitter and other APIs. It's quite bad. 2. I'm not a fan of the upvotes ticker. It don't see how it is adding anything valuable. He upvoted something? Okay......what am I supposed to take away from that? That there are active users on the site? The most important piece of information that should be in that feed is what they are upvoting. The fact that they upvoted is the least important thing in that feed - something that could be easily solved with a very small icon. The user isn't really important to me either because it's already moving too quickly for me to know usernames. 3. I inherently don't trust the site because of the usernames rather than real names. I'm not saying you have to verify that users are actually using their real name, but showing Joe Brown instead of xxjoey2stepxx is a big improvement on trustability. Designer News does this and it already feels like a place where there are real people behind the comments. Twitter shifted to this method as well. I can still make my name xxjoey2stepxx if I wanted, but most chose to use a real name, especially when they have credibility. 4. They are going to have to add some sort of levels / karma program so that I can instantly know which users have been around longer, been fact checking longer, been correct in their confirms more, etc. That's a complicated algorithm and many different things must be considered to determine a user's credibility. This can easily this break a site if not done carefully. Similar to how wikipedia has their intense, diehard mods who deter new users from editing, this site could easily steer new users away if too much power / value is given to a certain subset of users. 5. The fact that they are already talking about advertising, licensing API's, etc means their about two miles ahead of where they should be at this point. I have very little faith in people who believe so wholeheartedly in an idea that they think it will be successful before it is actually successful. These types of people are less likely to take the necessary risks to make big changes to a site, a user interface, or a block of code. They are in the MVP phase. This is the market research. You have 50k. Let's see how it goes before you blast off.
So suppose there is some war where both sides are putting out a mixture of truths and falsehoods to suit their own ends. Lots of sites on the web carry both sides' propaganda. Can Grasswire be brigaded just by supplying lots of links to confirm or refute any given piece of propaganda? Could whichever side has more users on Grasswire ensure that the other side's story is always marked "refuted"?
I'm with you, it's a cool idea, but a.) the UI is somewhat lacking - it's not obvious how to access information or confirm/refute posts once you've found them, and it seems generally to emphasize form over function, and b.) I'm not entirely convinced that this will be that much more accurate than existing methods of information sharing. Certainly placing an emphasis on confirming/refuting claims rather than just spreading them regardless of their validity will help, but let's face it, people are unreliable. It doesn't seem like Grasswire could've stopped something like reddit's Boston marathon fiasco, for example - with that, there was a large group of people that agreed on something totally false. But that's not to say I don't like it - I do think Grasswire is at least a step in the right direction.
Ryan Holiday had a poignant comment on the Bin Laden assassination. It's been trumpeted that Twitter broke the news of Bin Laden's assassination ahead of traditional media, therefore Twitter is the shiznit. Mr. Holiday pointed out that Twitter beat the official announcement by seven minutes. There isn't a lot of news where seven minutes matters. You'd much prefer fact-checking and vetting. What we need is a combination of grasswire, factcheck.org and Snopes.