The Genesis of Alt House
HARLEM — With 10 years of coding experience, and 5 years of building software for data-driven organizations, I have realized one surprising thing about information:
Inequality of information is much akin to inequality of wealth and income. The ability to act favorably at any given moment is a privilege granted first by access to information.
Information as a public utility is more rare today as creators and data brokers are striving to monetize their content, leading to a situation where quality information can be costly.
The Problem
The pandemic highlighted the stark disparities in information access. As misinformation surged, it became clear that the right data—especially in politics and journalism—was often out of reach for many, impacting both personal well-being and public discourse.
This experience inspired me to create Alt House. Our goal is to improve how people interact with information, providing a safety net against information abandonment and exploitative content like misinformation.
Just as food deserts highlight areas lacking nutritious options, we aim to expose and address regions of the internet where quality information is buried behind costly paywalls and sensationalized content.
The cost of high quality information can be thought of like the cost of high quality food. More time and resources must be spent acquiring it and less-nourhsing alternatives are bountiful.
Outside paywalls, people rely on tools like Google PageRank and social media algorithms to find information. However, these systems often prioritize advertisers, which can undermine trust and lead to issues like mood and attention disorders (Annals of Medicine and Surgery, 2023).
LLMs are rising in popularity for personal decision making and fact-finding, though they still suffer from training biases, lack of diversity, and transparency issues, leading to unreliable information (Harvard Data Science Review, 2024). Ultimately, “hallucinations” force users back to traditional search methods for fact verification.
As the volume of information has more than doubled since 2020, finding accurate answers has required more effort each year due to an overload of contradictory sources (Statistica Search Department, 2023).
The initial rapid adoption of text LLMs in 2023 should underscore the pent-up demand for fact-finding in an oversaturated information environment.
The Current Landscape
The oversaturation of content is driving a shift from traditional media to social media for news, as noted by Pew Research (2023). As trust in established news outlets declines and the effort to verify information increases, people increasingly turn to personal recommendations and word of mouth. We rely on authentic audio and video content to identify trustworthy sources, to get to know someone, a need that even advanced LLMs cannot fully address.
Our brains evolved to assess trustworthiness in people much more efficiently than in cold, impersonal data.
Consequently, today's news diet often involves both paying for quality journalism and vetting social media personalities, including those who produce premium news. This creates a “critical” media consumer who invests significant time in verifying sources—a luxury not afforded to everyone. It also locks readers into echo chambers.
Engagement ranking of content and the “rise of the tools of influence” reshape social networks by amplifying biased perspectives and fostering echo chambers, making it even more challenging to discern reliable information (David Troy, 2021-2024).
Figure 1. Three contrasting social network configurations. Source: David Troy, Disinformation and Its Effects on Social Capital Networks.
The era of objectivity is over. All that is left is powerful technology ranking millions of subjective takes.
Our Solution
Alt House envisions a platform where technology and journalism would merge to transform information access. By democratizing alternative data, we aim to provide clear evidence, source material, and disambiguation, evolving forensic journalism from individual efforts to comprehensive, always-on data operations. A platform for journalism.
Alt House pioneers the era of Journalism as Code, developing tools that enhance truth-seeking and facilitate a symbiotic relationship between journalists and consumers.
Alt House is the culmination of my professional journey and passion for data. Our flagship product, launching in 2025, will revolutionize modern journalism.
To transform how consumers engage with and report on current issues by leveraging the power of AI and alternative data.
With the launch of TruTake Crowd this Fall, we’re demonstrating AI’s potential to clarify social opinions rather than obscure them. You can access the white paper by signing up to our newsletter: http://eepurl.com/iWy8hk.
We’re committed to creating systems that prioritize truth over misinformation.
Alt House represents more than just company—it’s a vision for the future of journalism.
With unwavering commitment to the future of journalism,
Donald
Founder, Alt House
Citations
Statistica Search Department (2023, November 16th). Volume of data/information created, captured, copied, and consumed worldwide from 2010 to 2020, with forecasts from 2021 to 2025. Statistica. https://www.statista.com/statistics/871513/worldwide-data-created
Zubair, Ujala et al. “Link between excessive social media use and psychiatric disorders.” Annals of medicine and surgery (2012) vol. 85,4 875-878. 27 Mar. 2023, doi:10.1097/MS9.0000000000000112
Hardinges, J., Simperl, E., & Shadbolt, N. (2024). We Must Fix the Lack of Transparency Around the Data Used to Train Foundation Models . Harvard Data Science Review, (Special Issue 5). https://doi.org/10.1162/99608f92.a50ec6e6
David Troy. Disinformation and Its Effects on Social Capital networks. (2021-2024). https://docs.google.com/document/u/1/d/1R_aVUrbAmkVXFF1vJWxnXE03FBtpxE8jkHF9P53n4Qk
“Social Media and News Fact Sheet.” Pew Research Center, Washington, D.C. (November, 2023) https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/social-media-and-news-fact-sheet/.
