Yahoo on Tuesday launched a rebranded version of its mobile news aggregation app, now called Yahoo Newsroom.
Readers of a certain age may remember a time when Yahoo was the center of the then-small Internet universe. Millions of people visited the Internet pioneer's homepage on a daily basis to soak in the latest news headlines, stock updates, celebrity gossip, sports scores and more.
These days, however, things are a bit more fragmented as you've got a wide variety of apps and social media platforms all vying for your attention. With Newsroom, Yahoo is looking to once again become the one-stop shop for content discovery and discussion.
Available today for Android and iOS, Yahoo Newsroom lets users comb through a variety of topics - or Vibes, as Yahoo calls them - to follow. As you use the app, it learns your preferences and tailors the news feed to surface stories you're most likely to be passionate about. The app also encourages users to submit stories from around the web that others can view and comment on.
Yahoo hopes the app will empower its community to engage in healthy discussions without the pressure that social media may bring.
As TechCrunch correctly highlights, this could be a recipe for disaster. In addition to having to keep out spam, trolls and malicious content, Yahoo Newsroom will no doubt have to deal with the proliferation of "fake" news sites that have already exhibited the ability to outsmart Facebook's Trending Topics algorithm.