Noscroll: The AI Bot That Does Your Doomscrolling for You

Imagine being able to outsource your doomscrolling. That's the premise behind Noscroll, a new startup offering an AI-powered bot that can browse your social feeds, news sites, and other online chatter, then text you when something important happens. "no feed.

no brainrot. no ragebit," reads Noscroll's pitch to users. "just signal." The idea itself is fairly simple - it's a bot that reads the web for you.

But to work, there's a lot that needs to go on under the hood. Nadav Hollander, previously the CTO at the NFT marketplace OpenSea after selling his decentralized finance startup to the company in 2022, said he built Noscroll because he found himself in a love/hate relationship with X. He was taking time off after leaving his job at OpenSea, and spent a lot of time on the social platform.

"It's phenomenally entertaining and really informative in ways you just don't get from normal media," Hollander told TechCrunch. "But it's so toxic culturally, and it's just very upsetting to read," he said, comparing it to the nutritional equivalent of fast food. "You just feel terrible after it." Hollander said he wanted to get off the app without missing out on the news and content.

That inspired him to build Noscroll, which launched just a couple of days ago to the public. To get started with the service, you just text the Noscroll AI agent directly at (415) 718-4828, and it sends you a link to connect your X account to the service. This authentication provides Noscroll with information about your likes, bookmarks, and the accounts and posts you follow.

The bot uses a variety of off-the-shelf AI models running on the company's own proprietary infrastructure. The models have been customized with a lot of prompting, so the bot has its own unique voice and communication style. You can chat with the AI agent in natural language, telling it what sort of news or topics you want to keep up with, as well as what you don't care about.

It will then prepare a sample digest. To work, the AI pulls in information from beyond X, including news sites, blogs, Reddit, Hacker News, Substack, and more. It can even tap into things like research papers, local politics, or any other sources you may need.

(You can recommend specific sources, too, if there's something you want to make sure it checks.) Then, instead of spending your time scrolling through endless social media feeds to stay current on the news you care about, Noscroll will send you news digests via text at whatever cadence works best. For instance, a casual user might want to receive a weekly update on a topic, while a news junkie might want texts multiple times per day. These digests are essentially a collection of news links along with a brief AI summary of the article.