[HN Gopher] Ask HN: News site that provides world updates only w...
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Ask HN: News site that provides world updates only when relevant?
Author : tbihl
Score : 150 points
Date : 2021-12-14 14:15 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (legiblenews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (legiblenews.com)
| nickstinemates wrote:
| The most valuable/relevant news includes original sources.
|
| As an example,, If there's a summary about court proceedings,
| link to the transcript.
|
| Gone are the day we need someone to interpret the original event
| for us with their own bias.
| EGreg wrote:
| Wikinews?
| benbristow wrote:
| I've been quite enjoying these two Twitter accounts (primarily
| UK-centric)
|
| https://twitter.com/PoliticsForAlI
|
| https://twitter.com/NewsForAllUK
|
| Bite-sized news headlines with sources in the replies if you need
| them, and the standard Twitter discussion thread.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| BBC news is the closest to "just the facts, ma'am" to the extent
| that the app shows me (untouched, unbumped) months old news
| stories for categories that have had no recent updates. Their
| articles have a "news only with a narrative" main section and
| then any opinion is separated by an hr with the name of the
| person and their take on the news.
| omarhaneef wrote:
| Relevance is in the eye of the beholder.
|
| Or, to put it another way, relevance is a property of the
| relationship between the material and the consumer. You would
| have to know something about me in order to provide me with
| relevant (to me) news.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Or you could just have a tag-like approach to news. If
| something new interests you, subscribe to a tag. If it ceases
| to interest you, unsubscribe from that tag or snooze it for
| some months. You discover new tags by seeing them referenced in
| stories from tags you already follow.
|
| That's pretty similar to what Reddit does. And it doesn't even
| need much user data, other than the user expressing what they
| are interested in.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Even if a media tries to make a guess as to what you view as
| relevant they might not get it right and the internet will go
| banans and claim that the site is suppressing relevant stories.
|
| Relevant can better judged in hindsight. I'd try to find an
| outlet which publish stories once a week, or less. That filters
| out the less important stories.
| [deleted]
| dougmwne wrote:
| Spicy take: none of it is relevant to you. All world news is
| outside your sphere of influce and sphere of concern. It's a pure
| waste of your time and you don't need to read anything about it.
| If a global event is about to affect you, I guarantee you will
| hear about it.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| By the time you hear of an impending national disaster (maybe a
| pandemic), you can take no further steps to prepare because
| it's already happening. IMO, being able to prepare and brace
| yourself for coming change or disruption is a key benefit to
| consuming news.
| moonchrome wrote:
| Especially important to point out considering the amount of
| posturing and virtue signalling about "global problems" goes on
| in our society.
| dougmwne wrote:
| How much time has collectively been wasted on "Free Tibet"
| for instance? A person's interest or disinterest was
| irrelevant to China's policies.
| xenocratus wrote:
| > none of it is relevant to you.
|
| > I guarantee you will hear about it.
|
| Choose one.
|
| I had to book emergency flights back to the UK on a day's
| notice last year before Christmas because all the countries
| were closing borders. My partner would've missed it and been
| stuck abroad if I didn't tell her about it. In a world as
| connected as ours, finding out what's relevant and what's not
| is a continuous struggle.
| slingnow wrote:
| You didn't know there was a pandemic going on and that
| countries were reacting by restricting travel? I find that
| hard to believe.
| proto-n wrote:
| Last christmas was the delta scare I believe, with sudden
| unexpected closures.
| whalesalad wrote:
| This is an area of thought that I am interested in learning
| more about. Humans globalized too quickly - we are not evolving
| quickly enough to meet the new demand it has put on our mental
| wellbeing. Our tribes used to be small, and they slowly grew
| and grew. Now the tribe is essentially the size of the world -
| if you permit that firehose of that data to your mind. I do
| think it is healthy to turn that off. It's a slippery slope
| though - I want to know about atrocities happening on the other
| side of the world. I don't care that some province in Canada
| has reinstated an indoor mask mandate.
| dougmwne wrote:
| Yes, and of course I am playing devils advocate. After all I
| am here on HN commenting on the news of the day. You are
| hitting on exactly the issue here though and think it's
| extremely healthy to tell a person who feels overwhelmed and
| besieged by the news cycle to take a break from a 100%
| optional activity.
| u2077 wrote:
| Winno is an iOS app that I've been using and it's amazing. They
| don't have a web app, however that is in the pipeline. For now
| you can join their discord server and there is a bot that posts
| summaries. (Unfortunately the read-more urls are only available
| within the app)
|
| The only downsides I've found is that the only way they make
| money is buymeacoffee. I haven't looked into their privacy policy
| as well.
|
| https://winno.app/
| divbzero wrote:
| "The World This Week" by the _Economist_ [1] provides a quick
| glance of prominent current events each week.
|
| [1]: https://www.economist.com/the-world-this-week/
| hankchinaski wrote:
| the only lightweight news site i like is lite.cnn.com although
| with US focus i would love to see a more EU/UK/Worldwide focused
| one
| avandermeulen wrote:
| Have you checked out the Wikipedia current events page?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
| HPsquared wrote:
| It's a nice summary if you read the whole thing, but the
| alphabetical ordering (both by category and by title) is not
| great for a quick skim. If there is no 'priority ordering', the
| most important article is on average going to be buried
| somewhere in the middle.
|
| It makes it easier for the Wikipedia editors (avoids endless
| arguments about priority), but not great for the average
| reader.
| nomilk wrote:
| Along side each event it would be great to have a small link to
| a google news search for that event. Possibly even a google
| news search that _isn 't_ personalised or tailored to a
| location, if that's possible.
| kiwicopple wrote:
| If you like this in email format:
|
| https://currentevents.email
|
| (looks like my GitHub action has stopped working - will fix it
| tmr)
| desku wrote:
| This looks great. Is it possible to get this as an RSS feed
| instead of an e-mail newsletter?
| input_sh wrote:
| https://www.to-rss.xyz/wikipedia/current_events/
| judofyr wrote:
| I'm pretty sure since the linked page here
| (https://legiblenews.com/) is a just more readable version
| (typography) of Wikipedia's current events.
| mstngl wrote:
| Yes, there is correct attribution on the bottom reflecting
| this: "Original text authored by Wikipedia contributors" &
| linked to Revision history of the corresponding Wikipedia
| Portal:Current events/2021 December 13
| tbihl wrote:
| Now I have; Thank you! This is probably the 80/20 solution that
| doesn't abuse my attention too much.
| tjansen wrote:
| I love the idea. It would be nice if events (Miss Universe,
| Tornado outbreak) would be put on a timeline, and there would be
| a separate section for ongoing things (Covid, russian troops).
| theelous3 wrote:
| For "legible" news, I'd like to see the section headers more
| clearly defined.
|
| Also... what does relevant mean? This news about conflict in the
| congo is not really relevant.
| berkut wrote:
| I guess "relevant" depends on where you are in the world
| (and/or where you're from which might be different to where you
| are currently) :)
|
| It's also a tricky thing due to interconnectedness: I generally
| don't care _that_ much what happens in the US, but clearly
| there are important things happening there, which can have
| knock-on effects the world over...
| masterof0 wrote:
| > This news about conflict in the congo is not really relevant.
| Why not? Or does it have to be a "technologically advanced"
| country to be relevant?
| tbihl wrote:
| You're right, I didn't define 'relevant', though I appreciate
| the Congo story. Examples, since you asked: 1. I don't care
| about Miss Universe (one of the stories in the link). 2. Sports
| are low value except for championships. 3. I want Covid stories
| batched where I can look at them if I want to look at that, but
| where they otherwise don't clutter everything. 4. The Midwest
| tornadoes are relevant, but human interest stories about one of
| the deceased candle workers are not.
| tbihl wrote:
| I didn't know about the massing of nearly 100K Russian troops on
| the Ukranian border until a week or so ago, and felt completely
| blindsided. I am desperately searching for a (preferably
| lightweight) site that would offer important world news, limited
| updates on that story, and be willing to be quiet when nothing is
| going on. The site I linked is way better than most, but still is
| full of low-value updates, and it tends to miss stories of real
| significance. In the past I have used text.npr.org, but it is
| worse yet about missing stories and giving low-value updates.
| goblin89 wrote:
| As a counter-anecdote, I have been inundated with the
| Russia/Ukraine story every day for weeks since the US
| intelligence report.
|
| Every few hours there's a new report on just this topic by DW
| or BBC on YouTube, and each time it's 99% rehashing of the
| status quo plus 1% of maybe genuine new developments.
|
| Same goes for the new variant of COVID, multiple new
| sensational "breaking" reports per day all summed up as "yeah,
| stand by, we'll know in a couple of weeks, or earlier".
|
| I just stopped following the news recently, I may be projecting
| but it's all a frenzy.
| HPsquared wrote:
| On the 99% rehashing, that is another compromise that is
| forced by the format. The news org doesn't know how much
| context a reader has: they have to balance between a brief
| update to a known story (in which case a reader unfamiliar
| with the story will have no idea who's who, or what's going
| on) and a full rehashing every time there's an update (which
| is repetitive and harder to follow over time for someone
| familiar with the story).
| goblin89 wrote:
| It't not just that--they also overstate the severity of the
| event covered, _in each report_ , even as they inevitably
| follow that by "well, no cause to _really_ worry yet, we'll
| have to see in coming weeks".
|
| I wish for a solid news source that did unbiased reporting
| in a way that doesn't offend knowledgeable viewer/reader's
| intelligence. Just assume I already know what happened up
| to this point; then add links/annotations as appropriate.
| Don't drum up sensational headlines and speculations. Save
| your effort, save my time.
|
| This isn't something that can be found on YouTube, as it
| wouldn't generate grand amounts of ad revenue.
| HPsquared wrote:
| When something "big and scary" turns out to be nothing,
| they don't usually post an "all clear" on the front page
| to tie up the loose ends for the reader.
|
| The resulting accumulation of worrying information
| probably contributes to a chronic stress in regular
| readers.
| thr0wawayf00 wrote:
| The problem with this is question is that it all comes down to
| how you define "relevant". What is very relevant to one person
| is not the same as another, and news orgs are in the business
| of sending out as many updates as they can.
|
| I follow the AP directly, which IMO is pretty good about being
| concise, relatively impartial and generally does a good job of
| covering national news. You might try a few different
| aggregation newsletters to see what feels right for you. But
| you're always going to make tradeoffs between missing stories
| and receiving low-value updates, because your low-value updates
| may be someone else's hugely relevant story.
| biztos wrote:
| I didn't know about the crisis on the Poland-Belarus border[0]
| until half way through because I wasn't paying attention to the
| news in Hungary (a very pro-Poland and anti-"migrant" country)
| and then was surprised by it when I went to Germany and
| randomly picked up a newspaper.
|
| Which is only to say: in addition to the "what is relevant to
| whom" problem, a lot of times we are just focused on other
| things, and news sites are not going to find us. Not even
| hypothetically perfect ones that send us emails about the
| things we really care about, because sometimes we are going to
| be busy with work or family or whatever and tune out the
| constant stream of news alerts.
|
| Instead we will rely, as people have for a long long time, on
| other folks telling us if something really important is afoot.
|
| In a way -- counterintuitively? -- this is an argument for
| watching the Evening News as a sort of information-gathering
| ritual, just because it's harder to tune out. When I was a kid
| we always caught the news and the weather. One doesn't _need_
| to do that anymore, but maybe it 's the better paradigm? You
| sit there, you chat about something else, you half-listen, but
| when Dennis Richmond[1] says the alien invasion is on, you're
| going to hear it.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Belarus-
| European_Union_bo...
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hv-Kt-F5CFQ
|
| [Edit: it's debatable whether this was a "refugee" crisis so I
| removed that word.]
| anyfactor wrote:
| I am very specific about the news I read. So, I aggregate news
| (particularly opinion features) from an easy to scrape news
| portal. Than I latex-format that to a pdf document using Pandoc
| and read it offline.
|
| I thought about making a news YouTube channel that described
| essential news stories under 30 or 60 seconds with only the
| essential highlights. But the incentive was simply not there. I
| run a VA firm where we aggregate industry news for social media
| posts. So, my business proposition is that like minded people
| could pool money to hire a VA and setup strict policies about
| the scope, news sources (also pay for those news sources) then
| aggregate and summarize essential news articles catered just
| for them. I feel like community based services should be a
| thing and people should pay and own the services they want.
| [deleted]
| nojito wrote:
| >I didn't know about the massing of nearly 100K Russian troops
| on the Ukranian border until a week or so ago, and felt
| completely blindsided.
|
| That's pretty unbelievable. It was on the frontpage of all
| major western news sources.
| tfehring wrote:
| On the median day, major western news sources have zero
| articles I care about. Here are the current headlines from
| https://text.npr.org:
|
| - The parents of the accused Michigan school shooter head to
| court again
|
| - Experts crack the secret to last letter of Mary, Queen of
| Scots before her execution
|
| - The Air Force discharges 27 service members for refusing to
| get a COVID vaccine
|
| - Their lives were changed by gun violence, and now they're
| running for office
|
| - The best and worst places to live if you care only about
| money
|
| - To save lives, the overdose antidote naxalone should be
| sold over-the-counter, advocates argue
|
| - Vaccine protection vs. omicron infection may drop to 30%
| but does cut severe disease
|
| - The federal agency that measures racial diversity is led
| mostly by white people
|
| - Rep. Liz Cheney read the text messages she says Mark
| Meadows got during the Jan. 6 siege
|
| - Kentucky crews search painstakingly for 109 people missing
| after deadly tornadoes
|
| - 'Return of the Jedi,' 'Selena' and 'Sounder' added to
| National Film Registry
|
| - Pfizer data shows that its COVID-19 pill is effective
| against severe disease
|
| - Saule Omarova gets candid: Banks sank her nomination to
| become a key regulator
|
| - The Supreme Court again leaves a state vaccine mandate in
| place for health care workers
|
| - Survivors of Nassar's abuse reach a $380 million deal with
| USA Gymnastics and the Olympic committee
|
| - This year's Golden Globes nominations avoid obvious
| pitfalls, but won't restore the awards' luster
|
| - More Black families are homeschooling their children,
| citing the pandemic and racism
|
| - No U.S. troops behind a drone strike that killed Afghan
| civilians will be punished
|
| - What dish is never missing from your holiday table? Tell us
| why you love it
|
| - Elon Musk is Time's 2021 Person of the Year
|
| I'd love an RSS feed that lets me know about Russian troops
| on the Ukranian border but not about any of those "stories."
| Actually reading the news is a frustrating experience because
| the signal-to-noise ratio is so poor.
| gberger wrote:
| > - Pfizer data shows that its COVID-19 pill is effective
| against severe disease
|
| This seems the most relevant piece of news to me. Do you
| not care about it?
| tbihl wrote:
| It's not news. You can read the trials yourself from
| months (year?) ago and know this. Important, yes, but not
| news.
| tfehring wrote:
| I care about the effectiveness and approval of Pfizer's
| treatment, but I don't care to be informed about every
| single new piece of information that comes out about it.
| In this case the news was that Pfizer released additional
| data that's consistent with the interim report it
| released a little over a month ago. If the final analysis
| _contradicted_ its original report, or if their emergency
| use authorization were approved or denied, that 's
| something I'd want to see. It's still the most newsworthy
| item on the list IMO, and I wouldn't be upset if it
| slipped into my feed.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| It's buried in a mountain of spam. You might just miss
| it.
| kzrdude wrote:
| Was it on the frontpage more than one day? One can often miss
| many whole days but check in from time to time.
| nojito wrote:
| If you don't check every day, it's inevitable you will miss
| something. I guess the real need is not a webpage but more
| of a notification service that tells you the major news
| stories of the day.
| kzrdude wrote:
| I think I'm good without being pushed news every day
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Sounds like a niche for RSS to me. Push updates on a
| situation as it develops, know which part of the news
| stream you haven't caught up to yet.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Question: Why is this "Ask HN"? Shouldn't it be "Show HN"?
|
| Looks like a decent site.
| tbihl wrote:
| Answer: I misunderstood the submission prompt, thinking my
| comment would be attached to the post and not lost below. I
| linked that as a halfway-there example of what I want, and also
| because I'm a slave to SEO and HN ranks posts higher if they
| have a link.
| gnicholas wrote:
| You can edit the title of your post, or if it's been too long
| for editing to be an option, email hn@ycombinator.com to ask
| dang to do it for you. I had a similar reaction to others.
| Ask HN posts are supposed to just be a question, not a link
| to a site.
| berkut wrote:
| It _is_ a question though, the link isn 't their site...
| efields wrote:
| Relevant is relative.
| Ettaa wrote:
| Somebody has learned a lesson +1
| ricardobayes wrote:
| Soo... essentially a clone of Reuters? Failing to see why this is
| new.
| ZanyProgrammer wrote:
| I'd like to see a news site in the style of the kind of cable
| bulletin board you saw a lot of from the 70s-90s.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEP96kDKW44&list=PLu7_of-Pg8...
| iso1631 wrote:
| I subscribe to a weekly news magazine, it comes through the door
| on a Friday, and I read it on Saturday morning.
|
| There's very little news that I need to change my approach to the
| day for.
| galfarragem wrote:
| https://www.slowernews.com
|
| I cherry-pick articles that dissect trends, unveil lesser known
| trends or are interesting edge cases, and are relevant, at least,
| for some months. It's like a generalist and slow HN once most
| articles appeared here. I couldn't find something similar so I
| built it... RSS, quarterly newsletter[0] and open source[1]. It's
| my pet project: I feed him, he doesn't feed me but in the end he
| makes me a better person.
|
| [0] https://slowernews.substack.com/
|
| [1] https://github.com/slowernews/slowernews
| newacc9 wrote:
| I think the product you are looking for is a weekly or monthly
| email/magazine analysis of the news. There must be a large number
| of companies in the space, fwiw I get my weekly update from
| worldaffairsbrief.com.
| vpribish wrote:
| isn't that the Chemtrails guy? yep
|
| https://www.worldaffairsbrief.com/keytopics/Chemtrails.html
| newacc9 wrote:
| His major research focus is deep state and triggers for world
| war.
|
| https://www.worldaffairsbrief.com/keytopics/threats.html
| dfghdfhs wrote:
| Depends on what you mean by "relevant". Personally I don't think
| Miss Universe is super relevant for the world. It's just some
| show that someone owns and monetizes.
|
| Or that some kid detonated himself. Or something something about
| the NFL....
| als0 wrote:
| This is just a reskin of
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
| goblin89 wrote:
| It's not an Ask HN but a promotion for Legible News, which has a
| paid product and is apparently based off content written by
| Wikipedia's contributors.
|
| It doesn't seem like Legible News uses any part of its profits to
| donate to Wikimedia or its contributors, or at least this isn't
| stated anywhere on the website.
| gpm wrote:
| OP just messed up posting it, see explanation here [1] and his
| "original comment" which was meant to be the question here [2].
|
| I also feel like me and my as-of-yet unnamed/unreleased product
| is probably the main benefactor, since my top level comment has
| gotten a lot of attention (>20 emails too). I promise that I
| don't know the OP.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29552591
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29551687
| Sommer wrote:
| In the spirit of several projects mentioned here, this is an NLP-
| based RSS feed generator I put up recently- it takes a news story
| as a search parameter and it creates a latest, related story feed
| from it. add any url or search term to
| https://followthisstory.com/rss/?q=[url or search term]
|
| Here is a good example using a Harpers story on disinformation:
|
| https://followthisstory.com/rss/?q=https://harpers.org/archi...
|
| It is a WiP (new filter parameters shortly), but you can also
| visit the root of that domain if you rather get email alerts or
| use a slack notification. The UI in particular is very alpha, so
| please feel free to send suggestions. [edit:learning about
| formatting]
| barkerja wrote:
| It's not a "site" per se, but I have been thoroughly enjoying
| winno https://winno.app. It's news that you subscribe to based on
| very specific topics and/or categories.
| dmingod666 wrote:
| I am thinking of building a simple comments per hour and total
| comments driven alert from HN. I missed the whole log4j news few
| days back. It will just ping me when something interesting comes
| up.
| narrator wrote:
| Someone will probably tell you if it's important enough to affect
| your life. Barring that, the best very low volume news Twitter,
| IMHO, is @disclosetv . They don't tweet more than about 20 or so
| times a day and anything really important always shows up there.
| They are definitely right wing, so if you can't stand that,
| you're out of luck.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Not for COVID. I had approximately 2 weeks lead time ahead of
| the general public, thanks to message boards of all things. I
| could've known it as early as January, AFAIK, if I'd had enough
| background knowledge to identify the information as
| significant.
| gpm wrote:
| I'm working on something that you might like - though it's not
| released yet.
|
| It's a news site that doesn't write articles. It just organizes
| links to other peoples articles, and links to original sources,
| into sagas that unfolded over time.
|
| For stories of sufficient note I'd like to offer the ability to
| subscribe to them and get email notifications when something
| major changes. Unfortunately I suspect that for the long tail of
| other stories I will need to rely on a wiki-style model for
| gathering links, and probably can't send notifications without it
| becoming a source of spam.
|
| The brief version of the motivation for this is basically three
| fold:
|
| - Most stories of any interest really unfold over a period of
| weeks to years, but the current news cycle really only favors
| reporting on them as a single one time event. I'd like that to
| change.
|
| - Most news sites seem to have a severe allergy to linking to
| original sources, but often the original sources have a lot of
| value.
|
| - I'd often like to be able to compare new articles to what I've
| already read on the topic.
|
| Edit: Send me an email (my email is on my profile), and I'll send
| you one back once I have a MVP released. That's just my personal
| email, and I promise not to add you to a mailing list or
| anything.
| remram wrote:
| That sounds a lot like Wikinews.
| nathias wrote:
| This is very cool, especially the assembling news into units of
| longer duration, it would be great if you also expanded on that
| with design and make the overarching sagas visually distinct.
| smoe wrote:
| I was thinking about building something that sounds very
| similar when I was working at a news site. For me the main
| benefits of organizing articles into sagas is, that you can
| easily start reading up on something only once there is
| actually sufficient information there and to follow stories
| over time.
|
| Think, for example if there is some collapse of a bridge
| somewhere. Immediately news sites will publish stories to
| generate clicks but will not have anything useful to say beyond
| pure speculation. Bride x collapsed and some immediate
| consequences like road closures is the only thing you'll get
| that actually contains information. It will take weeks at least
| before there is anything useful about the why. By the time it
| might be easy to miss the story.
|
| The other thing I think is nice about it, that you can decide
| your own pace of consuming news. Say you only read news Sunday
| morning with breakfast, give me the most "relevant" articles
| and sagas from the the last x days.
| gpm wrote:
| I think we're thinking along nearly identical lines :)
| phgn wrote:
| Interesting, how are you planning to collect articles for the
| news "sagas", and how often do you want to update information?
| I'd say articles written on the same day as some event will
| always have more noise than summaries written later.
| gpm wrote:
| So I plan to collect every link I can, and then sort them
| into "events" that are based on something that actually
| happened.
|
| This just moves the problem to being "what links to
| prominently display for an event". I'm not sure on the
| details, but I'll probably end up with some heuristics for
| what links are the best with an option to manually override
| it. I also want to implement a fair bit of user-controlled
| filtration (think along the lines of
| https://pcpartpicker.com/products/motherboard/, except for
| news articles instead of motherboards)
|
| Organizing links is, I think, best done manually in the end.
| But with automation to make it easier. For example scrapping
| RSS feeds and using keywords to suggest where I might want to
| put them. I also want to make it possible for users of the
| site to add content (or for high profile articles, just
| suggest it, because spam sucks).
|
| In some sense this is "realtime", but without any plan to
| race to make it happen as quickly as possible. Pushing
| updates to email of course less so. Triggering "this is a big
| enough of a change to send an email" will be a separate
| manual action. As for when that email will be sent, I'm
| thinking of setting it up so people can subscribe to a saga
| with daily (default)/weekly/immediately on change.
| new_guy wrote:
| You could run them through sentiment analysis too,
| categorise sources as left/right/middle etc. Flag obvious
| content farms/bias etc. I do think it's been done before
| but can't remember any details from the top of my head.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Would be great to have a timeline with "AP reported that
| 1) ..." with a list of say five facts and then "these 274
| sites reported the same facts within the same 24h" or
| something similar with another early source identified.
| You could then add data like "Twitter user $USERNAME
| reported that ..." earlier in the timeline, or what have
| you.
|
| I guess if it got popular you'd get news/syndication
| sites doctoring their publication times to always appear
| first on the timeline.
|
| Would be useful to look at something like a timeline of
| political events spanning a decade, or a topic like the
| JET (Joint European Torus project) with all the stories
| that made mainstream news.
|
| You could add mashups like what the main entertainment
| news was, or what the other main stories were, or stock
| tickers, alongside the news timelines.
|
| I guess focus and where to prune the branching news
| stories will be hard.
|
| The UK PM's handlers are constantly using the technique
| of burying 'boring' news by having him do something
| really stupid that is expected to fill news cycles for a
| few days. Their manipulation of the media has been
| masterful pulling in all the learning from the USA; I
| digress. The point being it would be interesting to plot
| a timeline of apparent buffoonery, or short-lived outrage
| stories, and the actually important also-ran news stories
| that the buffoonery was there to hide.
| M2Ys4U wrote:
| The BBC (in collaboration with The Guardian and PA) created
| an RDF ontology[0] a few years ago for describing "Story
| lines" stories that can span multiple articles over time.
|
| That could be useful to use (or just take inspiration
| from).
|
| [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20170719191914/http://www.b
| bc.co... - bbc.co.uk/ontologies is currently offline as a
| mitigation against the log4j incident, hence the
| archive.org link
| fouc wrote:
| Gathering news/article links & source links into sagas?
| Perfect. Love that idea.
|
| Would it be user-submitted links & tag based?
|
| My imagination takes me to something like: the overall
| #covid-19 saga, plus the sub-sagas: "#covid-19 #delta",
| "#covid-19 #omicron"
|
| Super curious what your approach will look like!
| gpm wrote:
| > Would it be user-submitted links & tag based?
|
| Partially and not really.
|
| ---
|
| I absolutely want to get users to submit links and help out
| with organization. I'd never manage to find every source,
| even for the most important stories, without that sort of
| help. That said, I expect I'll be doing a lot of the research
| and submission myself (with helper programs) for the core
| stories - for one thing I don't think there's any other way
| to bootstrap a community.
|
| For niche and more "local news" stories I want to rely on a
| more wiki-like model, where anyone can directly edit them
| (and full history is preserved). I wish I could do that for
| everything, but I think bad actors would present a pretty
| insurmountable problem. Even for local news "anti-evil" will
| be difficult, and I'll need to clearly mark that this is
| community-controlled content, I don't want to be
| hosting/recommending spam after all.
|
| ---
|
| I don't really think of the organization system as tags,
| though I suppose in some sense it's equivalent. I think of it
| as more of a top down hierarchy, saga -> event -> link, and
| if the same link ends up in multiple sagas/events, that's ok
| and not really an important fact - i.e. the fact that the
| link is tagged as something isn't the important bit.
|
| I'm sure I'll want to solve nested sagas better eventually,
| but for now I'm ignoring the problem. This is a bet that for
| most sagas a single layer of time based interior organization
| (grouping links into events) is sufficient. There will also
| be other forms of intra-saga organization, like link type
| (article/legal document/study/video/tweet/press release/...).
|
| For now a covid-19 saga would link to a delta saga much like
| it would link to an external site, and result in a certain
| amount of duplication of content. I think covid is unusual in
| how long of a saga it is.
| lijogdfljk wrote:
| > Most news sites seem to have a severe allergy to linking to
| original sources, but often the original sources have a lot of
| value.
|
| Omg, so true. A while back i found out about Axios and thought
| they were really cool. A nice way to skim news, keep up to
| date... but the lack of sourcing made the information worthless
| to me. Difficult to tell what is opinion, reality, how they got
| to a summary of a quote, etc.
|
| Axios has the right idea for me, but they need to pair it with
| detailed sources, quotes, etc to drill into. Reality is often
| too strange these days to trust a summary, i need sources.
| 0xCMP wrote:
| You're actually sort-of describing the original idea for Vox.
| They wanted to basically have like a website of _things
| happening_ with explainers for everything they could easily
| link-to and keep updated so they could write a story explaining
| an event and provide context for experts and normal consumers.
|
| e.g. Explainers on the budget process and what happened before
| with regulations of some kind. etc. And that only becomes
| relevant to readers when it becomes important and if they're
| interested in it.
|
| Unfortunately because of social media, AMP, and etc. they _had
| to fit in the article format_ even though they had big plans
| for doing richer UIs on the website itself. They basically were
| forced to pivot into a blog which I think they still do a good
| job at today cause the mission is still similar, but the
| mechanics of getting people to read things which aren 't
| articles is difficult.
|
| [This is all from memory of an episode of Erza Klein's Vox
| Podcast where the founders talk about the original ideas of Vox
| and why they ended up where they were]
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > You're actually sort-of describing the original idea for
| Vox. They wanted to basically have like a website of _things
| happening_ with explainers for everything they could easily
| link-to and keep updated so they could write a story
| explaining an event
|
| I see something different in gpm's idea. Vox wanted to update
| their articles. That's bad. gpm wants to aggregate coverage
| of the same topic over time. That's great; it gives you an
| easy way to look at "what did people think in 2018?".
| fknorangesite wrote:
| > Vox wanted to update their articles. That's bad. gpm
| wants to aggregate coverage of the same topic over time.
| That's great; it gives you an easy way to look at "what did
| people think in 2018?".
|
| At the risk of sounding Extremely Hacker News(tm), this
| sounds like a job for version control, ha.
| gpm wrote:
| These days "CRDTs" are all the rage for this sort of use
| case :P
|
| Anyways, I'm basically planning on doing this part, but
| linearly like wikipedia (and it's history page) not as a
| tree like git. Also what I'm currently doing only counts
| as a CRDT if "rerender the whole page in case of
| conflict" is a valid update strategy...
|
| https://crdt.tech/
| wutbrodo wrote:
| > I think they still do a good job at today cause the mission
| is still similar, but the mechanics of getting people to read
| things which aren't articles is difficult.
|
| I think Axios fits what you're describing much better. Vox is
| a boilerplate left-biased blog[1], with their only unique
| quality being a sneering insistence that they're just
| "explaining". They're like the Economist, but without the
| self-awareness or quality.
|
| Axios, on the other hand, is much better at the just-the-
| facts style of reporting, to the extent this is possible.
| They even use a non-traditional article format, making heavy
| use of bullet points and standardized paragraph headers like
| "Why it matters".
|
| [1] Not to treat them as the final word, but Allsides has
| their bias marked as Left, not even Center-Left. They have
| Axios as Center. https://www.allsides.com/news-source/vox-
| news-media-bias
| fouc wrote:
| well gpm's idea doesn't necessarily involve any writing from
| my read of it.
|
| Actually I'd like to see a news site that has no story
| telling, no explainers, no narrative. Just the core facts as
| much as possible, but presented over a timeline. So the
| timeline itself ends up providing the narrative/structure to
| a large extent.
| gpm wrote:
| As little writing as possible anyways. I end up giving
| titles to events, but that's about it.
|
| Just the facts news would be interesting, the practical
| problem is it would also be labor intensive - since you end
| up needing to write your own (short) article for every
| story, and understanding the story well enough to do a good
| job at that. I sort of hope that my site is the 80/20
| version of that for people looking for that, by
| approximating it without actually doing it. Or maybe it
| could be a useful source of facts for someone who did want
| to make a news site that did that.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| Even just curation without text still risks an agenda. WaPo
| is famous for this: when there is something happening they
| want to take a position on, their entire homepage becomes
| every nitty gritty news piece or reflection that would push
| one via sheer inundation into supporting their cause with
| shock and rage.
|
| Edit: maybe I shouldn't have mentioned any names; it seems
| some people took that as an attack on their particular
| herd.
| gladinovax wrote:
| some folks are super touchy here nowadays. Sad.
| artembugara wrote:
| If you need access to news data, we'd be willing to grant it
| for free:
|
| https://newscatcherapi.com/news-api
| jacobsievers wrote:
| Question re. your site: "By using this website you agree to
| our Policy." refers to what policy?
| gpm wrote:
| I do!
|
| The open source stuff you guys have is also interesting :)
|
| - https://newscatcherapi.com/blog/python-web-scraping-
| librarie...
|
| Will reach out to you via email later today
| RONROC wrote:
| All hard-to-argue with pain points that could be addressed in a
| novel way. There's a lot of unsolved problems in the new media
| morass and it would be great if a couple of new white hat firms
| emerged in this space to cut through the noise and the
| bullshit.
|
| But identifying what's wrong and even getting an MVP together
| is one of the easier problems.
|
| The burning question is how do you monetize your efforts
| without giving into the ad cartel? Will people pay a premium
| for a link tree? Unless this is more of a civic minded
| volunteer type thing?
|
| Either way, best of luck. There's a sack of coins _somewhere_
| in here.
| gpm wrote:
| Monetization is definitely a hard problem. If I have any
| advantage it's that my costs should be a lot lower, since I'm
| happy pointing people at pre-existing articles instead of
| writing my own. Unfortunately I don't think I have any great
| insights that the news industry hasn't already had on it.
|
| In the end, I suspect I will be using advertising, even
| though I do find that industry pretty distasteful. Low costs
| mean that if I do go down this route I should be able to keep
| it pretty unobtrusive and minimal, which gives up short term
| income but is likely a good long term tradeoff.
|
| I don't think it makes sense to put the core product behind a
| subscription wall. Apart from the issue of "would people pay
| for it", it's the sort of thing that benefits from network
| effects. I'd be shooting myself in the foot if I tried.
| Conceivably the tools I'm making to help gather the
| information could make a useful product for professional
| researchers of various kinds (hedgefunds, paralegals, etc) -
| but that would be more of an offshoot and not something I
| could really pursue before gaining traction.
|
| Another idea I've had (and again, this is largely ripping off
| existing monetization schemes), is that it might make sense
| to have a section of the website dedicated sagas about
| "products" (e.g. "IPhone 17"), linking to things like reviews
| and spec sheets, with affiliate links to amazon. Conceivably
| you could attract the /r/buyitforlife crowd to something like
| this, and make it a force for good in the world.
|
| Just asking for donations seems to work to some extent to
| (see The Guardian, and wikipedia) - though given how hard
| they seem to need to push for them I'm not sure that's a
| route I really want to go down.
|
| ---
|
| Like you say, there's a sack of coins somewhere in here. I'm
| willing to believe that if I make a useful product that
| people like, I'll figure out how to pick up at least a few of
| them.
| RONROC wrote:
| > Another idea I've had (and again, this is largely ripping
| off existing monetization schemes), is that it might make
| sense to have a section of the website dedicated sagas
| about "products" (e.g. "IPhone 17"), linking to things like
| reviews and spec sheets, with affiliate links to amazon.
|
| I don't know much but as a user i'm hard to deceive, and
| this seems like the most pragmatic way to make a real,
| efficient compromise without sacrificing some of the purer
| intentions of your project.
|
| Good luck man, I'm rooting for you.
| stevesearer wrote:
| Circa News from 2012 (now closed) had some similarities to what
| you are describing.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circa_News
|
| Basically they would distill an article down to facts with
| links to the original source of the facts. Users could
| subscribe to a story and it would update you when a new
| substantive fact was added to the story.
| deadso wrote:
| I found Circa to be an amazing way to consume news. News was
| written in the most boring way possible, and it would have
| bullet points for news stories along with sources for each
| bullet point. As much as I like reading full articles to get
| all the nuance, there's just too much information to consume.
| Circa seemed to be the sweet spot between brevity and
| information density that I need.
|
| I've been hoping for something like Circa to pop back into
| existence, but unfortunately I can see why it's not a
| profitable venture.
| Vivtek wrote:
| I've always wanted to see (or do) that - just something that
| you can check in on a year later and say, whatever happened to
| X from last year?
| indogooner wrote:
| This sounds very useful. The quality of sagas would matter a
| lot. This is from my personal experience of trying to build a
| news site in my past life which cuts the clutter and focuses on
| facts. The problem I faced was in how do I decide which link to
| choose without biases. This turned off a lot of people who did
| not conform to that view. Even on clear topics. For instance
| most people agree racism is bad but there would be diverse
| opinion on where to draw the line and what actions constitute
| racism.
|
| However there are quite a few topics where you could be
| objective - sports scores, election results, new releases etc.
|
| Good luck. Hope to see it on Show HN one day.
| evandwight wrote:
| How do you decide what qualifies?
|
| I'm trying to build something like that. Take hacker news and let
| the community curate it into a weekly newsletter of just the
| important posts.
|
| It's a work in progress and I'm a little starved for feedback.
|
| https://efficientdemocracy.com
| cabirum wrote:
| How much effort does it take to maintain? Are topic discovery and
| story updates automated?
|
| It looks it could take a whole team to manually update every
| notable development in a timely manner.
| arasx wrote:
| I've briefly worked on an idea that was "pandora for news" when
| pandora was the hot music app. The app would learn from your
| votes and cater news/aggregations based on your preferences every
| day to your news dashboard. I was in love with the idea but never
| pursued it. Is there something like this now?
| BrazzVuvuzela wrote:
| That sounds like it would be a radicalization engine for at
| least some portion of the population. I strongly encourage you
| to not pursue this idea.
| arasx wrote:
| call this a romanticized view, but for every tool mankind has
| created - there are ways to utilize it in good VS bad
| outcomes. I didn't really think of it as; the learning would
| concentrate around opposing views. Instead of "liberal views
| on middle east" vs "conservative views on middle east" it
| would be about "middle east politics" whether you are
| interested in the topic or not in general - if that makes
| sense.
|
| I would use a tool like this. That being said, that is not
| always a good indicator for a broad adoption interest.
| BrazzVuvuzela wrote:
| > _for every tool mankind has created - there are ways to
| utilize it in good VS bad outcomes_
|
| Counter point: Slot machines exist. (I suppose you might
| find some few instances of them being used to raise money
| for charity or something, but I don't think that redeems
| the technology.)
|
| Recommendation engines are generally benign when the input
| content is benign. Pandora itself doesn't seem to cause
| trouble. Though even with benign content, content
| recommendation can encourage unhealthy behavior, such the
| content recommendation engine of netflix/etc encouraging
| binge consumption and couch potatoism.
|
| But what does it mean for content to be benign and how is
| that determination made? When you have relatively little
| content that changes relatively infrequently, like netflix,
| you can have trusted humans perform the selection. That
| bakes the biases of those humans into the system, which is
| not inherently a problem (it's not as though any newspaper
| or book was ever any different in this regard.) But with
| things like youtube or the hypothetical Pandora for News,
| the the depth and breadth of content is too large for
| trusted human curation. I think we've actually already seen
| some examples of this manifest on Facebook, where the
| recommendation engine sends people down radicalizing holes
| of local news particularly.
|
| There has been a lot of talk recently about the
| identification and suppression of disinformation and
| misinformation. D&M is problematic and tasking independent
| fact checkers to fight it may have some merit, but I think
| there is much more to consider. For starters, the local
| fact-checkers, who understand the language and cultural
| context of the material they are evaluating, are imposing
| their own potentially harmful biases onto the system.
| Secondly, and more importantly, some propaganda is neither
| misinformation nor disinformation. An example: racists love
| to pass around links to factually correct local news
| articles about crime. They will inundate their targets with
| news stories that support their narrative. Each of those
| stories, evaluated independently, might be factual and come
| from a reputable news organization. But the sum of those
| stories may mislead people by not presenting mitigating
| considerations, social or historical context, etc. If you
| create a system that recommends people the intersection of
| 'local news' and 'crime', you've automated the job of the
| racist propagandists. But if your content recommendation
| engine doesn't recommend such intersections, by lumping all
| local news into a single category, then it has little
| utility over simply visiting the websites of local news
| organizations. And if your system forbids local news
| entirely because the breadth of local news across the world
| is too much to moderate, then your system omits the news
| that directly impacts the lives of news readers the most.
|
| I don't see any way around the above, but what makes a
| recommendation engine any worse than the local newspaper
| itself? Simply this: a newspaper is the same for everybody
| who reads it, when somebody is being sent down some bizarre
| radical rabbit-hole, those around them can read the
| newspaper and see what sort of thing their friend is
| reading. But recommendation engines provide personalized
| experiences. People can be radicalized without others in
| their community seeing what is happening, denying that
| community the opportunity to effectively respond and
| intervene. People withdraw into their own personal
| realities, losing touch with those around them. The further
| apart people grow, the harder reconciliation becomes.
| arksingrad wrote:
| The archive is a few years out of date:
| https://legiblenews.com/archive/
| lorenzfx wrote:
| I like the economist, for keeping up with the latest news
| especially the brief updates on the first 2-4 pages.
| phgn wrote:
| What global news would you consider relevant? Why not look them
| up when you're wondering about that thing?
|
| IMHO we can do without almost all news coverage, except where it
| touches our work or social circle. Important bits like election
| dates, new regulations, significant opportunities etc seem to get
| to us in any case trough random conversations.
| tootie wrote:
| https://theworld.org/
|
| This one is pretty on the nose. It's from PRX/PRI. They have web
| and audio.
|
| But "relevant" is not easily measured. It's obviously pretty
| personal.
| webscout wrote:
| https://biztoc.com and https://upstract.com are the exact
| opposite but also feature Wikipedia Current events (among many
| others).
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| Is it normal for an Ask HN to be a link? It's got a weird ad
| smell.
| tbihl wrote:
| No, I don't think so. I've answered elsewhere in this thread:
| when making the submission, I thought my comment would stay
| with the initial post, and yes, I wanted the bump for including
| a link in the submission. The linked page is a decent page, and
| a halfway-there example of what I'm looking for.
| ShamelessC wrote:
| > and yes, I wanted the bump for including a link in the
| submission.
|
| Wait so are you the originator of the link you posted or not?
| berkut wrote:
| Obviously not OP, but I don't think so: they give examples
| where they'd like improvements.
|
| Seems to have just been an example of the best thing
| they've found so far...
| tbihl wrote:
| No, it's a skin of Wikipedia news (TIL) that has no
| connection to me. When you make a HN submission, there's
| some placement penalty applied to your submission if it
| doesn't have a link, IIRC. That's what I was referring to.
| wheels wrote:
| Here's one that I personally find really interesting: Spiegel is
| one of the major German news magazines, and it has a small
| international section, where it takes the most important
| important, almost always long-form articles per day and
| translates them into English. As a result, it's both better than
| the German language Spiegel (which contains the usual fluff), and
| better than most English language publications (in curation, not
| sum of good content). It's EU focused, but maybe worth a gander:
|
| https://www.spiegel.de/international/
| gladinovax wrote:
| The Norwegian government announces that alcohol sales at bars and
| restaurants will be banned and stricter rules will be implemented
| at schools due to the spread of the Omicron variant. The
| government also announces that the COVID-19 vaccine booster dose
| interval has been reduced to 4.5 months and that the military
| will assist with the booster dose campaign.
|
| Scary.
| jcgoette wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23542718
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