by lsanger on 11/22/14, 8:44 PM with 100 comments
by lsanger on 11/22/14, 8:46 PM
by sparkzilla on 11/22/14, 9:04 PM
Larry's attempt to break down the news into bits is an interesting experiment (and I wish him the best of luck as he goes forward). I'm not sure he will be able to attract the user base he needs to make it work though. We pay our writers, and are moving to implementing a revenue-share model to reward our writers. I'm not sure if the "work-for-free-while-the-owners-get-rich model works any more.
[1]http://newslines.org [2]http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedia-is-not-a-newspaper/ [3]http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-13-deadly-sins/
by fennecfoxen on 11/22/14, 9:44 PM
by smoe on 11/22/14, 10:44 PM
E.G. not living in the states, half of the "top news" section is pretty irrelevant to me and the relevancy of the others seems to be based on the personal interests of the tech sawy contributors. I'm sure this gets better once more people are using it. But i guess having some noise is unavoidable.
The nice thing about this crowd approach might or might not be, that only provable facts are quoted and fewer false accusations are made. Thats mostly the reason why I stopped following news after the Utøya massacre in 2011 and later quitted my job at a news site.
Is there already an API one can fiddle around with? I think there is a huge potential in being able to use that data and hopefully feed stuff back. In my opinion, the problem with journalism today is not journalism itself but the distribution of content and the lack of choice how to consume it.
[0] http://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rol...
by hackuser on 11/23/14, 12:58 AM
A story, possibly apocryphal, about Richard Feynman: He gave a strong negative review to a textbook that the other reviewers endorsed. When confronted he said he might not be the smartest person in the world, but was he more intelligent than the average of a hundred people? Certainly!
Or from a Car Talk brain teaser: Do two people who don't know what they're talking about know more or less than one persion who doesn't know what they're talking about?
What about 100 or 1,000 people? I'm pretty sure they know less, as they create in their echo chamber greater certainty and additional untruths.
(I am overstating the case for effect; there is value in the aggregate factual knowledge of crowds, and they are not always ignorant.)
by leoh on 11/22/14, 10:11 PM
by hackuser on 11/23/14, 12:46 AM
How will you prevent users from politicizing your content? For example, will you exclude more politicized sources such as Fox and the Huffington Post? Separate editorial sources from straight journalism? What about government-controlled media such as Russia Today (RT)?
It seems like the content of politicized stories could be mostly politicized 'bitts' (where often both sides are deceptive and none of the information is valid), and it could merely represent the beliefs of whichever side has more dedicated contributors.
by frankydp on 11/23/14, 3:25 AM
With the voting on GN being time and search traffic? I am not sure how the determination on GN ordering works, but the idea of human curated news seems an even more sensation driven principle than the current network news industry.
Even HN falls victim to sensationalism on a regular basis, and I presume most of HN's users are somewhat invested in the quality.
I am not meaning to detract from the effort, but the outcome for such a scenario seems pretty repeatable. Especially with the history of non-niche vote driven news outlets/sites, and their predilection to not be viewed as quality, definitive, or substantive.
by skadamat on 11/22/14, 10:01 PM
by Animats on 11/22/14, 10:25 PM
Machines should think. People should work.
by billaronson on 11/22/14, 10:16 PM
by billaronson on 11/22/14, 10:21 PM
by nanxi on 11/22/14, 10:16 PM
by denchik37 on 11/23/14, 3:24 AM
by mojaam on 11/22/14, 8:54 PM
by lettercarrier on 11/22/14, 10:20 PM
This has as big of a chance to improve humanity as wikipedia, I believe. The elimination of news curators will reduce other people thinking for them.
by vivooshka on 11/22/14, 10:20 PM
by krick on 11/22/14, 11:51 PM
I'm pretty sure it isn't. People who claim the opposite seem to miss something important. Well, of course it depends on how to define "wikipedia for news", but there are several reasons why it is empty talking.
First off, wikipedia is all about data. It's really cool that it provides easy to use service as well, and that's the reason why it is somewhat more successful than OSM, but nevertheless, Wikipedia is the data. Newspapers, TV, now all these news portals are services. There is important difference between data and service.
Data is gathered and shared amongst us as people working for some great good, which is useful for us personally as well. I might event not like you, disagree with all your opinions, but as long as you can provide to that great work of ours some knowledge that I cannot provide (even if I'm not particularly interested in it) I welcome you. All that matters to me is that you are not lying here. And, as you can see, even in such (presumably) politically-neutral environment there is much disagreement and silly behavior, people tend to get personal, there're edit wars, forked projects like encyclopedia dramatica, because there obviously appears to be some content which isn't interesting for one community, but interesting for another. I don't know much about content of sites like knowyourmeme and such, but russian clone of lurkmore is actually a funny example, as many of articles there are about some real, important topic, about which article on Wikipedia also exists, but are composed in a much more harsh manner, without worrying about political neutrality, and often delivering some curious facts, so if you are interested in the subject you would probably read article both there and on wikipedia.
Service is something to be delivered. It must be on time, as "cold news" aren't even news anymore. It's about you providing me information I'm interested in even before I know I'm interested in it, so you should guess it (no matter if it's having good intuition or using machine learning). It's about it being provided in right amount, so I wouldn't stop reading before I get to the most interesting part (and never buy a newspaper from you anymore). It should be reasonably entertaining, so I would want to come back for more. That being said, service is kinda hard. And sadly I assume you don't want to work your sweat off just to please me, for free it is. So our little community-driven platform should be as useful for me, as it is for you. There are several easily deductible reasons why it is a problem, so I'll skip discussing them and get to the first conclusion: something that is about opinions and is equally useful and interesting for all participants isn't news service, it is social network. So if you think you are building news service I guess you don't understand what you are building, because actually you are trying to build one more social network. Lack of understanding what you are making is a problem by itself.
Second is empirical confirmation of the first, and is pointed out in other comments: we have plenty of services like that and services which are social networks in the first place (reddit, HN, even twitter for that matter) are more successful news platforms that specialized news platforms. And I don't even see any claims of how different form them it would be.
Third problem is as much as I don't like journalists, there are reasons for them to exist. They go to dangerous places and make photos, they use all kinds of shady tricks to find ugly and quite interesting story under plain-looking surface, they know who to ask, they know how to ask. They know what to tell to their consumers, they know how to tell. If you are building your own virtual newsroom without journalists you either need to use resources provided by real ones working for other agencies, which makes your own platform some aggregator like facebook or google adds, or, yeah, reddit, HN, Twitter, everything else. Or you just won't have anything (interesting) to tell, really.
by frozenport on 11/22/14, 10:27 PM
by billconan on 11/22/14, 10:08 PM