Comment by rubicon33 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rubicon33 | Hacker News Reader

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If you're able to categorize news sources as conservative, or liberal, then couldn't you aggregate news by grouping the conservative and liberal articles about a specific topic together, and presenting them side by side?

For instance, lets say Trump creates an executive order demanding that a wall between Mexico and the US be built by 2018. Both the right, and the left, will write thousands upon thousands of articles about how this will be great for the country, and terrible for the country. The truth like most things, may lie somewhere in between the extremes. Your news aggregator would allow you to read articles about the wall, as written by both conservatives, and liberals.

Then, you'd at LEAST be reading the differing opinions. The problem is, I doubt many people would want a service like this. Like it or not, human beings seem to enjoy the comfort of their solidified beliefs. It's far easier to digest your right wing, or left wing news, rather than digesting BOTH. People don't really want to change.

>If you're able to categorize news sources as conservative, or liberal, then couldn't you aggregate news by grouping the conservative and liberal articles about a specific topic together, and presenting them side by side?

See, the thing is, people aggressively self-bubble so if you natively show them both sides, they will stop using your service.

There may be a minority of less-political and more-rational folks who want that, but I've discovered trying to get people to use polurls.com that people don't want side by side.

If you do side by side, you create cognitive dissonance when "their side" "appears" "wrong", and the easiest way to solve that cognitive dissonance is to close the tab and not return.

>Then, you'd at LEAST be reading the differing opinions. The problem is, I doubt many people would want a service like this. Like it or not, human beings seem to enjoy the comfort of their solidified beliefs. It's far easier to digest your right wing, or left wing news, rather than digesting BOTH. People don't really want to change.

Exactly, which is why I envision a system of silos where you can have your biased lunch and eat it too, but whose tools allow us to measure opinion and biases, and which can attempt to bring down some of the barriers between bubbles through a variety of surfacing techniques.

Give people what they want and the tools to classify THEIR bubble, and in the process, keep other bubbles and ideas just on their edges, visible in the periphery...

Combatting cognitive dissonance self-preservation is a problem worth solving though, ugh.

One solution can be to show the news that conform to one's bias, but have some sort of "score", measuring the sentiment of those of the opposite view, and the general public. There should also be the option to dig deeper on that if desired.

Says I'm liberal, I may get articles that criticize Trump's immigration plan, and the articles would show how well received the plan is to the right.

Again, that's what realclearpolitics.com appears to be doing... listing articles from both sides of the isle, twice daily.

I don't work for them, I've just found their published lists useful.

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