Hacker News Reader

Comment by zimablue | Hacker News Reader

In my opinion, the interesting decision at a news site (and determining the politics of a news site) is what gets printed/promoted. It's fundamentally different to an encyclopedia because an online encyclopedia can pretty much include everything, with a filter on notability. A news site that tried to include "everything that happened today" is useless, by definition news is a digest of facts over time where someone has applied the filter to what's important.

If you do this by community views/claps I think you get medium - a massive slant towards social justice, whatever Trump last tweeted and other divisive topics.

If you do it by some sort of committee arbitration like how Wikipedia resolves conflicts then that committee has all the power that matters, and there's less concrete logic to fall back on.

I've read a few of the links on this thing and I can't find how they propose to do it.

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I don't quite understand how this is supposed to work anyway. In order to obtain genuine news, you need journalists and correspondents in the field. While sometimes regular citizens can do this job, it seems unlikely that they can do the work in general. Even newspapers and journal do not employ enough journalists, they also need to buy news from freelancers and press agencies.

It seems to me what they are planning is a mere news aggregation site instead. While this may be commendable if it's done the right way, it is also true that too many people already fail to to differentiate between those who actually report and produce news and those who merely copy&paste it from elsewhere or write opinion pieces about news.

They have already hired journalists. The readers and the staff journalists are supposed to work together; it's not just the readers doing the work.

I also don't understand, but I know that Jimmy Wales knows a little more of wikis and collaboration than me. I'd probably say that an editable encyclopedia wouldn't work. Now I consider it one of humanities greatest feats.

Go for it, Jimmy!

Actually, if I'm remembering the details correctly, Wales also didn't think it would work. Wikipedia arose as an offshoot of Wales' Nupedia. I don't think Wikipedia was his idea, and I believe he was opposed to the idea of something that was freely editable.

Well based on personal experience, or should I state a certain politically active relative who I need to ping about it.

It will be an interesting experiment co opted quickly to drive a specific political message. As in, they already use a mailing list to control reddit's political subs so a site like this is just another avenue to explore. any site where commenters have the ability to move into moderation positions or more is instantly corruptible and will be.

that is just how it is, PACs and related have realized the value and therefor they are assigned minders or whatever term you want to use to direct the conversation/etc the direction desired

> A news site that tried to include "everything that happened today" is useless,

That pretty much describes newspapers on in Internet age, though. I can trivially access newspaper websites across the US and much of the world, and see everything that happened recently that passes the local newspaper's bar for notability, which for a small town paper is going to be lower than for national news (as it should be).

We've developed (or should I say Google News and other sites have developed) systems to take filter the firehose in some fashion, and if WikiTribune started off simply linking to other people's reports on everything that happened every day, they would quickly be forced to develop their own filtering system.

Given Wikipedia's charitable mission, I imagine the system will be open in some fashion. While Wikipedia's committee holds an undue amount of power compared to random IP addresses editing that want to edit Wikipedia, think about how much power is bestowed upon the members of the board of the six companies that own 90% of the news media.

Right now, it takes a non-profit and their staff dedicated wholly to an issue (eg http://www.gunviolencearchive.org ) to offer data which a reporter can draw from, if not they are forced to do it themselves. I hope to see WikiTribune expose data and metadata about news stories that can then be plotted on a timeline to make it easier for reporters to see connections between stories, and allow to share those with commentary.

They could add some filters and drilldowns available to the user. For example, you could get a feed of news with a certain name, tag, or regarding locations you care about.

imo Reddit does it right: Hot content, new content, popular content, controversial content.

I don't mean to bag on Reddit because I agree they do it very well (based on how frequently I personally use it), but I would still agree with folks who've pointed how it can be subverted. r/politics seems to be the poster child of these naysayers.

I would say Reddit is a great example of an open platform getting vandalized by the public.

no one goes to Reddit to read the linked articles, they go to Reddit to enter an echo chamber (like HN) or deliberately quarrel

On a tangent you prodded me towards an insight: as mentioned other places news might not be what we lack, but journalism. And for tech news, hn does a great (or ok) job of doing a "collective writeup" of many news items. True, the discussions can get side-tracked - and are often more speculation than analysis. But on any given "news like" story there tends to be enough background and insight to sum up to the content of a decent article on the given event/revelation.

No-one actually writes it up, so you might average 150-200% more text than a great article - on the other hand some bias will be balanced out.

I'm not sure machine learning is (will ever be?) a good fit to fill in the role of journalist. But I think hobbyist/specialists dedicating a bit of time to commenting paired with a handful of people writing up the emerging concensus could be at least as good as much current mainstream media. I think that's true whether the experts knows the ins and outs of circuit design or schoolboard and neighbourhoods in a corner of Afghanistan - and who's gotten monetary support to build schools or something.

> on any given "news like" story there tends to be enough background and insight to sum up to the content of a decent article on the given event/revelation.

Exactly. The investigation, the debate and the plurality of viewpoints are easier to find in a reddit comment thread than a newspaper.

I do.

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