Hacker News Reader

Comment by inetknght | Hacker News Reader

I used Google News for a long time. I have since blackholed it on all of my machines. By tailoring the news articles presented to be based on the interests that Google data mined from my Google profile, it became an echo chamber even worse than Facebook.

It became a very bad source of news: all of the articles were self-reinforcing each other with very very little actual diversity of sources.

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I disagree with your sentiment about Google News. I think it does a great job of aggregating all the sources to a given headline. It even goes as far as labeling the sources as "Opinion pieces", "Highly Cited", or even "From ___" opposing entity sources (eg. From Saudi Arabia sources).

There is no easy answer to to display ONLY unbiased sources, because that would require an unbiased source to pull from. Which I don't believe exists. With Google News, responsibility falls on the reader to use the sources in front of them to formulate an educated opinion and gain an understanding of the story. If a reader chooses to only view either right-wing or leftist sources via Google News, then that's beyond Google's control.

We seem to be expecting technology to allow us to cast media literacy to the wind, but that's not going to happen. I don't happen to be a google news user, but it strikes me as providing the opportunity for the user to either remain in an echo chamber (for any given story, you can read the article from your outlet of choice, for example), or to diversify what you consume. Technology is one tool that people use to spread disinformation, propaganda, and bias, but it's just a tool. Similarly, technology is one way to fight it, but it's just one way—I think we could all use a reminder on how to be a savvy consumer of news media. Most people don't seem to appreciate the difference between an outlet covering a story versus breaking it, or how sourcing and citing work, the difference between opinion articles, analysis and reportage, and so on.

Well, offloading responsibility gets you nowhere. It doesn't solve the problem, it simply ignores it. What value is there in aggregation if there is no standard of quality?

I only used Google News occasionally, but these days I treat it as anathema. At some point I heard about an event I wanted to look up, tried Google News in hopes of getting the most current sources, and couldn't find it.

Whatever decisions were being made, it was preferring old articles on barely-related technology topics to something high-profile on every major news site. I don't know if it was my profile or simply a crappy algorithm, but having a major event 'vanish' like that made me permanently swear off the site. I didn't get the experience of a bubble, but I certainly got the sense that the content was non-representative, and curated for goals other than keeping me informed.

I purposely blocked all news of a certain sort, and they still get pushed to the top of my feed. I'm convinced that Google is using News to push its agenda, as evidenced by both my experience and Eric Schmidt's comments [1]

1. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/pa39vv/eric-schmi...

The best thing about Google News (the old Google news) was that it was like being able to search microfiche of all the old-school news publications (but digitally): articles written by journalists for publications that happened to also be digitized. You could scroll back and back to as many results as the engine could find on any given topic. As a research tool, it was unparalleled in its ability to help journalists link facts to unbiased sources and to multiple sources.

When they redid the design (yes, I know exactly what you are talking about) it was like ... murdering democracy: limiting results.

I had to stop using it all together.

Sure you can go search google.com, but items that would show up on news ( == important things) are somehow lost from google, and it's just not the same.

Sad day when we lost the old news.google.com. If what they're saying here is true, the first thing to do is to bring back the old news search. That will help journalists more than anything.

I know there are many people disagreeing with you, but I found the same as you. The news I was seeing was so hyper targeted that I was missing major events just because they were unrelated to the echo chamber that had been created around my past reads.

The article is NOT about Google News, it’s about the Google News _Initiative_.

If Google didn't want the two connected in peoples' minds then Google should not have named the two so similar.

Indeed, I cannot fathom an initiative which would not tie directly into Google News, as yet another data point to profile you (the product).

I had a similar problem. After I stopped using gmail & google search (for privacy reasons) and started using Duck Duck Go, it almost seemed random in what news it was trying to feed me because it didn't have enough data. I messed with the little sliders, banned fake news sources like HuffPost/WashPost etc, but I couldn't get it to deliver a news feed I actually wanted to consume... so... I just gave up on it.

Finally went back to a combination of InnoReader.com (RSS from sites I know I want) and News360.com (more subject based, varying sources). No need for Google News anymore, particularly after all the news of their censorship and bias has become more and more public.

> banned fake news sources like HuffPost/WashPost etc

Is the Washington Post considered fake news by most? Do you have examples of why you think it's fake? I'm curious because I actually pay for WaPo. I occasionally pull up fox news to see another side, but while I do consider WaPo liberal leaning, it seemed at least less biased than some other sources I've seen, and I would rather know the biases I'm consuming.

WaPo isn't biased and it's definitely not "fake news".

It has been the newspaper of record for anybody who follows the federal government for a very long time.

Are you confusing WaPo with The Washington Times?

I do much the same. But I'm still missing local events, news, politics. I haven't figured out how to efficiently get those feeds.

I agree...and more and more the same articles are being presented to me for days on end, maybe because they are a "match" to my interests.

But in fact my interest is have an unbiased/multi-biased news feed so I can properly survey the news-scape. It is how I can get a sense of the world,upcoming trends.I can choose, and quickly, based on text, whether an article is of probable interest. I do not want a bubble, and I do not want an algorithm deciding what is interesting to me. It is inefficient and false.

And don't get me started on AMP

I disagree; I get a lot of stuff I disagree with on Google News.

Could not disagree more. I am generally pretty liberal but get news stories from Breitbart, Fox news, etc all the time in my feed.

I like to read all sides so love this aspect of Google news. Heck I get negative Google stories from Google. Can't ask for more neutral.

Is there some feedback feature or something you use to get a helpful range of stories?

My experience with Google News isn't so much bias or a bubble as uselessness. Source quality, comprehensiveness, and coverage depth seem totally irrelevant, like I'm just getting a feed of every news site a bunch of people clicked on recently. It's the same stuff as Facebook's trending bar, at about the same level of shallow and unfocused.

And occasionally, it seems like a major story is incompatible with my profile, or has a keyword collision with other topics, or something, and so disappears almost completely.

I tried Google News and Google Now with real eagerness, but my experience with both of them was just shockingly low quality.

You can weigh your news sources. I intentionally give a little more weight to sources I don’t always agree with but aren’t obviously biased. Things like fake news spreaders, conspiracy theorist, government propaganda machines, or fair topical sites that simply don’t interest me (mostly Celebrity News and Gossip) get black holed.

You can find those sliders in your settings. Also they ask you periodically on the desktop homepage.

Pro tip: if you hate the mobile or new UI as much as I do, set your user agent to iPhone and go to google.com/nwshp. For whatever reason that magical incantation gives you the classic home page (with the sliders I mentioned in easy access/obvious places). I’ll be really excited if someone knows how to just set that globally in settings. I haven’t found it.

>You can weigh your news sources.

Neat site that does it for you: https://www.allsides.com/

Thank you for this, hadn't run across a site as well presented as this.

This helps if you love/hate a few sources; not if you want a wide range of non-garbage sources; and especially not if you want the non-garbage stories from one source like CNN or WaPo or FoxNews that has some very good news and a lot of hot-button middlebrow-opinion-masquerading-as-news trash that bubbles to the top of the dungheap.

Thanks for this, I actually didn't know about that. Might be a product I'll like once I put a bit of effort into cleaning it up.

I'm worried I'll share kolpa's problem, where sources I use for certain like CNN are also full of absolute dreck I don't want to see. But with a bit of luck I can put together a "news of the day" feed, and I'll just go to those touchier sources directly when I expect a specific piece to be usable.

I do NOT weight any news sources. It is just what happens or the default. I like all sides personally. But know some do not. Probably most do not.

I am naturally a super curious person.

I have zero problem with the UI on all devices. A big part is I am also use to it as I read news a lot.

Reuters is good for that. Because they resell to other newspapers they're more fact oriented and less opinion.

No it just happens. But at times I get a dialog of "is this card valuable to you". Which pretty much for everything I answer yes.

But the default is a mixture. Plus I use Google services a lot and for a long time as I try to keep all my data at Google instead of spread around. So everything from DNS, to TV as we have YouTube TV. We have Google Homes, etc.

Wish we could use Fi but I have a huge family so not financially practical. That would keep my location data away from my wireless provider.

Can't tell you why get both sides but do. Love last week I had back to back articles

1) Kid suspended from school for not walking out during the gun walkout.

2) kid spanked in Arkansas spanked for walking out.

About perfect. I am more center left but like to hear all aspects. Does drive my wife crazy when she walks in the room and I am watching Fox News. Do then turn off and put on MSNBC.

This. The impression of vanilla Google News is that searching for an event will give you stories/opinions from publications of random type/quality/bias/nationality/age randomly grouped (and even more randomly regrouped when you click "view all") and so weakly classified it sometimes surfaces compilations of reader comments as "in depth" articles. It doesn't even seem to bother highlighting paywalls anymore.

I have used many feedback forms that Google provides. I am convinced that they completely ignore my feedback.

What about the South Asian Times, The Hindu, South China Morning Post, Russia Today, AL Jazeera, et Al?

They cover world news, in English, and yet I rarely find them on Google News, and I suspect it's location-based filtering that's to blame.

The remedy to information overload (spam) is better filters.

I demand the filter bubble that we were promised.

We live in an attention economy. My most valuable resource is my time.

The inclusion of trog media is precisely why I won't use Google News. I couldn't figure out how to exclude it.

What little benefit Google News, Twitter, Facebook provide is more than offset by the negative impact of their quest for our attention.

There's a lot more to 'news diversity' than the basic "left-wing" vs "right-wing" opposing views on hot-button controversies of the moment. The topic selection is as important as the bias selection.

I've had the same experience. For some reason Google thinks I want bi-daily reports on Trump's bathroom schedule, or what utensil he ate with. Which I can almost understand why I get that because so many people apparently want that, but that is literally ALL I get from them. And believe me, that is not figured out by skillful mining of my data.

Wow you really, REALLY like Google based on your comment history

I understand the temptation to interpret people's comments that way, but users are far too quick to jump to conclusions about astroturfing or PR, and cross into personal attack in the process. That damages the community at least as much as what you all are insinuating, if it's true—and it's usually not true. For example, I doubt that a shill would write about their Cobol programming experience.

I just wrote more about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16632589

This perpetuates the misconception that there is a such thing as objective newsworthiness. If I only want to read stories about endangered species and polka musicians, that's no less valid than someone who wants to read about school shootings and the Olympics.

The issue is that I don't want to only read about school shootings and Olympics - but because I spent 3 weeks following the latter closely and 2 days actively investigating the former now it dominates everything that I see and it isn't obvious that this is happening.

If I open a newspaper and skip through most of the pages to the celeb gossip one, at least it's a conscious choice. Out of sight out of mind and all that

You can just tell Google News you're not interested in those topics. Believe me, you won't miss them. I only read news about topics I've explicitly said I'm interested in.

At first I was afraid of missing out on "general interest" news until I realized: there isn't any such thing. General uncategorized news is just a collection of topics chosen by someone else. You don't need it.

I think all of google search results are increasingly becoming more and more "filter bubbly" too, I have to anonymize completely or I know I'm just going to get bullshit results.

This announcement is hilarious, their products harm journalism bigly. It's like McDonald's putting a nice little leaf drawing about the environment on their cups.

I use google to look up rules from a game pretty frequently. I find that for some pretty vague search terms it is giving the results I want, from the particular game I want, at the top of the search results. Aside from the significant privacy concerns, this is useful...until I try to search for something else...then my results get screwed.

I wonder whether you got downvoted for your choice of words. I'll try using bigly in a sentence when it can happen organically and see whether the same happens to me.

Out of similar concern, could you share your blackhole list?

Specifically for google news? It's a pretty short one-liner:

0.0.0.0 news.google.com

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