Hey Google, tell me something good | Hacker News Reader

Hey Google, tell me something good

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26 pointsnetcyrax21 comments

When I was a teenager, I made a website with a friend called "I'm really sad" and the idea was that if people searched that, our site would pop up and show a picture of a kitten or a puppy or other cute animal. The site was really successful, hit a high of 750k visits in one day. I later sold it because money is fun, but I've seen that sort of site/service/forum pop up all time time (such as r/eyebleach or r/wholesomememes).

There's definite good in giving people tiny, inconsequential bites of happiness, even if it's just a distraction.

One of my favourite current versions of those is the Anotherly email newsletter. http://www.anotherly.com/

(Their signup page could do with an example newsletter.)

Would you be willing to share how much that sold for back then?

I think $3500? At it's peak it was making around $200/m, so that is a bit more than the 12x monthly rate that websites used to go for. It was making a fair bit less when I sold, though, I just didnt have the time to keep it updated.

In hindsight, there are some websites I used to run that I really wish I could tell my younger self to keep running. I had a little video site (pre-youtube) that was doing well, a few forums (although those were an absolute pain to keep active), a link shortener (that got my server shut down over, as spammers found it useful), a music video site for myspace.

When I was 15, I hired a programmer on scriptlance to build me a php script to run a site I had sketched up. The project never really materialized, but the programmer I hired was none other than a (then 15~ year old) Guillermo Rauch, who later went on to author socket.io, mongoose, and found Zeit. I like to think I did my small part to help him on his path to being such a prolific programmer :]

Easiest sell ever! Congrats.

> “Tell me something good” isn’t meant to be a magic solution.

From a user aspect, I'd imagine the news that's curated to me would be arbitrary. A better phrase for Google to listen for is..."What a shitty day." Then Google could counter with "today may have rained shit for you without an umbrella, but these people are enjoying sunshine."

I'd laugh from the sarcasm, and who knows, it might drive up some sales for Google after I break my Google assistant and have to buy a new one.

Needless to say, I prefer laughter as my cure all over positive news that makes me look on the brighter things. On a positive note to my fellow HN readers....HAPPY FRIDAY!

I'm glad to hear that "good news" is getting some attention. A rule of thumb I was taught was "bad news spreads faster than good" - People expect good things and will make you aware of bad things.

That being said, I am a little concerned this is just a band-aid on a bigger issue. We have too much information/news coming at us. Selective filtering the news (or "personalizing" it to sound like cynical) is the same issues with why one half of the US political system claims the other is "fake news". Not to mention Huxley's idea we shut ourselves further off from the world by consuming more of it [1].

Maybe its the working late on a Friday making me cynical today, but its a fun feature. So, good on them!

[1] https://www.sanjuan.edu/cms/lib/CA01902727/Centricity/Domain...

Compelling though the cartoon is, I question the premise that people read the news because we evolved to do so as an extension of scuttlebutt about attacks, predators, and disease. Surely where there is communication, there are both intelligent minds and "news" (i.e. some kind of prioritization of information to be communicated). I don't know: this seems an overuse of evolutionary "just so" storytelling that far oversimplifies—and just isn't useful to explain—the nature of intelligence and information. Why not a cartoon explaining how people are intelligent and gain a sense of stimulation and control from information about the world around them, and yet this can result in a lot of negative news etc...? What does running from bears have to do with it?

> These days we’re consuming more news than ever

Who is 'we'? I feel like people now consume very few news, mostly about what they like.

My parents and grand-parents listened news at the radio, watched news at the TV, read news in several newspapers.

At breakfast, at lunch, at diner.

Every day.

Do you know a lot of 20-40 years old who consume as much news as our parents?

I think its more apt to say "more news is being generated than ever". Humans may be consuming the same amount of news are prior generations, but its been an accepted fact that we are producing more information than ever.

That's a nice spin on what is essentially another way of saying "filter bubble."

This only applies when you are specifically requesting good news. It's not really a filter bubble unless you exclusively access content by asking google for good news.

I suppose that this gives Google the opportunity to redefine what "good" means.

That’s quite cynical. What makes you think that they would attempt something so Orwellian?

... literally everything that's happened in the last 10 years?

Is this personalized?

And isn't this just like the Facebook feed, except you only get one post?

Why separate this from the regular news?

User selection is what makes modern news on the web helpful.

I'm also curious what what defines 'regular news'? What if it's from a finance-focused paper like the WSJ versus my local daily? To wit, why separate stock from weather from sports? Why not all news from all places at once?

The regular news is often negative, stressful.

Yeah but if they mixed in some good news sometimes... that would fix that.

Alexa, indoctrinate me!

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