Show HN: Not Depressing News | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Not Depressing News

notdepressing.com

209 pointsarmatav168 comments

The first thing I notice browsing the homepage is that these "not depressing news" are often feel-good stories that can be uplifting but also aren't very intellectually stimulating, e.g.:

>Thanks to ‘Super Mom’ Saving Her Husband’s Life, He Opens His Eyes in Time to See His Son’s Birth

That's super nice to hear but it barely qualifies as "news" as far as I'm concerned.

Meanwhile those that seem more interesting are not that uplifting to me, for instance:

>Donations Pour Into Northwest Iowa Library After Man Burns LGBTQ Books

So that means that somebody burned LGBTQ books in the first place? That's pretty messed up.

>A Christian woman who was sentenced to death in Pakistan for blasphemy has won her appeal and been acquitted in a landmark ruling.

Somebody was sentenced to death for blasphemy at some point in this day and age? That's not uplifting at all.

I guess I'm a glass half-empty kind of guy.

I do sympathize with the intent here, it's true that actual news can be very depressing. My personal "not depressing news" involves reading about sciences, in particular astronomy. Questioning the way our world functions, contemplating the scale of the universe (both in space and in time) is really soothing to me.

> contemplating the scale of the universe (both in space and in time) is really soothing to me.

I contemplate those things and regularly verge on existential crisis.

From a news curation perspective, I typically follow a couple of simple rules: timeliness, importance, and proximity.

For a site focused on 'good' and 'uplifting' I think I would follow your preferences and focus on new research and development (like cancer research, or cheaper drugs/prosthetics, etc.). Perhaps OP could shift focus, or add a section that have posts related to STEM subjects.

> I think I would follow your preferences and focus on new research and development (like cancer research, or cheaper drugs/prosthetics, etc.).

This very quickly devolves into pop-sci clickbait. Cancer gets solved roughly 3 times a week, along with Alzheimer's and every other scary sounding disease. And our battery capacity somehow goes up by an order of magnitude a few times a month. And so on.

Journalism is just broken in the internet age. Clickbait is more profitable than reality. Anger inducing clickbait is the most profitable of all.

I rather like EEVBlog's criticism of tech journalism.

It seems 'journalists' are actually just curators, looking for content that generates clicks. We're trying to feed the ad machine to make a little revenue.

What would a successful model look like? There are a few revenue models that are at least interesting:

Hackaday was purchased by SupplyFrame, doesn't run ads, has an internal store, and has decent articles (with sometimes rage-inducing flaws). The bias is obvious, they are owned by a parent company that now uses the platform to advertise on.

The Guardian is shifting towards an ad-less, pay what you want revenue model.

Patreon isn't really a model that an organization can use... Or can it?

All major players in the social media and news market tend to lean on ad-centered models. Do examples of successful social/media companies exist that don't depend on ad revenue?

Many of the “positive news” sites out there also have this property, that the good news is often about horrible situations and ends up being still pretty depressing.

Similarly if you go deep into cute animals websites, you’ll start getting more and more content about disfigured or abandoned animals.

I think people—and maybe especially depressed people who seek out this kind of content—are really more deeply interested in dark stuff than truly uplifting stuff.

Reddit's /r/upliftingnews suffers from the same problem.

"Woman held captive in basement entire life visits Yosemite."

I don't feel uplifted, and that's not news.

The real story is that the woman was held captive for her entire life - which is bad news!

I think a big part of the problem is an asymmetry of how good things and bad things tend to happen. A terrorist attack might take place in minutes; building a strong community takes years of small efforts, no one of which might be 'newsworthy.'

As a result, I find obituaries to be a great source of 'good news,' rounding up awesome work by an individual that perhaps played out over decades. It would be interesting to see some 'living obituaries' to capture some of this awesome work in a way which lets the perpetrators enjoy it a bit. (I guess major awards do this; but would be cool to see it on a weekly publication scale.)

It's true and I think an other problem is that "uplifting news" generically is kind of a lower common denominator: it's easy to come up with an actual newsworthy information that would be almost universally considered terrible but harder to find something that everybody will find uplifting.

Country X allows abortion? That's going to make people angry. Forbids abortion? Now the rest are angry. A new law that makes polluting more expensive? Surely that's uplifting... unless you have to drive your car for work and you end up losing money because of it. It rains a lot? That sucks. It doesn't rain enough? Now farmers are complaining about the crops.

Completely untainted positive news are hard to come by.

On the one hand, I will compliment this and say what a good idea is this is. The world is becoming, on average, a less violent, more prosperous place since the industrial revolution. Fewer people starve and there is much less armed conflict. People need to be reminded of this. But it can be a really dangerous game to live in an bubble and turn blinders on to reality. I hope everyone can take this "not depressing" news dose and also keep an eye on reality. Final thought: Being depressed by the news, any news, is a choice. Depression from the news is often from a feeling of powerlessness over the situation. But what you can control are your emotions and your decision to be depressed by the news. Channeling Epictetus here. He would just tell us to decide not to be depressed and focus on what you can control. Politics got you down? Vote. Get others to vote. Become involved. Local politics are important, etc. That is my thoughts, hopefully that seems balanced. That said, bookmarking this site and I will see how it evolves.

Reality is not simple to decipher in an environment of info overload.

Imagine walking into a huge library. Every book has descriptions of complex problems. Some books have solutions. Some books don't. But you can only read one book at a time. In that library you can focus on the book that matches your needs and skills. And the world doesn't seem too crazy.

Now imagine the same library, but with a thousand different people shouting at you to come look at the problem in some book they picked just up. What kind of reality are you going to experience in that library?

I would argue experiencing that reality is also a choice. Unless I am doing research or actively in search of information, I read one of a very few web sites. HN, NY Times, WaPo, and Electoral Vote. I don't feel under-informed. I deleted Facebook and only use things like Twitter/LinkedIn/Instagram to keep in touch with an extremely small circle of people, mostly I just email and call folks. That is just how it is. I don't think our brains are meant to drink from the firehouse that is the Internet. It is addicting and counter to what most on HN want in terms of deep work and productivity.

I think the intent is solid.

But using curation by someone else in an attempt to solve the problem of overwhelming malaise in one's news feed just won't "scale" (sorry for using that valley buzzword). How much can any entity curate on a day-to-day basis? How does one decide what's actually worthy? Didn't we see this before in the early web when Yahoo thought it could categorize everything? Can we trust _anybody_ (other than ourselves) to white-list what we see?

As a twitter user, I've found using the "muted words" feature to be somewhat helpful, my list is _very_ long and includes not only the people and issues I despise (president cheeto-satan, etc), but also their opposition which I generally agree with. Yeah, it's "leaky", every once in a while I get mug shot of somebody I'd rather not see, but it does mitigate the never ending stream of despair.

In general, I think individuals would do better to limit their news feeds by themselves, either through the discipline of sticking to trusted sources, or by more draconian measures of filters. Cable news, of course, is a no-go dumpster-fire.

Do things that don't scale.

Back before the rise of our newer technology, curation seemed to work pretty well. Most folks in the US had access to three or four TV channels, one or two local papers, and a handful of national newspapers and general interest magazines.

I'm not sure that particular genie is going back in the bottle, though.

Prosperous for whom? There are people who are struggling to make ends meet, have their houses dispossessed, can't get steady jobs or afford housing, in student debt they can't pay, facing racism and violence from the state now and segregation in the recent past so its a matter of individual experiences and perspectives.

There are entire countries in the middle east that have been destroyed with millions dead, millions of refugees, families and infrastructure destroyed and set back a hundred years without consequences. And more are threatened as we embrace this new 'violence free' world.

On one side there are sweeping claims without evidence of the world getting 'better'. These kind of wide assertions would need a lot more data points and discussion by historians, economists and sociologists to get to some kind of 'truth' that is not propaganda.

Fortunately there are detailed works by academics like Piketty, Stiglitz and others with real data on stagnant wages and inequality over 40 years, on how gains are going to a small minority worldwide for those who are interested. Some may want to feel better because the current system favours them and that's perfectly valid. But sweeping claims about improvements sound as credible as the trillion dollar sv elite wanting to solve the worlds problems while failing to address the homelessness in their backyard.

I guess you missed the part about on average?

For those that are interested in positive/uplifting news, I've been following a few newsletters that have similar content:

1) https://www.goodgoodgood.co/goodnewsletter/ (From a recently funded Kickstarter) 2) https://www.theguardian.com/info/2018/feb/12/about-the-upsid... (From the popular newspaper The Guardian) 3) https://tinyletter.com/inbetternews (More cute news/ GIFS of animals) 4) https://www.positive.news/ (UK based positive news)

https://futurecrun.ch/ Science, technology and intelligent optimism. All previous issues: https://us8.campaign-archive.com/home/?u=6321feeb3ffd42b0e44...

- https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/

- https://www.facebook.com/thehiddengood/

- https://thehappynewspaper.com/

https://twitter.com/HumanProgress

So, you're just taking the list from https://www.reddit.com/r/UpliftingNews/ ?

You should at least name/link them somewhere...

Upliftingnews overpowers any other subreddit when you mix them together, so it makes sense to do just them for the MVP - I'd like to scrape from as many news sources as possible in the future, but I've got work to do for that.

I posted a few more positive news sources in the thread if you're interested in adding them to your data ingest.

Oh yeah! I'll take a look at those!

It looks like it's just UpliftingNews but uglier than reddit (which is kind of impressive). I think for it to be an MVP it has to be more than just scraping some community's content. Otherwise this is just an RSS view of one subreddit - I'd rather get the subreddit and all the comments and content surrounding it. No real added benefit from this site.

I agree, not sure what all the fuss is about. The internet is filled with sites of nothing but links to other sites...

The big revolution was web 2.0, where interactivity was enabled and encouraged. That's the reason I go to specific sites, the content is what you make yourself these days, not what gets posted to you...

Putting "not" to negate a negative isn't always a great idea. "Not Depressing" still has the word depressing, versus "uplifting",pleasant or even hopeful these words will always be much better.

Very obviously the domain availability is a big problem with that.

It's a perfectly valid rhetorical device. It's called "litotes", and it often conveys a distinct meaning compared to "collapsing" the negatives into a single positive. It's been used liberally by figures such as Homer, Jonathan Swift, Robert Frost, Fredrick Douglass and Shakespeare (as well as pretty much every great writer throughout history).

For instance, saying "it's not without issues" usually means something different from "it has issues". In the former case, you probably intending a meaning something similar to "it's has issues, but none of them are serious", while the latter conveys just what it says. The exact thing your trying to communicate obviously varies with context, but it is generally distinct from the "collapsed case"

In this particular case, "Not depressing news" puts an emphasis on the fact that most news is depressing, and that this site is different. "Uplifting news" does not communicate that as effectively.

Now, it's true that George Orwell complained about a similar construction in Politics and the English Language, but that book is full of terrible ideas about language, and you're doing yourself a disservice if you take any of his advice too seriously.

> For instance, saying "it's not without issues" usually means something different from "it has issues".

Interesting that you go on to say that "it's not without issues" is milder than "it has issues". To me it's the opposite, like a short form of "Is it without issues? No way!" I guess it depends on context and, particularly, how much sarcasm can be detected in the tone of voice (if said out loud).

> In this particular case, "Not depressing news" puts an emphasis on the fact that most news is depressing, and that this site is different. "Uplifting news" does not communicate that as effectively.

In any case, I agree with this simple explanation.

Your username implies that you're from the UK. Isn't this a well-known cultural difference between British and... just about any other culture? I know we Dutch people get caught by that quite often.

(Funny enough, in the Groningen region the expression "kon minder" ("could be worse") is often used as high praise. Whatever it applies to is implied to be fantastic, almost perfect, in a "but don't get cocky about it" kind of way)

You're right. Actually, I remember a story [1] of a British army commander asking his American superior (on a UN mission) for help by saying "Things are a bit sticky, sir". Unfortunately this was taken to mean that everything was fine, so no reinforcements were sent.

I understand that the Dutch are very much at the other end of the spectrum - very direct and straightforward.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/apr/14/johnezard

Honestly, after living abroad for five years in total (with one year back in the Netherlands inbetween), that "direct and straightforward" part feels like it has been co-opted as an excuse to not bother with looking at things from the point of view of someone else and reaching out.

> Isn't this a well-known cultural difference between British and... just about any other culture?

At least in French, litotes are meant to amplify the negative.

The classical example being in Le Cid, "Go, I don't hate you" from Chimène to Rodrigue (who just killed her father), meaning "I love you".

Other example can be found, "Not OK" meaning totally unacceptable, "Not bad" meaning excellent, or "Not stupid" meaning very clever. Of course, all litotes can be interpreted literally, and you often need context or tone to convey the meaning

Yeah, the change of meaning is often very subtle, and people can sometimes disagree on the direction of the change.

Usually though, the device is used to express a kind of understatement. Compare these statements:

He's not bad looking

He's good looking

Which one would you say is stronger? I think most people would say that the affirmative "He's good looking" is stronger than the first version. Another example:

It's not without flaws

It's flawed

If you say "not without flaws", you're usually saying something like "it's good despite its flaws", so that version understates the case compared to the other one.

Again, though: my point was mostly that the meanings are distinct and that language is not mathematics. You can't just replace two minus signs with a positive one and expect the to get the same thing on the other side. Nor should you follow any simple "rule" like that blindly.

"Which one would you say is stronger?"

I would go for "He's not bad looking" being stronger - but then again I'm from the UK :-)

I don't think that authors you mentioned would have bothered using this as a creative flourish if it was just meant to be interpreted in an extremely literal way. The whole fact that they bothered means that there's some alternative meaning, whether the slightly sarcastic one I understand or something else.

"It's not without issues" to me means I might object to parts of it but overall I'm positive, or I feel the issues can be accommodated, tolerated, or corrected.

"It has issues" is to me a stronger, more general objection to the whole thing.

You're not wrong, but I think the OP was rather looking at the psychology of the words, rather than their implication.

Why do you care about the name? You'd go to that kind of place for the content not because of the title anyway.

because first impressions count

Lol exactly what I was thinking

ramigb probably spends a not-insignificant amount of time trying to determine what functions and variables do based on what others have named them. This leads to thinking that names are important.

It’s kind of annoying that this is the top comment. “Not + [Negative Term]” has a distinctly different logical meaning than “[Positve Term]”. It means “everything except [Negative Term], while [Positive Term] means [Only Positive Term] unless otherwise qualified.

The default hypothesis should be that OP deliberately intended the more inclusive “Not + [Negative]”, not that that this was an accidental misnomer.

Natural language is not well described at all with analogies to first order logic. Centuries of thought on the philosophy of language have well established this.

Nobody shouldn't not undisable the non-undepressing news inhibition disengagement mechanism neither.

There are many interesting questions around this.

Is the purpose of news to manipulate your mood?

If that is the case it competes with video games, sports, fiction, etc.

Is the purpose of news to inform?

In that case "current events" competes with an understanding of past events.

I was listening to an evangelical preacher the other day about the book "Romans" written by my namesake and how the apostles are getting their asses kicked in roman jails and preaching with anger against immorality (beyond the pale today in the west) such as polygamy and slavery.

Then I was reading about how the Polish and Japanese both learned how to write at the same time in the same way. I felt the dread hanging over Arlington National Memorial and was shocked to discover who had owned the land it was on.

This 1971 book

https://www.amazon.com/Information-Machines-Ben-H-Bagdikian/...

predicted that we would have "news on the web" in the 1980s and has a much deeper analysis of that entails than most books written since.

He sees a fundamental problem in "news" that the gatekeeper function has to be done efficiently and quickly. Of all the things that happened today, the "news" is one in a billion or so.

That selection is necessary to create a feeling of shared reality. (I saw CNN at 5:14 and my Uncle Nic saw it at 7:31 and we saw "the same thing")

That selection is also violence against reality itself.

Not to be a downer, but the current top story is "Thousands of Native voters in North Dakota getting free IDs". The reason that's necessary is not not depressing.

It's sort of like "Man who fell off click only broke both legs".

Nothing wrong with voter ID, nearly all developed countries do it.

The U.S. has a long history of voter suppression, of which using IDs to limit who can vote is one tactic. For some of us, that's depressing. This is off-topic though so I won't comment further.

In theory, sure. The problem comes in when a detectable amount of people don't have and can't easily get accepted IDs.

In theory, sure, sounds good. But the facts on the ground matter more than theory.

The first fact is that there is precious little voter fraud of the type that can be stopped by voter ID laws. Did you hear about the woman from Texas who was recently convicted and sentenced to prison for it? You know why it was in the news? Because it's that rare.

So whatever the costs of more stringent restrictions at the ballot box are, they have to be borne by some pretty slim benefits. And the costs are pretty severe. Thousands of the Native Americans in North Dakota don't have the kind of residential address required by the law, passed by Republicans shortly after a Democrat one her Senate race by 3,000 votes with strong Native American support.

And for many of the ones who do have a residential address, the address the state has on record for them is off by enough to theoretically trigger the provisions of the law, making it unlawful to cast their ballots. I.e., their actual address doesn't match what the government thinks it is, so either they illegally provide the matching address or legally provide the correct address and get their ballot rejected.

Some sort of voter registration obviously makes sense, but do you think this particular law is a good one? Further, do you think it was passed with good intentions?

Nearly all developed countries use a national ID of some sort to do it though. Plus elections are usually run nationally. We don't have a national ID in the US. And the elections are run locally. Which means local politicians get to meddle in both of those areas. It get ugly pretty quickly.

There is indeed ‘not’ depressing news on the page. In fact, there isn’t any news at all.

Is this a practical joke? Or is the website broken?

Try again - there are many uplifting articles listed.

In the latest Firefox, the console informs me

> The resource at “https://www.reddit.com/r/upliftingnews/new.json?sort=new?” was blocked because content blocking is enabled.

This is due to Firefox's built-in content blocking / tracking protection [1], not a plugin.

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-protection

Soo, it's just poaching content from reddit?

Got the website to load headlines after I disabled 'content blocking' in latest Firefox.

I really like this idea, and have long thought of doing something similar, the reason being that most/all existing services that I've come across so far don't do a good job at it. They can actually be even more depressing than normal news (to me).

One reason reason is that the "positive news" are often reported against something really depressing, don't point to sustainable solutions and so defeats the purpose. In essence I believe "positive news" must either turn a slightly blind eye to the vast number of problems facing humanity (without being essentially just pictures of cats), or mainly bring up such problems if a true solution has been found (not "eating more raisins may reduce cancers in mice").

If this problem could be solved (by heavy manual curation?) I believe a service like this could actually take off.

How do you handle new stories that some people find positive and others find negative?

Go for very general values (they exist), and have one or several specific target audiences.

I have been thinking about this too, and posed an idea some time ago, to the Humane Tech Community [0], named "Turning the Weapon Around" [1].

The gist is to use our existing social media channels, that generally - through their algorithms - reinforce negative sentiments and divisiveness (because that keeps us engaged best, as Max Stossel explains very well in his recent Medium article [2]) to create a network of people that do the opposite: Post, share, like and comment on positive news.

This would work best if it were supported by an app that faciliates this. Our community is thinking about such app, a decentralized one, which we'll use for our crowdsourced Humane Tech Awareness program.

[0] https://community.humanetech.com

[1] https://community.humanetech.com/t/idea-turning-the-weapon-a...

[2] https://medium.com/@maxstossel/how-everyone-lost-their-mind-...

Hey that's really cool! Thanks for the link to Humane Tech Community, looks promising and will definitely check it out. Good luck!

Hey HN,

I'm looking for some feedback on NDN, it's a little MVP that will eventually give you only the not-depressing news from all over the web - it's seeing quite a bit of retention, and I'd like to know what you think! I'd like to turn it into a product, but it's pretty hard to see where to go.

Just a tiny bit of typography on the links would go a long way to making the site look more professional.

I'd be happy to add that, if you can suggest what kind of typography I should use or take a look at

A basic start: bigger font size, drop the underscore (text-decoration: none), change the font color to black or dark gray. You can do a lighter color on hover to make it clear it's a link.

Not perfect, but I think it's better than what's live right now. You can browse for a nicer font, too. Plenty of free choices at Google Fonts.

End result would be something like this: https://i.imgur.com/c7YJCN9.png

Maybe align the text with the image as well, although vertical aligns are always a big pain to implement haha.

Flexbox makes vertical alignment a snap. It's even pretty well supported these days: https://caniuse.com/#search=flexbox

In this case, all you need to do is add "display: flex; align-items: center" to your a tags. After that I'd probably get rid of the margin-bottom on them too. Finally, to visually center everything vertically, remove the margin-top on the img inside the a.

A bonus of using display:flex is that it'll fix the wrapping problem where long links wrap underneath the image. With flex, the text will stay on the right, in its own "column".

You are a genius. I was super panicked and couldn't get the working memory going to actually fix the spacing.

Thanks!

A lot of your news is not just "not-depressing". It's actively uplifting. In fact, most of the stories on the front page are "feel good" stories.

It'd be cool/useful if you could provide news on the important issues of the day that's simply "not-depressing". I.e., factual and detached and doesn't elicit emotion, but not explicitly feed-good.

(e: forgot to say: nice work!)

Thanks! Yeah I'm thinking of adding a sentiment slider after I get a large amount of news sources going, as well as a "which sources I want to see" selection.

Do you have a main audience (i.e. age range, field of work) you're shooting for? What do you care about seeing in the news? How do you discern between truly good news and 'puff pieces'?

One thing I've actually liked is the approach of organizing news of the sad with the good. Deregulation nation ( https://deregulationnation.substack.com/welcome ) is an example where the newletters are organized by bad/better/good/great - it's focused around a core topic (environment/Trump) and written by hand.

I don't have a main audience that I'm shooting for, but I think this will attract younger folk - I care about seeing anything other than sensationalism. That's kind of cool, I'll take a look at their site!

Promote it on Twitter. There are periodically requests there for some kind of relief from negativity.

No clue how to monetize it though.

Like just post it on Twitter with a billion related hashtags?

Didn't know Twitter people needed relief from negativity, I should do more research.

There's a lot of politics on Twitter. Sometimes people get overwhelmed and then say stuff like "Send me all your puppy pic feeds."

I don't really know how to self promote on Twitter. You will need to figure that part out yourself.

Alright - thanks for the tip man!

The idea seems nice, but:

> You need to enable JavaScript to run this app.

Here you go: https://www.enable-javascript.com/

It doesn't display any news, just two empty round boxes, on my browser (Firefox), probably due to the privacy extensions I'm using.

Disabling uBlock Origin and noScript for the site doesn't change this situation.

Doesn't work on Firefox (updated) : "Warning: Invalid DOM property `class`. Did you mean `className`?" and some CORS errors.

Recently some people rescued a kangaroo from drowning and gave the marsupial some mouth to mouth resuscitation. I shared this story with animal loving members of the family and we were all moved by it, reassured that humanity was out there in this cruel world.

However, was it news?

This was news in the broader sense of the word but really it was just a human interest story (and maybe a kangaroo interest story).

If we look at the divers rescuing boys from a cave story that Elon Musk got so badly wrong then the same criteria can be applied. Yet their rescue certainly was news. But we didn't give as much scrutiny to the thousands of people rescued in Japan from floodwaters at or around the same time. My Japanese neighbours could have done with less of Elon Musk that week and more of Japan. For them the good news of the rescue in Thailand was at a cost of hearing good (and bad) news from Japan.

Invariably there is a political aspect to the news beyond human interest stories.

For instance, if Donald Trump choked on a pretzel (heaven forbid) and had to leave office due to the calamity then some people would be absolutely delighted, for them this would be 'good news'. Same goes with news regarding the economy. If house prices go up then this is good news to the rent-seeking class but it is not good news for those that are not on the housing ladder and have to pay more money to the rent-seeking class.

Even sport has the same problem, if Burkina Faso beat Brazil in the World Cup then a lot of people would be absolutely gutted, it would not be received as 'good news'.

Given that you are not in control of the content and are stuck with what you have got in that aspect (copying from Reddit) you might want to do what others in this comment section have suggested - remove the 'not' and the 'depressing' from the title. There is a double negative going on there. My suggestion is to go for something where you don't have to limit yourself to mere human interest stories, take a side but leave the politics aside. If you went with something like 'underdog news' then you would be able to take the side of 'Burkina Faso against Brazil' without a problem, plus you could do a nifty logo. You could also engage with your audience on this basis, get them to mod up/down stories based on whether there was some epic struggle going on with a clear underdog. Small child beating grand master at chess? Clearly epic for the underdog. You can sidestep the Trumps/Brexits of the world with this type of a spin and not decide what is and what isn't 'non depressing'.

Do you have to curate this, or is it dependent on other curated websites to generate the news? Some sort of ML-backed reading of each story to determine not-depressing vs. depressing? I could see aggregating different curated sites as a potential liability.

Was fun to read all the items on your page. Great work!

This MVP is dependent on Reddit, I'm going to start working on a scraper that runs a sentiment analysis on articles (or something) to provide the same effect from every news source available.

My wife has been running a somewhat-related twitter account for a few years:

https://twitter.com/happyanimalnews

I am, of course, a big fan :)

I just bookmarked your site in the hope that you will find the energy to continue this for a long time.

The interesting thing is that there is a big gap between our personal life and what we read in the news. While what we read in the news is often terrible, depressing stuff, our personal life is usually good, mostly manageable and not threatening at all. For most of us, life is worth living. And notdepressing.com caters to that reality, even gives the reader hope that everything will turn out well.

No, your website is not a replacement for the news sites we all are used too. But it might become a wonderful addition. Keep it going!

Thanks man, the only issue right now is that I really have no idea what to add other than more sources/news articles.

Regional filtering? So you can see everything that happened near you.

My high school runs a podcast that does a similar thing, we talk about positive news and interview people who've made a positive impact on the world (we've done Austen Allred and Turbovote).

https://anchor.fm/somethinggoodhappened

Love to have you on sometime! :)

I'd love to be on! Sounds awesome - email me at notdepressingnews@gmail.com

Doesn't work at all for me on FF63.

A quick look at the dev console - I think tracking protection blocks it from loading reddit which it wants for whatever reason.

Probably a 'proxy through the back-end' job.

edit: I just realised I have reddit's DNS blocked. Oops. FF still brings up tracking protection regardless I think.

All good man - I'll take a look ASAP

I'm having an issue on Firefox 63 as well. No content is loaded. Works fine in Chrome.

Something similar from David Byrne: https://www.reasonstobecheerful.world/

Reddit is blocked by most if not all major ISPs in Indonesia, which breaks the site without the use of a proxy.

Maybe scrape Reddit server-side? I’m not too sure if that would work but just a suggestion.

I really like the idea, though.

Maybe use a VPN? The issue is clearly with indonesian ISPs.

It's not the user's fault, they shouldn't need a VPN to read an uplifting news site... That's just depressing...

True

Agreed, the fault is with the ISPs. It seems that they are not actually providing internet service.

I will ASAP.

I'm now doing eldercare.

Are there any Happy Stuff TV channel(s) that I can program as defaults? Knitting, kittens, panda bears, food, travel, museum tours, antiques, etc.

An easy default channel for those people who use TV as company, background noise. (For examples: my mom, her boyfriend, my uncle.)

The default channels (Fox, CNN, local news, crime shows) are horrifying. Fear, outrage, gore, drama, political ads.

No wonder the boomers are acting insane.

Of course, I change the channel to some happy stuff, if I can find it. Which delights my mom and her boyfriend. But such programming is not 24/7. When the segment is over, cue channel surfing, and it's right back to horror show.

I don't have TV, so don't know how to Chromecast, Roku, Apple TV. (I've been reading up, but haven't experimented yet.)

Tangent: I just discovered my mom's been paying $250/mo for triple play. Outrageous. But given the givens, I'd happily pay $100/mo for curated commercial free Happy Stuff TV cable channel package.

Similar boat, have to look after my parents now and the difference between my father watching Fox News (well...any news these days) regularly and not is night and day. He's far more angry with it on, its just nonstop outrage and cynicism. I'd love to find something that would satisfy his desire to 'stay current' without the overreaction and FUD, but maybe he'd just go looking for it anyway.

No offence to the developer, but isn't this like propaganda? I mean you're not just choosing to only see the best in world, but you're letting someone else define what is the best (or not depressing). Just seems a little weird to me...

That's the case with any newspaper though, isn't it? We should always cross-check and verify, listen to multiple opinions and look at a variety of sources if possible.

The main purpose of newspapers used to be exactly an opposite. You choose the particular newspaper, by editorial board views closest to yours, and just get an information. You don't have to cross-check everything - that's what you pay for subscribing to newspaper. You outsource the job to the editors.

The part "by editorial board views closest to yours" says it all. All newspapers have views. They choose what is "good" or "bad" based on their views. That's why cross-checking is essential.

Just seems a little weird to me...

Isn't this how most curated sources of information, from newspapers to scientific journals, work?

True, I guess this source is a least transparent about what kind of content they are promoting

Less transparent comparing to MSNBC or FoxNews?

I imagine they meant to say "at least" transparent and just typo'd it. Otherwise the rest of their comment makes little sense.

Yep, it was a typo

This view assumes that news that cultivates conflict and dwells on catastrophe is the natural way of things. Every news source chooses what to cover, and most of them currently choose in a manner to maximize viewership.

It's important to know that bad things are happening in the world, but there's a big difference between hearing that a number of murders happened and reading an hour long story about each individual murder.

Whenever we stay with the in-laws and watch a lot of local news, I am always blown away both by how negative it is, and how uninformative it is.

I think we could replace a lot of news with news from 10 years ago and no one would ever know the difference because almost none of the news affects them personally, but they carry around anxiety with them constantly because they learned implicitly from the news that the world is a scary place. That seems at least as much like propaganda as this.

From time to time there tends to arise a demand for news that are not "bad" or depressing or paints the world in a somber palette. However, I'm often reminded of this quote by George Orwell:

“Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.”

Perhaps news are inherently skewed towards the negative side, and that's the way it should be.

I suppose I should point out that although the quote is often attributed to Orwell, there's no evidence that I know of the said it. A similar quote is also attributed to Harold Evans, during his time as Sunday Times editor.

Perhaps they are, but news also heavily sensationalizes and dramatizises in order to sell clicks.

Leaving out the good traits of a person to paint him as a monster, even though it might have been an honest mistake.

> Perhaps they are, but news also heavily sensationalizes and dramatizises in order to sell clicks.

I don't think that's true if you choose your news with even a modicum of care. Read the Economist, and you won't ever hear of starving children. Unless they become statistically relevant, which points to certain problems with the wish for "positive news".

In other quality outlets, you're more likely to read the human-interest stories of crime & suffering. But there's still a vast difference to the blatant exploitation of emotion by tabloid.

That's most pronounced in the decision what to cover, and how much space to devote to it: national newspapers do not splash gruesome sex crimes on A1. They do get mentioned when they rise above what happens every day, but receive treatment in proportion to their relevancy.

You can argue that some terrorist attack is not relevant to your life, because the chance of dying under such circumstances is still astronomically low. But by that standard, almost everything is irrelevant: once a story becomes directly relevant to you, you're also likely not care about the reports of it very much. Not just for the punny reason that you are dead, but also (if you're less directly involved) because you no longer need to be informed of the event.

That little contradiction proves the wisdom of the media's long-standing approach: they set a low bar, and let readers decide which articles to spend time with.

There's also an obvious analogy with schooling here: you're unlikely to ever need 90% of what you learn in school. But that's a rather terrible argument against today's curricular, because, as it turns out, everybody ends up needing 10%, and those 10% rarely overlap.

Similarly, it'd be a mistake to restrict your news coverage to what's immediately relevant to your life. At the very least, you need some information on what's going on within the wider community every two years when you're asked to make an informed decision at the ballot box. Because if you don't know what's going on, the only feedback loop connection politicians' careers with their actions is gone.

People often struggle with this connection: the act of voting is so small and rare, and I am just one of so many. In that way, one feels entirely powerless. But acting on that impression and shutting out bad news, or not voting, still represents a grave dereliction of duty. Because collectively, that minor act is all of it, representing roughly 100% of the legitimacy of democracy. It does not even take 100% of people to abstain from getting involved to turn a society into a banana republic: once participation drops below, say, 80%, you start to see a roughly proportional increase in appeals to some supposed "silent majority" supporting every minority candidate or opinion.

As a final observation, I'll point to the NYT long-form features such as [0] to show that quality media does a far better job of grappling with the nuance and contradictions of life. I think there's vastly more excellent journalism out there than people acknowledge, and disparaging the "mainstream media" with the accusation of shoehorning facts into a single, collectively-decided narrative is itself an illegitimate generalization. To use an example that's not the elephant in the room, look at the US' changing attitudes toward drug dependency for an example of the political process working better than most people give it credit for: we are today seeing the inflection point of a decades-long process relying on the initiative by people on the ground and, often in a feedback loop, journalists giving them the light of day changing the collective story ("narrative") from crime to disease. You and I may believe we came up with our opinions on this (and any other) issue completely independently, and through a logical process combining stringent empiricism with sound principles. But that's sort of just being a fish ignorant to the water around them.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/nyregion/dying-alone-in-n...

I agree, there are still some good news sources in the traditional print media. It is unfortunate that US society has reached the point that they are all now seen by a large chunk of the population as partisan and untrustworthy.

Orwell didn't anticipate the infotainment industrial complex.

Marshall McLuhan correctly recognized that overstimulation, the outrage machine, shuts down critical thought. What McLuhan calls "auto-amputation".

Aldous Huxley did however, cf Brave new world

Great Idea love it!

I'll second the idea of providing straight info on major current events too, tho that might take a big editorial/journo staff...

More immediately, while Chrome populates nicely, Firefox just comes up with the main page with [Top Today] and [New] blank. I'm also running NoScript but w/restrictions lifted on all sources on your site.

Yeah straight info on major stuff would be good.

That's interesting - I have no idea why that could be the case - I'm googling around to help it.

isnt that what reuters does?

Yes, Reuters & BBC are already in my feeds, along with Google searches in sci/tech, and carbon fiber (my biz area).

Just always looking for more sources...

You want Memeorandum: https://www.memeorandum.com/

Looks good - thanks!

>You need to enable JavaScript to run this app.

Sorry man :(

Here is how to enable JavaScript: https://www.enable-javascript.com/

Thanks, but I'd rather not.

I like it. If you would like to share any insights in how you've built this, I'm quite curious. Perhaps it goes without saying, but if you prefer not to say for whatever reason, then I respect that.

Someone mentioned this above but this scrapes headlines from Reddit's r/UpliftingNews.

This scrapes from Reddit currently (I just built this) - I'm doing this to check traction - and I'm working a an algorithm that I can feed news sources and any 'happy subreddit' to and get the same effect.

You might wanna check this:

  Unhandled Rejection (TypeError): Cannot read property 'children' of undefined
  App._callee2$
  src/App.js:72
    69 | let topTen = []
    70 | 
    71 | let newPostsRaw = await axios.get("https://www.reddit.com/r/" + subreddit + "/new.json?sort=new?")
  > 72 | let newPosts = newPostsRaw.data.data.children
    73 | ^
    74 | // console.log(newPosts)
    75 |

I'll take a look ASAP

For the observer:

Don't worry, this is still politically slanted. It's "not depressing" that donations pour in after some wacko burned "LGBTQ books" (for children, left out of the headline; also, exactly four books).

Not sure I have time for that much news, depressing or not. And I definitely don't need to be told that it's the opposite of depressing that some people are getting into a tit-for-tat over LGBTQ children's books, a subject I'd love to hear nothing about ever.

It's just scraping everything right now - I'm working on a proper filter for it.

Sincerely, I feel depressed reading that the government is away things to people (as the money ultimately will leave my pocket for that); or that a new drug may solve many problems (as I feel I'll have to do my own research to evaluate these claims now); or that a dog had cancer and lots of people were worried about it; or that Snapchat is getting praised for anything.

I would like something that filters either Google News or Apple News (app), and removes all stories of murders and abuse.

I understand that a small % of adults behave badly, but I’m not sure that reporting each instance isn’t actually making the problem worse. Or desensitizing us. I guess morbid curiosity sells.

I would also like to exclude most Trump news. But still know what’s going on in the world.

That's pretty much what I'm aiming for while I build it out behind the scenes - I just want the option to not get slammed in the face with some crazy depressing stuff.

The trouble with the vast majority of Trump "news" is that it's not really news - if I wanted to know the content of each and every one of his tweets I'd just follow him on Twitter. It's very lazy journalism.

Sure, but it feeds the outrage machine and leads to more ad views. Win-win!

Living in a news bubble isolated from the depressing news of the time inhibits the negative feedback lagely responsible for making change from reaching the public.

Aren't people's news feeds on social emdia already effectively doing this? And it's part of the problem.

"not derpessing"

1st yeah ok

2nd 'Remote Canadian town has been in isolation for a year'

3rd 'a bunch of people have diabetes and alzheimers'

4th 'some dude was unemployed and in a closet'

5th 'some dog lost a leg'

6th 'dude burns LGBTQ books'

7th 'A Christian was sentenced to death'

Yeah man... I'm not seeing this 'not depressin'g part.

Needed this. Right now my city (heck country's) cellular services have been been suspended on account of the thousands of people rioting & torching public and private property to protest the acquittal of a woman in a blasphemy case by the Supreme Court.

Just more of the same, I guess.

I was about to say 'Florida', but I looked outside, nothing's on fire... so googled it.

Pakistan.

Yikes dude, glad my little project helps

“None of the news that’s fit to print”

That's a really good tagline

Just FYI: Firefox and Edge both give me a warning about it not being secure.

"The owner of www.notdepressing.com has configured their website improperly. To protect your information from being stolen, Firefox has not connected to this website."

So you just built a barebones, frankly sort of ugly UI around an RSS feed of /r/UpliftingNews/?

Is this a bootcamp application project? How did this end up on the front page?

Great idea! Thanks for trying to make the world a better place.

Indeed. This, https://phys.org/news/2018-10-portugal-wild-circus-animals.h... made my day. Portugal is a little on the conservative side and taking the kids to see the elephants at Christmas is very much a tradition. This law is going to raise eyebrows and open some eyes. The date of 2024 seems rather far away but given the cultural impact this will have it's rather pragmatic.

You should call it Great News

Wait, dogs can get cancer? Fuck. That is super depressing.

I think actually every living animal can get cancer. Except maybe sharks, or is that an urban legend?

Alas, they do.

https://www.livescience.com/41655-great-white-shark-cancer.h...

> Scientists have known for more than 150 years that sharks get cancer. And yet the belief persists that the animals don't suffer from the disease.

"You need to enable JavaScript to run this app."

Depressing.

Great concept! I really hope this catches on.

Can you please, pretty please, add an RSS feed?

He is using Reddit /r/upliftingnews as source so you subscribe to; https://www.reddit.com/r/upliftingnews.rss

The design needs some work for desktop, plz

I like it. Especially the Red Hat story.

Yeah. That blew my mind. I'm not actually sure it's not depressing. Will IBM maintain Red Hat's open source policies? It seems very unlikely...

Well, it got yoinked off the front page. Sucks.

https://imgur.com/a/coYjsZ4

Wow this is going pretty high actually

Nice idea. Basically the opposite of this excellent short story: http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/

Looks empty to me

Reply on news.ycombinator.com