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Comment by save_ferris | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me a lot of the political echo chambers we're already seeing in the US media. If you think the Russia investigation is a big hoax, you watch Fox News. If you think otherwise, you watch CNN/MSNBC/etc.

Choice in our news consumption is allowing people to believe that vaccines cause autism, that there's a "deep state" cabal of leaders secretly pulling the levers of power, that Russia didn't really interfere in the 2016 election. We no longer have to confront difficult truths, we can simply believe the version that we want to believe and ignore everything else.

Choice in our news consumption is giving rise to incompatible versions of what's going on, and it's setting a pretty terrifying precedent. How can you give people a choice of what they want to see while maintaining a standard of quality that rises above propaganda?

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I don't know how to break the echo chamber issue, but one thing I don't like about the news market is that they are advertisement-based. Or rather the consequences that come from that, for example the long articles where they spread the important points over the whole text so that I spend a lot of time on the site. If I just jump to the article, stay for 10 secs and then leave this is considered to be negative, but if I get all my news points in those 10 seconds its great for me. And the click-bait titles because they want the views etc...

So I imagine if say 1000 people make a wish to get a story covered and they even fund the wish, and the wish is "make a very short summary of this... including the following points..." then they can earn money by delivering on that. The result might be a very short article where people spend only 10 seconds and with a boring title, but they would still earn money with that.

Right, online advertising sucks. Period.

There's already a solution to this problem though: subscriptions. The issue there is that people just don't want to pay for something that they're used to getting for free.

Your idea sounds like a service where people can request content on a given topic for a fee, without really knowing who's creating the content. What are the quality controls there? Who gets to write the content? How do I, the user, know that I'm getting a fair representation of what's going on?

If someone is willing to pay for news content, why not just buy a newspaper subscription and get the email newsletter from a company that knows how to create news content?

I'm just another internet rando, but I've worked for news organizations so I have some operational background here. Frankly, I just don't quite see the value in the service you're imagining, based on my interpretation. I'd have a really hard time trusting content written by a stranger catered specifically to my preferences if they weren't a bona fide journalist with experience at a reputable news organization. And I certainly wouldn't pay for it. Such a system would be super vulnerable to malicious influential behavior like we saw in the 2016 election.

If you hate online ads in your news so much, do you currently pay for any of your news right now? If not, then how painful is this problem for you?

We can't convince the public to spend on their news content the same way they spend on Netflix. That kinda sums it up right there.

Well the site is just a test (which didn't really take off to be honest, I've posted it here and there). But regarding the controls and the trust, you only pay out the reward if you like the result (that's how it works at the moment). And both the creators and the requesters can gain a reputation. A requester gets a good reputation for offering rewards and regularly paying them out. A content creator gets a good reputation for regularly fulfilling good wishes.

The app looks awesome for curating things that aren’t time-sensitive or dependent on trust or verification of content.

But again, relying purely on the community to verify quality is a major liability when it comes to information geared towards the public interest.

I highly recommend you read up on the fake political groups that the Russians created on Facebook and Twitter that generated hundreds of thousands of followers and millions of engagements. People just didn’t realize that they were fake groups while sharing their content/tweets. The mueller report covered this operation in great detail, it’s worth the read if you’re serious about building products like this.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/18/us/politics/m...

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