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Show HN: Slower News

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133 pointsgalfarragem59 comments

>Articles are hand selected. Everything that calls my attention and passes the «trivia filter»

Let me respectfully comment that the above explanation doesn't actually mean anything to me because I don't know what articles you rejected.

That's the same problem I have with people's lists of "best" book recommendations: I don't know what supposedly great and well-regarded books the curator disliked or found useless. That "negative" list that nobody ever volunteers is probably more useful than seeing "How to Win Friends and Influence People" repeatedly on everyone's list.

If I knew you well as a longtime friend -- or -- you were already an established authority on digesting news (e.g. Chomsky, Hitchens, etc), then I could forego looking at your rejections. But since I don't, the only way to know if your "pass" filter is useful to me is if I weigh it against your "rejects".

On that note and all other faults aside you nearly described Apple News' curation process. They hired a large number of experienced editors out of their field to hand-curate their digest listings.

That said, Apple News is anything but "slow news".

I make book lists and this is GREAT advices. From now on I will have an addendum at the bottom that lists ALL the books for that list that were rejected, thank you!

I mean while this is a flippant response, this does highlight something that doesn't really exist at the moment: second order derivative lists.

You make a list and then I prioritise and filter your list.

Making a list of your top 100 books implicitly rejects all other books. Me taking your list of 100 books and rejecting a load with justification gives a lot more information about what I value in the books and, moreover, which of your values I disagree with.

We kind of have this with comment trees but it will often be the case that someone publishes a list (e.g. all of the episodes of Black Mirror in order of preference or all Studio Ghibli films in order of preference) and then the comments will take issue with the inclusion of certain items, exclusion of certain items or the placement of certain items. What you rarely get is the commentator publishing their own version of the list and what you never get is the commentator creating a completely derivative list.

Isn't this a superset of providing your ratings/reviews for books you've read? Like Goodreads?

Minor English correction! You should say: Great advice. (It's an uncountable noun.)

This kind of selection bias applies to everything, e.g. you don't see the news stories media doesn't report on.

> This kind of selection bias applies to everything, e.g. you don't see the news stories media doesn't report on.

Traditional media like TV or newspaper or a YouTube channel, agreed. On some media you (partly) do tho ie. they allow more transparency.

I remember (back in 2002 or so, not sure nowadays) on Indymedia they had an open publishing method. All declined articles were in a recycle bin. Admitted ones were in the newswire, starred ones in middle.

HN has a "new" queue. Everything from there which does not get enough points, does not get reported, as it does not reach the front page (nor page 2).

Either way it is a shitload of work to go through this manually, though.

Just recently I was telling my brother that I cannot ever trust book recommendations from authors, because they never hand out negative reviews.

I understand why they do it, of course, but it saddens me that the people I most want to look to for suggestions are mostly useless.

>Articles are hand selected. Everything that calls my attention and passes the «trivia filter»

I was a little disappointed when I read this. When I read the title, I was hoping for something based on natural language processing summarization, which would aggregate many stories into cohesive chunks.

I agree. Is valuable information see the _rejected_ items.

I make a year list of movies that I personally recommend [1], and that is why I start to add a full list with 1-10 points of all the movies that I watch (the "rejected" or "not recommended" are the 6/10 and below). I think this make the list more interesting and highlight my personal taste.

[1] [redacted]

I read dissenting opinions on Supreme Court cases and have gotten the most insight into possible perspectives.

I would definitely like to see the “dissenting list”, even though in this case it would be by the same person instead of the part of a committee that didnt gain consensus

This is one of the things I like about Wirecutter's format for product recommendations-- in a good Wirecutter review, the "runner up" and "competition" sections are just as informative as their actual pick, because they'll highlight any deficiencies or tradeoffs in the item they picked, and explain why they chose what they did.

Would you use a kinda social network that let you put different media types like articles, books, movies, etc in any List you like like standard(READiNGG or WATCHINGG, etc?) or custom ones you can setup. like a trello board kinda

So that's a lot of fancy language to say it's... a manual blog aggregating stuff interesting to the editor? We definitely used to have a lot of those a few years ago, you remember, pre-facebook, fair enough.

It's usually helpful if you explain more about your scope of interest for selecting content, I don't really understand what the words mean here. "relevant trends, micro-trends and edge cases for borderline nerds"-- Not sure if this is implied within the field of software development, or just... general human knowledge? Not sure the difference between a trend or a micro-trend, edge case in... what, or if it's meant to be applicable to full-on nerds or just borderline nerds...

It's hard to curate articles (at least in subjects where we are not specialists) for a different audience than ourselves. So I pick the group where I feel I fit in.

Sure. I don't feel you've been successful in describing what that audience is in a way that makes sense to anyone else, or in describing what about this project you think makes it interesting or novel.

It's basically just a list of links you personally find interesting then? That can be said more clearly. I'm not totally sure what would make it novel as a project, lots of people have assembled public lists of links interesting to them before, yes?

One of the most annoying things to me in current journalism is how news and facts and opinion pieces get more and more conflated. Probably because the pure "news" is readily available to everyone, so the respective media just take those news, put their spin on it and cater it that way to their audience as a way to create a "product".

Unfortunately this linkblog (that's what it is) isn't really much different, it's a collection of opinion pieces that the author agrees with.

When I want reasonable, global news, I usually just go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events, which is quite balanced and linking sources and Wikipedia articles about the topic.

This Wiki link is awesome! It is way more useful to get an idea of major news trends over time than OP's blog

Slow news definitely has value for people who prefers them. The best thing I did last year was to delete all my social accounts (except HN) and subscribe to hard copy of The Economist. It comes weekly, covers all important events around the world and gives good level of depth on the subjects. I would not consider switching to a digital source though. Paper is better, goes better with dumbphones :)

I'm glad you're better off after taking that decision, which is definitely a brave one nowadays. When do you get the paper delivered? I feel like I'd prefer to read it on the weekends. I might think about doing something similar. I already use a dumbphone, as well.

The Economist shows up in my mailbox on every Friday regularly. I live in Berlin, not sure about their delivery to other places.

Mine arrives on Tuesday afternoons in Dublin, posted from Germany in fact.

If I renew my subscription I'll go digital only, because my physical paper is only in-date for a couple of days before the new issue is out on the website and app.

A single page containing a huge list of links, ordered by subjects which you necessarily have to scroll through, with no dates attached to them as well as lacking the date the list was last updated as a whole. And, to top it off, the author seemingly wants to include ads [0].

I'm all for slowly consuming relevant (i. e. relevant to me, personally) news, but I can't get behind the execution on this project.

[0] At the very top of the page: "Dear sponsor, this text link could show us your great product!".

I have to agree. While I applaud the effort and see a slow news digest as a great project idea, I think this could use some refinement.

The very purpose of "news" is timely publication. As it stands, this seems more to be a digest of subjects and articles of personal interest and little more.

On the subject of ads—I see no problem with that. It appears they want them to be static ads which is a refreshing move.

I encourage the creator to keep working on it.

How'd this one get past your hand-selected filter? It's literally just a link to a meme (linked to under the heading "Demography"):

https://imgur.com/a/BHqTPMO

There are also some quite sinister undertones that could be read into that, whether it was intentional or not.

I think it's very intentional. As hackneyed as the phrase is, the current political atmosphere has seen this rise of demographics change as a feared thing.

Yes, my personal interpretation of it is that it is a dogwhistle, but I was being charitable. Then again, a good dogwhistle is plausibly deniable as inoccuous.

Which really make me reconsider everything this person might have chosen to share on this site, and how "newsworthy" it really is.

I'd be more interested in an automated news aggregator that timelines top issues, so that you can see the updates. The timeline would be intelligent enough to know when news articles cross into other areas. Sorta like a Git branch looking tree.

Like the dems races linked up to the COVID-19 outbreak, where it largely was not linked up a week ago.

Although I think everything falls into the COVID-19 trunk at this point.

The timeline would have 1 sentence summaries using some kind of NL summary tool.

I love that the first part of the docs is a "WTF is this?" section. Unfortunately the paragraph that follows doesn't answer the question at all. And that "Colophon" section at the bottom... What? Anyway, after reading the readme, I still have no idea what this project is.

It is just a static HTML page with lists of links to articles the author thought were interesting. I remember making something like this 20 years ago to use as my homepage.

Props for listing the biases. Specially self-described centrists are prone to thinking their viewpoint is the unbiased one. At least from my experience.

Edit: One question. You say "new articles are easy to spot" but how do I spot them?

New links will have a different color for a few months.

You didn't want to spend so much time reading news, so you started curating news for others? Hm.

The site has nice and cozy design, good work. By the way, "Facebook is becoming an «independent nation»" is a dead link.

I just want to say that I've been thinking of making almost exactly this for a couple of years now. I'm glad someone did it [=

You're getting a lot of hate, but I really think there's a lot of value in something like this.

The reason I never pursued it very far is I'm not sure how you make a meaningful amount of money out of it.

I feel like you either stay small or get big and evolve into the problem you set out to solve.

A lot of hate is deserved. You have to have a huge ego to think that a list of articles you found on the internet is worthy of anyone's attention. There is next to no value here.

If you'd allow me to respectfully suggest an edit to the (IMO cleverly written) by-line of the site.

> This is, somehow, a slowly updated news-aggregator with relevant trends, micro-trends and edge cases for borderline nerds, that don't want to miss out, nor spend a shit-ton of time distilling trivia.

I like this idea if it focuses on a specific subject, but I don't think it works as an aggregator.

During the 2016 election there was a FB Messenger app called purple, which would send out 1 message per day with the news on the election. It allowed me to ignore all the headlines and clickbait because I knew that Purple would tell me everything real and useful.

With news aggregation, what I find interesting is highly personable to me so trusting a human to figure this out doesn't seem like the ideal approach.

Obviously google news is nailing this, but leans towards clickbait. Something like pocket offering this customized aggregation could be cool if they were optimizing for me saving articles, not just clicking on them. Of course Pocket does have suggestions and I completely ignore them.

Congrats on trying to slow down in general!

I built a slow news aggregator for people to control their own news (via RSS feeds). It’s at https://focusd.co in case that helps you with your curation for the aggregation

At first I thought this was a machine learning project that sampled news over a period of time and rejected nearly-identical articles that pop up over the same amount of time. "important news! bill gates gives 5 million to fight COVID!" that pops up on 50 news sites a few hours apart could be rejected, while a lone article that only appears in one or two places would appear as non-trivial. Apply filter on HN articles and you get just the unique, non-trending stuff. Sample over 24 hours and you have the most popular non-trending articles.

What's the point of news that's not new. This is a museum for articles that support a curator's worldview without the attached communities, timely context and broad appeal of HN or Reddit. Rewatching Friends or The Office is not meant to inform me about the state of the world.

This idea as a platform might work better. Giving me (the user) the ability to sculpt my own mirror or museum for the world's news with powerful categories might be more helpful. Thinkspot has gotten closer to a better news source than a Slow News application.

The idea behind the more general movement of slow news is

1. Given time to read and write proper investigative journalism, one doesn't have to resort to copy-pasting descriptive "news" from wire organisations.

2. With hindsight, it is easier to pick out which stories turned out to be significant, and which did not.

3. By revisiting past events, one can begin to unwind what greater consequences they had.

Essentially, slow news is a way to better understand what matters in the world. It won't let you talk about the latest soap opera star in the breakroom, but that's not news anyway, in my opinion.

I'm not sure the author agrees with this, but it's an attempt at answering your question about the value of slower news.

Quality journalism that takes a month to unpack requires journalism done by the greatest writers, someone who can pack a lot of information into a very small amount of content.

An article (from OP's website) titled 'Poor kids need summer jobs, Rich kids get them' is interesting for a moment to the majority of readers and few readers who have kids looking for summer jobs will find relevant information in the article. The article mentions Brexit and UBI which are inevitably going to age. A month or years after release I would find better information in books on the topic or ongoing conversations with people following the topic.

Hindsight is easier on a target that stands still and less interesting too. We can unveil the significance of long running stories in the stream of consciousness format on HN or Reddit by revisiting stories that are repeatedly relevant.

When I want information that transcends time I go to philosophers, intellectuals, scientists, professionals in the field that have written years of accumulated knowledge into a book. I don't see what a news article seeks to provide that will age well. It's not aiming at creating information that ages well.

During a subsequent visit, however, Chang told him that there were other books published up to about the middle of 1930 which would doubtless be added to the shelves eventually; they had already arrived at the lamasery. “We keep ourselves fairly up-to-date, you see,” he commented. “There are people who would hardly agree with you,” replied Conway with a smile. “Quite a lot of things have happened in the world since last year, you know.” “Nothing of importance, my dear sir, that could not have been foreseen in 1920, or that will not be better understood in 1940.

— James Hilton, Lost Horizon

It's a good quote and I don't see it's application. The idea is virtuous, this execution does not live up to it or hit the same mark as what Hilton was talking about.

A good book can last decades or centuries, a news article rarely (if ever at all) has the content to do that.

I think that’s the point, in part—most news is just noise. If it’s irrelevant in a week or a month, maybe it never was relevant in the first place. Weather and traffic reports aside, I guess.

> Giving me (the user) the ability to sculpt my own mirror or museum for the world's news with powerful categories might be more helpful.

Ultimately you can. I only curate 2 pages (main one and one about Portugal[0]) but I accept pull requests creating/updating other specific pages - if you are really interested and will handle the burden of building them directly in HTML. For now that's my filter to accept them.

[0] https://www.slowernews.com/portugal

This seems like it would be more useful to me as an email newsletter? At least I don't think I'm going to remember visiting once a month... Convenient that it's already js-free.

There are a lot of negatives comments on this article but somehow it reached the front page. Interesting...

I too am curious what quirk of the HN algorithm resulted in this on the front page.

Interesting project, I like the Wisdom TL;DR Guide [1] (collection of quotes and maxims) that comes with it.

[1] https://github.com/slowernews/wisdom-tldr-guide

Thank you for your comment. I would have missed it. I created a small repository of quotes and display a random one each time I open a new Terminal window. This list of quotes will perfectly complete my collection. Kudo to the curator (op ?).

Shameless plug: I made 20-things.com in order to try and make something like reddit but much slower. Limited to 20 things in a 24 hour period. Still work in progress. Fishing for ideas and feedback.

Edit: today I noticed a bug where SMS was not being sent to US numbers because they were being sent from alphanumeric "number" which is not supported. If you tried to register, please try logging in again and you should receive the SMS token.

Looking at the articles I find a large percentage of them to be trivia.

If you just want the most significant news, reading Le Monde diplomatique (english edition) will do it.

Recently subscribed to briefingday.com as recommended per Kevin Kelly. Similar, "slow" approach, but comes as a daily newsletter.

I like this. It does scratches my itch as well.

It would be great to add an RSS feed.

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