Show HN: A political news aggregator you can comment on | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A political news aggregator you can comment on

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41 pointskaczordon42 comments

The only visible comment is... not good.

How would one go about seeding a political news site with constructive comments?

As good as HN can be for discussion, many/most? political threads (especially pandemic or protest related lately) devolve very quickly.

Tough problem. Kudos for shipping.

i don't think it's possible without heavy moderation, even more so than on non-political forums

Agreed, it's the community that makes it useful. I mainly made this for my friends to use, was curious what HN users would think, although didn't expect such a toxic comment so soon...[edit] I'm leaving that comment up for a bit as it illustrates the problem I think. Perhaps a minimum word count with a valid word filter would help push people in the right direction or gamification, something like the tribunal(https://leagueoflegends.fandom.com/wiki/The_Tribunal) from League of Legends to ban toxic members.

The answer really is community. For example, look at churches.

Note that finding a non-personally-exhausting way to prevent a community from fracturing into a toxic mess of infighting is a problem. For example, look at churches.

lobste.rs attempts to do this by somewhat requiring people to have connections before they can register. Even if that's not your long term goal, it might be a good place to start to avoid broken windows.

I like this idea, constructing the community is the difficult part which this approach would seem to partly solve for.

HN has built-in community sculpting. That comment would be downvoted and possibly even deleted by HN mods.

How about a requirement to post support for the comment. I.e., reasoning behind the statement with links to sources, kind of like Wikipedia. We do it as a convention on HN, but maybe making it a requirement is appropriate for polarized topics:

"My opinion is xyz because abc and you can clearly see that abc is proven by this quote: 'my quote from the below linked article'

From: www.thebelowlink.com/intelligentreasoning.html

That comment would be ...possibly even deleted by HN mods.

This assertion runs counter to everything I understand about how HN moderation operates. I don't believe the HN mods do any such thing.

I don't know how one would accomplish this from a manpower perspective until you are able to get some sort of a critical mass of devoted users (or could implement some ML analysis + afford[1] to pay a moderator, at least at the start), but I've been thinking for a long time whether a new forum with strict epistemic and logical standards might be able to spawn a completely novel culture on the internet, one where people are "highly conscious" at all times and therefore not prone to the normal heuristic flaws that exist in large quantities on every single other forum...things like mind reading, future predicting, speculation stated as fact (and "truthy" as true), binary (vs trinary) logic, elementary logical flaws, transparently incorrect representations of reality, silly hyperbole, and so forth and so on.

It would likely be a ton of work to initially coax people into such a higher state of consciousness, and keep them there, but I think it would be extremely interesting to see if such a thing is even possible at any sort of scale. And, if accomplished even to a degree, what kind of novel ideas and perspectives on human existence might come out of such a forum. I struggle to see how we turn this increasingly crazy ship around if someone doesn't come up with some sort of a novel approach to counteract what is happening to people's minds in this mass-communication world that's been unleashed on humanity with no time for us to evolve accordingly.

[1] For the right person/platform, I bet you'd be able to crowdsource funding for such an initiative if you were able to sufficiently communicate the problem and proposed solution/goals. I'd certainly be willing to contribute what I could via Patreon or something like that.

Crowdsourcing various ideas about various techniques to crack this nut would be a good idea.

It's not possible to sustain in this climate.

If the parent is going to bother messing with an aggregator of this nature in today's particularly belligerent political atmosphere, they should capitulate and make it narrow. Plausibly build one for each major group (ie one for Democrats and Republicans). Swim with the echo chambers, if you want your product to be successful. You can be aspirational about creating a calm, well behaved political environment online that brings everyone together in reasoned discussion, and your product is guaranteed to fail.

The relative absence of politics in HN discussions is one of the key reasons it still works so well as a community with so much diversity of thought. Especially as things have changed increasingly in the past decade, as political vitriol has gotten worse by the year.

I can hear the retort: yeah but that's just giving in to everything that's wrong today, you should resist! Un huh, good luck with that. It's a nice sentiment and it will not work out. It's like waving your fists furiously at a tsunami wave as it drowns and breaks you. It will overwhelm your best efforts and you will suffer immensely for it.

How would one go about seeding a political news site with constructive comments?

Make friends with someone who sees the world very differently from you and has a very different political ideology from yours whom you, nonetheless, sincerely respect.

Both of you start seeding comments manually to model what a well-thought out comment looks like, regardless of ideology, so that it doesn't become a space de facto signaling "Republicans (or Democrats) only." or similar.

Political comments suck. > 90% of them are just rehashed talking points and they quickly devolve into echo chambers for the dominant voting bloc. I'd much rather see an aggregator using something like an argument map.

I've long been looking for a wikipedia for political stances. So you can sort of choose your own adventure going deep into the set of perspectives and why people choose them.

Maybe building that would be impossible because the bias of curators would fill it with strawmen etc.

You might be better off looking up the foundational texts for the various political philosophies. There's a lot of meaty and interesting stuff there. I'm partial to socialism, but reading the originals for liberalism, anarchism, anarcho-capitalism, etc is illuminating. People read (some of) this stuff in polisci degrees, but mostly they focus on quantitative micro stuff at the expense of the theories that motivate people. One thing polisci majors read is "Democracy in America" which was by a Frenchman taking a look at the new order post-revolution. As a socialist, I am partial to materialist views of history, and you can learn a lot by studying historical and scientific descriptions of the real conditions of societies. Usually they diverge quite significantly from whatever the ensconced and sheltered ruling class at the time likes to believe.

An incomplete but useful list of classics might be the list following. You may wish to start with wikipedia entries on them, or other sources, but reading the texts themselves is useful!

Plato: The Republic

Aristotle: Nichomachean Ethics; and Politics

Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan John Locke: Two Treatises of Government

Rousseau: The Social Contract

Montesquieu: The Spirit of the Laws De Toqueville: Democracy in America

Karl Marx: The Communist Manifesto; and Das Kapital.

JS Mill: On Liberty (the classic Utilitarian Enlightenment work)

John Rawls: A Theory of Justice (A hugely important work on rights and principles of political decisionmaking)

Robert Nozick: Anarchy, State and Utopia (a right-wing / libertarian oriented response to Rawls)

Michael Sandel: Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (critique of liberalism and introducing communitarianism)

/r/moderatepolitics on reddit is halfway decent. It's definitely liberal, but the way people discuss things is moderate, if that makes sense. It's not complete partisanship, and occasionally beliefs get questioned.

Reddit and Hacker News both solve the problem of "how do you host a site to allow for political discussion?"

To get good debate, you have to curate a social community by effective moderation. You see it on reddit all the time -- some communities are utter trash, and some are much better. It's a social problem, not a technological one.

A variation on this theme: make people frame their comments as falsifiable predictions. This is what Philip Tetlock advocates with his Superforecasting concept and sorta implemented here:

https://www.gjopen.com/

The hitch: making good falsifiable or verifiable predictions is tough and time-consuming. Evaluating and judging them requires even more moderation.

And let's face it: most online comments are not about advancing the public discourse. They're about getting a quick dopamine hit.

Sometimes, it is about thinking-out-loud about an idea.

That is to say, getting multiple dopamine hits as you type a long comment and imagine people on the internet being impressed by a comment you wouldn't be motivated enough to journal about.

This is a really good point.

That also opens up the ability to weight comments from a given user based on their success in predicting political outcomes.

If you have a high rate of success predicting outcomes, it's likely you have a good grasp on events in that broad category, and your comments are likely more valuable insights on-average.

I got pretty tired of seeing political news/discussion on my facebook so I made a dedicated site for it that aggregates news headlines, inspired by hacker news. Lemme know what you think or if there are any features you think would be useful on a site like this.

Seems very US centric. Where are you getting your data from? Facebook?

The TLD indicates that it is intended for US politics.

Ah, missed that. Good luck to OP. I think aggregating political content without extensive filtering is radioactive material so I would be curious about how they plan to tackle this.

Yeah US centric since that's what I'm most familiar with. I'm also very interested in gaming mechanics so I'm looking into ways of game-ifying constructive user submissions but without active moderation it is probably impossible.

It’s perhaps better to rebrand this as an unbiased or third party political news site or something like that. That’s the cool part of this, as others have pointed out it’s going to devolve rapidly into a political flame war cesspool.

Love the aggregation part of it though, nice job!

Thanks! I agree I did build this trying to include sources from left, right and center so that someone could get a sense of the climate in a quick glance without being in the FB news algorithm bubble. Getting people to use it is another thing entirely.

I think that’s a really smart approach. The bulk of the country are near center not the extreme edges. A site that organically gathers and represents that middle effectively would be beneficial to everyone.

This seems like reddit except people don't submit the stories themselves? So far the comments are of very poor quality, but to be fair that's a small sample size (6), or maybe a large sample size (100% of the comments on the site).

Basically yeah, a simple news feed without an algorithm but with the option of filtering by popular stories of the day.

That’s cool. If this were my project, I’d be spending long days seeding comments myself under different usernames with different POVs, and trying to get a handful of legitimate thoughtful users on there. Not an impossible task, good luck!

I do everything I can to do the opposite of read comments on political news articles so if you make the opposite of this product I'll subscribe.

I was hoping for it to be more of a long form style place for aggregating opinions. Perhaps a minimum word count to ensure only more thought out opinions would be allowed.

We do the aggregation part : https://www.thefactual.com/news

We tried a forum with comments before and it's not easy. But we did learn a lot of lessons and plan to introduce a version of it soon.

Nice but you guys might want to create a sort of ‘low-fi’ interface like this. It’s a ton easier on the eyes esp mobile and is a nice change from the typical news site.

We had a hard time showing users why we are different from other aggregators/curators.

Eg. we extract 3 most information dense sentences from article, we show different political perspectives, we analyze the articles and score them, we group related articles to a story into a cluster etc.

It's a fine line between showing too much and showing too little.

We also plan on building an app soon.

How do you make money? ads?

Or sponsored political thinkers giving an opinion people would want to read. Not really concerned with that right now, just wanted to make something I’d want to use myself.

How do you aggregate news?

I picked a few RSS feeds of news sources on the right, left and center based off of https://www.adfontesmedia.com/interactive-media-bias-chart/

Many of your articles are coming from real clear politics dot com. All they do is show an image and then forward on to an article. Would be better to cut the middle man out. Unless you also own RCP too, then carry on capitalist.

some of my favorite lists of sources, for your inspiration

https://www.memeorandum.com/lb

https://redef.com/charts/sources/total

https://aldaily.com/media/

https://longform.org/archive/publications

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