Facebook News

Literally the first thought which popped in my head.

> Don't people from facebook see this'd increase the already existing polarization and information bubbles?

Facebook isn't optimizing for the preservation of democratic norms or decrease of polarization; they're optimizing for eyeballs, time, and attention (which obviously translates to money).

To answer your question, they may not see it because they don't care, and if they do see it, they still don't care as that's not their KPI.

(Disclaimer: I'm not talking about specific employees but rather the company as an organization)

To be fair, this is a standard feature of most news apps. Like Apple's.

I get the idealism of wanting to expose people to a more diverse set of news sources but I also don't think I would ever use a news app that didn't let me filter out the chaff. Irrespective of your political beliefs there's still a lot of low-quality journalism out there that simply isn't worth your time.

I do think it's funny that "news" has become hard synonymous with "politics" despite the fact that columns like the arts, lifestyle, product reviews, food, local events, human interest, short fiction, non-political opinions, and sports are just as much news and are, arguably, the good bits.

Haha, it's janky and cropping parts of some logotypes too. Totally against the otherwise smooth animations and style in the rest of the page. It looks bolted on and I wouldn't be surprised it was a late decision to showcase some publishers and added by non web devs...

Benefit-cost ratio of owning your own CDN.

Bring back the `<marquee>` tag.

and when you click on how it works, it greets you with a 31MB gif

And it looks terrible. I’d guess that this site was thrown together by an outside agency, as these landing pages usually are by companies. In my experience these agencies don’t care about anything but getting paid, and will yield absolutely trash. And why wouldn’t they? They never have to deal with it again and the company hiring them probably doesn’t care, it’s just a marketing landing page. Then the company wants to change it some day and thinks it can just be handed off to engineering, because “it’s just code” and “how hard could it be” and fuck now I’m just sad. I am so done with tech lol, I can’t wait to get out.

Worked fine on Chrome, but broke the back button on Firefox.

Ah, the good old popurls days ;)

Please don't unnecessarily spam your product.

This reminded me of a project an acquaintance of mine did in 1997/98 when he build a news aggregator site. Mind this was before Google News arrived and it was a great way of seeing all headlines from the bigger (ans also smaller) sites in Germany.

Until the publishers came, dragged him to court on claims of copyright infringement (for doing deep links into the articles). That was a time, when clicking on a teaser brought you to a category page where you had to click the teaser again to get to the intended article. Why? To increase ad impressions. Sometimes you had to click three or four levels deep.

So they feared the lost ad impressions. They pulled the big guns on a high school kid creating a service. He agreed to delist them and the service was dead in the water. Because nearly every publisher wanted his sites to be delisted.

One or one and a half years later Google entered the German internet with Google News and the publishers sued again - this time it came to a trial and Google won. But 20 years later the publishers still try to lobby for laws against aggregators, against quoting from "their" news.

Thanks for this trip down memory lane into the late 90ies. Now I feel old. ;-)

This looks great - nice work!

Scroll down to the bottom of page, you'll see "Facebook © 2019"

I wasnt even able to access it in the mobile app. doa.

Interesting. I didn't even get a popup.

I checked the local storage for the site and they have stored exactly 0 bytes. Given FBs reputation, I'm quite surprised!