Ask HN: News site that provides world updates only when relevant?
legiblenews.com
legiblenews.com
It's a news site that doesn't write articles. It just organizes links to other peoples articles, and links to original sources, into sagas that unfolded over time.
For stories of sufficient note I'd like to offer the ability to subscribe to them and get email notifications when something major changes. Unfortunately I suspect that for the long tail of other stories I will need to rely on a wiki-style model for gathering links, and probably can't send notifications without it becoming a source of spam.
The brief version of the motivation for this is basically three fold:
- Most stories of any interest really unfold over a period of weeks to years, but the current news cycle really only favors reporting on them as a single one time event. I'd like that to change.
- Most news sites seem to have a severe allergy to linking to original sources, but often the original sources have a lot of value.
- I'd often like to be able to compare new articles to what I've already read on the topic.
Edit: Send me an email (my email is on my profile), and I'll send you one back once I have a MVP released. That's just my personal email, and I promise not to add you to a mailing list or anything.
Think, for example if there is some collapse of a bridge somewhere. Immediately news sites will publish stories to generate clicks but will not have anything useful to say beyond pure speculation. Bride x collapsed and some immediate consequences like road closures is the only thing you'll get that actually contains information. It will take weeks at least before there is anything useful about the why. By the time it might be easy to miss the story.
The other thing I think is nice about it, that you can decide your own pace of consuming news. Say you only read news Sunday morning with breakfast, give me the most "relevant" articles and sagas from the the last x days.
This just moves the problem to being "what links to prominently display for an event". I'm not sure on the details, but I'll probably end up with some heuristics for what links are the best with an option to manually override it. I also want to implement a fair bit of user-controlled filtration (think along the lines of https://pcpartpicker.com/products/motherboard/, except for news articles instead of motherboards)
Organizing links is, I think, best done manually in the end. But with automation to make it easier. For example scrapping RSS feeds and using keywords to suggest where I might want to put them. I also want to make it possible for users of the site to add content (or for high profile articles, just suggest it, because spam sucks).
In some sense this is "realtime", but without any plan to race to make it happen as quickly as possible. Pushing updates to email of course less so. Triggering "this is a big enough of a change to send an email" will be a separate manual action. As for when that email will be sent, I'm thinking of setting it up so people can subscribe to a saga with daily (default)/weekly/immediately on change.
I guess if it got popular you'd get news/syndication sites doctoring their publication times to always appear first on the timeline.
Would be useful to look at something like a timeline of political events spanning a decade, or a topic like the JET (Joint European Torus project) with all the stories that made mainstream news.
You could add mashups like what the main entertainment news was, or what the other main stories were, or stock tickers, alongside the news timelines.
I guess focus and where to prune the branching news stories will be hard.
The UK PM's handlers are constantly using the technique of burying 'boring' news by having him do something really stupid that is expected to fill news cycles for a few days. Their manipulation of the media has been masterful pulling in all the learning from the USA; I digress. The point being it would be interesting to plot a timeline of apparent buffoonery, or short-lived outrage stories, and the actually important also-ran news stories that the buffoonery was there to hide.
That could be useful to use (or just take inspiration from).
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20170719191914/http://www.bbc.co... - bbc.co.uk/ontologies is currently offline as a mitigation against the log4j incident, hence the archive.org link
But identifying what’s wrong and even getting an MVP together is one of the easier problems.
The burning question is how do you monetize your efforts without giving into the ad cartel? Will people pay a premium for a link tree? Unless this is more of a civic minded volunteer type thing?
Either way, best of luck. There’s a sack of coins somewhere in here.
In the end, I suspect I will be using advertising, even though I do find that industry pretty distasteful. Low costs mean that if I do go down this route I should be able to keep it pretty unobtrusive and minimal, which gives up short term income but is likely a good long term tradeoff.
I don't think it makes sense to put the core product behind a subscription wall. Apart from the issue of "would people pay for it", it's the sort of thing that benefits from network effects. I'd be shooting myself in the foot if I tried. Conceivably the tools I'm making to help gather the information could make a useful product for professional researchers of various kinds (hedgefunds, paralegals, etc) - but that would be more of an offshoot and not something I could really pursue before gaining traction.
Another idea I've had (and again, this is largely ripping off existing monetization schemes), is that it might make sense to have a section of the website dedicated sagas about "products" (e.g. "IPhone 17"), linking to things like reviews and spec sheets, with affiliate links to amazon. Conceivably you could attract the /r/buyitforlife crowd to something like this, and make it a force for good in the world.
Just asking for donations seems to work to some extent to (see The Guardian, and wikipedia) - though given how hard they seem to need to push for them I'm not sure that's a route I really want to go down.
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Like you say, there's a sack of coins somewhere in here. I'm willing to believe that if I make a useful product that people like, I'll figure out how to pick up at least a few of them.
I don’t know much but as a user i’m hard to deceive, and this seems like the most pragmatic way to make a real, efficient compromise without sacrificing some of the purer intentions of your project.
Good luck man, I’m rooting for you.
The open source stuff you guys have is also interesting :)
- https://newscatcherapi.com/blog/python-web-scraping-librarie...
Will reach out to you via email later today
Omg, so true. A while back i found out about Axios and thought they were really cool. A nice way to skim news, keep up to date... but the lack of sourcing made the information worthless to me. Difficult to tell what is opinion, reality, how they got to a summary of a quote, etc.
Axios has the right idea for me, but they need to pair it with detailed sources, quotes, etc to drill into. Reality is often too strange these days to trust a summary, i need sources.
e.g. Explainers on the budget process and what happened before with regulations of some kind. etc. And that only becomes relevant to readers when it becomes important and if they're interested in it.
Unfortunately because of social media, AMP, and etc. they had to fit in the article format even though they had big plans for doing richer UIs on the website itself. They basically were forced to pivot into a blog which I think they still do a good job at today cause the mission is still similar, but the mechanics of getting people to read things which aren't articles is difficult.
[This is all from memory of an episode of Erza Klein's Vox Podcast where the founders talk about the original ideas of Vox and why they ended up where they were]
Actually I'd like to see a news site that has no story telling, no explainers, no narrative. Just the core facts as much as possible, but presented over a timeline. So the timeline itself ends up providing the narrative/structure to a large extent.
Just the facts news would be interesting, the practical problem is it would also be labor intensive - since you end up needing to write your own (short) article for every story, and understanding the story well enough to do a good job at that. I sort of hope that my site is the 80/20 version of that for people looking for that, by approximating it without actually doing it. Or maybe it could be a useful source of facts for someone who did want to make a news site that did that.
Edit: maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned any names; it seems some people took that as an attack on their particular herd.
I see something different in gpm's idea. Vox wanted to update their articles. That's bad. gpm wants to aggregate coverage of the same topic over time. That's great; it gives you an easy way to look at "what did people think in 2018?".
At the risk of sounding Extremely Hacker News™, this sounds like a job for version control, ha.
Anyways, I'm basically planning on doing this part, but linearly like wikipedia (and it's history page) not as a tree like git. Also what I'm currently doing only counts as a CRDT if "rerender the whole page in case of conflict" is a valid update strategy...
Not at all. The most that would get you is "what did Vox think in 2018?".
I think Axios fits what you're describing much better. Vox is a boilerplate left-biased blog[1], with their only unique quality being a sneering insistence that they're just "explaining". They're like the Economist, but without the self-awareness or quality.
Axios, on the other hand, is much better at the just-the-facts style of reporting, to the extent this is possible. They even use a non-traditional article format, making heavy use of bullet points and standardized paragraph headers like "Why it matters".
[1] Not to treat them as the final word, but Allsides has their bias marked as Left, not even Center-Left. They have Axios as Center. https://www.allsides.com/news-source/vox-news-media-bias
However there are quite a few topics where you could be objective - sports scores, election results, new releases etc.
Good luck. Hope to see it on Show HN one day.
Would it be user-submitted links & tag based?
My imagination takes me to something like: the overall #covid-19 saga, plus the sub-sagas: "#covid-19 #delta", "#covid-19 #omicron"
Super curious what your approach will look like!
Partially and not really.
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I absolutely want to get users to submit links and help out with organization. I'd never manage to find every source, even for the most important stories, without that sort of help. That said, I expect I'll be doing a lot of the research and submission myself (with helper programs) for the core stories - for one thing I don't think there's any other way to bootstrap a community.
For niche and more "local news" stories I want to rely on a more wiki-like model, where anyone can directly edit them (and full history is preserved). I wish I could do that for everything, but I think bad actors would present a pretty insurmountable problem. Even for local news "anti-evil" will be difficult, and I'll need to clearly mark that this is community-controlled content, I don't want to be hosting/recommending spam after all.
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I don't really think of the organization system as tags, though I suppose in some sense it's equivalent. I think of it as more of a top down hierarchy, saga -> event -> link, and if the same link ends up in multiple sagas/events, that's ok and not really an important fact - i.e. the fact that the link is tagged as something isn't the important bit.
I'm sure I'll want to solve nested sagas better eventually, but for now I'm ignoring the problem. This is a bet that for most sagas a single layer of time based interior organization (grouping links into events) is sufficient. There will also be other forms of intra-saga organization, like link type (article/legal document/study/video/tweet/press release/...).
For now a covid-19 saga would link to a delta saga much like it would link to an external site, and result in a certain amount of duplication of content. I think covid is unusual in how long of a saga it is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circa_News
Basically they would distill an article down to facts with links to the original source of the facts. Users could subscribe to a story and it would update you when a new substantive fact was added to the story.
I've been hoping for something like Circa to pop back into existence, but unfortunately I can see why it's not a profitable venture.
Interactions with the service don't need a website. You literally send a email with a link to news@foobar,com, the service sees where the email came from, adds the link to your newsfeed and distributes it to your subscribers.
Ideally, you wouldn't even need to setup an account, just send a link from any email and your account is that email. Subscribing to someone's email could be as simple as sending a "subscribe to joe@schmoe,com" to the service.
You send an email to world@hey.com, it posts it as a blogpost, people can subscribe to your blog.
That's just another walled garden with user accounts and other bs.
I follow the AP directly, which IMO is pretty good about being concise, relatively impartial and generally does a good job of covering national news. You might try a few different aggregation newsletters to see what feels right for you. But you're always going to make tradeoffs between missing stories and receiving low-value updates, because your low-value updates may be someone else's hugely relevant story.
It would have to be fully subscription supported, since advertisers probably want to see an even amount of engagement each week (even if it’s small) so that they can set predictable budgets. But important news doesn’t work like that, sometimes there are 3 huge news events happening at the same time, sometimes there’s a slow month with no really big news happening.
That's pretty unbelievable. It was on the frontpage of all major western news sources.
- The parents of the accused Michigan school shooter head to court again
- Experts crack the secret to last letter of Mary, Queen of Scots before her execution
- The Air Force discharges 27 service members for refusing to get a COVID vaccine
- Their lives were changed by gun violence, and now they're running for office
- The best and worst places to live if you care only about money
- To save lives, the overdose antidote naxalone should be sold over-the-counter, advocates argue
- Vaccine protection vs. omicron infection may drop to 30% but does cut severe disease
- The federal agency that measures racial diversity is led mostly by white people
- Rep. Liz Cheney read the text messages she says Mark Meadows got during the Jan. 6 siege
- Kentucky crews search painstakingly for 109 people missing after deadly tornadoes
- 'Return of the Jedi,' 'Selena' and 'Sounder' added to National Film Registry
- Pfizer data shows that its COVID-19 pill is effective against severe disease
- Saule Omarova gets candid: Banks sank her nomination to become a key regulator
- The Supreme Court again leaves a state vaccine mandate in place for health care workers
- Survivors of Nassar's abuse reach a $380 million deal with USA Gymnastics and the Olympic committee
- This year's Golden Globes nominations avoid obvious pitfalls, but won't restore the awards' luster
- More Black families are homeschooling their children, citing the pandemic and racism
- No U.S. troops behind a drone strike that killed Afghan civilians will be punished
- What dish is never missing from your holiday table? Tell us why you love it
- Elon Musk is Time's 2021 Person of the Year
I'd love an RSS feed that lets me know about Russian troops on the Ukranian border but not about any of those "stories." Actually reading the news is a frustrating experience because the signal-to-noise ratio is so poor.
This seems the most relevant piece of news to me. Do you not care about it?
Every few hours there’s a new report on just this topic by DW or BBC on YouTube, and each time it’s 99% rehashing of the status quo plus 1% of maybe genuine new developments.
Same goes for the new variant of COVID, multiple new sensational “breaking” reports per day all summed up as “yeah, stand by, we’ll know in a couple of weeks, or earlier”.
I just stopped following the news recently, I may be projecting but it’s all a frenzy.
I wish for a solid news source that did unbiased reporting in a way that doesn’t offend knowledgeable viewer/reader’s intelligence. Just assume I already know what happened up to this point; then add links/annotations as appropriate. Don’t drum up sensational headlines and speculations. Save your effort, save my time.
This isn’t something that can be found on YouTube, as it wouldn’t generate grand amounts of ad revenue.
The resulting accumulation of worrying information probably contributes to a chronic stress in regular readers.
I thought about making a news YouTube channel that described essential news stories under 30 or 60 seconds with only the essential highlights. But the incentive was simply not there. I run a VA firm where we aggregate industry news for social media posts. So, my business proposition is that like minded people could pool money to hire a VA and setup strict policies about the scope, news sources (also pay for those news sources) then aggregate and summarize essential news articles catered just for them. I feel like community based services should be a thing and people should pay and own the services they want.
Which is only to say: in addition to the "what is relevant to whom" problem, a lot of times we are just focused on other things, and news sites are not going to find us. Not even hypothetically perfect ones that send us emails about the things we really care about, because sometimes we are going to be busy with work or family or whatever and tune out the constant stream of news alerts.
Instead we will rely, as people have for a long long time, on other folks telling us if something really important is afoot.
In a way -- counterintuitively? -- this is an argument for watching the Evening News as a sort of information-gathering ritual, just because it's harder to tune out. When I was a kid we always caught the news and the weather. One doesn't need to do that anymore, but maybe it's the better paradigm? You sit there, you chat about something else, you half-listen, but when Dennis Richmond[1] says the alien invasion is on, you're going to hear it.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Belarus–European_Union_bo...
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hv-Kt-F5CFQ
[Edit: it's debatable whether this was a "refugee" crisis so I removed that word.]
There is a certain stigma associated with ZH, but I find the articles well researched, containing in-depth analysis, many times with references to the original sources.
What helps to overcome the stigma, is that I see the articles as essays with opinions, rather than single source of truth.
Mostly important for me is that ZH is relevant and ahead of time of other MSM, in terms of global events.
It makes it easier for the Wikipedia editors (avoids endless arguments about priority), but not great for the average reader.
(looks like my GitHub action has stopped working - will fix it tmr)
I cherry-pick articles that dissect trends, unveil lesser known trends or are interesting edge cases, and are relevant, at least, for some months. It's like a generalist and slow HN once most articles appeared here. I couldn't find something similar so I built it... RSS, quarterly newsletter[0] and open source[1]. It's my pet project: I feed him, he doesn't feed me but in the end he makes me a better person.
Looks like a decent site.
> Leave url blank to submit a question for discussion.
Wait so are you the originator of the link you posted or not?
Seems to have just been an example of the best thing they've found so far...
This one is pretty on the nose. It's from PRX/PRI. They have web and audio.
But "relevant" is not easily measured. It's obviously pretty personal.
I would use a tool like this. That being said, that is not always a good indicator for a broad adoption interest.
Counter point: Slot machines exist. (I suppose you might find some few instances of them being used to raise money for charity or something, but I don't think that redeems the technology.)
Recommendation engines are generally benign when the input content is benign. Pandora itself doesn't seem to cause trouble. Though even with benign content, content recommendation can encourage unhealthy behavior, such the content recommendation engine of netflix/etc encouraging binge consumption and couch potatoism.
But what does it mean for content to be benign and how is that determination made? When you have relatively little content that changes relatively infrequently, like netflix, you can have trusted humans perform the selection. That bakes the biases of those humans into the system, which is not inherently a problem (it's not as though any newspaper or book was ever any different in this regard.) But with things like youtube or the hypothetical Pandora for News, the the depth and breadth of content is too large for trusted human curation. I think we've actually already seen some examples of this manifest on Facebook, where the recommendation engine sends people down radicalizing holes of local news particularly.
There has been a lot of talk recently about the identification and suppression of disinformation and misinformation. D&M is problematic and tasking independent fact checkers to fight it may have some merit, but I think there is much more to consider. For starters, the local fact-checkers, who understand the language and cultural context of the material they are evaluating, are imposing their own potentially harmful biases onto the system. Secondly, and more importantly, some propaganda is neither misinformation nor disinformation. An example: racists love to pass around links to factually correct local news articles about crime. They will inundate their targets with news stories that support their narrative. Each of those stories, evaluated independently, might be factual and come from a reputable news organization. But the sum of those stories may mislead people by not presenting mitigating considerations, social or historical context, etc. If you create a system that recommends people the intersection of 'local news' and 'crime', you've automated the job of the racist propagandists. But if your content recommendation engine doesn't recommend such intersections, by lumping all local news into a single category, then it has little utility over simply visiting the websites of local news organizations. And if your system forbids local news entirely because the breadth of local news across the world is too much to moderate, then your system omits the news that directly impacts the lives of news readers the most.
I don't see any way around the above, but what makes a recommendation engine any worse than the local newspaper itself? Simply this: a newspaper is the same for everybody who reads it, when somebody is being sent down some bizarre radical rabbit-hole, those around them can read the newspaper and see what sort of thing their friend is reading. But recommendation engines provide personalized experiences. People can be radicalized without others in their community seeing what is happening, denying that community the opportunity to effectively respond and intervene. People withdraw into their own personal realities, losing touch with those around them. The further apart people grow, the harder reconciliation becomes.
There's very little news that I need to change my approach to the day for.
Since I live in the Middle East the only one relevent to me is the iran-us feed, but even if I was interested in European news there are almost none there
Or, to put it another way, relevance is a property of the relationship between the material and the consumer. You would have to know something about me in order to provide me with relevant (to me) news.
Relevant can better judged in hindsight. I’d try to find an outlet which publish stories once a week, or less. That filters out the less important stories.
That's pretty similar to what Reddit does. And it doesn't even need much user data, other than the user expressing what they are interested in.
The only downsides I’ve found is that the only way they make money is buymeacoffee. I haven’t looked into their privacy policy as well.
Also... what does relevant mean? This news about conflict in the congo is not really relevant.
It's also a tricky thing due to interconnectedness: I generally don't care that much what happens in the US, but clearly there are important things happening there, which can have knock-on effects the world over...
https://twitter.com/PoliticsForAlI
https://twitter.com/NewsForAllUK
Bite-sized news headlines with sources in the replies if you need them, and the standard Twitter discussion thread.
IMHO we can do without almost all news coverage, except where it touches our work or social circle. Important bits like election dates, new regulations, significant opportunities etc seem to get to us in any case trough random conversations.
I'm trying to build something like that. Take hacker news and let the community curate it into a weekly newsletter of just the important posts.
It's a work in progress and I'm a little starved for feedback.
It doesn’t seem like Legible News uses any part of its profits to donate to Wikimedia or its contributors, or at least this isn’t stated anywhere on the website.
I also feel like me and my as-of-yet unnamed/unreleased product is probably the main benefactor, since my top level comment has gotten a lot of attention (>20 emails too). I promise that I don't know the OP.
Or that some kid detonated himself. Or something something about the NFL....
As an example,, If there's a summary about court proceedings, link to the transcript.
Gone are the day we need someone to interpret the original event for us with their own bias.
It looks it could take a whole team to manually update every notable development in a timely manner.
https://followthisstory.com/rss/?q=[url or search term]
https://followthisstory.com/rss/?q=https://harpers.org/archi...
It is a WiP (new filter parameters shortly), but you can also visit the root of that domain if you rather get email alerts or use a slack notification. The UI in particular is very alpha, so please feel free to send suggestions. [edit:learning about formatting]
"Ben Swann Exposes Institutional Failure Surrounding The Legitimate PizzaGate Investigation"
"Germany’s Deep State Murders Doctor for Spilling the Truth"
> I guarantee you will hear about it.
Choose one.
I had to book emergency flights back to the UK on a day's notice last year before Christmas because all the countries were closing borders. My partner would've missed it and been stuck abroad if I didn't tell her about it. In a world as connected as ours, finding out what's relevant and what's not is a continuous struggle.