Hacker News Reader

You're actually sort-of describing the original idea for Vox. They wanted to basically have like a website of things happening with explainers for everything they could easily link-to and keep updated so they could write a story explaining an event and provide context for experts and normal consumers.

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]

> 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.

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

well gpm's idea doesn't necessarily involve any writing from my read of it.

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.

As little writing as possible anyways. I end up giving titles to events, but that's about it.

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.

Even just curation without text still risks an agenda. WaPo is famous for this: when there is something happening they want to take a position on, their entire homepage becomes every nitty gritty news piece or reflection that would push one via sheer inundation into supporting their cause with shock and rage.

Edit: maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned any names; it seems some people took that as an attack on their particular herd.

> You're actually sort-of describing the original idea for Vox. They wanted to basically have like a website of things happening with explainers for everything they could easily link-to and keep updated so they could write a story explaining an event

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?".

> 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.

These days "CRDTs" are all the rage for this sort of use case :P

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...

https://crdt.tech/

> this sounds like a job for version control

Not at all. The most that would get you is "what did Vox think in 2018?".

can not we just offer a list of articles in all beginning of all article?

This sounds like a chrome extension

I was thinking about building something that sounds very similar when I was working at a news site. For me the main benefits of organizing articles into sagas is, that you can easily start reading up on something only once there is actually sufficient information there and to follow stories over time.

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.

I think we're thinking along nearly identical lines :)

This sounds very useful. The quality of sagas would matter a lot. This is from my personal experience of trying to build a news site in my past life which cuts the clutter and focuses on facts. The problem I faced was in how do I decide which link to choose without biases. This turned off a lot of people who did not conform to that view. Even on clear topics. For instance most people agree racism is bad but there would be diverse opinion on where to draw the line and what actions constitute racism.

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.

Circa News from 2012 (now closed) had some similarities to what you are describing.

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 found Circa to be an amazing way to consume news. News was written in the most boring way possible, and it would have bullet points for news stories along with sources for each bullet point. As much as I like reading full articles to get all the nuance, there's just too much information to consume. Circa seemed to be the sweet spot between brevity and information density that I need.

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.

If you need access to news data, we'd be willing to grant it for free:

https://newscatcherapi.com/news-api

I do!

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

Question re. your site: "By using this website you agree to our Policy." refers to what policy?

This is very cool, especially the assembling news into units of longer duration, it would be great if you also expanded on that with design and make the overarching sagas visually distinct.

Gathering news/article links & source links into sagas? Perfect. Love that idea.

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!

> Would it be user-submitted links & tag based?

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.

Interesting, how are you planning to collect articles for the news "sagas", and how often do you want to update information? I'd say articles written on the same day as some event will always have more noise than summaries written later.

So I plan to collect every link I can, and then sort them into "events" that are based on something that actually happened.

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.

The BBC (in collaboration with The Guardian and PA) created an RDF ontology[0] a few years ago for describing "Story lines" stories that can span multiple articles over time.

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

You could run them through sentiment analysis too, categorise sources as left/right/middle etc. Flag obvious content farms/bias etc. I do think it's been done before but can't remember any details from the top of my head.

Would be great to have a timeline with "AP reported that 1) ..." with a list of say five facts and then "these 274 sites reported the same facts within the same 24h" or something similar with another early source identified. You could then add data like "Twitter user $USERNAME reported that ..." earlier in the timeline, or what have you.

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.

This resonates with one idea I've had. A email-only service: I subscribe to your email and get notifications when you find something interesting in the internet and post a link to the service.

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.

It's not as slick as what you're describing, but that sounds similar to https://www.hey.com/world/ - if you use hey for email.

You send an email to world@hey.com, it posts it as a blogpost, people can subscribe to your blog.

"you’ll get a “world.hey.com/you” page (with the “/you” part being the same as the beginning of your @hey.com email address)"

That's just another walled garden with user accounts and other bs.

All hard-to-argue with pain points that could be addressed in a novel way. There’s a lot of unsolved problems in the new media morass and it would be great if a couple of new white hat firms emerged in this space to cut through the noise and the bullshit.

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.

Monetization is definitely a hard problem. If I have any advantage it's that my costs should be a lot lower, since I'm happy pointing people at pre-existing articles instead of writing my own. Unfortunately I don't think I have any great insights that the news industry hasn't already had on it.

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.

> 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.

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.

> Most news sites seem to have a severe allergy to linking to original sources, but often the original sources have a lot of value.

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.

I've always wanted to see (or do) that - just something that you can check in on a year later and say, whatever happened to X from last year?

That sounds a lot like Wikinews.