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Comment by fresh_broccoli | Hacker News Reader

I think this is the wrong direction. We need better journalism, not better summarizing aggregators.

Summaries are no substitute for real articles, even if they're generated by hand (and these apparently are not). Summaries are bound to strip the information of context, important details and analysis. There's also no accountability for the contents.

Sure, there are links to the actual articles, but let's not kid ourselves that most people are going to read them. Why would they need a summarizing service otherwise? Especially if there are 20 sources of varying quality.

There are no "lifehacks" to getting informed. I'll be harsh: this service strikes me as informationally illiterate person's idea of what getting informed is like.

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Also, they talk about "echo chambers" and "full spectrum of global perspectives". Representing all perspectives sounds great in theory, but how far should it go?

Should all politicians' remarks be reproduced verbatim with absolutely no commentary, no fact-checking and no context? Should an article about an airplane crossing the Pacific include "some experts believe that this is impossible because Earth is flat?"

Excessive bias in media is definitely a problem, but I don't think that completely unbiased media can exist while still being useful. In my expierence, people looking for it either haven't thought about it deeply enough, or they just want information that doesn't make their side look bad.

> Representing all perspectives sounds great in theory

A bigger bias problem by far is bias by omission, so including all stories whether they meet the presenter's political agenda or not would be a great start.

Who decides whether or not a given perspective is in the overton window?

> Should all politicians' remarks be reproduced verbatim with absolutely no commentary, no fact-checking and no context?

Yes. That's an interview, and is much better than summarizations and short soundbites and one-sentence quotes.

This presupposes that you have an informed population that already knows the facts and context

Just printing whatever lies a politician or CEO says without any context or pushback is not a useful “news” source. You could just follow them on social media if you are into that sort of thing.

Interviews have been a core part of serious journalism for much longer than you or me have been alive. If you want to be informed on a deeper level, you have to read or listen to interviews.

World leaders will always lie or side-step the truth in lesser or bigger degrees, because they represent a people or an organizations and committed fully to the interest of those. Part of being mature as a listener or reader is understanding that, and still get the useful information you need. Every person you meet in life will first and foremost speak from their own interest and agenda.

Then these interviews are complemented by regular reporting and interviews with people from the opposing viewpoint, if you so wish.

> We need better journalism, not better summarizing aggregators.

I agree, but how do you envision that happening? Journalism died a long time ago, arguably around the birth of the 24-hour news cycle, and it was further buried by social media. A niche tech company can only provide a better way to consume what's out there, not solve such large societal problems.

> There are no "lifehacks" to getting informed.

I don't think their intent is to change how people are informed. What this aims to do is replace endless doomscrolling on sites that are incentivized to rob us of our attention and data, with spending a few minutes a day to get a sense of general events around the world. If something piques your interest, you can visit the linked sources, or research the event elsewhere. But as a way of getting a quick general overview of what's going on, I think it's great.

We're seeing success with giving journalists better tools to create engaging journalism (which HN hates :). Many outlets are now seeing that they have to once more prove their value, and there exists some really great subscription-only media here in the Nordics and France.

That's precisely what Axios does, and they make money from this (and they don't list their sources). So I can see Kagi pursuing this.

FWIW, I agree with you.

I used to be a news junkie. I've always thought of writing the lessons I learned, but one of them was "If you're a casual news reader, you are likely more misinformed than the one who doesn't read any news." One either should abstain or go all in.

I guess I'd amend it to put people who only glance at headlines to be even more misinformed. It was not at all unusual for me to read articles where the content just plain disagreed with the headline!

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