Hacker News Reader

Comment by parpfish | Hacker News Reader

the twenty-four hour news cycle's unyielding need for urgent content has broken many people psychologically and we need to 'deprogram' them.

i've often thought about making a site that lets you easily do side-by-side comparisons of news sites on different timescales (1 week, 1 month, 1 year) so you can pull it up and show them "see all this stuff that you feel like you NEED to consume? like it makes you a better informed member of society? how much of it actually mattered and how much of it was just there to hook you in the moment?"

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I just wanna throw in that Tangle News[0] strikes a pretty good balance here. Their core offering is detailed breakdowns of what is generally regarded as the top four stories of the week, one a day from Monday through Thursday, which is usually more than enough space to keep you "up on current events", and they usually (though not always) tend to give enough space to let stories develop before summarizing.

They're a good fit on your "one week" timescale.

[0]: https://www.readtangle.com/

Agreed, they've been a boon for me.

The objective here feels like a good candidate for people to vibecode into their homebrew rss readers, in a composite feed. The marked source feeds then get hidden behind a minor effort gate. You still keep your unmarked and “safe” xkcd or whatever feeds as siblings.

A well informed population is important. The problem is they're not well informed they're well-hooked to whatever exaggeration and drama the news can whip up.

The invented news and invented intensity is the problem.

"hooked" is right.

I'm trying to tell people, you have to take initiative, you have to have agency and be responsible for your own attention.

If you are being "fed" from a "feed" you are being fattened for slaughter

Agreed. The 24 hour news and social media with our brightest phds learning to drain all attention from you have broken and radicalized our society.

our brightest phds are attacking attention from all fronts (ads, social media, news), but the news one in particular is particularly insidious because for years you were told that watching the news made you a good, responsible person. but back then the news was just one or two 30minute blocks on TV and the newspaper.

People that get sucked into social media srolling for hours know that they're not doing something good for themselves, people are guzzling from the fear-monger newshose and they think they're doing something "healthy".

“ but back then the news was just one or two 30minute blocks on TV and the newspaper.”

There was all kinds of quasi-serious news-adjacent crap like 60 minutes, 48 hours, etc. The big difference was none if it was data driven and backed by algorithms that are constantly tuned for max engagement.

Was 60 Minutes always crap? Until recently it seemed to me to be reasonable quality investigative journalism.

https://www.verity.news/ might be interesting for you; they try to show you both sides of the spin.

that is really interesting idea. I'd be really happy to read such a site, as I very often wonder if current hype/prediction will be relevant in the future. But I always forget to check being flooded by more hype.

What would you need to start such a project?

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