Show HN: Grasswire – A collaborative newsroom for the Internet | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Grasswire – A collaborative newsroom for the Internet

grasswire.com

69 pointsaustenallred25 comments

Hey, so it's pretty buggy, but we decided to throw it out there sooner than later.

Basically the idea is to bring in all of the social media feeds and let everyone upvote and fact-check the content in real time. Turn the news over to everyday people.

I really like this idea, for quite some time I've been toying with the idea of creating a way to collect and organize all news (social/online newspapers/etc) into one stream by topic so things like "Aaron Swartz", "Ukraine Conflict", "BP Oil Spill", "Heartbleed", "Goto fail bug", etc and then arrange them on a timeline. The thought being to create an order of events and maybe even support connecting articles that link together so that you can see where (and when) a story broke and watch it unfold. Possibly even couple it with a summary engine so you can get quick bullet points about one subject across multiple sources. There would have to be a way to rank a sites credibility (Maybe through voting, maybe through an algorithm, maybe a little of both) but yeah. I really like what you have here so far as it seems to be in a similar vein.

Thanks. That is the end goal - you could literally follow any topic (and we're adding more social networks).

The thing that we found performing the process manually is that some of the best content comes form people with a couple followers, so there's not enough data (retweets, interaction) to determine what content is quality. Our proposed solution to that now is just to show everybody everything that matches a certain keyword, similar to the hackernews or reddit /new feed.

Interestingly enough there are some people doing this already, just without a tool. So they'll watch the networks all day and gather links into google docs, fb pages, twitter, etc. It works really well, but it's a one-man team, and it's a very painstaking manual process. We want to let more people contribute to that same process, and eventually (hopefully) entirely crowdsource breaking news.

>> eventually (hopefully) entirely crowdsource breaking news

Yes, and almost equally important (at least IMHO) would be providing a record of what happened in the past. A way to find every piece of news surrounding an event. For example if I want to see a full outline of every Snowden related article I could pull them all up and then filter down to just news articles that were first to publish a particular story. While I am sure there are people creating pages/full websites to document this one issue I would love to have that for every event so that instead of endlessly googling for articles related to something you could just got to Grasswire (or other site). Sort of a Wikipedia for events but built from sources instead of written by people who then link to sources.

I'm actually working on a project quite similar to what you two are talking about: http://www.mosttalked.com/ The idea is to prioritise news be shares + display the most popular tweets of people that you possibly care about, along with a summary as well. It might inspire you hopefully. I believe merging news outlets with social media has so many points to improve.

I like your site. My only criticism is that there are not dates and times with anything. It would be nice to know how old a tweet is instead of assuming you are sorting from most recent to oldest.

Functionally I also cannot seem to scroll to the bottom of the tweets, and I would fix the loading on the main page. The news articles are loading on the left side of the screen and then shifting to the center.

Great feedback; you're absolutely right. We'll make timestamps clearer and implement an infinite scroll with the next iteration. Thank you!

Awesome idea, something I've been wanting to see for a while. Maybe add a splash/about page to give more information on what it is for people who happen upon the site from other sources than HN, where it has been described.

I've been following grasswire for a month or two now, since I was made aware of it (I've actually linked you on my website as a similar project to one of mine). I'm excited to see it is up now and will definitely be playing with it.

The 'fact-check' feature is fantastic, I'm excited to see how it plays out and hope you get some traction.

You don't happen to have an RSS feed being generated for grasswire, do you? I'd love to play with the feed via xml.

Would love to collaborate you if you need another interested brain to bounce ideas off of, feel free to email me.

No RSS feed yet. My email is in my HN profile as well.

Yea I'm pumped for the fact-check stuff as well.

This would have been great to prevent the "mob ruling" on, say, Reddit during the 2013 Boston Marathon. Very cool.

That's the hope. Reddit is great at what it does, but that system needs to have something to reign it in. Generally a very simple fact-check has done the job when we have been "reporting" on Twitter (@grasswire and @grasswirefacts), so we are trying to expose more people to that process and democratize it.

Sometimes I get the app with the Russia news and sometimes I get the landing page. It's probably a propagation issue.

Looks awesome. Excited to watch this grow.

Cool stuff, Austen. Good to see a product that cuts through the noise online. What do you think of inside.com from Jason Calacanis?

I feel like Inside is mostly a response to summly. Calicanis basically said, "this computer-generated content doesn't work well, I'll do the same thing by paying reporters.

But I feel like that misses the larger point. We're all instantly connected and publishing now, and realistically every single person can act as an editor, fact-checker and reporter; it doesn't make sense that we still use the same model as we did in the 1800s to create news.

Basically, we think we can create a world where news is entirely controlled by everyday people, and not governments or corporations.

Love this idea. My only crit so far is that you limit my password to 20 chars. Really keen to see where you go with this :)

Haha, we'll look into that :)

Seems to be defaulting to the landing page. Load from front page traffic, I assume?

DNS issues; it's really slow to propagate the new page for some ISPs. Sorry about that.

http://grasswire.com/#/newsfeeds/d3ebe78f-918f-4a9f-9c98-cdd... is working better for some.

Good idea, however at this point of time almost all the news are about Ukraine. I know it is important, but surely other events are going on as well. Technology is fine, but content is king.

Yes, of course. This feed is specifically about Ukraine; we can add other feeds by topic (see http://grasswire.com where we will eventually list other topics/events).

The concept is a newsroom that we can spin up with one click about any given topic, and let everyone curate and fact-check it.

Did not see that, good point.

Austen! So glad you launched successfully. The new site looks great.

Nice work Austen. Excited to see this out there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com