Infobitt – A movement to do for the news what Wikipedia did for encyclopedias
infobitt.com
infobitt.com
It is bothering me that I have to even sign up to view anything on Infobitt.com. That already is sending me away since I refuse to blindly sign up for any service.
This is fine if you have been paying attention to everything up until that point.
This is not so great if you came in a bit late and want an overview of everything about the story.
In other words, wiki forces users to collaborate on the same extended piece of content. This has all sorts of great effects, if enough people are participating. But it makes it harder to make short fungible pieces of content, rearrange them by vote, and do contests to discover the best version of each type.
How do you aim to tackle lengthy bike-shedding over trivial nonsense? (for example, there are at least a million words about hyphens, dashes, endashes and em dashes).
In the fullness of time, at scale, we'll have features permitting us to filter/weight the news presented to us according to our preferences. Breaking news into small pieces makes this possible.
The reason Wikipedia articles are often biased is that people in authority in the community simply do not respect the neutrality policy. Even if most Wikipedians and most readers would prefer things to be more balanced, those in de facto control of an article determine the article's degree of bias. If the wording and order of facts is determined by open public vote, my hypothesis is that there will be more of a moderating effect.
I can imagine this to be much harder in a community with a vague, biased crowd not identifiable due to the hight amount of uncoordinated accounts participating.
I'd love to hear more thoughts on this bias-problem.
Larry's attempt to break down the news into bits is an interesting experiment (and I wish him the best of luck as he goes forward). I'm not sure he will be able to attract the user base he needs to make it work though. We pay our writers, and are moving to implementing a revenue-share model to reward our writers. I'm not sure if the "work-for-free-while-the-owners-get-rich model works any more.
[1]http://newslines.org [2]http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedia-is-not-a-newspaper/ [3]http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-13-deadly-sins/
We've got quite a few very motivated writers who find writing bitts to be fun, and they know they're working on a site that will be open content (complete with API) and thus a potentially forkable public resource. We're considering doing a profit-sharing system, but I'm worried about the effect that will have on the community. We haven't even hard-launched (the content is still behind a login), we have had minimal publicity, and yet we've got enough regular participants to have a decent evening edition. Relying exclusively on paid writers will prove a drain on resources and might pose a significant roadblock to allowing the site to scale. It's a good thing we didn't do that with Wikipedia...
If you don't pay people, you have to compensate them in other ways--especially in terms of community recognition and other evidence of the value of their work to the community/readership as a whole.
And that's it. You report the facts of the investigation and then the public has an unbiased view of the facts, without the subtle nuances that introduce bias. Such as, "A black police officer shot a Vietnamese man. Until the facts of the case reveal that race was a motive, then those details presumptively introduce race as a motive. That's the kind of journalism that is successful financially because it generates strong emotions, and thus viewers however it's subtly dishonest not because those facts aren't true, but because of the motivation behind why those facts where included.
Let's help him create a 2nd top ten website instead of being another HN troll criticizing bravely on the Internet.
If wikinews isn't able to get this idea working, why is everyone else required to keep supporting it. Maybe it's time for an alternative.
But Wikinews isn't some just started website. It launched in 2004.
The idea that everyone needs to keep working on it until it's successful is becoming a joke.
It's been a decade. It hasn't worked.
People should feel free to develop an alternative. Wikinews has no right to a monopoly on an idea.
A new site with a fresh start has a better chance of widening its contributorship.
E.G. not living in the states, half of the "top news" section is pretty irrelevant to me and the relevancy of the others seems to be based on the personal interests of the tech sawy contributors. I'm sure this gets better once more people are using it. But i guess having some noise is unavoidable.
The nice thing about this crowd approach might or might not be, that only provable facts are quoted and fewer false accusations are made. Thats mostly the reason why I stopped following news after the Utøya massacre in 2011 and later quitted my job at a news site.
Is there already an API one can fiddle around with? I think there is a huge potential in being able to use that data and hopefully feed stuff back. In my opinion, the problem with journalism today is not journalism itself but the distribution of content and the lack of choice how to consume it.
[0] http://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rol...
In the long run our platform will make it possible for you to get the news ranked according to your preferences and interests, which will be made possible by the fact that we break the news into facts that people can rank differently. So your friends' (and compatriots') rankings can be up-weighted and what you're shown will be different.
I know this isn't what you see on the site yet...but in 2001 and 2002 you wouldn't see what you'd have liked on the front page of Wikipedia, either. :-)
Sorry, no API yet. We will have one; we're open content. We're not even hard-launched. We've built what you see on a shoestring...
A story, possibly apocryphal, about Richard Feynman: He gave a strong negative review to a textbook that the other reviewers endorsed. When confronted he said he might not be the smartest person in the world, but was he more intelligent than the average of a hundred people? Certainly!
Or from a Car Talk brain teaser: Do two people who don't know what they're talking about know more or less than one persion who doesn't know what they're talking about?
What about 100 or 1,000 people? I'm pretty sure they know less, as they create in their echo chamber greater certainty and additional untruths.
(I am overstating the case for effect; there is value in the aggregate factual knowledge of crowds, and they are not always ignorant.)
The Infobitt model has an advantage over wikis that will enable a wisdom of crowds effect. People contribute and vote independently of each other, not by having to agree on a single version of the content. Yes, there can be comments, and that will have a biasing effect; but what people say in comments is obviously not as important as their votes, which they can exercise independently of each other and comments.
Also, since the pieces of content are short and fungible, they are therefore capable of being subject to contests. We can submit competing versions of facts, and the best can rise to the top.
Finally, every fact in Infobitt has to be sourced, and the fact is a summary of the source; and (soon) we'll be able to compete to write the best summary. So, to be sure, we'll have bad summaries occasionally, but generally I think we'll have good ones, once we've built the community up some more.
I think that is the point. If Infobitt gets the readers and revenue, who will pay the originators of facts?
And you can have conferences like TechCrunch.
How will you prevent users from politicizing your content? For example, will you exclude more politicized sources such as Fox and the Huffington Post? Separate editorial sources from straight journalism? What about government-controlled media such as Russia Today (RT)?
It seems like the content of politicized stories could be mostly politicized 'bitts' (where often both sides are deceptive and none of the information is valid), and it could merely represent the beliefs of whichever side has more dedicated contributors.
It still functions better than most major news outlets do. Usually the only time I see an article that is very heavily slanted is when it the pet issue of some particular group or cause (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_United_Sta... )
Its rules on sources aren't bad at all, it's just implementation which is a bit dodgy sometimes.
With the voting on GN being time and search traffic? I am not sure how the determination on GN ordering works, but the idea of human curated news seems an even more sensation driven principle than the current network news industry.
Even HN falls victim to sensationalism on a regular basis, and I presume most of HN's users are somewhat invested in the quality.
I am not meaning to detract from the effort, but the outcome for such a scenario seems pretty repeatable. Especially with the history of non-niche vote driven news outlets/sites, and their predilection to not be viewed as quality, definitive, or substantive.
Machines should think. People should work.
Is this something Infobitt evaluated or do you mean they don't rank it well for your personal needs? Also, they do provide 1-2 sentence summaries, but nothing as detailed as Infobitt.
I happen to think Google ranks news surprisingly well, though not well enough to be my primary source (I doubt any machine or group of people will beat my personally selected and organized RSS feeds), but that's only for my needs. FWIW I don't logon to Google and block most tracking so I'm not sure they customize it for me.
EDIT: Clarified first paragraph
Issue is these other news aggregators just link you to articles that may be the best individual source.
And you have to waste time reading an article instead of just getting the key news facts fast.
Folks already contributing hundreds of hours for free for some time.
I can't imagine someone doing free work and writing, ranking restaurant reviews, editing, citing, writing pieces of encyclopedia entrees or electing Presidents like in 2008.
Grassroots wha?
This is just a beta version.
For me, it's already a pretty good way to catch up on the main news fast.
I can pick one bitt and learn some key facts and move on.
Fast, easy, good enough.
Much faster than any alternative.
And, philosophically, do you HN folks really want to rely on the MSM to tell you what's important? And likes, shares and troll-ridden comments on news stories?
Or do you want a democratized way to decide, collectively, what news stories and facts are important.
Don't forget the NYT, etc. screwed up on no WMD's in Iraq.
I was at a small group dinner with Judith Miller, ex-NYT, who's nice but she messed up.
Who's checking the mainstream media?
This has as big of a chance to improve humanity as wikipedia, I believe. The elimination of news curators will reduce other people thinking for them.
I'm pretty sure it isn't. People who claim the opposite seem to miss something important. Well, of course it depends on how to define "wikipedia for news", but there are several reasons why it is empty talking.
First off, wikipedia is all about data. It's really cool that it provides easy to use service as well, and that's the reason why it is somewhat more successful than OSM, but nevertheless, Wikipedia is the data. Newspapers, TV, now all these news portals are services. There is important difference between data and service.
Data is gathered and shared amongst us as people working for some great good, which is useful for us personally as well. I might event not like you, disagree with all your opinions, but as long as you can provide to that great work of ours some knowledge that I cannot provide (even if I'm not particularly interested in it) I welcome you. All that matters to me is that you are not lying here. And, as you can see, even in such (presumably) politically-neutral environment there is much disagreement and silly behavior, people tend to get personal, there're edit wars, forked projects like encyclopedia dramatica, because there obviously appears to be some content which isn't interesting for one community, but interesting for another. I don't know much about content of sites like knowyourmeme and such, but russian clone of lurkmore is actually a funny example, as many of articles there are about some real, important topic, about which article on Wikipedia also exists, but are composed in a much more harsh manner, without worrying about political neutrality, and often delivering some curious facts, so if you are interested in the subject you would probably read article both there and on wikipedia.
Service is something to be delivered. It must be on time, as "cold news" aren't even news anymore. It's about you providing me information I'm interested in even before I know I'm interested in it, so you should guess it (no matter if it's having good intuition or using machine learning). It's about it being provided in right amount, so I wouldn't stop reading before I get to the most interesting part (and never buy a newspaper from you anymore). It should be reasonably entertaining, so I would want to come back for more. That being said, service is kinda hard. And sadly I assume you don't want to work your sweat off just to please me, for free it is. So our little community-driven platform should be as useful for me, as it is for you. There are several easily deductible reasons why it is a problem, so I'll skip discussing them and get to the first conclusion: something that is about opinions and is equally useful and interesting for all participants isn't news service, it is social network. So if you think you are building news service I guess you don't understand what you are building, because actually you are trying to build one more social network. Lack of understanding what you are making is a problem by itself.
Second is empirical confirmation of the first, and is pointed out in other comments: we have plenty of services like that and services which are social networks in the first place (reddit, HN, even twitter for that matter) are more successful news platforms that specialized news platforms. And I don't even see any claims of how different form them it would be.
Third problem is as much as I don't like journalists, there are reasons for them to exist. They go to dangerous places and make photos, they use all kinds of shady tricks to find ugly and quite interesting story under plain-looking surface, they know who to ask, they know how to ask. They know what to tell to their consumers, they know how to tell. If you are building your own virtual newsroom without journalists you either need to use resources provided by real ones working for other agencies, which makes your own platform some aggregator like facebook or google adds, or, yeah, reddit, HN, Twitter, everything else. Or you just won't have anything (interesting) to tell, really.
But, still, what I said in the previous post are pretty general statements which I believe must be true to some degree for every single form of "wikipedia for news".