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Google to add 'news feed' to website and app

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Google to add 'news feed' to website and app

#141

Post by anon1385 »

hyperdunc wrote: post #109
jamespo wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Equating Breitbart and the Guardian shows your bias I'm afraid. Something like the Huffington Post would have been a better comparison.

I didn't really equate them, I just used as them as examples since they'd both already been mentioned. Also, don't you think that suggesting Breitbart is worse than the Guardian might point to your own bias? The Guardian is designed to look less like a tabloid, which gives the appearance of it being more honest - but is it really a less biased source of news? It's very hard to judge such things. I've been reading the…

>I've been reading the Guardian for a long time and I've noticed it's been embracing some of the more unsavory elements of the left in recent years.

What elements? If you mean deliberately antagonistic opinion pieces from transphobic feminists (TERFs) then yes you're right. But I'm guessing that's probably not what you were referring to. If you mean run of the mill socialists then I can't see any truth to your claim - there's a small handful now and it's mostly the same small handful they published 10 years ago (Monbiot, Jones, previously Milne, and a couple of others). The Guardian as an institution hates socialism, even if it occasionally allows a mild opinion piece from a socialist about how it might be nice to raise the top rate of tax by 1% to pay for hospitals.

Other than an increase in the amount of clickbait the Guardian is mostly the same as it was 10 or 20 years ago. The editorial position has actually shifted to the right slightly since Viner took over. But historically it's always been a liberal paper. It supported the SDP, has supported the Lib Dems at various times, supported Blair and supported Iraq.

Part of liberalism involves giving voice to any old opinion no matter how dangerous, crazy, offensive or wrong, at least as long as it comes from the elite class and doesn't do anything as gauche as question the property rights of the wealthy middle class readership (coincidentally this leads to great clickbait on a lot of social and religious issues). So that's why you see the Guardian doing things like publishing articles by Ergodan or other fairly repulsive people as well as hosting flamewars over atheism/islam/feminism/cultural appropriation etc. It's not being left wing that leads to any of that. If it was a left wing paper it would contain far fewer articles of that type because the left wing generally doesn't subscribe to a "free market of ideas" like liberals do.

Re: Google to add 'news feed' to website and app

#142

Post by nl »

hyperdunc wrote: post #124
panarky wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is false equivalence. It's comforting to think that Breitbart and The Guardian are equally biased, and if you average them together, you get the truth. But I'd challenge you to find headlines on The Guardian that match Breitbart stories like these: "Pro-Nazi Roots of Planned Parenthood Revealed" "The Solution to Online Harassment is Simple: Women Should Log Off" "Huma Abedin Most Likely a Saudi Spy With Deep Ina…

It'd be more productive to compare the substance of articles and not their clickbait headlines. For example that last headline in your list is incendiary but the points it makes are well cited. From memory here are a couple of Guardian headlines: "Your worst nightmare: a successful Donald Trump Presidency" "Have we reached peak beard?" And here's a couple they're serving up right now: "'Soon you'll be able to afford…

With the exception of Peter Dutton's new mega department will streamline dog whistling and fear whipping I cant see how you could compare these with the Breitbart articles in anyway.

For example, "Your worst nightmare: a successful Donald Trump Presidency" is an article critical of the left(!) The headline itself comes from the conservative British historian Niall Ferguson. The complete quote is:

“I think one of the things Guardian readers, and their counterparts on the American coasts, don’t want to think about is the possibility that despite his obvious ineptitude, Trump might actually be successful.

“I said last summer to a bunch of liberal friends: ‘Your worst nightmare is not a Trump presidency; it’s a successful Trump presidency.’ The successful Trump presidency scenario is one in which, despite it all, the economy does better thanks to deregulation and tax cuts, foreign policy delivers some big wins on North Korea, the Middle East.

“It doesn’t take an awful lot for a president to start looking good. If the expectations start really low, which they have done, it may be one win, and I definitely don’t rule out a kind of ‘success in spite of himself’ scenario. And then you begin to wonder if a left-of-Clinton Democrat in 2020 would be blown away. We’ll see. The fun thing about doing history is you really can’t tell at this point which way it will go. It could quite easily go Jimmy Carter and he could be a lame duck.”

I just don't see how you can compare this to the Breitbart "reporting".

Re: Google to add 'news feed' to website and app

#143

Post by sametmax »

BigJono wrote: post #41
aphextron wrote: post #11

The "newsfeed" pattern is one of the worst ideas humanity has ever had. Never has it been so easy to manipulate public opinion at will. 10 years ago there was a such thing as standards in journalism. Now anypoliticalblog.com's headline has been promoted to the equal status of an actual news organisation by means of the implicit legitimacy of appearing in a news feed. This insanity has reached a crescendo with the off…

> 10 years ago there was a such thing as standards in journalism Was there? Because last I checked all that these so called 'reputable' sources of news seem to put out is biased garbage full of misleading data and often blatant lies. I've seen better journalism from bloody buzzfeed than I have from some of the "proper" news networks in Australia...

+1. It's very hard to take seriously reputable sources when the work they produce is of such poor quality. Lies, partial truth, clear lobby/politics/companies influences, lack of fact checking... Even the correct ones, doing a decent work, don't provide much interesting analysis or insight.

That's why many people are on sites like HN: we get often more values from the comments that the articles themself.

Re: Google to add 'news feed' to website and app

#144

Post by breatheoften »

BigJono wrote: post #41
aphextron wrote: post #11

The "newsfeed" pattern is one of the worst ideas humanity has ever had. Never has it been so easy to manipulate public opinion at will. 10 years ago there was a such thing as standards in journalism. Now anypoliticalblog.com's headline has been promoted to the equal status of an actual news organisation by means of the implicit legitimacy of appearing in a news feed. This insanity has reached a crescendo with the off…

> 10 years ago there was a such thing as standards in journalism Was there? Because last I checked all that these so called 'reputable' sources of news seem to put out is biased garbage full of misleading data and often blatant lies. I've seen better journalism from bloody buzzfeed than I have from some of the "proper" news networks in Australia...

Like most things in Australia I was impressed by Australian mainstream news outlets (coming from the US). I have a memory of reading the comments after an article on a real estate related story published by one of the bigger newspapers and being genuinely impressed by the quality of the reader discussion.

That kind of feedback and engagement is the only thing that can keep journalism standards high I think.

Re: Google to add 'news feed' to website and app

#145

Post by Qub3d »

elihu wrote: post #98
pesenti wrote: post #9

20 years ago, all the engines (AltaVista, Lycos) did exactly that. And then they all became "portal" like. And then a brand new engine with just a search box (so refreshing so clean) came along and swiped them over....

Time for a new search engine maybe? Duckduckgo seems like the obvious alternative search engine these days, but how much of their own indexing do they do? It seems from some casual googling (no, the irony of that is not lost on me) that they mostly rely on Bing or Yahoo as the backend. Some thoughts: Search engines should be a lot easier to build in 2017 than they were two decades ago when Google started out. We don'…

I like DDG, I just hope they have some contingency in place when the Yahoo! engine they're relying on inevitably goes belly up.

Re: Google to add 'news feed' to website and app

#146

Post by Qub3d »

rawfan wrote: post #96
atupis wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some weird reason duckduckgo usually gives worse search results than google.

I repeatedly tried "living in another search-engine" for a month at a time. I tried Bing, DDG and Yahoo. If I didn't search for something easy (like "population new york") the results were useless and superficial. Searching for something like "programatically create credit memo magento" yielded the user documentation on how to create a credit memo while Googles first result was the relevant API page with the second b…

I use DDG, but honestly still go to google a lot. The secret is DDG allows "bangs" -- !g in front of a query is a google search. It turns the Chrome omnibox into an even more powerful tool.

Re: Google to add 'news feed' to website and app

#147

Post by Qub3d »

killedbydeath wrote: post #56
to_bpr wrote: post #5

>The feed will include news stories from a variety of publishers, to avoid the so-called filter bubble effect, where people follow only content aligned with their pre-existing point of view. >"To provide information from diverse perspectives, news stories may have multiple viewpoints from a variety of sources... and, when available, you'll be able to fact check," the company said in a blog post. I'm growing increasin…

2020 election will be Larry Page running against Mark Zuckerberg

I don't know about you, but I'll be voting for Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson[0].

[0]: http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/dwayne-the-rock-johnson-...

Re: Google to add 'news feed' to website and app

#148

Post by hyperdunc »

anon1385 wrote: post #141
hyperdunc wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't really equate them, I just used as them as examples since they'd both already been mentioned. Also, don't you think that suggesting Breitbart is worse than the Guardian might point to your own bias? The Guardian is designed to look less like a tabloid, which gives the appearance of it being more honest - but is it really a less biased source of news? It's very hard to judge such things. I've been reading the…

>I've been reading the Guardian for a long time and I've noticed it's been embracing some of the more unsavory elements of the left in recent years. What elements? If you mean deliberately antagonistic opinion pieces from transphobic feminists (TERFs) then yes you're right. But I'm guessing that's probably not what you were referring to. If you mean run of the mill socialists then I can't see any truth to your claim…

I can think of several common opinions surrounding Islam, gender and culture that the Guardian would not publish today. So I don't believe its as liberal as you say.

Re: Google to add 'news feed' to website and app

#149

Post by matthewmacleod »

tormeh wrote: post #112
CM30 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've clearly not seen the UK press. The Daily Mail has been around for decades, and has quality standards roughly on par with Fox News at best. The tabloids have spent years posting any old speculation they can find and sometimes even hacking people's phones for information. And the more respectable papers have generally had their own problems with reporting standards. The likes of the Guardian and the Telegraph sh…

Ah, the UK press. How did that happen? Why do the British like that sort of thing? And I'd also add that the Greek press is also garbage. They don't turn a profit at all and are simply propaganda for their owner's point of view. Their owners usually being family-owned conglomerates. It's as if the Kochs started their own newspaper. I get the impression this is actually pretty common in many countries, particularly ea…

Let's stress – some of the UK press. The Express, Daily Mail, the Sun, and so on. Tabloid journalism is still a thing, and has been present for an awfully long time globally – it's not a new thing, nor particular to the UK.

But then there's also The Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Economist, the FT – all of which have bias and flaws in their own way, but are indisputably higher-quality.

The mistake is in assuming that there can ever really be a realistic, completely-free-from-influence publication. In reality, we have to rely on a diversity of publications, funding models and political viewpoints, and make informed decisions. This needs to be backed by strong FOI laws and a culture of press freedom, which sadly is something which the UK has not been doing well at recently.

Re: Google to add 'news feed' to website and app

#150

Post by matthewmacleod »

hyperdunc wrote: post #148
anon1385 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I've been reading the Guardian for a long time and I've noticed it's been embracing some of the more unsavory elements of the left in recent years. What elements? If you mean deliberately antagonistic opinion pieces from transphobic feminists (TERFs) then yes you're right. But I'm guessing that's probably not what you were referring to. If you mean run of the mill socialists then I can't see any truth to your claim…

I can think of several common opinions surrounding Islam, gender and culture that the Guardian would not publish today. So I don't believe its as liberal as you say.

If you are making these statements, you need to identify the things you think will not be published.

It's very easy to whip out an accusation like "This would never be published" if you never say what "this" is.

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