121–130 of 195 posts
I got fed up with Google News a year or so ago, over the echo chamber that the news site has become. It motivated me to create https://statesreport.com , with no ads and no tracking.
Are you open to creating an API for us to query for https://www.chooseholly.com ? We currently pull data from Bings API for our Discover feature. Happy to pay for usage :)
I used Google News for a long time. I have since blackholed it on all of my machines. By tailoring the news articles presented to be based on the interests that Google data mined from my Google profile, it became an echo chamber even worse than Facebook. It became a very bad source of news: all of the articles were self-reinforcing each other with very very little actual diversity of sources.
Could not disagree more. I am generally pretty liberal but get news stories from Breitbart, Fox news, etc all the time in my feed. I like to read all sides so love this aspect of Google news. Heck I get negative Google stories from Google. Can't ask for more neutral.
As someone who runs a regional newspaper, I very much doubt that the future of healthy journalism is in the hands of a big company such as Google. We are already thinking hard what to do with the Facebook monopoly, we would be crazy to voluntarily stick our neck into another one.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I wish they would spend more time providing tools for people to consume information in powerful ways rather than trying to 'tailor' experiences. Power users are a very, very small number, probably sub-million, generate zero revenue, complain a lot and want features that cost a lot of money. There's no reason why Google would target them. But I'm sure you can find a professional service that does that, allowing for…
Empowering users to become more and more power users is literally the reason humanity bothers with science and technology. It was the reason shared by many people who started now successful software companies. It's sad to see profit motive distract people away from that core reason.
Quite the opposite. Technology allows users to become less and less power users.
> It's sad to see profit motive distract people away from that core reason.
Not sure I got that part, are you complaining that other people are not leaving their jobs and living aside to build the product you want for free with no pay?
As someone who runs a regional newspaper, I very much doubt that the future of healthy journalism is in the hands of a big company such as Google. We are already thinking hard what to do with the Facebook monopoly, we would be crazy to voluntarily stick our neck into another one.
Especially one that's shown a willingness to try to silence narratives that are against its corporate interests:
http://www.businessinsider.com/new-america-fires-antitrust-r...:
> Barry Lynn, formerly the director of the antitrust-focused Open Markets program at New America, charged Wednesday that Google pressured the think tank to fire him and drop his program after he wrote a statement in June praising European regulators for fining the search giant $2.7 billion for abusing its market power. In that statement, Lynn said Google's "market power is one of the most most critical challenges for competition policymakers in the world today."
> After Lynn published the statement, Eric Schmidt, chairman of Alphabet, Google's parent company, contacted New America, and "communicated his displeasure," Lynn told the New York Times on Wednesday.
> "Google is very aggressive in throwing its money around Washington and Brussels, and then pulling the strings," Lynn told the Times. "People are so afraid of Google now."
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>Those who align with the left typically don't see it, because the organizations align with their biases Are you sure it's not the opposite? That you don't agree with them because they don't align to your biases? Again, based on your comments here, your viewpoint seems to be far more than "slightly" right of center. By comparison, if I were a hardcore socialist, I would find objections with much of the center-left/ce…
What have I said that's solidly right? I've only stated that other organizations show bias. The irony is that you're applying your own biases to someone whom you've never met while denying bias. I don't agree with most of what comes out of right-wingers' mouths. I'm a center-leftist that's tired of having half of the viewpoints "filtered". When Politifact labels something Trump said as "Pants on Fire", then buries th…
The idea that the mainstream media is biased against conservatives is an argument that just won't go away. At some point people who read the NYT or WSJ and say it's far too liberal may have to accept that their definition of "center" is skewed. And people can make mistakes or have opinions without there being any inherent and insurmountable political bias involved.
I apologize for assuming you were conservative, I didn't realize you identify as a liberal. It was a judgement based on the fact that you're claiming the very-much centrist mainstream media is too biased toward liberal news, and Facebook is too biased towards liberals with the very-much centrist mainstream media outlets, and YouTube is too biased against center-right figures without mentioning they demonetize controversial left-leaning channels, too. It sounded exactly like many far-right extremists I've talked with in the past, and again I apologize for that inference.
I don't think this conversation is going anywhere productive and we're getting dragged from the original topic, so I'll just finish by re-stating my point that if everyone is biased against your completely centrist and moderate viewpoints, your viewpoints may not be as centrist and moderate as you thought. This applies to both sides of the aisle.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Snopes and Politifact If these are your enemies, your political views might be a little further than "slightly" right of center.
Don't know about Snopes, but Politifact has a well documented bias. http://thefederalist.com/2016/12/16/running-data-politifact-...
I would take their claims of bias with a grain of salt.
Sadly, Google is also sitting on a HUGE amount of archival newspaper in a completely unsearchable state. They've OCR'd thousands of historical papers but the search is completely broken. https://news.google.com/newspapers It's a pretty incredible resource if you know the date/place of an event but if you wanted to research a little more broad it's a tool with incredibly untapped potential. I wish they would spend mor…
What specifically is broken? Basic keyword search seems to work.
I used Google News for a long time. I have since blackholed it on all of my machines. By tailoring the news articles presented to be based on the interests that Google data mined from my Google profile, it became an echo chamber even worse than Facebook. It became a very bad source of news: all of the articles were self-reinforcing each other with very very little actual diversity of sources.
I disagree with your sentiment about Google News. I think it does a great job of aggregating all the sources to a given headline. It even goes as far as labeling the sources as "Opinion pieces", "Highly Cited", or even "From ___" opposing entity sources (eg. From Saudi Arabia sources). There is no easy answer to to display ONLY unbiased sources, because that would require an unbiased source to pull from. Which I don'…
HackerNews is pretty much turning into an echo chamber itself around news. Pretty much every announcement is greeted with intense negativity, less discussion of facts, or other solutions. And I'm not just talking about tech companies, even the release of a new language, framework, or tool is often accompanied by excessive negativity.
If you don't want news to make money via ads, and you don't like systems to encourage subscriptions, and you don't like paywalls, than pretty much you need public funding of news by the state like NPR/PBS/BBC to make news a non-profit.
So I propose the following: A national 3% tax on all internet connections: mobile phone bill, cable, etc. The revenue for this to be paid to PBS/NPR/VOA/other public news orgs.