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Show HN: Not Depressing News

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Re: Show HN: Not Depressing News

#151

Post by jniedrauer »

all2 wrote: post #136
simias wrote: post #108

The first thing I notice browsing the homepage is that these "not depressing news" are often feel-good stories that can be uplifting but also aren't very intellectually stimulating, e.g.: >Thanks to ‘Super Mom’ Saving Her Husband’s Life, He Opens His Eyes in Time to See His Son’s Birth That's super nice to hear but it barely qualifies as "news" as far as I'm concerned. Meanwhile those that seem more interesting are n…

> contemplating the scale of the universe (both in space and in time) is really soothing to me. I contemplate those things and regularly verge on existential crisis. From a news curation perspective, I typically follow a couple of simple rules: timeliness, importance, and proximity. For a site focused on 'good' and 'uplifting' I think I would follow your preferences and focus on new research and development (like can…

> I think I would follow your preferences and focus on new research and development (like cancer research, or cheaper drugs/prosthetics, etc.).

This very quickly devolves into pop-sci clickbait. Cancer gets solved roughly 3 times a week, along with Alzheimer's and every other scary sounding disease. And our battery capacity somehow goes up by an order of magnitude a few times a month. And so on.

Journalism is just broken in the internet age. Clickbait is more profitable than reality. Anger inducing clickbait is the most profitable of all.

Re: Show HN: Not Depressing News

#152

Post by armatav »

mixedCase wrote: post #144

You might wanna check this: Unhandled Rejection (TypeError): Cannot read property 'children' of undefined App._callee2$ src/App.js:72 69 | let topTen = [] 70 | 71 | let newPostsRaw = await axios.get("https://www.reddit.com/r/" + subreddit + "/new.json?sort=new?") > 72 | let newPosts = newPostsRaw.data.data.children 73 | ^ 74 | // console.log(newPosts) 75 |

I'll take a look ASAP

Re: Show HN: Not Depressing News

#153

Post by armatav »

dceddia wrote: post #97
rococode wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A basic start: bigger font size, drop the underscore (text-decoration: none), change the font color to black or dark gray. You can do a lighter color on hover to make it clear it's a link. Not perfect, but I think it's better than what's live right now. You can browse for a nicer font, too. Plenty of free choices at Google Fonts. End result would be something like this: https://i.imgur.com/c7YJCN9.png Maybe align the…

Flexbox makes vertical alignment a snap. It's even pretty well supported these days: https://caniuse.com/#search=flexbox In this case, all you need to do is add "display: flex; align-items: center" to your a tags. After that I'd probably get rid of the margin-bottom on them too. Finally, to visually center everything vertically, remove the margin-top on the img inside the a. A bonus of using display:flex is that it'l…

You are a genius. I was super panicked and couldn't get the working memory going to actually fix the spacing.

Thanks!

Re: Show HN: Not Depressing News

#154

Post by armatav »

sailfast wrote: post #94
armatav wrote: post #2

Hey HN, I'm looking for some feedback on NDN, it's a little MVP that will eventually give you only the not-depressing news from all over the web - it's seeing quite a bit of retention, and I'd like to know what you think! I'd like to turn it into a product, but it's pretty hard to see where to go.

Do you have to curate this, or is it dependent on other curated websites to generate the news? Some sort of ML-backed reading of each story to determine not-depressing vs. depressing? I could see aggregating different curated sites as a potential liability. Was fun to read all the items on your page. Great work!

This MVP is dependent on Reddit, I'm going to start working on a scraper that runs a sentiment analysis on articles (or something) to provide the same effect from every news source available.

Re: Show HN: Not Depressing News

#157

Post by armatav »

crispyambulance wrote: post #98
bitexploder wrote: post #25

On the one hand, I will compliment this and say what a good idea is this is. The world is becoming, on average, a less violent, more prosperous place since the industrial revolution. Fewer people starve and there is much less armed conflict. People need to be reminded of this. But it can be a really dangerous game to live in an bubble and turn blinders on to reality. I hope everyone can take this "not depressing" new…

I think the intent is solid. But using curation by someone else in an attempt to solve the problem of overwhelming malaise in one's news feed just won't "scale" (sorry for using that valley buzzword). How much can any entity curate on a day-to-day basis? How does one decide what's actually worthy? Didn't we see this before in the early web when Yahoo thought it could categorize everything? Can we trust _anybody_ (oth…

Do things that don't scale.

Re: Show HN: Not Depressing News

#158

Post by simias »

sdenton4 wrote: post #146
simias wrote: post #108

The first thing I notice browsing the homepage is that these "not depressing news" are often feel-good stories that can be uplifting but also aren't very intellectually stimulating, e.g.: >Thanks to ‘Super Mom’ Saving Her Husband’s Life, He Opens His Eyes in Time to See His Son’s Birth That's super nice to hear but it barely qualifies as "news" as far as I'm concerned. Meanwhile those that seem more interesting are n…

I think a big part of the problem is an asymmetry of how good things and bad things tend to happen. A terrorist attack might take place in minutes; building a strong community takes years of small efforts, no one of which might be 'newsworthy.' As a result, I find obituaries to be a great source of 'good news,' rounding up awesome work by an individual that perhaps played out over decades. It would be interesting to…

It's true and I think an other problem is that "uplifting news" generically is kind of a lower common denominator: it's easy to come up with an actual newsworthy information that would be almost universally considered terrible but harder to find something that everybody will find uplifting.

Country X allows abortion? That's going to make people angry. Forbids abortion? Now the rest are angry. A new law that makes polluting more expensive? Surely that's uplifting... unless you have to drive your car for work and you end up losing money because of it. It rains a lot? That sucks. It doesn't rain enough? Now farmers are complaining about the crops.

Completely untainted positive news are hard to come by.

Re: Show HN: Not Depressing News

#159

Post by all2 »

jniedrauer wrote: post #151
all2 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> contemplating the scale of the universe (both in space and in time) is really soothing to me. I contemplate those things and regularly verge on existential crisis. From a news curation perspective, I typically follow a couple of simple rules: timeliness, importance, and proximity. For a site focused on 'good' and 'uplifting' I think I would follow your preferences and focus on new research and development (like can…

> I think I would follow your preferences and focus on new research and development (like cancer research, or cheaper drugs/prosthetics, etc.). This very quickly devolves into pop-sci clickbait. Cancer gets solved roughly 3 times a week, along with Alzheimer's and every other scary sounding disease. And our battery capacity somehow goes up by an order of magnitude a few times a month. And so on. Journalism is just br…

I rather like EEVBlog's criticism of tech journalism.

It seems 'journalists' are actually just curators, looking for content that generates clicks. We're trying to feed the ad machine to make a little revenue.

What would a successful model look like? There are a few revenue models that are at least interesting:

Hackaday was purchased by SupplyFrame, doesn't run ads, has an internal store, and has decent articles (with sometimes rage-inducing flaws). The bias is obvious, they are owned by a parent company that now uses the platform to advertise on.

The Guardian is shifting towards an ad-less, pay what you want revenue model.

Patreon isn't really a model that an organization can use... Or can it?

All major players in the social media and news market tend to lean on ad-centered models. Do examples of successful social/media companies exist that don't depend on ad revenue?

Re: Show HN: Not Depressing News

#160

Post by elektor »

Ptyx wrote: post #148
elektor wrote: post #14

For those that are interested in positive/uplifting news, I've been following a few newsletters that have similar content: 1) https://www.goodgoodgood.co/goodnewsletter/ (From a recently funded Kickstarter) 2) https://www.theguardian.com/info/2018/feb/12/about-the-upsid... (From the popular newspaper The Guardian) 3) https://tinyletter.com/inbetternews (More cute news/ GIFS of animals) 4) https://www.positive.news/ (…

https://twitter.com/HumanProgress

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