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Show HN: Not Depressing News

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161–170 of 176 posts

Re: Show HN: Not Depressing News

#161

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…

Back before the rise of our newer technology, curation seemed to work pretty well. Most folks in the US had access to three or four TV channels, one or two local papers, and a handful of national newspapers and general interest magazines.

I'm not sure that particular genie is going back in the bottle, though.

Re: Show HN: Not Depressing News

#162

Not to be a downer, but the current top story is "Thousands of Native voters in North Dakota getting free IDs". The reason that's necessary is not not depressing. It's sort of like "Man who fell off click only broke both legs".

Nothing wrong with voter ID, nearly all developed countries do it.

Nearly all developed countries use a national ID of some sort to do it though. Plus elections are usually run nationally. We don't have a national ID in the US. And the elections are run locally. Which means local politicians get to meddle in both of those areas. It get ugly pretty quickly.

Re: Show HN: Not Depressing News

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps they are, but news also heavily sensationalizes and dramatizises in order to sell clicks. Leaving out the good traits of a person to paint him as a monster, even though it might have been an honest mistake.

> Perhaps they are, but news also heavily sensationalizes and dramatizises in order to sell clicks. I don't think that's true if you choose your news with even a modicum of care. Read the Economist, and you won't ever hear of starving children. Unless they become statistically relevant, which points to certain problems with the wish for "positive news". In other quality outlets, you're more likely to read the human-i…

I agree, there are still some good news sources in the traditional print media. It is unfortunate that US society has reached the point that they are all now seen by a large chunk of the population as partisan and untrustworthy.

Re: Show HN: Not Depressing News

#164

I would like something that filters either Google News or Apple News (app), and removes all stories of murders and abuse. I understand that a small % of adults behave badly, but I’m not sure that reporting each instance isn’t actually making the problem worse. Or desensitizing us. I guess morbid curiosity sells. I would also like to exclude most Trump news. But still know what’s going on in the world.

The trouble with the vast majority of Trump "news" is that it's not really news - if I wanted to know the content of each and every one of his tweets I'd just follow him on Twitter. It's very lazy journalism.

Sure, but it feeds the outrage machine and leads to more ad views. Win-win!

Re: Show HN: Not Depressing News

#167
Just FYI: Firefox and Edge both give me a warning about it not being secure.

"The owner of www.notdepressing.com has configured their website improperly. To protect your information from being stolen, Firefox has not connected to this website."

Re: Show HN: Not Depressing News

#168
Living in a news bubble isolated from the depressing news of the time inhibits the negative feedback lagely responsible for making change from reaching the public.

Aren't people's news feeds on social emdia already effectively doing this? And it's part of the problem.

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