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Credder Wants to Create an Equivalent to “Rotten Tomatoes” for News

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Re: Credder Wants to Create an Equivalent to “Rotten Tomatoes” for News

#171

Post by munificent »

josefresco wrote: post #58

This, and many other concepts based on "vetting" news assumes that the audience cares. A significant portion of the audience does not care, and is instead looking for news that validates their worldview, and furthers their (and their chosen political party's) goals. So basically these services will cannibalize the part of the audience that does care about truth, turning people against each other over marginally skewe…

The past few years have certainly provided mountains of coal to shovel into my cynicism train's engine, but I am not quite so far gone to believe this entirely.

Your point is true of many people, but I think even more do want good information and there is the possibility to improve journalism going forward. Snopes is a good example that fact checking is useful, desired, and can help drive consensus. I can't count the number of stupid Facebook threads I've seen get resolved by a Snopes link.

Your concern about the first-order effects of this are valid. If we're very lucky, the second-order effects may prevail. Yes, shady news sites won't want to be validated by Credder at all, leaving only better news to be critically examined and thus potentially undermined. But, if the system works, the absence of something like Credder on an article may itself become a signal of disreputability.

The odds of this panning out are slim, but I think it's important to keep trying until something works. Democracy cannot function without citizens having accurate, relevant information in their heads.

Re: Credder Wants to Create an Equivalent to “Rotten Tomatoes” for News

#172

Post by vinw »

DonHopkins wrote: post #152
vinw wrote: post #61

If you like this, then you might also like spidr[0] "SPIDR is an AI-powered news aggregator that uses text analysis to group similar news together. The aim is to provide fast access to relevant news from different viewpoints." [0] https://spidr.today

I dunno -- the name "credder" sounds much more authoritative and trustworthy to me than "spidr", because they didn't leave out the penultimate "e".

But in spidr's favour I've been able to use it for quite a while whereas credder is still just an idea.

Re: Credder Wants to Create an Equivalent to “Rotten Tomatoes” for News

#174

Post by wutbrodo »

jonathankoren wrote: post #170
jerkstate wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that the theory is that having "skin in the game" in the form of money would help optimize the news for something other than clickworthiness.

You’re assuming that a publisher would be willing to put enough money into a prediction market to make a profit from the market machinations rather than advertising or subscriptions. This is also assuming that prediction markets are actually useful in general, and useful in this specific case. Both of which are open to discussion, but even for this specific case, it’s not even clear what the the prediction market wou…

> You’re assuming that a publisher would be willing to put enough money into a prediction market to make a profit from the market machinations rather than advertising or subscriptions.

The publisher doesn't (need to) interact with the prediction market at all. The idea isn't that the publisher isn't directly financially punished for inaccurate reporting. That doesn't happen in the RT analogue, isn't what's proposed by the OP service, and can't really happen in any constitutional system (plus, subscribers may be looking for content that isn't factual but feeds their biases).

The conversation is about a third party for those who want to know about the factual accuracy of a publication.

That being said, I agree with you that prediction markets aren't quite a good fit. When the NYT publishes some clearly inaccurate nonsense and leans on its reputation as "the paper of record", the issue generally isn't predictive analysis which is later uncontroversially falsified. The issue is usually lying about statistics in ways that are clear with close attention but that escape the attention of the casual reader and thus shape the conversation. Prediction markets wouldn't really help much here: if the outcome the market was predicting was uncontroversial, then you wouldn't need a system for checking the article in the first place.

Re: Credder Wants to Create an Equivalent to “Rotten Tomatoes” for News

#175

Post by wutbrodo »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #89
josefresco wrote: post #58

This, and many other concepts based on "vetting" news assumes that the audience cares. A significant portion of the audience does not care, and is instead looking for news that validates their worldview, and furthers their (and their chosen political party's) goals. So basically these services will cannibalize the part of the audience that does care about truth, turning people against each other over marginally skewe…

It's even worse. For most people, news is just a social object. Something to talk about with family, co-workers, etc. Whether or not any particular story is true doesn't matter - what matters is that everyone in their circle is aware of the described event (whether they read the same story, or a different one). Humans are pretty good at fact-checking and critical thinking when getting it wrong means some immediate lo…

That's what I find so disgusting about this tendency of many people. If I don't care enough about an issue to be rigorous about it, then by definition I don't care enough about it to 1) vote based off of it or 2) spread my uninformed opinion about it (when I do talk about it, I'm clear that I have only a tentative, uninformed model of the situation).

People have often defended the average voter with "people have busy lives and don't have time to think about this stuff" (and as you point out, don't really have the will to), but I've never understood how it's defensible to treat policies that affect other people's lives as idle fun.

Re: Credder Wants to Create an Equivalent to “Rotten Tomatoes” for News

#176

Post by goto11 »

beat wrote: post #137
keiferski wrote: post #4

Taking a look at the Rotten Tomatoes “Top 100 Films of All Time” list [1], I’m not exactly sure why it’s a model to be replicated. It’s extremely obvious that “top” means “popular and/or most advertised.” [1] https://www.rottentomatoes.com/top/bestofrt/

Fully half that list is movies from the 20th century, going back as far as 1920. I think it's a flawed list in many ways (especially the lack of non-English language films, missing masterpieces like Tarkovsky's Stalker ), but it doesn't seem to be driven by mere popularity or advertisement.

Popularity and marketing is a factor to the extent that lesser known movies will not get enough reviews to count. Note that some movies gets ranked lower despite having a higher percentage. E.g Citizen Kane has 100% but is ranked several steps below Black Panther which has 97%. This is due to Panther having more reviews so the confidence is higher.

Re: Credder Wants to Create an Equivalent to “Rotten Tomatoes” for News

#177

Post by bduerst »

DamnInteresting wrote: post #97
joeblau wrote: post #40

I wrote something that was trying to do this a back in January that was called desational[1]. What I did was very basic but the process I did went as follows. 1. Break up news articles into sentences 2. Pay Amazon MTurkers to tag sentences as `news` or `not-news` 3. Train a text classifier based on the results for Mturk 4. Process new articles using the trained model to identify and strip out parts pf the article tha…

Very interesting idea. However, having dabbled with Bayesian classifiers myself, I suspect that your decision to break the article into sentences may be a fatal flaw...both the Mturkers and the classifier lose out on valuable context that way. I know because I took a a similar approach in one of my own projects, and the classifier could never gain enough 'confidence' to classify things, even after thousands of traini…

Good point, but keep in mind that many news articles also break paragraphs out into single sentences.

For example: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-china-airbus/airbu...

Re: Credder Wants to Create an Equivalent to “Rotten Tomatoes” for News

#178

Post by darkpuma »

jimbokun wrote: post #138
amanaplanacanal wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect most people either can't or don't care to tell the difference. Fox News, for instance is widely regarded to be biased to the right. And their opinion or editorial content absolutely is, often to the point of absurdity. But their actual news content is very well done so far as I can see. Do their viewers distinguish the two? I doubt it. Do their detractors distinguish the two? I doubt that also.

"Do their detractors distinguish the two?" There is a significant amount of respect for Shep Smith and Chris Wallace in predominantly liberal news discussions (like r/politics subreddit) for being willing to criticize Trump and Republicans.

Was there similar respect for these two men before 2015, when they were presumably being no less sincere but circumstances were such that the targets of their ire were not targets shared by predominantly liberal news discussion forums?

That might sound like a rhetorical question, but it's not. I don't know the answer.

Re: Credder Wants to Create an Equivalent to “Rotten Tomatoes” for News

#179

Post by malvosenior »

jimbokun wrote: post #134
josefresco wrote: post #58

This, and many other concepts based on "vetting" news assumes that the audience cares. A significant portion of the audience does not care, and is instead looking for news that validates their worldview, and furthers their (and their chosen political party's) goals. So basically these services will cannibalize the part of the audience that does care about truth, turning people against each other over marginally skewe…

I think there are people who care. But the real problem, is the growing cynical world view that we cannot trust any authorities, and therefor have no way of assessing truth or reliability of anything we read or here. The first step is to educate people this is not inevitable. No, don't trust authorities, but trust your ability to research and verify and spot faulty or unsupported arguments and assertions. I'm pretty…

> I think it will be very difficult now for anyone to argue there was not a massive effort from the Russians to help elect Trump

Statements like this are exactly why people are cynical of the mainstream news. There is no evidence of "massive" efforts from Russia to get Trump elected, yet you state it as a fact and that we should trust mainstream news.

The tighter people cling to false narratives pushed by the media, the more you'll see trust drop through the floor. Since not only is the media lying to people, but there's are large groups of people that will believe anything that fits their political view regardless of information that comes to light that contradicts it.

Re: Credder Wants to Create an Equivalent to “Rotten Tomatoes” for News

#180

Post by owldimoon »

goto11 wrote: post #121
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, ok. In that cause I gotcha. I just didn't want it to sound like these films were somehow safe when it came to subject matter.

No, they are just safe enough to not offend critics.

Which is a line that changes over time, I might add! It's interesting to think about how each movie on that list got there in a way that's relative to the era it was produced in.

You could choose a cutoff, sort by date, and have a pretty neat timeline of what's considered "safe".

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