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Ask HN: Any viable alternatives to Google News?

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Ask HN: Any viable alternatives to Google News?

#1

Post by metadat »

I hate how unclear the degree of echo chamber is with Google News. It also keeps showing me the same articles for days or weeks after I've already seen and read them.

Are ther any real contenders out there? Ideally it'd aggregate all news across the globe and let me browse by region, perhaps with automatic translation for non-english articles.

The idea of a global, non country-centric front page is highly appealing to me (I want to deprogram myself from the western slant, it possible).

Re: Ask HN: Any viable alternatives to Google News?

#2

Post by PaulHoule »

I think of that song by the Talking Heads Psycho Killer that has the line "Say something once, why say it again?" which sometimes seems like the most sensible thing anyone has every said.

That is, a "news" application should work a bit like Tinder. News articles should slide through and be either accepted or rejected: you should never see the same article twice in the "new" feed.

This counts for sites like HN and reddit too.

Re: Ask HN: Any viable alternatives to Google News?

#5

Post by metadat »

wolpoli wrote: post #4

You could also consider building your own by adding various RSS feeds into your own RSS aggregator software/service and using that as your front page.

Absolutely, but if that's required I might as well go and build a full-fledged product around it. There is definitely lots of opportunity to improve and explore the space. It's hard to imagine that nobody except Google has done this so far.

Re: Ask HN: Any viable alternatives to Google News?

#6

Post by dflock »

metadat wrote: post #5
wolpoli wrote: post #4

You could also consider building your own by adding various RSS feeds into your own RSS aggregator software/service and using that as your front page.

Absolutely, but if that's required I might as well go and build a full-fledged product around it. There is definitely lots of opportunity to improve and explore the space. It's hard to imagine that nobody except Google has done this so far.

There are/have been plenty of products in both the news aggregator and the feed aggregator spaces, but it seems like there's almost no revenue available, so they tend to come and go.

Re: Ask HN: Any viable alternatives to Google News?

#7

Post by assttoasstmgr »

I quit using the totally-not-biased Google News over 5 years ago when nearly all top headlines were consistently sourced from The Huffington Post. This was logged-out by the way.

For the uninitiated, it is a glorified opinion blog. Don't take my word for it; to quote Wikipedia, "HuffPost is an American news aggregator and blog... created to provide a liberal alternative to the conservative news websites such as the Drudge Report."[1]

I place them one step above BuzzFeed, which pumps out quality hard-hitting journalism such as "Quiz: How Much Random Vagina Knowledge Do You Have?"[2]

Don't worry, "articles were randomly chosen by a computer program". That's when I realized that Google News was programmed to be an echo chamber, otherwise such biased unverified opinion wouldn't consistently bubble up to the top and masquerade as "news".

I use Bing News[3] now. It's not perfect, the signal-to-noise has gotten slightly worse over time but at least it's sourced from legit news outlets.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HuffPost

[2] https://www.buzzfeed.com/audreyworboys/how-well-do-you-know-...

[3] https://www.bing.com/news

Re: Ask HN: Any viable alternatives to Google News?

#8

Post by no-dr-onboard »

assttoasstmgr wrote: post #7

I quit using the totally-not-biased Google News over 5 years ago when nearly all top headlines were consistently sourced from The Huffington Post. This was logged-out by the way. For the uninitiated, it is a glorified opinion blog. Don't take my word for it; to quote Wikipedia, " HuffPost is an American news aggregator and blog... created to provide a liberal alternative to the conservative news websites such as the…

For the person about to reply that you can “hide outlets”: doing so only marginally improves the experience. I’ve personally hidden over 20 outlets with overtly leftist biased writing. My feed is now only obscure local channels that are owned by the same company. Google News refuses to permit socially conservative viewpoints (Fox News doesn’t make that list for me) to make up a user’s personalized feed.

Re: Ask HN: Any viable alternatives to Google News?

#10

Post by assttoasstmgr »

no-dr-onboard wrote: post #8
assttoasstmgr wrote: post #7

I quit using the totally-not-biased Google News over 5 years ago when nearly all top headlines were consistently sourced from The Huffington Post. This was logged-out by the way. For the uninitiated, it is a glorified opinion blog. Don't take my word for it; to quote Wikipedia, " HuffPost is an American news aggregator and blog... created to provide a liberal alternative to the conservative news websites such as the…

For the person about to reply that you can “hide outlets”: doing so only marginally improves the experience. I’ve personally hidden over 20 outlets with overtly leftist biased writing. My feed is now only obscure local channels that are owned by the same company. Google News refuses to permit socially conservative viewpoints (Fox News doesn’t make that list for me) to make up a user’s personalized feed.

They shouldn't be promoting any news source over another. A true unbiased news aggregator should spit out articles like a bingo cage. Once you rank sources, or include opinion masquerading as news, it's manipulation of the media. When you deliberately bury all sources you disagree with, you are de facto creating an echo chamber. It's enraging that they tried to pass themselves off as unbiased with the vague statement about the ordering of the articles being "chosen by a computer program"; I noticed that statement no longer appears.
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