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I Hate the News (2006)

aaronsw.com

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Re: I Hate the News (2006)

#61

Post by austenallred »

ta82828 wrote: post #58
austenallred wrote: post #8

I, strangely enough, agree with Most of what Aaron says. And I'm the founder of a news company. I worry about this attitude on a macro scale, but it's hard to argue with on a micro one. I spend most of my day following what's going on in the world, and it hasn't added much value to my life. But I worry about everyone not caring. Not because that would kill my company (I started it because I hate news in its current f…

Asking me to sign up before I've even looked at the page is annoying (to me). http://tabcloseddidntread.com/

Yeah, originally everything was open, we didn't even require a login to upvote/comment/etc. Then some folks from ISIS came on and started trying to muck everything up, so we had to throw a gate on it (banning by IP was just too chaotic). We'll add some more info to the gate soon.

Re: I Hate the News (2006)

#62

Post by austenallred »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #52
austenallred wrote: post #8

I, strangely enough, agree with Most of what Aaron says. And I'm the founder of a news company. I worry about this attitude on a macro scale, but it's hard to argue with on a micro one. I spend most of my day following what's going on in the world, and it hasn't added much value to my life. But I worry about everyone not caring. Not because that would kill my company (I started it because I hate news in its current f…

The sign up process didn't ask me where I was from and/or what I was interested in. For general world news with a reasonable frequency and good digests I've got The Economist. It's the national, local and specialist news that I'm missing.

Right now it's world/international news only. We'll be building out other sections as we scale, but need to nail this down first, and there's a lot of work we still need to do on that.

Re: I Hate the News (2006)

#63

Post by icebraining »

chez17 wrote: post #38
bkurtz13 wrote: post #21

He uses voting as an example. Which begs the question: why vote? If you're living within a corrupt, self-serving political system (we are), then naturally the only people who run for office will be products of that system. If a candidate who genuinely wants to change the status quo somehow manages to slip in, they will be prevented from achieving anything meaningful once inside. No matter what, none of these people h…

Well the majority of people aren't voting and our system is clearly going to shit on a major level. The point is that it's your civic duty to vote, people fought and died for your right to vote, and it's the best non-violent way for you to impact your world. It boggles my mind when people advocate for others not to vote. You know that's what the power structure wants right? An apathetic population. How on earth can p…

it's the best non-violent way for you to impact your world

Clearly parent disagrees that it impacts the world in any way; simply asserting it is probably not going to change their mind.

You know that's what the power structure wants right? An apathetic population.

Not voting does not mean being apathetic, and vice-versa.

How on earth can people look at our current situation, where the majority don't vote, and say it's working?

I don't think parent is saying it's working, or that the solution is to not vote, but that voting or not is irrelevant to the result, and therefore, why bother.

Re: I Hate the News (2006)

#64

Post by austenallred »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #54
austenallred wrote: post #8

I, strangely enough, agree with Most of what Aaron says. And I'm the founder of a news company. I worry about this attitude on a macro scale, but it's hard to argue with on a micro one. I spend most of my day following what's going on in the world, and it hasn't added much value to my life. But I worry about everyone not caring. Not because that would kill my company (I started it because I hate news in its current f…

Great landing page, I'm sure conversion rate is good. But the visuals don't make me want to stay, even with the mini-tutorial its a little annoying. Crowd-sourced fact checks are an interesting idea, I'm not sure it works for news. You need to be fast and thorough, which is hard. I'd love to have reliable background information for long-running issues, like the Ukraine crisis. Maybe this will be easier, as the value…

Thanks for the feedback. What "visuals" are you referring to that don't make you want to stay?

It's tough for me to grasp what someone wants/needs to stick around. Right now we have a pretty good core of hardcore news junkies that come every day, and maybe that's OK for the curation/fact-checking side of things, but what do you want/need?

We're adding a "background" area to each news item. That was an issue that I didn't really have at first because I sit there and watch the news all day, but turns out not everybody is like me :). That may take a couple weeks along with all of the other changes we need to make, but it will be in there.

Re: I Hate the News (2006)

#65

Post by balabaster »

The most ironic thing I think about this piece is that he claims not to have followed the news since he was 13 and has drawn this conclusion...

Having spent a large portion of my life keeping up with the news, other than a few minor quibbles about semantics, I'm inclined to draw the similar conclusions.

Most of what is presented is not news, it's politically slanted propaganda relating to daily events that further the political position of the network that owns that media outlet - this goes the same for papers, TV and radio. They only bring in "experts" that corroborate their own viewpoint, and when opposing opinions stray too far from their party line and cannot be discredited, they're let go. It happens time and again, and eventually you have to wonder why you continue to allow your own perspectives to be influenced by their agenda.

It's gotten to the point where I'm so tired of wading through all the bullshit to find facts or something remotely resembling truth that I frequently wonder why I bother...

We all know at this point that what goes on behind the closed doors of Government doesn't even closely resemble "legal" or "constitutional" and when they get busted, they "welcome public debate" and change the law or reinterpret the constitution to allow their illegal or unethical behaviour to continue and discredit anyone against that as at best unpatriotic or at worst a traitor... you get to a point where you wonder which side is the side of truth and righteousness. Does any of it matter? Is it all just bullshit, distracting us from greater things...?

Re: I Hate the News (2006)

#66

Post by sarciszewski »

tom-lord wrote: post #41
slau wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's apparently not possible to use a space in the password. Please don't limit the characters or length of a password. Thanks.

My company considers one of its systems "more secure" because they enforce a policy that all passwords must contain 8+ non-space characters. The implementation? "Must be 8+ characters; must not contain spaces." I've expressed my view on this (and similar password-related policies) many times, but apparently it's all simply a box ticking exercise for pen testers...

There are much better ways to enforce this validation. Shoot me an email if you'd like any assistance.

Also, https://github.com/dropbox/zxcvbn is amazing.

Re: I Hate the News (2006)

#67

Post by austenallred »

aidos wrote: post #55
austenallred wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're looking at is kind of like a backend - consider it the "talk" page for Wikipedia. It's a little bit chaotic this early in the morning, but our algorithm pulls in the "breaking" stuff on the left, and the most upvoted stuff flows to the top of the "popular" page. Grasswire users fact-check stuff for accuracy, and comment on whether or not/why it's important. The site is mostly for news junkies. It's a litt…

I really like this. I too am sick of seeing stuff promoted in everyday media which is clearly fabricated. Admission. I think I up-voted some comments by accident. It's not obvious what that large up arrow does (now that I say it out-loud I think it's probably pretty obvious!) and there's no way to undo the operation. Sorry. Are there plans to add a frontend to it?

Well once I push these code changes in the next few minutes you should be able to click on the upvote again to remove it. For now, don't worry about it :)

We see the "frontend" as a daily email that goes out or an app with a daily push notification that says "Hey, here you go, the best news of the day in 30 seconds." So the hours of work that the people are putting in on the back-end really just reduces the amount of time for the end user. We could probably hire five people to do that, but it's important to us that it's democratic and open.

Re: I Hate the News (2006)

#68

Post by ta82828 »

austenallred wrote: post #61
ta82828 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asking me to sign up before I've even looked at the page is annoying (to me). http://tabcloseddidntread.com/

Yeah, originally everything was open, we didn't even require a login to upvote/comment/etc. Then some folks from ISIS came on and started trying to muck everything up, so we had to throw a gate on it (banning by IP was just too chaotic). We'll add some more info to the gate soon.

I don't know what you can do on your site, because I didn't want to sign up, but you can look at HN without having to sign up and you still need an account to vote or to comment.

Re: I Hate the News (2006)

#69

Post by hueving »

popeshoe wrote: post #59

I feel that this was and is a super myopic view to hold, while it's true that most of the worlds news probably doesn't affect you directly, it will almost certainly affect you indirectly, since you live in the world. It boils down to the same reason you should vote, sure you probably won't swing any elections, but in the same way your voting might influence politicians into listening to the things you care about, by…

>while it's true that most of the worlds news probably doesn't affect you directly, it will almost certainly affect you indirectly, since you live in the world.

That's a useless conclusion in itself. There is an unlimited amount of news if you just include the whole world since "you live in it". Do you follow individual county elections for Nebraska? Why or why not? How do you determine what news is important enough for you to follow? Now you are back to square one.

Re: I Hate the News (2006)

#70

Post by austenallred »

ta82828 wrote: post #68
austenallred wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, originally everything was open, we didn't even require a login to upvote/comment/etc. Then some folks from ISIS came on and started trying to muck everything up, so we had to throw a gate on it (banning by IP was just too chaotic). We'll add some more info to the gate soon.

I don't know what you can do on your site, because I didn't want to sign up, but you can look at HN without having to sign up and you still need an account to vote or to comment.

Yes, that will be how it works in the future, but we haven't had time to build out the non-logged-in states of everything. So it's a hacky solution, but we just threw up a wall for now.
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