Show HN: I made a daily spot the fake headline game

#1

Post by alexilchenko » Thu, May 01, 2025, 4:49 AM UTC

Hi! I made this daily game recently and I am just looking for feedback on how to make it more intuitive and fun.

I wrote a pipeline that searches the news and, using an LLM, suggests headlines (both real and fake) for me to use. Then I manually sift through the suggestions and pick out a few for the next week.

If you join the beta program (after you sign up), you can play more games and test variations of the daily game. I am currently testing if showing the full headline right away is better than giving the reader an option to reveal it (but lose a point)

Show HN: I made a daily spot the fake headline game
tfite.com

Re: Show HN: I made a daily spot the fake headline game

#2

Post by almosthere » Thu, May 01, 2025, 5:29 AM UTC

This isn't what fake news is usually about - fake news is a real event with an interpretation or spin on top of it that leans to an ideology rather than keeping the story neutral. The ideological spin makes it fake because of disingenuous assumptions.

There is literally no way I can tell if "poop drones are keeping NYC sewers clean so humans don't have to" without actually looking up the news.

Re: Show HN: I made a daily spot the fake headline game

#3

Post by alexilchenko » Thu, May 01, 2025, 7:22 AM UTC

almosthere wrote: post #2

This isn't what fake news is usually about - fake news is a real event with an interpretation or spin on top of it that leans to an ideology rather than keeping the story neutral. The ideological spin makes it fake because of disingenuous assumptions. There is literally no way I can tell if "poop drones are keeping NYC sewers clean so humans don't have to" without actually looking up the news.

Very good point! So right now what I have is a pipeline that looks at the real news and generates (using an LLM) a mixture of fake headlines that are inspired from the recent events and some fake headlines that are not conditioned on the current events (I, of course, do a final pass and ranking). I do agree that this isn't what most people call "fake news" but maybe more funny, cards against humanity abstract headlines.

Do you think that maybe I should source from snopes.com (or another fact-checker) or create another pipeline that tracks down more what people call fake news? How would you improve this project?

I've thought about going that route but defaulted to just making something fun

Re: Show HN: I made a daily spot the fake headline game

#4

Post by WalterGR » Thu, May 01, 2025, 9:25 PM UTC

almosthere wrote: post #2

This isn't what fake news is usually about - fake news is a real event with an interpretation or spin on top of it that leans to an ideology rather than keeping the story neutral. The ideological spin makes it fake because of disingenuous assumptions. There is literally no way I can tell if "poop drones are keeping NYC sewers clean so humans don't have to" without actually looking up the news.

No, fake news in the modern era is news that is literally invented. It came to prominence during the 2016 US election and was tied largely to, as I recall, the Russian influence campaign and just plain moneymaking via ads.

Some politicians then co-opted the term to describe news and news outlets that they don’t like, and that definition was adopted by their fans.