Wow
"Its obsession with the criminal and the deviant makes us less trusting people. Its obsession with the hurry of the day-to-day makes us less reflective thinkers. Its obsession with surfaces makes us shallow."
I Hate the News (2006)
111–120 of 192 posts
Re: I Hate the News (2006)
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
I started the news site because I have the same frustrations Swartz has. Most of the news is bullshit and a worthless time-suck. All of the examples he uses, all of the websites out there, feel completely irrelevant to me and not interesting whatsoever. I disagree with him that it's 100% - I think it's just 99.9%, and that .01% is valuable. Perhaps that's a major difference, but Swartz's point was that it's not valua…
I find it interesting that someone who is making a news site would say that most of the news is "bullshit and a worthless time suck". Are you really saying that just 0.1% of the news on your site has value? Perhaps you should take Swartz's advice and stop fighting to improve something that has so little value to you.
> I find it interesting that someone who is making a news site would say that most of the news is "bullshit and a worthless time suck."
Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. 99.9% of news is garbage, .01% of news is valuable. I want to make it easy for people to get that .01%.
> Perhaps you should take Swartz advice and stop fighting to improve something that has so little value to you.
I think news is badly broken, and I'm trying to fix it. I don't understand what problem you have with that.
Re: I Hate the News (2006)
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a really good frame of reference, I think. Thank you for that. I consider our service like Wikipedia - there is a small collection of people who are just abnormally fascinated by the news - the 1% of news junkies who want to see what's happening, vet it, and tell you if it's wrong. The biproduct of that is that the 99% of "normal people" get a news digest that contains only the most important info, that's easi…
A vetting process seems like a useful filter, but it's not a sufficient one. Vetting doesn't necessarily affect stories that are factually accurate but irrelevant. What is your definition of "important"? Or, more importantly, what definition of "important" does your community of "news junkies" apply? Because almost by definition, those "news junkies" have a different idea of what's important than other people do.
There are two main functions on the site. One is a fact-check, the other is an upvote. People are told to upvote the most important info - we define "most important" as "having the most affect on the citizens of the world."
Of course, that's very difficult to quantify, and there may be some bias of the news junkies, but I think the end product is pretty great (though not perfect yet). Of course that's just me, and I'm probably biased as well, but there have been times when I have said the news coming out of grasswire is complete shit, so I'd like to think I'm at least trying to be honest with myself.
Re: I Hate the News (2006)
#114Let's say we never had "the news", and we all decided we needed to help society understand and react to novel events. Would we invent newspapers and cable channels? I don't think so. When modern institutions realize they have an information distribution problem, they don't get a bunch of ink-stained, dubiously sober arts graduates with no special qualifications, and tell them to write stories. They pay people to do r…
Wow, that's pretty damn dismissive of journalists. Is writing not a skill?
Re: I Hate the News (2006)
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's why I limited my news to Hacker News. Whenever there is an event that actually matters - like a war or a cataclysm - it will be here, upvoted and with comments made by people who know what they're talking about. I don't mind missing the 99% of the typical news sites content.
I've been running an experiment for the past several months to outsource relevant news curation. It's super simple and super passive. Basically I only read news brought to my attention organically; social media, word on the street which I later look up, etc. Thus far I haven't missed anything of genuine humanity-shaking importance, my emotional state has improved, and I have much more time for reading, hacking, and a…
Doesn't this experiment rely on a certain critical mass of people consuming information in a non-organic fashion?
Re: I Hate the News (2006)
#116I completely disagree with Aaron, who here seems to jump rather quickly to the (merely asserted) conclusion that the news (i.e. the world) doesn't affect him. (Without this same news we would not have heard of Snowden OR, in an ironic twist, of Aaron himself). Furthermore, how ironic is it that we're discussing this itself on a self-purported news site?
The news, even global news, absolutely affects all of us even if we live local, cloistered lives. Let us take the United States - which is overly represented on this site. The US economy is fueled by its finance and investment sectors, which are in turn fueled by neocolonialist enterprises overseas. The success of the US domestic economy is fundamentally tied to its navigating geostrategy and multilateral diplomacy, its overthrowing of governments, stabilizing and destabilizing nations with propaganda and embargos, fixing international law in favor of the leaders of its private sectors, and in its opening resources abroad to US companies is the primary and nearly exclusive driver of the finance sector. And in fact, domestic and international law now blur due to a similarly increased globalization.
I find it odd that Aaron, known for his stance on free access to information and to being informed, would fall only to the knowledge of the academic - and not information and facts about the world in which we immediately live.
Yes there are some truly irrelevant news items (take celebrities). One must filter and prioritize. It is a small price to pay.
I would love to defend whichever notions have offended downvoters.
Re: I Hate the News (2006)
#117Here are two ideas for non-traditional news, that would reduce the information overload, and make news more interesting and healthy:
- Actionable news. Only news to which you can (or have to), as a citizen, take some action. Examples: Changes in law, cultural events that will take place in the future, openings of new institutions, planned political demonstrations or petitions.
- Old news. Only give news about something after it is resolved, not when it is happening (avoid especially breaking news). Examples: Instead of speculation who will be appointed to some office, just tell me who was appointed. When disaster occurs, wait three days when the information is more complete about the aftermath. Reviews of products that have already been released.
Re: I Hate the News (2006)
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think you agree with Swartz at all. You used an article that explains why someone does not read the news to promote your news site. According to the article, Swartz wasn't looking for an alternative way to consume news: he decries the news industry as a whole. I'm all for self-promotion on HN when it's relevant, but Grasswire appears to be exactly the kind of thing Swartz would not be interested in. If you we…
I started the news site because I have the same frustrations Swartz has. Most of the news is bullshit and a worthless time-suck. All of the examples he uses, all of the websites out there, feel completely irrelevant to me and not interesting whatsoever. I disagree with him that it's 100% - I think it's just 99.9%, and that .01% is valuable. Perhaps that's a major difference, but Swartz's point was that it's not valua…
It's not just Aaron Swartz (he's wrong about this part).
Many people think the news is completely junk:
http://dobelli.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Avoid_News_Par...
http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/10/01/the-low-informatio...
http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/why-tv-news-is-a-waste-of-human-...
http://www.stansberryradio.com/James-Altucher/Latest-Episode...
Re: I Hate the News (2006)
#119I find it very ironic that of course I am learning about this thought-provoking post via one of my go-to news channels, HN. Doesn't the very fact that we are having an interesting online discussion about an idea we hadn't previously given as much attention to, because it came up on HN, serve as an example of exactly why reading the news has value in our lives?
Re: I Hate the News (2006)
#120Let's say we never had "the news", and we all decided we needed to help society understand and react to novel events. Would we invent newspapers and cable channels? I don't think so. When modern institutions realize they have an information distribution problem, they don't get a bunch of ink-stained, dubiously sober arts graduates with no special qualifications, and tell them to write stories. They pay people to do r…
I disagree. If you want to get people engaged with the level of unemployment in the country, showing them a chart of unemployment figures are not going to engage them much. Dashboards, charts, etc. are great for engaging people in things they already care about.
Instead, a journalist can contextualise those jobs figures and explain why someone you don't know being out of work can affect your life. Narrative is, and always has been, a method of engaging people.
Never mind the fact that journalists also uncover data themselves. Formalising whistleblowers is all very well, but you still want someone to investigate. Take yesterday's story of a Congressman who claimed more miles in expenses than his car had driven - that was a reporter querying FOIL records to match up the numbers. Two completely different data sets in different governmental bodies. There would be no whistleblower there. Who heads up these information reporting networks, the government? What about government corruption?
What you are describing sounds ideal - but that's exactly what it is, an ideal. Very few real life systems work like that.