151–160 of 195 posts
A better solution is a fractional subscription model where subscriptions are tiered to one's reading needs. This is what my company http://CivikOwl.com is working on. Hope to make a positive contribution to this important issue facing society.
'journalism' and 'news' are obsolete concepts. A journalist was an employee of a large entity who wrote articles and made videos that complied with the reality and perspective the company they work for wanted to promote. (There are still a few of these employees left working for what's left of these entities) 'News' was selective packaged information to influence and inform the broadest reach, with a goal of selling…
Newspapers existed long before advertising. The goal was to inform, and to have a public place of record accessible to all.
'journalism' and 'news' are obsolete concepts. A journalist was an employee of a large entity who wrote articles and made videos that complied with the reality and perspective the company they work for wanted to promote. (There are still a few of these employees left working for what's left of these entities) 'News' was selective packaged information to influence and inform the broadest reach, with a goal of selling…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Empowering users to become more and more power users is literally the reason humanity bothers with science and technology. Quite the opposite. Technology allows users to become less and less power users. > It's sad to see profit motive distract people away from that core reason. Not sure I got that part, are you complaining that other people are not leaving their jobs and living aside to build the product you want…
> Quite the opposite. Technology allows users to become less and less power users. That seems pedantic. Technology allows users to become "less and less power users" by giving them the tools to solve problems they were not advanced enough to solve before, or that were too time-consuming or difficult to solve before. That's exactly the same point the OP is making -- Google has the potential to build a tool which would…
Exactly, today a regular user can do what a power user could do years ago.
Create a full website with good design, structure, functionality? You had to be a power user, but not anymore.
Drive a car? You had to know how to use a clutch, shift gears, etc. Not anymore.
Access the internet? You had to buy a modem, configure it, connect, etc. Not anymore.
And so on.
Technology removes burdens, and allows regular users to do what only power users could before.
People don't want to be power users. People don't even want to be users. People want to listen to music, move, read.
I got fed up with Google News a year or so ago, over the echo chamber that the news site has become. It motivated me to create https://statesreport.com , with no ads and no tracking.
Generally for news I prefer Blendle, and no I don't mind paying per story although I think some papers are pretty extreme in what they think their journalism is worth.
I used Google News for a long time. I have since blackholed it on all of my machines. By tailoring the news articles presented to be based on the interests that Google data mined from my Google profile, it became an echo chamber even worse than Facebook. It became a very bad source of news: all of the articles were self-reinforcing each other with very very little actual diversity of sources.
I had a similar problem. After I stopped using gmail & google search (for privacy reasons) and started using Duck Duck Go, it almost seemed random in what news it was trying to feed me because it didn't have enough data. I messed with the little sliders, banned fake news sources like HuffPost/WashPost etc, but I couldn't get it to deliver a news feed I actually wanted to consume... so... I just gave up on it. Finally…
Is the Washington Post considered fake news by most? Do you have examples of why you think it's fake? I'm curious because I actually pay for WaPo. I occasionally pull up fox news to see another side, but while I do consider WaPo liberal leaning, it seemed at least less biased than some other sources I've seen, and I would rather know the biases I'm consuming.
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The server is written in Go. The news scraper is written in python. I don't have the full list of sites offhand, but I'll try and get back to this comment!
So your Python scraper has a list of websites whose home pages it scrapes?
I used Google News for a long time. I have since blackholed it on all of my machines. By tailoring the news articles presented to be based on the interests that Google data mined from my Google profile, it became an echo chamber even worse than Facebook. It became a very bad source of news: all of the articles were self-reinforcing each other with very very little actual diversity of sources.
When they redid the design (yes, I know exactly what you are talking about) it was like ... murdering democracy: limiting results.
I had to stop using it all together.
Sure you can go search google.com, but items that would show up on news ( == important things) are somehow lost from google, and it's just not the same.
Sad day when we lost the old news.google.com. If what they're saying here is true, the first thing to do is to bring back the old news search. That will help journalists more than anything.