Why I'm skeptical of Ground News • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I'm skeptical of Ground News

#41

Post by AnimalMuppet » Wed, Jul 09, 2025, 9:05 PM UTC

wredcoll wrote: post #33

exabrial wrote: post #23

>The data collected here shows that left-leaning stories tend to have far better sourcing than right-leaning ones In the same breath, he quotes an article about it dousing Newfoundland in microplastics; a broad sweeping conclusion from a laughably flawed study method for the given results. And to be fair, this isn't a diss on the student's effort: scientific study is the holy grail. However, that headline and what wa…

Starting with an actual study is a gigantic improvement compared to the "we quote a random person's conspiracy theory as fact" style of journalism.

Is a dodgy study that "establishes" a preconceived idea really all that much better than a random person's conspiracy theory?

Re: Why I'm skeptical of Ground News

#42

Post by klank » Wed, Jul 09, 2025, 9:07 PM UTC

dlivingston wrote: post #14

riskable wrote: post #3

Summary: Ground.news puts far too much faith in the legitimacy of many right-wing headlines; giving them front-page views as "blindspots". Meaning: Even though the story itself is complete BS/non-factual, the algorithm shows it as a legitimate thing that isn't being covered by left-leaning or centrist news. To fix this, Ground.news should update their algorithm to perform much more scrutiny for headlines trending on…

Sources should really be evaluated on a multi-dimensional axis: - Factuality (low -> high) - Partisanship (low -> high) - Political orientation: social issues (left -> right) - Political orientation: economic issues (left -> right) - Political orientation: foreign policy (left -> right) etc. Sources like NPR are decisively not centrist w.r.t social issues and partisanship. There has been a distinct change in their re…

It'd be nice, but I can't see it being effective at changing broad consumer behavior. Giving people more information to make a choice doesn't do much value when they're already making poor choices based on the already existing information.

Put another way, I wish we had the nuanced shit to sift through where some nice multi-dimensional analysis could save the day. But the issue is people are consuming shit that is demonstrably shit from the first whiff/taste. I can't see how having some pretty vectors to showing them where their shit lives in shitspace is going to be helpful.

Re: Why I'm skeptical of Ground News

#43

Post by wredcoll » Wed, Jul 09, 2025, 9:16 PM UTC

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #41

wredcoll wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starting with an actual study is a gigantic improvement compared to the "we quote a random person's conspiracy theory as fact" style of journalism.

Is a dodgy study that "establishes" a preconceived idea really all that much better than a random person's conspiracy theory?

Literally yes, we can read the study's hypothesis, its experiments, the data it collects and then actually evaluate it on the merits. Conspiracy theories are unfalsifiable.

Re: Why I'm skeptical of Ground News

#44

Post by Havoc » Wed, Jul 09, 2025, 9:24 PM UTC

Tried but can't say I particularly liked it. The axis they're splitting things on is very US centric Democrat vs Rep...which just isn't all that useful to me.

Re: Why I'm skeptical of Ground News

#45

Post by AnimalMuppet » Wed, Jul 09, 2025, 9:49 PM UTC

wredcoll wrote: post #43

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is a dodgy study that "establishes" a preconceived idea really all that much better than a random person's conspiracy theory?

Literally yes, we can read the study's hypothesis, its experiments, the data it collects and then actually evaluate it on the merits. Conspiracy theories are unfalsifiable.

Fair enough. They're better in that way. But they are no better at actually supplying us with knowledge or evidence, though they claim to. So in that way, they might be worse.

Re: Why I'm skeptical of Ground News

#46

Post by edavison1 » Wed, Jul 09, 2025, 10:53 PM UTC

wnc3141 wrote: post #25

I think the only way to approach this is to have a panel of credible people for each beat (maybe from academia) who can qualitatively asses a range of articles and curate a spectrum of articles. However this is all scooting around the fundamental problem that we are all individually responsible for critical thinking - ideally developed through primary and secondary education.

Getting dangerously close to inventing editors w that idea, no good we tried that already :)

Re: Why I'm skeptical of Ground News

#47

Post by msdrigg » Thu, Jul 10, 2025, 12:23 AM UTC

flysand7 wrote: post #38

nicwolff wrote: post #24

That first stacked bar chart appears to have "left" and "right" mixed up, if the analysis just below it is correct. Not confidence-inspiring, and hasn't been corrected in 18 months since the post was published...

The analysis seems to disagree with the data shown in the graphs about the labels of "left" and "right". The author seems to be confusing left/right? It's not just the first stacked bar, but also the third (avg %bias)

I think what you’re seeing is a confusion coming from ground news own terms. They call something a “left wing blind spot” when it’s a story that does not appear in left-wing sources, meaning that it only appears in right wing sources. The blog copies that terminology here, but it can lead to some confusion.

Re: Why I'm skeptical of Ground News

#48

Post by dlivingston » Thu, Jul 10, 2025, 2:12 AM UTC

klank wrote: post #42

dlivingston wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sources should really be evaluated on a multi-dimensional axis: - Factuality (low -> high) - Partisanship (low -> high) - Political orientation: social issues (left -> right) - Political orientation: economic issues (left -> right) - Political orientation: foreign policy (left -> right) etc. Sources like NPR are decisively not centrist w.r.t social issues and partisanship. There has been a distinct change in their re…

It'd be nice, but I can't see it being effective at changing broad consumer behavior. Giving people more information to make a choice doesn't do much value when they're already making poor choices based on the already existing information. Put another way, I wish we had the nuanced shit to sift through where some nice multi-dimensional analysis could save the day. But the issue is people are consuming shit that is de…

I don't think anyone could (or even necessarily should) design a service like this for the masses. (Designing anything with the masses in mind is probably a way to end up with a mediocre product regardless, but I digress.) This would be more for people like us and the typical HN crowd: interested in truth and nuance for the sake of knowing the world accurately.

The problem with people consuming low-information, rage-baiting, distorted, highly-partisan slop masquerading as news is a problem I don't have the first idea on solving. The issue isn't even with the existence of the shit itself: that sort of content has always and will always exist, regardless. The issue is with (i) the volume of people consuming and accepting it, and more importantly, (ii) how much influence that garbage has on the national discourse and policy. For example, Musk consumes that sort of content and then feeds it into Grok (hello, MechaHitler), which then propagates to elected officials and the electorate and has real-world consequences in policy.

Re: Why I'm skeptical of Ground News

#49

Post by oldandboring » Thu, Jul 10, 2025, 2:48 AM UTC

wredcoll wrote: post #37

oldandboring wrote: post #11

I see where the author is coming from. The author's main gripe is that non-factual right-wing stories are being presented as left-wing blindspots. The author would seemingly prefer that those stories be flagged as being untrustworthy due to low factuality scores among its sources. Understandable but I think it defeats the purpose of Ground News. I think the idea is that if you are seeking the truth, and Ground News s…

> Ground News shows you a story that's being covered exclusively by right or left wing sources, that's their signal that the story could be either a) bullshit, Except this isn't what this guy found. What he found was that right-wing-only stories were invariably lies. You'd have a point if there was also the same tendency to lying on "the left" (whoever that is supposed to be). Just because you can come up with two si…

Read what I wrote again please. You didn't understand it the first time.

Re: Why I'm skeptical of Ground News

#50

Post by gsf_emergency_2 » Thu, Jul 10, 2025, 3:03 AM UTC

alganet wrote: post #16

antifa wrote: post #2

> This leads the platform to publish dodgy stories from the right, with the appearance that they are just as valid as high-fact reporting from the left or the center. Sadly, this is downstream of mainstream news itself. I think if Ground News attempted to truly solve this problem, the right would condemn Ground News as "fake news" or controlled by Soros like they do Wikipedia. I'm looking to be skeptical of Ground Ne…

Ground News makes all news be about left versus right. It teaches its users to approach everything as a political battle. We have enough "left-leaning skeptics" and "right-leaning skeptics", even some "neutral skeptics", but barely any skeptics. The word "skeptic" is poisoned by I will continue to use it. That's intentional.

Skepticism is definitely quite Lindy..

That said, having it as the main tool in the toolbox* is...

Something to be skeptical about?

*Bundled up with another in-your-face one like "personal experience", this also screams "political".. and thus hard to take seriously (particularly when those personal experiences are actually relevant)

Freshness- whatever. You probably already know fresh is somewhat popular, but are you really sure you want to be right but not loved? Be respected by your (fr)enemies maybe? Not even that?

(I'm certainly skeptical about "loved for being right" :)