4 ms·

If we all such smart people/techies, can we spitball a better breaking news feed algorithm into existence? I'll kick it off - 1. Focus all news on Who? What?

If we all such smart people/techies, can we spitball a better breaking news feed algorithm into existence? I'll kick it off - 1. Focus all news on Who? What? When? Where? Omit the "Why?". 2. When in doubt cite the primary news sources (police feeds/courtrooms/local authorities/opposition leaders/pictures/geo tagged and timestamped audio&video feeds with geo tags) 3. Secondary news sources like news orgs and journalist videos are second in importance 4. Quote tertiary news outlets like Reddit/HN/4chan only when they can be cross verified with a primary source More suggestions?

have_faith 9y ago
I've been toying with the idea of building a meta-news site of sorts for a while. Only one page per story (as opposed to the scatter-shot approach of normal news sites), stick just to facts, don't report death tolls while the bodies are still warm, anti-sensationalist and so on. Just curate a list of primary and secondary sources for a given story and present an overview of the story with opposing viewpoints. Very dry from a presentation perspective.
- saimiam 9y ago
  How do you make it sufficiently authoritative and trustworthy so that the general population including us doesn't go out and seek hearsay and speculation to get their jollies. I mean, what interest could the identity of the killer have for people while the shootout was in progress. Why not just stop once the basic unbiased facts have been surfaced? Everything else can wait for the cold light of reason and time.
- oddlyaromatic 9y ago
  The difficulty is that curating involves editorial decision making and some threshold for what you consider to be a fact. There's very little someone won't find fault with. But maybe if the sites editorial standards are also published, people could adjust for that themselves?
bo1024 9y ago
Just a comment: Reputation is key. Having studied game theory for systems of agents producing results and content, I feel fairly confident in this conclusion: the only reliable long-term design to incentivize beneficient, truthful behavior involves assigning good reputation in return for good behavior, and assigning future rewards/attention based on past reputation. Based on this, I postulate that any good news feed algorithm must use reputation scores based on past history to choose what to believe and what to show when a new story comes out. Humans of course do this instinctively, which many modern news organizations will have discovered too late as they sell out their integrity, accuracy, and priorities. Remember what von Neumann said about arithmetic attempts to generate random numbers? Similarly, anyone who attempts to algorithmically determine "truth" based on instantaneous metrics is living in a state of sin.
- saimiam 9y ago
  When it comes to sourcing information from discussion boards, each top thread is effectively the one and only time the algorithm will interact with that thread for that topic. Unless each thread is monitored and updated by a small subset of power users when weighting for reputation matters, it is likely that the persons managing a thread are volunteers at the scene of breaking news or have been (self-)coopted into that role by circumstances. Such self selected thread managers can safely be treated as a one-time participant in the prisoner's dilemma game. If this is true, the algorithm can safely assume that the other prisoner (the "thread") is going to betray them and so, betray them first by low-weighting them. Of course, you use some sort of reputation for the source of the threads - for breaking tech news, a GitHub issue tracker is probably going to be a better tracker than an HN thread than a general purpose Reddit thread than a 4chan thread.
  - bo1024 9y ago
    > Of course, you use some sort of reputation for the source of the threads Yes, this is what I mean. A news source should have a history of correctness before being trusted to report future news. The issues you're discussing are exactly the reason we need reputation -- otherwise some false news can arrive once, get a ton of attention, and do a lot of damage before going away forever (and we see this on e.g. reddit).

have_faith 9y ago

I've been toying with the idea of building a meta-news site of sorts for a while. Only one page per story (as opposed to the scatter-shot approach of normal news sites), stick just to facts, don't report death tolls while the bodies are still warm, anti-sensationalist and so on. Just curate a list of primary and secondary sources for a given story and present an overview of the story with opposing viewpoints. Very dry from a presentation perspective.

saimiam 9y ago
How do you make it sufficiently authoritative and trustworthy so that the general population including us doesn't go out and seek hearsay and speculation to get their jollies. I mean, what interest could the identity of the killer have for people while the shootout was in progress. Why not just stop once the basic unbiased facts have been surfaced? Everything else can wait for the cold light of reason and time.
oddlyaromatic 9y ago
The difficulty is that curating involves editorial decision making and some threshold for what you consider to be a fact. There's very little someone won't find fault with. But maybe if the sites editorial standards are also published, people could adjust for that themselves?

bo1024 9y ago

Just a comment: Reputation is key. Having studied game theory for systems of agents producing results and content, I feel fairly confident in this conclusion: the only reliable long-term design to incentivize beneficient, truthful behavior involves assigning good reputation in return for good behavior, and assigning future rewards/attention based on past reputation. Based on this, I postulate that any good news feed algorithm must use reputation scores based on past history to choose what to believe and what to show when a new story comes out. Humans of course do this instinctively, which many modern news organizations will have discovered too late as they sell out their integrity, accuracy, and priorities. Remember what von Neumann said about arithmetic attempts to generate random numbers? Similarly, anyone who attempts to algorithmically determine "truth" based on instantaneous metrics is living in a state of sin.

saimiam 9y ago
When it comes to sourcing information from discussion boards, each top thread is effectively the one and only time the algorithm will interact with that thread for that topic. Unless each thread is monitored and updated by a small subset of power users when weighting for reputation matters, it is likely that the persons managing a thread are volunteers at the scene of breaking news or have been (self-)coopted into that role by circumstances. Such self selected thread managers can safely be treated as a one-time participant in the prisoner's dilemma game. If this is true, the algorithm can safely assume that the other prisoner (the "thread") is going to betray them and so, betray them first by low-weighting them. Of course, you use some sort of reputation for the source of the threads - for breaking tech news, a GitHub issue tracker is probably going to be a better tracker than an HN thread than a general purpose Reddit thread than a 4chan thread.
- bo1024 9y ago
  > Of course, you use some sort of reputation for the source of the threads Yes, this is what I mean. A news source should have a history of correctness before being trusted to report future news. The issues you're discussing are exactly the reason we need reputation -- otherwise some false news can arrive once, get a ton of attention, and do a lot of damage before going away forever (and we see this on e.g. reddit).