6 ms·

An Airline Geek Trying to Build a Media Giant with No Reporters

60 points by raleighm 8y ago

personlurking 8y ago
FYI: The article isn't about aviation
Gravityloss 8y ago
This is pretty damn dangerous. False news will spread extremely fast.
- asdfologist 8y ago
  How's this any worse than Trump spreading falsehoods on Twitter to a massive audience?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - elsurudo 8y ago
    He never said it was worse, just that it is bad. Both of these are bad.
- ape4 8y ago
  If it becomes popular, everyone will try to game it.
  - plantain 8y ago
    Kind of like the current system then.
pinko 8y ago
Although I'm willing to believe this kind of low-latency news-mining tech may be quite robust against noise, it seems like it would be difficult or impossible to filter real news from intentional, hostile, targeted false news injected by people who understand the basic principles upon which the tech is based.
- neffy 8y ago
  That could though, also be said about the existing human based media, which isn't exactly robust against noise or false news either.
- notahacker 8y ago
  Judging from the article, it relies mostly on "trusted accounts" who often tweet things they hear before they substantiate and file articles on them (but can certainly be fooled themselves) and can pick up some image-driven false stories by identifying the same image in earlier contexts (which presumably has some issues with stock images too...)
  - bobthepanda 8y ago
    Presumably if an event is real, there is at least a handful of articles or tweets with new, unique images of the event.
    - notahacker 8y ago
      Some events can't be photographed (either for legal reasons, access reasons or because they happen on computers). Stock Pictures of relevant people, buildings and logos get used instead. It's a bit more likely to be fake news if the pictures are supposed to be "protests" or "bombing" from different dates and geographical contexts but those stories see people posting stock photos of locations and repost vaguely relevant memes too...
- mc32 8y ago
  If you take that approach and add Musk's source truthfulness rating[1], then perhaps we'll have something. Something's gotta give. Right now, it's all hard about narrative. It's not information, it's all shaping and characterization these days. Of course Trump doesn't help the cause, but to watch the news contort itself in an effort to "counter" has lead to its demise as a semi trusted fourth estate. [1]money.cnn.com/2018/05/23/technology/elon-musk-media/index.html
  - 8y ago
SadWebDeveloper 8y ago
Isn't this what reddit already does? a media giant with no reporters but instead of robots using humans scraping content for fictional internet points (karma)
Jeff_Brown 8y ago
Google's (now public) PageRank algorithm isn't that complicated, and it brought an astounding improvement in our ability to find what we wanted. There might in fact be a simple algorithm for determining who to trust -- but a closed-source algorithm seems like it cannot by definition go very far to improve media transparency. If we had more kinds of metadata publicly available -- "[person] trusts [person]", "[person] found [article] helpful for understanding [topic]", "[person] testifies that [person] wrote a good PhD dissertation on [topic]", etc. -- we could publicly experiment with algorithms like, "restrict results to people whose writings have been contradicted fewer times than they have been endorsed", or "to people trusted by people I trust," or "to persons X for whom at least 50 other persons Y testify that X helped them understand [topic]," or whatever. Hypergraph databases (e.g. Grakn, HypergraphDb) and logic programming languages (e.g. Datalog) already let us express arbitrary metadata -- anything expressible, as far as I am aware. Getting ordinary users to state their thoughts (and their search queries over those thoughts) in an easily machine-readable manner might be tough. For that purpose I wrote a language[1,2], extremely close to natural language, that allows such machine-readable expression of higher-order relationship information. [1] Why use Hash: https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/digraphs-with-text/blob/master/Hash/why-use-hash.md https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/digraphs-with-text/b... [2] How to use Hash: https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/digraphs-with-text/blob/master/Hash/the-hash-language.md https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/digraphs-with-text/b...
emmelaich 8y ago
> two-thirds of which are engineers Bloomberg, really? "Which?" I presume the author is not a native speaker but their editors should know it should be "whom"
rmason 8y ago
If you want to be in the know when news is breaking I've found the Banjo app to be invaluable. If something is happening in say Provo, you're patched into the local newspapers, TV and radio stations and the Twitter from locals. Sure sometimes there are errors but when multiple people are saying something it's got a pretty good chance of being right. But the national media gets things wrong as well. Often you're in the know thirty to sixty minutes ahead of national media and with more details - if that's important to you.
sgnelson 8y ago
I have to ask a question,and this question has bothered me for a while: Do we absolutely have to have breaking news at the speed of light? Can most people not wait a couple of hours before they hear about the latest tragedy or event? All I've ever seen from citizen journalists (on Reddit/Twitter/etc.) is a bunch of typically wrong rumors, data and analysis. Every once in a while they get it right, but that's the rare exception. The reason people watch CNN et al is because biases or not, they're somewhat trusted to at least get the majority of their facts correct (and see below as to why I think all of these wishy washy adjectives). I think this goes back into the curse of the 24 hour news cycle. It creates demand for sensationalism, "breaking" news. The speed that these news networks feel that they have to be have the exclusive does lead to errors, which leads to less trustworthiness in their reporting. I just don't see the necessity of constant up to the minute news reporting. I consider myself a news junkie, but to me the important questions are usually answered after the fact anyways: "Why did this happen and what does it mean?" I also have to wonder if this is part of our Constantly Connected Culture. People have to have their smart phone and be connected to every event constantly. I don't know if these phenomenon are somehow connected, but I would guess they are. But again, are people that impatient about facts?
- abhirag 8y ago
  You are not alone in thinking this -- [https://www.slow-journalism.com/ https://www.slow-journalism.com/]
- richjdsmith 8y ago
  Last September, my fiance and I made a rule: no more phones in the bedroom. That small decision has been life-changing. Right away it had a couple interesting effects; I ended up reading (novels) about 3x more, we chatted more, there was more sex, and I stopped starting my day out with the news. That last point has had the largest impact on my life. By not starting my day with what inevitably ends up being something negative (Oh Joy, what industry am I as a millennial ruining today and how many times has the president tweeted about it?), I quickly noticed that my morning mood had improved. First I started reading the news once I got out of my room making breakfast, then that became reading it after breakfast and eventually that became catching up on the news after lunch. About 3 months later, I was catching up on the world around me later on in the day, and in smaller bits. I was also noticeably happier. While I'm all for carefully examining causul vs correlation, and am keenly aware of the biases, it didn't take a lot of reading a couple papers to see that, surprise surprise, the news is depressing. Then I had a realization when hanging out with my grandpa, who frankly, is all out of fucks to give. While extremely well read, he gets all of his news from the few magazines he is subscribed to (The Economist, Bloomberg and Maclean’s) and therefore only hears things sometimes two weeks after they happen. And it didn't matter. He's just as well read on world events, he's not living in a cave or under a rock, he just isn't stuck in this cycle of fear of missing out on being in the know. He doesn't care. So three months ago, I quit reading the news. I set a couple of redirects on my computer so that whenever I tried to visit a few of the places I used to frequent, I was redirected to either here, HN, where I enjoy the comments, or to Pocket. Every Sunday since then, I take the time to sit down in the morning, and read through The Economist, which I am a subscriber to. That's it. That is my only source of news - well, that and what I read on here or twitter. Sure I still hear about major events (and unfortunately, school shootings tend to make their rounds on twitter). I am keenly aware that like all news sources, the economist is biased. I try to balance that out by following a few tweet-happy people with opposing views. But let me tell you, being unplugged from the Breaking News! cycle and the continuous back and forth between the talking heads is the most refreshing thing I've ever done for my mental health. It may not be for everyone, and I may not do it forever, but for now, I have no intentions on going back to reading the news.
jnaina 8y ago
My brain somehow read this as an An American Greek Trying to Build a Media Giant with No Reporters. Maybe I’m reading too much Huffington Post

60 points by raleighm 8y ago

personlurking 8y ago

FYI: The article isn't about aviation

Gravityloss 8y ago

This is pretty damn dangerous. False news will spread extremely fast.

asdfologist 8y ago
How's this any worse than Trump spreading falsehoods on Twitter to a massive audience?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- elsurudo 8y ago
  He never said it was worse, just that it is bad. Both of these are bad.
ape4 8y ago
If it becomes popular, everyone will try to game it.
- plantain 8y ago
  Kind of like the current system then.

pinko 8y ago

Although I'm willing to believe this kind of low-latency news-mining tech may be quite robust against noise, it seems like it would be difficult or impossible to filter real news from intentional, hostile, targeted false news injected by people who understand the basic principles upon which the tech is based.

neffy 8y ago
That could though, also be said about the existing human based media, which isn't exactly robust against noise or false news either.
notahacker 8y ago
Judging from the article, it relies mostly on "trusted accounts" who often tweet things they hear before they substantiate and file articles on them (but can certainly be fooled themselves) and can pick up some image-driven false stories by identifying the same image in earlier contexts (which presumably has some issues with stock images too...)
- bobthepanda 8y ago
  Presumably if an event is real, there is at least a handful of articles or tweets with new, unique images of the event.
  - notahacker 8y ago
    Some events can't be photographed (either for legal reasons, access reasons or because they happen on computers). Stock Pictures of relevant people, buildings and logos get used instead. It's a bit more likely to be fake news if the pictures are supposed to be "protests" or "bombing" from different dates and geographical contexts but those stories see people posting stock photos of locations and repost vaguely relevant memes too...
mc32 8y ago
If you take that approach and add Musk's source truthfulness rating[1], then perhaps we'll have something. Something's gotta give. Right now, it's all hard about narrative. It's not information, it's all shaping and characterization these days. Of course Trump doesn't help the cause, but to watch the news contort itself in an effort to "counter" has lead to its demise as a semi trusted fourth estate. [1]money.cnn.com/2018/05/23/technology/elon-musk-media/index.html
- 8y ago

SadWebDeveloper 8y ago

Isn't this what reddit already does? a media giant with no reporters but instead of robots using humans scraping content for fictional internet points (karma)

Jeff_Brown 8y ago

Google's (now public) PageRank algorithm isn't that complicated, and it brought an astounding improvement in our ability to find what we wanted. There might in fact be a simple algorithm for determining who to trust -- but a closed-source algorithm seems like it cannot by definition go very far to improve media transparency. If we had more kinds of metadata publicly available -- "[person] trusts [person]", "[person] found [article] helpful for understanding [topic]", "[person] testifies that [person] wrote a good PhD dissertation on [topic]", etc. -- we could publicly experiment with algorithms like, "restrict results to people whose writings have been contradicted fewer times than they have been endorsed", or "to people trusted by people I trust," or "to persons X for whom at least 50 other persons Y testify that X helped them understand [topic]," or whatever. Hypergraph databases (e.g. Grakn, HypergraphDb) and logic programming languages (e.g. Datalog) already let us express arbitrary metadata -- anything expressible, as far as I am aware. Getting ordinary users to state their thoughts (and their search queries over those thoughts) in an easily machine-readable manner might be tough. For that purpose I wrote a language[1,2], extremely close to natural language, that allows such machine-readable expression of higher-order relationship information. [1] Why use Hash: https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/digraphs-with-text/blob/master/Hash/why-use-hash.md https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/digraphs-with-text/b... [2] How to use Hash: https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/digraphs-with-text/blob/master/Hash/the-hash-language.md https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/digraphs-with-text/b...

emmelaich 8y ago

> two-thirds of which are engineers Bloomberg, really? "Which?" I presume the author is not a native speaker but their editors should know it should be "whom"

rmason 8y ago

If you want to be in the know when news is breaking I've found the Banjo app to be invaluable. If something is happening in say Provo, you're patched into the local newspapers, TV and radio stations and the Twitter from locals. Sure sometimes there are errors but when multiple people are saying something it's got a pretty good chance of being right. But the national media gets things wrong as well. Often you're in the know thirty to sixty minutes ahead of national media and with more details - if that's important to you.

sgnelson 8y ago

I have to ask a question,and this question has bothered me for a while: Do we absolutely have to have breaking news at the speed of light? Can most people not wait a couple of hours before they hear about the latest tragedy or event? All I've ever seen from citizen journalists (on Reddit/Twitter/etc.) is a bunch of typically wrong rumors, data and analysis. Every once in a while they get it right, but that's the rare exception. The reason people watch CNN et al is because biases or not, they're somewhat trusted to at least get the majority of their facts correct (and see below as to why I think all of these wishy washy adjectives). I think this goes back into the curse of the 24 hour news cycle. It creates demand for sensationalism, "breaking" news. The speed that these news networks feel that they have to be have the exclusive does lead to errors, which leads to less trustworthiness in their reporting. I just don't see the necessity of constant up to the minute news reporting. I consider myself a news junkie, but to me the important questions are usually answered after the fact anyways: "Why did this happen and what does it mean?" I also have to wonder if this is part of our Constantly Connected Culture. People have to have their smart phone and be connected to every event constantly. I don't know if these phenomenon are somehow connected, but I would guess they are. But again, are people that impatient about facts?

abhirag 8y ago
You are not alone in thinking this -- [https://www.slow-journalism.com/ https://www.slow-journalism.com/]
richjdsmith 8y ago
Last September, my fiance and I made a rule: no more phones in the bedroom. That small decision has been life-changing. Right away it had a couple interesting effects; I ended up reading (novels) about 3x more, we chatted more, there was more sex, and I stopped starting my day out with the news. That last point has had the largest impact on my life. By not starting my day with what inevitably ends up being something negative (Oh Joy, what industry am I as a millennial ruining today and how many times has the president tweeted about it?), I quickly noticed that my morning mood had improved. First I started reading the news once I got out of my room making breakfast, then that became reading it after breakfast and eventually that became catching up on the news after lunch. About 3 months later, I was catching up on the world around me later on in the day, and in smaller bits. I was also noticeably happier. While I'm all for carefully examining causul vs correlation, and am keenly aware of the biases, it didn't take a lot of reading a couple papers to see that, surprise surprise, the news is depressing. Then I had a realization when hanging out with my grandpa, who frankly, is all out of fucks to give. While extremely well read, he gets all of his news from the few magazines he is subscribed to (The Economist, Bloomberg and Maclean’s) and therefore only hears things sometimes two weeks after they happen. And it didn't matter. He's just as well read on world events, he's not living in a cave or under a rock, he just isn't stuck in this cycle of fear of missing out on being in the know. He doesn't care. So three months ago, I quit reading the news. I set a couple of redirects on my computer so that whenever I tried to visit a few of the places I used to frequent, I was redirected to either here, HN, where I enjoy the comments, or to Pocket. Every Sunday since then, I take the time to sit down in the morning, and read through The Economist, which I am a subscriber to. That's it. That is my only source of news - well, that and what I read on here or twitter. Sure I still hear about major events (and unfortunately, school shootings tend to make their rounds on twitter). I am keenly aware that like all news sources, the economist is biased. I try to balance that out by following a few tweet-happy people with opposing views. But let me tell you, being unplugged from the Breaking News! cycle and the continuous back and forth between the talking heads is the most refreshing thing I've ever done for my mental health. It may not be for everyone, and I may not do it forever, but for now, I have no intentions on going back to reading the news.

jnaina 8y ago

My brain somehow read this as an An American Greek Trying to Build a Media Giant with No Reporters. Maybe I’m reading too much Huffington Post