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Show HN: Slower News
- cyborgx7 7y agoProps for listing the biases. Specially self-described centrists are prone to thinking their viewpoint is the unbiased one. At least from my experience. Edit: One question. You say "new articles are easy to spot" but how do I spot them?
- galfarragem 7y agoNew links will have a different color for a few months.
- franky47 7y agoInteresting project, I like the Wisdom TL;DR Guide [1] (collection of quotes and maxims) that comes with it. [1] https://github.com/slowernews/wisdom-tldr-guide https://github.com/slowernews/wisdom-tldr-guide
- pauletienney 7y agoThank you for your comment. I would have missed it. I created a small repository of quotes and display a random one each time I open a new Terminal window. This list of quotes will perfectly complete my collection. Kudo to the curator (op ?).
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- kevmo314 7y agoThis seems like it would be more useful to me as an email newsletter? At least I don't think I'm going to remember visiting once a month... Convenient that it's already js-free.
- jmiskovic 7y agoYou didn't want to spend so much time reading news, so you started curating news for others? Hm. The site has nice and cozy design, good work. By the way, "Facebook is becoming an «independent nation»" is a dead link.
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- jasode 7y ago>Articles are hand selected. Everything that calls my attention and passes the «trivia filter» Let me respectfully comment that the above explanation doesn't actually mean anything to me because I don't know what articles you rejected. That's the same problem I have with people's lists of "best" book recommendations: I don't know what supposedly great and well-regarded books the curator disliked or found useless. That "negative" list that nobody ever volunteers is probably more useful than seeing "How to Win Friends and Influence People" repeatedly on everyone's list. If I knew you well as a longtime friend -- or -- you were already an established authority on digesting news (e.g. Chomsky, Hitchens, etc), then I could forego looking at your rejections. But since I don't, the only way to know if your "pass" filter is useful to me is if I weigh it against your "rejects".
- 52-6F-62 7y agoOn that note and all other faults aside you nearly described Apple News' curation process. They hired a large number of experienced editors out of their field to hand-curate their digest listings. That said, Apple News is anything but "slow news".
- kylebenzle 7y agoI make book lists and this is GREAT advices. From now on I will have an addendum at the bottom that lists ALL the books for that list that were rejected, thank you!
- Zhyl 7y agoI mean while this is a flippant response, this does highlight something that doesn't really exist at the moment: second order derivative lists. You make a list and then I prioritise and filter your list. Making a list of your top 100 books implicitly rejects all other books. Me taking your list of 100 books and rejecting a load with justification gives a lot more information about what I value in the books and, moreover, which of your values I disagree with. We kind of have this with comment trees but it will often be the case that someone publishes a list (e.g. all of the episodes of Black Mirror in order of preference or all Studio Ghibli films in order of preference) and then the comments will take issue with the inclusion of certain items, exclusion of certain items or the placement of certain items. What you rarely get is the commentator publishing their own version of the list and what you never get is the commentator creating a completely derivative list.
- roadbeats 7y agoSlow news definitely has value for people who prefers them. The best thing I did last year was to delete all my social accounts (except HN) and subscribe to hard copy of The Economist. It comes weekly, covers all important events around the world and gives good level of depth on the subjects. I would not consider switching to a digital source though. Paper is better, goes better with dumbphones :)
- Funes- 7y agoI'm glad you're better off after taking that decision, which is definitely a brave one nowadays. When do you get the paper delivered? I feel like I'd prefer to read it on the weekends. I might think about doing something similar. I already use a dumbphone, as well.
- roadbeats 7y agoThe Economist shows up in my mailbox on every Friday regularly. I live in Berlin, not sure about their delivery to other places.
- ploika 7y agoMine arrives on Tuesday afternoons in Dublin, posted from Germany in fact. If I renew my subscription I'll go digital only, because my physical paper is only in-date for a couple of days before the new issue is out on the website and app.
- Tepix 7y agoLooking at the articles I find a large percentage of them to be trivia. If you just want the most significant news, reading Le Monde diplomatique (english edition) will do it.
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- webscout 7y agoRecently subscribed to briefingday.com as recommended per Kevin Kelly. Similar, "slow" approach, but comes as a daily newsletter.
- Funes- 7y agoA single page containing a huge list of links, ordered by subjects which you necessarily have to scroll through, with no dates attached to them as well as lacking the date the list was last updated as a whole. And, to top it off, the author seemingly wants to include ads [0]. I'm all for slowly consuming relevant (i. e. relevant to me, personally) news, but I can't get behind the execution on this project. [0] At the very top of the page: "Dear sponsor, this text link could show us your great product!".
- 52-6F-62 7y agoI have to agree. While I applaud the effort and see a slow news digest as a great project idea, I think this could use some refinement. The very purpose of "news" is timely publication. As it stands, this seems more to be a digest of subjects and articles of personal interest and little more. On the subject of ads—I see no problem with that. It appears they want them to be static ads which is a refreshing move. I encourage the creator to keep working on it.
- friendlybus 7y agoWhat's the point of news that's not new. This is a museum for articles that support a curator's worldview without the attached communities, timely context and broad appeal of HN or Reddit. Rewatching Friends or The Office is not meant to inform me about the state of the world. This idea as a platform might work better. Giving me (the user) the ability to sculpt my own mirror or museum for the world's news with powerful categories might be more helpful. Thinkspot has gotten closer to a better news source than a Slow News application.
- kqr 7y agoThe idea behind the more general movement of slow news is 1. Given time to read and write proper investigative journalism, one doesn't have to resort to copy-pasting descriptive "news" from wire organisations. 2. With hindsight, it is easier to pick out which stories turned out to be significant, and which did not. 3. By revisiting past events, one can begin to unwind what greater consequences they had. Essentially, slow news is a way to better understand what matters in the world. It won't let you talk about the latest soap opera star in the breakroom, but that's not news anyway, in my opinion. I'm not sure the author agrees with this, but it's an attempt at answering your question about the value of slower news.
- friendlybus 7y agoQuality journalism that takes a month to unpack requires journalism done by the greatest writers, someone who can pack a lot of information into a very small amount of content. An article (from OP's website) titled 'Poor kids need summer jobs, Rich kids get them' is interesting for a moment to the majority of readers and few readers who have kids looking for summer jobs will find relevant information in the article. The article mentions Brexit and UBI which are inevitably going to age. A month or years after release I would find better information in books on the topic or ongoing conversations with people following the topic. Hindsight is easier on a target that stands still and less interesting too. We can unveil the significance of long running stories in the stream of consciousness format on HN or Reddit by revisiting stories that are repeatedly relevant. When I want information that transcends time I go to philosophers, intellectuals, scientists, professionals in the field that have written years of accumulated knowledge into a book. I don't see what a news article seeks to provide that will age well. It's not aiming at creating information that ages well.
- choward 7y agoI love that the first part of the docs is a "WTF is this?" section. Unfortunately the paragraph that follows doesn't answer the question at all. And that "Colophon" section at the bottom... What? Anyway, after reading the readme, I still have no idea what this project is.
- time0ut 7y agoIt is just a static HTML page with lists of links to articles the author thought were interesting. I remember making something like this 20 years ago to use as my homepage.
- peterwwillis 7y agoAt first I thought this was a machine learning project that sampled news over a period of time and rejected nearly-identical articles that pop up over the same amount of time. "important news! bill gates gives 5 million to fight COVID!" that pops up on 50 news sites a few hours apart could be rejected, while a lone article that only appears in one or two places would appear as non-trivial. Apply filter on HN articles and you get just the unique, non-trending stuff. Sample over 24 hours and you have the most popular non-trending articles.
- RankingMember 7y agoHow'd this one get past your hand-selected filter? It's literally just a link to a meme (linked to under the heading "Demography"): https://imgur.com/a/BHqTPMO https://imgur.com/a/BHqTPMO
- nkrisc 7y agoThere are also some quite sinister undertones that could be read into that, whether it was intentional or not.
- mlavin 7y agoI think it's very intentional. As hackneyed as the phrase is, the current political atmosphere has seen this rise of demographics change as a feared thing.
- nkrisc 7y agoYes, my personal interpretation of it is that it is a dogwhistle, but I was being charitable. Then again, a good dogwhistle is plausibly deniable as inoccuous. Which really make me reconsider everything this person might have chosen to share on this site, and how "newsworthy" it really is.
- jrochkind1 7y agoSo that's a lot of fancy language to say it's... a manual blog aggregating stuff interesting to the editor? We definitely used to have a lot of those a few years ago, you remember, pre-facebook, fair enough. It's usually helpful if you explain more about your scope of interest for selecting content, I don't really understand what the words mean here. "relevant trends, micro-trends and edge cases for borderline nerds"-- Not sure if this is implied within the field of software development, or just... general human knowledge? Not sure the difference between a trend or a micro-trend, edge case in... what, or if it's meant to be applicable to full-on nerds or just borderline nerds...
- galfarragem 7y agoIt's hard to curate articles (at least in subjects where we are not specialists) for a different audience than ourselves. So I pick the group where I feel I fit in.
- jrochkind1 7y agoSure. I don't feel you've been successful in describing what that audience is in a way that makes sense to anyone else, or in describing what about this project you think makes it interesting or novel. It's basically just a list of links you personally find interesting then? That can be said more clearly. I'm not totally sure what would make it novel as a project, lots of people have assembled public lists of links interesting to them before, yes?
- kuu 7y agoThere are a lot of negatives comments on this article but somehow it reached the front page. Interesting...
- jrochkind1 7y agoI too am curious what quirk of the HN algorithm resulted in this on the front page.
- rhacker 7y agoI'd be more interested in an automated news aggregator that timelines top issues, so that you can see the updates. The timeline would be intelligent enough to know when news articles cross into other areas. Sorta like a Git branch looking tree. Like the dems races linked up to the COVID-19 outbreak, where it largely was not linked up a week ago. Although I think everything falls into the COVID-19 trunk at this point. The timeline would have 1 sentence summaries using some kind of NL summary tool.
- mikesabat 7y agoI like this idea if it focuses on a specific subject, but I don't think it works as an aggregator. During the 2016 election there was a FB Messenger app called purple, which would send out 1 message per day with the news on the election. It allowed me to ignore all the headlines and clickbait because I knew that Purple would tell me everything real and useful. With news aggregation, what I find interesting is highly personable to me so trusting a human to figure this out doesn't seem like the ideal approach. Obviously google news is nailing this, but leans towards clickbait. Something like pocket offering this customized aggregation could be cool if they were optimizing for me saving articles, not just clicking on them. Of course Pocket does have suggestions and I completely ignore them.
- BrunoBernardino 7y agoCongrats on trying to slow down in general! I built a slow news aggregator for people to control their own news (via RSS feeds). It’s at https://focusd.co https://focusd.co in case that helps you with your curation for the aggregation
- onlyrealcuzzo 7y agoI just want to say that I've been thinking of making almost exactly this for a couple of years now. I'm glad someone did it [= You're getting a lot of hate, but I really think there's a lot of value in something like this. The reason I never pursued it very far is I'm not sure how you make a meaningful amount of money out of it. I feel like you either stay small or get big and evolve into the problem you set out to solve.
- mitchdoogle 7y agoA lot of hate is deserved. You have to have a huge ego to think that a list of articles you found on the internet is worthy of anyone's attention. There is next to no value here.
- dt3ft 7y agoShameless plug: I made 20-things.com in order to try and make something like reddit but much slower. Limited to 20 things in a 24 hour period. Still work in progress. Fishing for ideas and feedback.
- dt3ft 7y agoEdit: today I noticed a bug where SMS was not being sent to US numbers because they were being sent from alphanumeric "number" which is not supported. If you tried to register, please try logging in again and you should receive the SMS token.
- elcapitan 7y agoOne of the most annoying things to me in current journalism is how news and facts and opinion pieces get more and more conflated. Probably because the pure "news" is readily available to everyone, so the respective media just take those news, put their spin on it and cater it that way to their audience as a way to create a "product". Unfortunately this linkblog (that's what it is) isn't really much different, it's a collection of opinion pieces that the author agrees with. When I want reasonable, global news, I usually just go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events, which is quite balanced and linking sources and Wikipedia articles about the topic.
- mitchdoogle 7y agoThis Wiki link is awesome! It is way more useful to get an idea of major news trends over time than OP's blog
- AnyTimeTraveler 7y agoI like this. It does scratches my itch as well.
- QuelqueChose 7y agoIf you'd allow me to respectfully suggest an edit to the (IMO cleverly written) by-line of the site. > This is, somehow, a slowly updated news-aggregator with relevant trends, micro-trends and edge cases for borderline nerds, that don't want to miss out, nor spend a shit-ton of time distilling trivia.
- juliend2 7y agoIt would be great to add an RSS feed.