6 ms·

Show HN: A political news aggregator you can comment on

41 points by kaczordon 6y ago

kaczordon 6y ago
I got pretty tired of seeing political news/discussion on my facebook so I made a dedicated site for it that aggregates news headlines, inspired by hacker news. Lemme know what you think or if there are any features you think would be useful on a site like this.
- searchableguy 6y ago
  Seems very US centric. Where are you getting your data from? Facebook?
  - Minor49er 6y ago
    The TLD indicates that it is intended for US politics.
    - searchableguy 6y ago
      Ah, missed that. Good luck to OP. I think aggregating political content without extensive filtering is radioactive material so I would be curious about how they plan to tackle this.
      - kaczordon 6y ago
        Yeah US centric since that's what I'm most familiar with. I'm also very interested in gaming mechanics so I'm looking into ways of game-ifying constructive user submissions but without active moderation it is probably impossible.
01100011 6y ago
Political comments suck. > 90% of them are just rehashed talking points and they quickly devolve into echo chambers for the dominant voting bloc. I'd much rather see an aggregator using something like an argument map.
- emerged 6y ago
  I've long been looking for a wikipedia for political stances. So you can sort of choose your own adventure going deep into the set of perspectives and why people choose them. Maybe building that would be impossible because the bias of curators would fill it with strawmen etc.
  - tehjoker 6y ago
    You might be better off looking up the foundational texts for the various political philosophies. There's a lot of meaty and interesting stuff there. I'm partial to socialism, but reading the originals for liberalism, anarchism, anarcho-capitalism, etc is illuminating. People read (some of) this stuff in polisci degrees, but mostly they focus on quantitative micro stuff at the expense of the theories that motivate people. One thing polisci majors read is "Democracy in America" which was by a Frenchman taking a look at the new order post-revolution. As a socialist, I am partial to materialist views of history, and you can learn a lot by studying historical and scientific descriptions of the real conditions of societies. Usually they diverge quite significantly from whatever the ensconced and sheltered ruling class at the time likes to believe.
    - triplesec 6y ago
      An incomplete but useful list of classics might be the list following. You may wish to start with wikipedia entries on them, or other sources, but reading the texts themselves is useful! Plato: The Republic Aristotle: Nichomachean Ethics; and Politics Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan John Locke: Two Treatises of Government Rousseau: The Social Contract Montesquieu: The Spirit of the Laws De Toqueville: Democracy in America Karl Marx: The Communist Manifesto; and Das Kapital. JS Mill: On Liberty (the classic Utilitarian Enlightenment work) John Rawls: A Theory of Justice (A hugely important work on rights and principles of political decisionmaking) Robert Nozick: Anarchy, State and Utopia (a right-wing / libertarian oriented response to Rawls) Michael Sandel: Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (critique of liberalism and introducing communitarianism)
- asdfman123 6y ago
artembugara 6y ago
How do you aggregate news?
- kaczordon 6y ago
  I picked a few RSS feeds of news sources on the right, left and center based off of https://www.adfontesmedia.com/interactive-media-bias-chart/ https://www.adfontesmedia.com/interactive-media-bias-chart/
  - sixty4bit 6y ago
    Many of your articles are coming from real clear politics dot com. All they do is show an image and then forward on to an article. Would be better to cut the middle man out. Unless you also own RCP too, then carry on capitalist.
  - basch 6y ago
    some of my favorite lists of sources, for your inspiration https://www.memeorandum.com/lb https://www.memeorandum.com/lb https://redef.com/charts/sources/total https://redef.com/charts/sources/total https://aldaily.com/media/ https://aldaily.com/media/ https://longform.org/archive/publications https://longform.org/archive/publications
chishaku 6y ago
The only visible comment is... not good. How would one go about seeding a political news site with constructive comments? As good as HN can be for discussion, many/most? political threads (especially pandemic or protest related lately) devolve very quickly. Tough problem. Kudos for shipping.
- asddubs 6y ago
  i don't think it's possible without heavy moderation, even more so than on non-political forums
- kaczordon 6y ago
  Agreed, it's the community that makes it useful. I mainly made this for my friends to use, was curious what HN users would think, although didn't expect such a toxic comment so soon...[edit] I'm leaving that comment up for a bit as it illustrates the problem I think. Perhaps a minimum word count with a valid word filter would help push people in the right direction or gamification, something like the tribunal(https://leagueoflegends.fandom.com/wiki/The_Tribunal https://leagueoflegends.fandom.com/wiki/The_Tribunal) from League of Legends to ban toxic members.
  - afarrell 6y ago
    The answer really is community. For example, look at churches. Note that finding a non-personally-exhausting way to prevent a community from fracturing into a toxic mess of infighting is a problem. For example, look at churches.
    - 6keZbCECT2uB 6y ago
      lobste.rs attempts to do this by somewhat requiring people to have connections before they can register. Even if that's not your long term goal, it might be a good place to start to avoid broken windows.
      - kaczordon 6y ago
nvr219 6y ago
I do everything I can to do the opposite of read comments on political news articles so if you make the opposite of this product I'll subscribe.
- kaczordon 6y ago
  I was hoping for it to be more of a long form style place for aggregating opinions. Perhaps a minimum word count to ensure only more thought out opinions would be allowed.
ajoy 6y ago
We do the aggregation part : https://www.thefactual.com/news https://www.thefactual.com/news We tried a forum with comments before and it's not easy. But we did learn a lot of lessons and plan to introduce a version of it soon.
- evo_9 6y ago
  Nice but you guys might want to create a sort of ‘low-fi’ interface like this. It’s a ton easier on the eyes esp mobile and is a nice change from the typical news site.
  - ajoy 6y ago
    We had a hard time showing users why we are different from other aggregators/curators. Eg. we extract 3 most information dense sentences from article, we show different political perspectives, we analyze the articles and score them, we group related articles to a story into a cluster etc. It's a fine line between showing too much and showing too little. We also plan on building an app soon.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
the_arun 6y ago
How do you make money? ads?
- kaczordon 6y ago
  Or sponsored political thinkers giving an opinion people would want to read. Not really concerned with that right now, just wanted to make something I’d want to use myself.
evo_9 6y ago
It’s perhaps better to rebrand this as an unbiased or third party political news site or something like that. That’s the cool part of this, as others have pointed out it’s going to devolve rapidly into a political flame war cesspool. Love the aggregation part of it though, nice job!
- kaczordon 6y ago
  Thanks! I agree I did build this trying to include sources from left, right and center so that someone could get a sense of the climate in a quick glance without being in the FB news algorithm bubble. Getting people to use it is another thing entirely.
  - evo_9 6y ago
    I think that’s a really smart approach. The bulk of the country are near center not the extreme edges. A site that organically gathers and represents that middle effectively would be beneficial to everyone.
site-packages1 6y ago
This seems like reddit except people don't submit the stories themselves? So far the comments are of very poor quality, but to be fair that's a small sample size (6), or maybe a large sample size (100% of the comments on the site).
- kaczordon 6y ago
  Basically yeah, a simple news feed without an algorithm but with the option of filtering by popular stories of the day.
  - site-packages1 6y ago
    That’s cool. If this were my project, I’d be spending long days seeding comments myself under different usernames with different POVs, and trying to get a handful of legitimate thoughtful users on there. Not an impossible task, good luck!

41 points by kaczordon 6y ago

I got pretty tired of seeing political news/discussion on my facebook so I made a dedicated site for it that aggregates news headlines, inspired by hacker news. Lemme know what you think or if there are any features you think would be useful on a site like this.

searchableguy 6y ago
Seems very US centric. Where are you getting your data from? Facebook?
- Minor49er 6y ago
  The TLD indicates that it is intended for US politics.
  - searchableguy 6y ago
    Ah, missed that. Good luck to OP. I think aggregating political content without extensive filtering is radioactive material so I would be curious about how they plan to tackle this.
    - kaczordon 6y ago
      Yeah US centric since that's what I'm most familiar with. I'm also very interested in gaming mechanics so I'm looking into ways of game-ifying constructive user submissions but without active moderation it is probably impossible.

01100011 6y ago

Political comments suck. > 90% of them are just rehashed talking points and they quickly devolve into echo chambers for the dominant voting bloc. I'd much rather see an aggregator using something like an argument map.

emerged 6y ago
I've long been looking for a wikipedia for political stances. So you can sort of choose your own adventure going deep into the set of perspectives and why people choose them. Maybe building that would be impossible because the bias of curators would fill it with strawmen etc.
- tehjoker 6y ago
  You might be better off looking up the foundational texts for the various political philosophies. There's a lot of meaty and interesting stuff there. I'm partial to socialism, but reading the originals for liberalism, anarchism, anarcho-capitalism, etc is illuminating. People read (some of) this stuff in polisci degrees, but mostly they focus on quantitative micro stuff at the expense of the theories that motivate people. One thing polisci majors read is "Democracy in America" which was by a Frenchman taking a look at the new order post-revolution. As a socialist, I am partial to materialist views of history, and you can learn a lot by studying historical and scientific descriptions of the real conditions of societies. Usually they diverge quite significantly from whatever the ensconced and sheltered ruling class at the time likes to believe.
  - triplesec 6y ago
    An incomplete but useful list of classics might be the list following. You may wish to start with wikipedia entries on them, or other sources, but reading the texts themselves is useful! Plato: The Republic Aristotle: Nichomachean Ethics; and Politics Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan John Locke: Two Treatises of Government Rousseau: The Social Contract Montesquieu: The Spirit of the Laws De Toqueville: Democracy in America Karl Marx: The Communist Manifesto; and Das Kapital. JS Mill: On Liberty (the classic Utilitarian Enlightenment work) John Rawls: A Theory of Justice (A hugely important work on rights and principles of political decisionmaking) Robert Nozick: Anarchy, State and Utopia (a right-wing / libertarian oriented response to Rawls) Michael Sandel: Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (critique of liberalism and introducing communitarianism)
asdfman123 6y ago

artembugara 6y ago

How do you aggregate news?

kaczordon 6y ago
I picked a few RSS feeds of news sources on the right, left and center based off of https://www.adfontesmedia.com/interactive-media-bias-chart/ https://www.adfontesmedia.com/interactive-media-bias-chart/
- sixty4bit 6y ago
  Many of your articles are coming from real clear politics dot com. All they do is show an image and then forward on to an article. Would be better to cut the middle man out. Unless you also own RCP too, then carry on capitalist.
- basch 6y ago
  some of my favorite lists of sources, for your inspiration https://www.memeorandum.com/lb https://www.memeorandum.com/lb https://redef.com/charts/sources/total https://redef.com/charts/sources/total https://aldaily.com/media/ https://aldaily.com/media/ https://longform.org/archive/publications https://longform.org/archive/publications

chishaku 6y ago

The only visible comment is... not good. How would one go about seeding a political news site with constructive comments? As good as HN can be for discussion, many/most? political threads (especially pandemic or protest related lately) devolve very quickly. Tough problem. Kudos for shipping.

asddubs 6y ago
i don't think it's possible without heavy moderation, even more so than on non-political forums
kaczordon 6y ago
Agreed, it's the community that makes it useful. I mainly made this for my friends to use, was curious what HN users would think, although didn't expect such a toxic comment so soon...[edit] I'm leaving that comment up for a bit as it illustrates the problem I think. Perhaps a minimum word count with a valid word filter would help push people in the right direction or gamification, something like the tribunal(https://leagueoflegends.fandom.com/wiki/The_Tribunal https://leagueoflegends.fandom.com/wiki/The_Tribunal) from League of Legends to ban toxic members.
- afarrell 6y ago
  The answer really is community. For example, look at churches. Note that finding a non-personally-exhausting way to prevent a community from fracturing into a toxic mess of infighting is a problem. For example, look at churches.
  - 6keZbCECT2uB 6y ago
    lobste.rs attempts to do this by somewhat requiring people to have connections before they can register. Even if that's not your long term goal, it might be a good place to start to avoid broken windows.
    - kaczordon 6y ago

nvr219 6y ago

I do everything I can to do the opposite of read comments on political news articles so if you make the opposite of this product I'll subscribe.

kaczordon 6y ago
I was hoping for it to be more of a long form style place for aggregating opinions. Perhaps a minimum word count to ensure only more thought out opinions would be allowed.

ajoy 6y ago

We do the aggregation part : https://www.thefactual.com/news https://www.thefactual.com/news We tried a forum with comments before and it's not easy. But we did learn a lot of lessons and plan to introduce a version of it soon.

evo_9 6y ago
Nice but you guys might want to create a sort of ‘low-fi’ interface like this. It’s a ton easier on the eyes esp mobile and is a nice change from the typical news site.
- ajoy 6y ago
  We had a hard time showing users why we are different from other aggregators/curators. Eg. we extract 3 most information dense sentences from article, we show different political perspectives, we analyze the articles and score them, we group related articles to a story into a cluster etc. It's a fine line between showing too much and showing too little. We also plan on building an app soon.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

the_arun 6y ago

How do you make money? ads?

kaczordon 6y ago
Or sponsored political thinkers giving an opinion people would want to read. Not really concerned with that right now, just wanted to make something I’d want to use myself.

evo_9 6y ago

It’s perhaps better to rebrand this as an unbiased or third party political news site or something like that. That’s the cool part of this, as others have pointed out it’s going to devolve rapidly into a political flame war cesspool. Love the aggregation part of it though, nice job!

kaczordon 6y ago
Thanks! I agree I did build this trying to include sources from left, right and center so that someone could get a sense of the climate in a quick glance without being in the FB news algorithm bubble. Getting people to use it is another thing entirely.
- evo_9 6y ago
  I think that’s a really smart approach. The bulk of the country are near center not the extreme edges. A site that organically gathers and represents that middle effectively would be beneficial to everyone.

site-packages1 6y ago

This seems like reddit except people don't submit the stories themselves? So far the comments are of very poor quality, but to be fair that's a small sample size (6), or maybe a large sample size (100% of the comments on the site).

kaczordon 6y ago
Basically yeah, a simple news feed without an algorithm but with the option of filtering by popular stories of the day.
- site-packages1 6y ago
  That’s cool. If this were my project, I’d be spending long days seeding comments myself under different usernames with different POVs, and trying to get a handful of legitimate thoughtful users on there. Not an impossible task, good luck!