63 ms·

Show HN: Boring Report, a news app that uses AI to desensationalize the news

• JALTU 3y ago
  There's also: https://www.newsminimalist.com/ https://www.newsminimalist.com/
  • RobinL 3y ago
    I would love to see a combination of the two: stories ranked by importance with boring headlines
    • chrisbolt 3y ago
      It already is rewriting the headline and summary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35797241 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35797241 Full thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35795388 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35795388
• kasdi 3y ago
  It would be great if it could summarize topics of bundled individual news over time. Often a single news really is part of a wider context and doesn’t make sense to be read in isolation without knowing the context before. I believe Google News does some bundling of topics. Though I also recognize that topics are hard to define as they could be chosen arbitrarily wide. Everything could be a topic. The ultimate topic would be “The Universe” which contains everything.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• teeray 3y ago
  I’m kinda curious how this would make truly sensational news completely blasé
• oatmeal1 3y ago
  I feel like the kind of person who would use Boring Report is also the kind of person who's brain is already discounting sensationalist titles and doesn't really need an app to do it for them. That being said, I'm all for trying things to make the news more measured and nuanced.
  • nsilvestri 3y ago
    I disagree, as I think this would be useful to people with anxiety disorders who don't want to entirely disconnect from the news. Just because they may be able to logically identify articles and headlines as "sensationalist" doesn't mean their brain won't still kick off some uncomfortable physiological responses.
• dubcanada 3y ago
  What exactly does "desensationalize the news" mean? Is there any additional detail on what exactly it does?
  • yamazakiwi 3y ago
    What exactly does "What exactly does "desensationalize the news" mean?" mean? I think what you're really saying is: "I'm less interested in the work this person did to make something cool; selfishly, I'd like to know if it follows my biases so I can judge it based on politics." Or you're just curious how it works and haven't spent the effort trying it out, which is valid.
    • DiggyJohnson 3y ago
      This is unnecessarily presumptive and negative. They have a simple question - and that doesn't mean they didn't try it out to see how it works from the user side of things.
      • yamazakiwi 3y ago
        The way the question was asked was not asked as if by a person who was simply curious, so yes I was negative.
    • dubcanada 3y ago
      What a weirdly aggressive attack... Either I'm selfish and have a lot of biases or I'm lazy. Could it not be that as a person with an interest in AI and general technology I am wondering if there is any detail on what does an "AI" look for to determine a "sensationalist" title and how does it "desensationalize" it? I have scanned the twitter feed and the app and just wondering if there is anything on how it works. The answer can be no.
      • yamazakiwi 3y ago
        I'm not trying to attack you, I was dissecting your intentions, which I'm now noticing came off as super rude and I apologize for that. But let's be frank... It's clear through your verbiage that you were either thinking about this politically or were actually just curious as I stated in my previous message. I never said you were lazy, there are many reasons why you might not be able to try out the product right now and it's totally normal to ask questions when you assume others might have answers. It's also possible to do selfish things, or think selfishly at times and not be a selfish person, I was not trying to antagonize. Sorry for misunderstanding your intentions, for some reason when you asked "What does desensationalize exactly mean?" I read it particularly negatively.
• CSSer 3y ago
  What I find most ironic about this is that rather than bringing users closer to the source of information it potentially pushes them farther away by adding an additional step to verification. I imagine you've considered this? How easy does your app make it to access the source article and author information, for example?
  • beardyw 3y ago
    Looks like the original URL is at the top of every story.
  • aquaVitae 3y ago
    We readily make available the source article on both iOS app and website. We want to serve as the stepping stone for information about an event that would encourage people to seek out more.
• LightBug1 3y ago
  What? You mean make news headlines useful? * rapturous applause * if this works.
• tehjoker 3y ago
  You can't just reword things and get a better result. If there actually is an alien invasion and the earth is actually doomed, that's actually the correct headline. Media literacy is about way more than about the wording of headlines. It's also about understanding why a headline was selected, who benefits from a story, whether the story is internally logically consistent, and why were the people quoted selected, context of the story that you wouldn't know just from reading it, etc. I say this as someone that wrote a browser plugin to do something similar in like 2011 by screening words that indicated the headline was pointless.
  • pdabbadabba 3y ago
    I agree. Although one side effect of the Boring Report's approach that I quite like is that it also seems to make the headlines more informative.
• malcolmgreaves 3y ago
  > In today's world, catchy headlines and articles often distract readers from the actual facts and relevant information. A reasonable premise! But easier said than done. I wonder how this app counteracts the hallucination and lying behavior of LLMs.* Would be pretty bad to trade off easier-to-decipher human bias and sensationalism for distorted truths and lies from an obfuscated sequence of dot products! * I assume they are using LLMs because they state: > By utilizing the power of advanced AI language models capable of generating human-like text,
  • micromacrofoot 3y ago
    Usually it hallucinates when you're asking for information, in this case it's rewriting existing text, so it should be a little safer. When in doubt check another source, as with everything.
    • hammyhavoc 3y ago
      People should doubt everything an LLM outputs, ergo, why use it in the first place if the desired output is objective fact? LLMs hallucinate, that's what they do. When it's wrong, you likely won't notice that it's wrong, but over time, your world view is going to become more and more distorted.
      • micromacrofoot 3y ago
        > why use it in the first place if the desired output is objective fact rewriting facts is like 90% of all writing jobs
  • a13o 3y ago
    I think there will be an art to these "information summarization" products. You want just enough summarization to accomplish the reader's goal, while also minimizing your hallucination surface area. Summarize too short, and your user won't get what they came for. Summarize too long, and watch user trust crater as the hallucinations pile up. I don't think there's a generalized solution to this problem for all information domains, so when search engine companies implement it it'll be low quality. What remains to be seen is if the money is in being a curator/aggregator within a niche, as Boring Report aims to be; or if it will be in selling the specialized summarization tech to the content creators directly - for use by them when they publish. I think the latter leans B2B and will have higher quality since the content creator signs off on it. But we'll see. Either way, the right mental model for LLMs may be to treat them as memetic compression algorithms.
• mxmbrb 3y ago
  Add some localization to include country specific news and theme filters and I'd pay for this without hesitation. Free me from this cacophony of ever repeating "content" news.
  • aquaVitae 3y ago
    Localization and further customization is on our list of priorities, so say tuned. Thank you for your interest!
• tikkun 3y ago
  I'm generally excited about something I'm calling "English to English translation" - and this is a good example. Previously translation has focused on going between languages. I think there's just as much benefit to translating within a given language. * Translate corporate speak to plain English. * Translate passive aggressive to calm and peaceful. * Translate sensationalist to neutral (like the OP). * Translate implicit and heavy with subtext to direct and assertive.
  • tikkun 3y ago
    See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35256007 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35256007
    • throwaway280382 3y ago
      TI have been thinking on similar lines. I have access to my own freelancers. However, do you have any pointers to algos/libraries I should be using? My NLP skills are not great!
  • dontupvoteme 3y ago
    you are missing "rewrite email i don't want to read in the style of <author i like> influenced by <other thing i like>"
  • nico 3y ago
    The same concept applies to so many things One time, local-dialect subtitles completely changed a movie experience for me It was an American movie. Where I was, they usually watch movies with english audio and neutral Spanish subtitles This time, instead of neutral Spanish, they used local Spanish with slang… wow, what a difference in the way the movie felt Having local language and slang can convey meaning and emotions so much more effectively
    • nottorp 3y ago
      Proper translation is an art form... if you have the budget. Otherwise, it's someone typing as fast as the movie goes on the first viewing.
• mgcross 3y ago
  This is great, but I didn't realize that was a video at the top of the page; I think it needs the 'muted' attribute for it to autoplay.
  • vaskal08 3y ago
    Hey, dev on this project, thanks for the heads up! Fix should be there soon.
• lumb63 3y ago
  This is a great concept! Thanks for sharing. I do have to wonder, though, if this is a Band-Aid over the problem of sensationalist reporting. Assuming there is a market for “boring” news (I think there is; I’d like to read it!), wouldn’t it be cheaper to pay journalists to write less exaggerative pieces in the first place?
  • solarkraft 3y ago
    There are boring news orgs, but how many are you subscribed to? How likely are others to find them?
  • notduncansmith 3y ago
    I think counteracting the market forces that drive exaggerated journalism would be far more expensive and difficult than simply developing some software to filter the exaggerations locally. Also, we can work on the first more effectively with the second in hand.
  • carabiner 3y ago
    Try ft.com. Most of their revenue comes from subscriptions, not ads, so they are not striving to generate clickbait like most papers.
  • woile 3y ago
    In an ideal world yes, but the incentives are not there. For example, many governments benefit from media being sensationalist, within and outside borders. They don't want less sensationalism. I think this "attention to negativity" is something inherent to humans, and now that we have opened the door, I doubt it's gonna close by everyone paying more to journalists.
  • dclowd9901 3y ago
    I would posit the minority of people are drawn to more "boringly" presented news, and as such, it wouldn't make much sense to have it be the primary artifact. (for better or worse)
  • mkoubaa 3y ago
    If there is a x million dollar market for boring news, there's an x+a million dollar market for the same news that's less boring
• ConfusedDog 3y ago
  I need an alternative YouTube homepage that generate video suggestions without clickbait titles and thumbnails.
  • jeremyjh 3y ago
    But how will you know what to click on without a goofy face with a shocked expression?
    • dontupvoteme 3y ago
      is anything of value lost by suppressing youtube videos with thumbnails containing faces showing happiness > 0.9? i suspect not. this probably functions decently well as a "europe vs america" discriminator.
  • crazygringo 3y ago
    For thumbnails, ask and ye shall receive -- Clickbait Remover for Youtube: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clickbait-remover-for-you/omoinegiohhgbikclijaniebjpkeopip https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clickbait-remover-... Further discussion on HN: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+Clickbait+Remover+for+Youtube https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+...
    • ssd532 3y ago
      Thanks a lot. This is great. Any tricks for Youtube mobile app as well? Maybe any unofficial app you recommend?
  • SomewhatLikely 3y ago
    https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/youtube-videos-summary-wi/lmkmjanpomcegbcpnfkggbkdokmlfiao https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/youtube-videos-sum...
  • sureglymop 3y ago
    I use Procrastination Free YouTube. It has settings to customize YouTube so that you don't see any suggestions at all. If i need to watch a video, I have to search for it. In order to not miss Videos from people i want to follow, I use NewPipe on my phone.
• morsch 3y ago
  JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon testified before a Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs hearing on September 22, 2022. Dimon mentioned that as the U.S. nears a potential default on its sovereign debt, markets could experience panic. ...[1] He said that today, but in an interview with Bloomberg. The source article[2] just illustrates it with an archive photo from 2022, when he testified in a Senate hearing. Similarly, the Disney article[3] starts non-sensically The Disney+ logo was displayed on a TV screen in Paris on December 26, 2019. Disney shares decreased by 9%[...] (I don't think displaying the logo 4 years ago is to blame). I suppose you should just stop parsing image subtitles. The two articles I checked were otherwise accurate. [1] https://www.boringreport.org/app/all/645cfc85bab323b21e6195e7 https://www.boringreport.org/app/all/645cfc85bab323b21e6195e... I had to use the developer tools to copy paste the text, obnoxious. You also can't right- or middle-click the source link (to copy it or open it in a background tab). Don't hijack basic browser functionality. [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/11/jpms-jamie-dimon-warns-of-market-panic-as-us-nears-default.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/11/jpms-jamie-dimon-warns-of-ma... [3] https://www.boringreport.org/app/all/645d0cebbaef7c040f89ca4e https://www.boringreport.org/app/all/645d0cebbaef7c040f89ca4...
  • madeofpalk 3y ago
    I've come around to there being legitimate usecases for this type of generative AI, but I don't think producing anything that's supposed to be "True" or "Correct" is one. I think the only useful usecases is for when you want to generate fiction.
    • golemotron 3y ago
      I've come around to there being legitimate use cases for journalism, but I don't think producing anything that's supposed to be "True" or "Correct" is one.
    • ghotli 3y ago
      If you tell GPT-4 specifically to respond with proper jargon for the domain like that found in a textbook or journal it provides much much more useful replies. Silly that prompt engineering is what's required but at least for my purposes wherein I fact check it's output it's right nearly all the time and I've learned a great deal.
• solarkraft 3y ago
  I'm sceptical about how good you can make low-quality source material. If you've managed to train an AI to find the little nuggets of truth that the headline is based on, that's cool. But if the topic is relevant, there will be an article from a reputable source about it. With the current advancements, is there finally a browser extension that just hides clickbait titles/thumbnails?
• DesiLurker 3y ago
  So basically https://www.reddit.com/r/savedyouaclick https://www.reddit.com/r/savedyouaclick autogenerated by AI
• unpopularopp 3y ago
  The most watched and read US news site has not a single submission on the front page [0] Wonder if you can make Fox News boring too. 0, https://www.forbes.com/sites/markjoyella/2023/02/01/fox-news-hits-23rd-consecutive-month-as-most-watched-in-cable-news-as-cnn-sees-gains-in-january/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/markjoyella/2023/02/01/fox-news...
• carabiner 3y ago
  You could just read the Financial Times.
• chaoz_ 3y ago
  Will definitely use that for my next dopamine detox cycle.
• phs 3y ago
  Please allow me to pay you so you can focus on this full-time.
• sigstoat 3y ago
  personally i'm not interested in seeing the news rewritten by gpt as it stands. but if you could automatically find the least sensational article on the subject, and then send me to that site, along with a plugin that just highlights the most salient points, and fades the worst parts to grey, that'd be interesting. i'd also like to see a service which shows me the news about subjects which have managed to stay in the news for at least a week. just drop all the 24-48 hour rage/hype cycles.
• xtracto 3y ago
  Thanks for doing this. This is something I've been looking for since ChatGPT was unveiled generally. I wish Feedly or a similar RSS/News-aggregator would add a feature like this ... it would make so much sense.
  • aquaVitae 3y ago
    We plan to implement RSS support as well, so please stay tuned. Thanks for the support.
    • gumballindie 3y ago
      Ha! Was just scrolling about to see if anyone asked about rss. I think you are onto something, I know i will keep your app installed for a while. Good luck and well done!
    • xtracto 3y ago
      I'm a paying feedly customer . FWIW I would move into your paid service if you implemented rss. I moved to feedly when greader was killed, but never liked feedly that much.
• powersnail 3y ago
  I've also been thinking about processing news with LMs, but from a different angle. One big complaint I have for reading news through RSS, is that there's no natural hierarchy/priority to the news. There's no front page, no headline, no size in RSS feeds. Given the way news agencies generates those feeds, there are _tons_ of repetition, tiny updates, some insignificant one-liner interview about some significant events. Not to mention the "no update at this point" updates. Entries that are not informative look exactly the same as---but often outnumbers---the entries that are informative. An ideal news feed processor to me, would be one that reads through last weeks RSS feeds, and merges the all those tiny updates into coherent articles, ranked by the significance of the event. Sort of turning newspaper into a journal. The merging and reflow should be well-within an LM's capability. However, I'm not sure if OpenAI's API can swallow an entire week's worth of RSS, or produce multiple full-sized articles, but this is something that I'd like to try when I get some free weekends.
  • TySchultz 3y ago
    I had nearly the same idea as you around surfacing what is "important" vs just a large list of RSS articles. The main differences compared to what you are thinking are two things. One for the `Significance of the event` I've used the number of publishers talking about that event. So more publishers == more important. Two, I've done this in a daily fashion instead of a weekly report. I can also confirm that the LM has the capability to do at least a days worth (2500+) of articles. I would doubt its capability to produce an entire article but it does a great job at a small summary. Here is the link if you wanted to check it out. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/quill-news-digest/id1669557131 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/quill-news-digest/id1669557131
    • haldujai 3y ago
      Are you curating the list of publishers somehow? I would imagine the AP/AFP newswire repost circuit/echo chamber would result in overestimating importance of a lot of crapola and underestimate the importance of investigative pieces for example.
      • 3y ago
• rpastuszak 3y ago
  I love the idea! I was thinking about doing sth similar to my medieval content farm (https://tidings.potato.horse/about https://tidings.potato.horse/about) but as a personalised feed, where I can apply different “soft” filters to different types of content, eg. remove garbage tech-bro language, provide outlines/shorter versions of sensationalised content, reference related articles from different sources. Essentially, I was thinking about replacing my poet/editorial team personas with different user personas.
  • ghostbrainalpha 3y ago
    Dude, I love your Medieval Content Farm!!!
• LeoPanthera 3y ago
  I wrote a small utility to send the AP news feed to GPT and ask it to judge which stories are important based on how many people they affect and how time-sensitive they are. ie. Will this story still be important tomorrow? Only the passing ones are then delivered to me. I'm not releasing this as a product, it's too simple, but it works surprisingly well, and it's trivial to add criteria for what you deem to be important, or not.
• miguelbemartin 3y ago
  Love the idea, it would be nice to have this as a chrome extension.
• uoaei 3y ago
  Orwell's Newspeak comes to mind. This can be a good app but it can also serve to stifle conversation by narrowing the Overton window if this kind of technique becomes the norm. Stay vigilant.
• asoneth 3y ago
  The headline style reminds me of Matt Winkler's "Bloomberg Way" which specified headlines that summarized the article into a single line, see: https://wildtech.mongabay.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2016/05/2.TOP-News-Page.jpg https://wildtech.mongabay.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/20... or https://www.optionsbro.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Bloombegr-Terminal-News.png https://www.optionsbro.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Bloomb... I'm not sure if they always achieved that, but it was at least a goal for readers to be able to skim feeds to understand what was going as quickly as possible. Such a policy was feasible because the readers were paying customers as opposed to web news which are often funded by advertisers or worse.
• chankstein38 3y ago
  I think this is an amazing idea! The only flaw I see with it is that without the sensationalized headlines I read through going "Oh that doesn't matter, that doesn't matter either" etc haha I haven't found an article that sounds interesting in a few scrolls. I mean, it's great because it's accurate. Half of the "news" we're fed is sensationalized so we'll click on it and it's really nothing but it gets us riled up about something that is effectively meaningless to us. This just brings reality to the forefront and makes me realize I don't care about the news lol Thank you though, this is awesome!
  • Clubber 3y ago
    Yes, this has a lot of potential. If the news orgs won't de-sensationalize because of incentives, we can do it for them. It would be a great browser plugin, and you can define the URL's you want to de-sensationalize.
    • chankstein38 3y ago
      I love that idea!
  • harryvederci 3y ago
    > This just brings reality to the forefront and makes me realize I don't care about the news Maybe the pre-clickbait era version of you would have found more of these articles interesting? So maybe it's not that you don't care about the news, but your "base level" of what's interesting is different due to being used to clickbait.
    • chankstein38 3y ago
      100% agree, doing this wholesale would probably help my (and likely others) mental states as a whole! Imagine desensationalizing product sites and ads and the like, we might actually be able to bring down that threshold so it can stop ever increasing. The irony here is I feel like what I wrote here is sensationalized lol I do truly think it could be helpful I just think a lot of us are "broken" as far as that's concerned from the exhausting nature of everything these days always vying for our attention.
• gnicholas 3y ago
  Love the idea, the name, and the app logo. I tried it with a CNN article and found that the output was a bit too summarized. It would be nice if users could specify if they want no summarization (just desensationalize) or if they want summarization included (and possibly to what degree).
• kmod 3y ago
  I built something that summarizes hacker news discussion pages for me, and I have been very pleasantly surprised how much nicer it is to read "angryuser1 and angryuser2 got into a heated discussion" than to actually read the discussion. Forcing everything into the neutral gpt voice has greatly reduced the emotional valence of my HN consumption
• akomtu 3y ago
  Modern "news" is a lot like sewage padded by corn fructose syrup and wrapped into shiny colorful pills to fool the mind. It's true that the pills have useful elements in trace amounts, but if you start harvesting them from the pills, you'll get poisoned. Your LM just removes the deceptive shell, but the pill's contents remain the same. I think it would be better if your LM identified and highlighted lies and deceptions in news articles. Most of them will be all in red, but that's the goal: give users an idea what they are reading. For example, the prompt for your LM could be: "for every statement in this arricle, mark it in red if it's a lie or an unsubstantiated claim, mark it in purple if it's appeal to emotions, mark it in green if it's appeal to authority" and so on. I doubt journalusts will be able to outmaneuver LLM trained on every book in the internet. (journalusts to distinguish from true journalists, that are exceedingly rare today)
  • DesiLurker 3y ago
    though thats true this product (if widely used) would reduce incentives to make clickbaity headlines like 'You Wont Believe' or 'Watch what happens when'. Also 5000 word essay at the start of every boiled potato recipe. Thats a step forward but to change the actual content of news would require adjustment of journalistic motivations, which are primarily either money or power driven. they dont change easy especially given how much money is in keeping populus close to 50/50 on only 2 options.
• eternalban 3y ago
  I have a feeling this is somehow going to end up becoming a hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy.
• kritr 3y ago
  I actually liked this a lot more than I thought I would. I would say I’m pretty averse to clicking on sensational titles, but that definitely leads me to not click on articles that may have contained useful information. This actually makes me comfortable reading about politics and issues that are otherwise overdramaticized and gives me the opportunity to objectively filter what I want to read.
• amelius 3y ago
  I want this on my Facebook newsfeed.
• shireboy 3y ago
  Ah, I've had this idea for 5+ years now and just haven't had time to try to build a MVP. Before this year it would have been harder to do well - involve human writers and sentiment analysis. But lately I have been thinking about trying to do it with GPT. I genuinely think there is a huge underserved market for a "world's most boring news and weather site". Almost everybody I talk to on all sides of the aisle recognizes that clickbait news is one root cause of lots of problems and want an alternative. In fact, in some ways, Hacker News is that site for me. That said, I don't get why an app not a mobile-responsive website.
  • georgeg23 3y ago
    It does have a mobile web version: https://www.boringreport.org/app https://www.boringreport.org/app
  • heleninboodler 3y ago
    Agree strongly with the "why is this an app?" stance. The front page makes it unclear that there's a web interface at all because your options are big buttons for ios and for "desktop/android". No, I definitely don't want a "desktop" app. I want a web page. So I didn't click it and I closed the window. When considering installing any app, your first question should be "is there any benefit to the user of making this an app instead of a web page?" The answer is very frequently no, which means effort spent building the app and getting me to install it must be for a purpose that's not in my interests, such as tracking.
• vrglvrglvrgl 3y ago
  [dead]
• gumballindie 3y ago
  In an ideal world we’d have a network of trusted people that feed trusted event highlights and leave it to ai to fill in the gaps or detect bias. At the moment news is just a collection of episodes and arcs aimed at maintaining a constant state of fear and anger - emotions familiar to all of us. We are designed to pay attention to danger and the media knows this. We should detoxify it. It’s done enough harm. Edit: after reading some of the content i really like it!
  • 082349872349872 3y ago
    In the old days, I am told, BBC newsreaders read the news, and on days when not enough had happened, proceeded to play music for the remainder of their timeslot.
    • gumballindie 3y ago
      As it should be. Why constantly bombard us with nonsense? Every now and then i chill and listen to old radio broadcasts. There were plenty of bad things happening at the time but somehow the way they were presented was calming and reassuring. Modern news make it sound like civil wars are imminent and we are constantly ready to jump at each other’s throats. A bit like “Give me the photos, I will give you the war”. If there is no reason to panic they’ll manufacture one.
      • robertlagrant 3y ago
        News now behaves a lot more like gossip than journalism. Small things are made sensational, and big things are spun to make the best story for the teller and the receiver.
    • kevincox 3y ago
      I think this is the real problem. News is "made" to fit a budget. My ideal news would only be published when it is actually worth reading.
  • teawrecks 3y ago
    That's like saying, in an ideal world we don't need encryption because no one lies, everyone is responsible with the data they are entrusted with, and no one has any motives to look at data that doesn't belong to them. Ok, but we don't live in that world. So we have encryption, and people have to take what they hear with a grain of salt.
• reso 3y ago
  I'd be likely to use this in my daily workflow if it was a chrome extension that could simply modify headlines and article text.
• shrimpx 3y ago
  The prospect that this type of tech could proliferate is politicians' and political media's worst nightmare lol. Imagine everyone putting a boring filter on CNN, Fox News, and political Twitter. Politicians would have to run on policy platforms again, which has become almost unthinkable.
  • nomel 3y ago
    With the "by omissions" dishonesty that most politicized news orgs go with these days, I think gathering all news, then putting it through the AI, would be ideal. There would be some chance at getting the whole picture. I'm far more interested in what a sensational news org decided to not include.
• thyselius 3y ago
  Would be nice to be able to see a summary of the original article below the ai one, including the sensationalism
• badnewsforu 3y ago
  [flagged]
• upsidesinclude 3y ago
  The very first article is a left leaning fact check. This needs work to be what you claim. You've baked in bias and report it without emotion
  • int_19h 3y ago
    What is the problem with the summarization of that article, exactly? https://www.boringreport.org/app/all/645c525a001a7a3765dbc4c9 https://www.boringreport.org/app/all/645c525a001a7a3765dbc4c... Or are you complaining that it's there at all?
    • tekknik 3y ago
      Fact checks are sensationalist. Remember they were used primarily to go after Trump, and have been rarely used since. They also tend to be biased. I think it would be better to add a “how much it matters” weight to news, so this wouldn’t even show up for me (read I don’t care about fact checks), similar to newsminimist.com They could also use more right leaning site sources in general. It looks like they mostly have the token Fox News source and that’s it. It would be much more useful if I could either add my own sources, or for every left leaning source a right leaning one was added.
      • yakhinvadim 3y ago
        I'll just fix the link... https://www.newsminimalist.com/ https://www.newsminimalist.com/
      • int_19h 3y ago
        I remember that fact checks were a thing long before Trump was a prominent political figure. I also don't find it particularly surprising that Trump of all people is the subject of so many fact checks, given that the man is a brazen pathological liar.
        • tekknik 3y ago
          Fact checks were rarely, if ever used prior to Trump, and are rarely if ever used after Trump. And interestingly Biden’s lies, which are clear if you’re not on the left (read an independent or the right) never get covered. For instance, a real easy one is AR-15’s being unusual or not in common use. It’s the most popular gun in the US, yet you’ll only see this fact on right leaning sites. This means, unequivocally, fact checks are nothing more than political weapons and serve nothing more than brainwashing people. Let’s not even get started on how many mistakes Biden has made while speaking, and if Trump were have to done the same. There is very clear bias, and an attempt to stifle out competition by flooding the narriatve. Some of us are interested in a neutral perspective and really want this tit-for-tat crap to stop, before the rest of you destroy the country.
• freediver 3y ago
  I've played with a variation of this called "Unbiased News". The prompt asks to rewrite the article in an unbiased way and to also expose biases in the article. It feels 'good' to use. Demo here: https://twitter.com/vladquant/status/1647042056139968512 https://twitter.com/vladquant/status/1647042056139968512 Code and prompt here: https://github.com/OrionBrowser/ProgrammableButtons https://github.com/OrionBrowser/ProgrammableButtons
  • hgsgm 3y ago
    "Unbias" doesn't exist.
    • whythre 3y ago
      I will settle for news that isn’t clumsily trying to provoke an emotional response.
• rswerve 3y ago
  I love the idea of a news summary, but this is also something of a reductio ad absurdum of "just the facts" reporting. Informative reporting would tell me what happened, who is affected, why it might matter to me, etc. Having a point of view (or a bias, if you like) is unavoidable when providing context, but providing context is essential to being informative. It's a hard problem! But I'd guess that not many people will stick with this as their news source, because it won't hold their interest, because it doesn't include all that information about why they might want to care.
• ademup 3y ago
  I really like the concept and experience even though I almost missed out! I thought it was _only_ available as an app when I loaded the page on my phone. I rarely (basically never) install apps so I closed it immediately. It wasn't until I read on HN that I realized there's a web version.
• Proven 3y ago
  [dead]
• kjreact 3y ago
  This is the type of news app that I’ve always wanted. Kudos. I hate the sensationalism in news these days. One thing I’d like to see is a feature for grouping articles about the same piece of news. I keep seeing repeating articles covered by different outlets. It may not be easy to implement, but it’d make it much more useful for skimming the daily news.
• billythemaker 3y ago
  Also check out News Minimalist! https://www.newsminimalist.com https://www.newsminimalist.com
• no_no_no_no 3y ago
  [dead]
• mrguyorama 3y ago
  Here's an idea, maybe the reason why news is angering and emotional is that there is a lot of bad shit going on in the world that we have just kind of let happen for a long time, and a lot of injustice that shouldn't be ignored, and a lot of people justice ignores that it shouldn't. Maybe the solution isn't to pretend things are just fine. People keep trying to paint this as some sort of "sensationalism" and "I want just the facts" but the facts are that thousands of people die every day from cheaply and easily preventable illnesses and issues while people who can literally self fund rocketry get to accumulate even more wealth and power. There's a difference between "remember the maine" and "hey women right now are literally dying because they can't get abortions to remove dead tissue inside their body because of some completely different person believes their religion says doing so is a crime" Being angry from news like this isn't a bad thing. You SHOULD be angry.
  • thenoblesunfish 3y ago
    That sounds nice, but the problem is that 99.99% of people get angry and then .. do little. At best they complain to their friends and raise awareness. Mostly they just feel stressed. The point is that the bottleneck is not awareness or even justifiable rage, it's intelligent action, and a more staid view of current events sounds attractive.
  • krapp 3y ago
    >Being angry from news like this isn't a bad thing. You SHOULD be angry. Why? What are you going to do? Just get high off the dopamine drip fed by social media rage cycles? Angry rants on Twitter? Maybe start a Youtube channel and make a buck or two with banal political essays? Recognize that the news is designed to make you angry because that anger prevents you from taking any form of effective action, it misdirects your energy and consumes your focus. It is a means of control, leading you to confuse catharsis with praxis. By all means, be concerned about the world, injustice, social inequality, etc. There is a lot to be concerned about. But anger - much less the indignant virtue signaling anger you're displaying here, is a waste of time.
    • mrguyorama 3y ago
• ada1981 3y ago
  Here is a slightly more boring version of your description according to ChatGPT4: Today, many news articles contain eye-catching titles and content that can lead readers away from the central facts. Boring Report uses OpenAI's language models to take these types of articles and changes them into the content you are reading now, with the goal of aiding readers in paying attention to the primary information.
• mrandish 3y ago
  It's somewhat sad this tool is so desperately needed to make modern 'news' media less annoying and more useful. Frankly, over the past year I've intentionally blocked almost all news media out of my life by aggressively curating all my content. It was weird at first but over time I've found I'm less distracted and happier. I get more done and I'm now able to better focus on the people and things that actually matter to me. It's ironic that this tool is essentially reverting news reporting back to what journalism is supposed to be - factually reporting notable events that have already happened. It's bizarre how acceptable it now is for 'news' to include 'opinion and speculation'.
• remote_phone 3y ago
  Do they pay for a news feed to get the original articles to desensationalize? I’m curious about any copyright or licensing issues around using external news articles as source material for desensationalizing.
• robertlagrant 3y ago
  I'd love to see an ongoing set of graphs and data visualisations that show me what's going on. E.g. - how much are we borrowing this year and the last 50 years - what is net migration for the last 50 years - what is inflation for the last 50 years - what are the crime rates for the last 50 years - what are the violent crime rates for the last 50 years Don't know why I picked 50 every time, but I'd just love some key, well-contextualised data that we could all agree on. At the moment it seems as though people can't even agree on basic facts, and anything that helps with that would be awesome.
  • erehweb 3y ago
    Agree that this would be interesting, but your proposed solution would not address people not agreeing on facts, I think. People often (many on this site) say that they don't believe government inflation figures, or that underreporting of crime makes crime rates meaningless.
    • robertlagrant 3y ago
      > underreporting of crime makes crime rates meaningless Well, if they can present the rate of crime underreporting, and how it has changed over time, they're welcome to add it to the graph :)
• ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
  This should be useful for the ever-more-hyperbolic weather reports that dominate network news now. NBC News, almost every week: "20 million Americans threatened by severe weather this weekend!" "Bomb cyclone threatens 10 million people" "Atmospheric river menacing 18 million people" Translation: A rainy front is moving through several states.
  • pixl97 3y ago
    I mean there is a different between 'getting some rain this weekend' and 'life threatening flooding'. The atmospheric river post would be an example of the second headline and should still maintain the necessary urgency and implied danger.
    • ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
      There is indeed a difference, but you wouldn't know it from listening to these breathless announcements every night. What I hate about these particular (nearly verbatim) examples is the summing of the entire population of every state that might be touched by a system and barfing it out as if it's a body count. And why all of a sudden does every weather phenomenon (or variant thereof) have a new sensational name? And on a California-centric tangent: I also detest meaningless labels, which CA loves. For example, there's a RED FLAG WARNING! WTF is that supposed to mean? Are millions of people threatened by red flags? OH NOES! And finally there's "sigalert." Insert giant eye-roll emoji.
• ryanblakeley 3y ago
  From the Science section, there is a headline "Metallic Object Falls Through New Jersey Home's Roof", which is the desensationalized version of "Possible meteorite crashes through the roof of a New Jersey home, lands in bedroom still warm". The ambiguity of "metal object" kind of makes it more sensational than "possible meteorite".
• rs999gti 3y ago
  There's already - https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news It's shows left, center, and right bias of new articles. Read the 'From the center' version of articles, and the bias and sensationalism has been removed - https://www.allsides.com/story/media-industry-cnn-staffers-criticize-ceo-chris-licht-over-trump-town-hall https://www.allsides.com/story/media-industry-cnn-staffers-c...
  • andrewxdiamond 3y ago
    Isn’t coming to a news story from these specific political viewpoints already a whole lot of bias? I don’t think we can boil down most things into three separate POV. Not everything needs to be looked at through a political party’s perspective
    • vippy 3y ago
      Came to say this. The point seems not to be give an "all sides showing" but specifically to remove language that's designed to trigger our subcortical response systems.
      • haldujai 3y ago
        Is that even possible? Take the specific language apart the choice of which stories to report on is already/can be highly biased. Not sure a sanitized Fox News or NYT is “bias free” and is probably more dangerous than approaching the original articles knowing what their bias is. With that said the product being demo-ed here is about sensationalism not bias per se as in this discussion.
    • haldujai 3y ago
      They actually use a 5-dimension political spectrum. Left-right is not specific to any political party, dates back 200+ years and is extensively used in academic and nonacademic literature. What other system would you recommend for evaluating political bias in news?
      • 3y ago
• gerash 3y ago
  What a great idea! The next step is to give each outlet a sensationalism score and then normalize their headlines according to how they usually sensationalize.
• tppiotrowski 3y ago
  Another great option is legiblenews which provides headlines from Wikipedia edits and is a bit dry but informative. I remember when Trump was president he was mentioned on legiblenews[1] a handful of times during his term while the mainstream media gyrated with his every move. It made me realize how little of the day to day news cycle has meaningful impact on the long term history of the world. [1] https://legiblenews.com/ https://legiblenews.com/
• Fatboyrunning 3y ago
  Well done. There is something like this in 'A Fire Upon the Deep' by Vernor Vinge; his intergalactic societies translate their alien languages - and incompatible methods of expression - using an application similar to this one. Very cool whenever sci-fi becomes reality!
• tethys 3y ago
  Can’t say I‘m a regular user of Artifact, but I‘ve played around for a bit with their AI summarize feature and found it really satisfying. Very reliably tells you what‘s hiding behind clickbaity headlines and best of all, it works without having to confirm/close cookie dialogs or any other popovers first. Edit: To give an example: Coming across the headline "Popular action series is cancelled after just one season", the summary really provides everything I want to know (or at least: to let me decide if I want to spend time actually reading the article): > Cancelled after one season: CBS has axed action series True Lies, based on the 1994 film, after struggling to find its own identity. > Mixed reviews and lack of audience: The show failed to gain a large enough audience despite starring actors like Steve Howey and Beverly D'Angelo.
• AnonCoward42 3y ago
  I don't think it makes a difference in what tone you're being lied to.
  • int_19h 3y ago
    It does. You're much more likely to spot a lie that does not try to push your emotional buttons before delivering the falsehoods.
• gnicholas 3y ago
  Do you generate the headline from the original headline, or do you desensationalize the body of the article and then ask OpenAI to generate a headline based off of the new article body? It seems like the latter might be better, since it ensures the headline actually matches the article below, as opposed to relying on a likely-clickbaity title that would no longer match the desensationalized article body. Probably worth testing both ways to see what the results look like!
  • rkangel 3y ago
    Also, in a couple of cases the desensationalising has removed (useful) information. E.g. in https://www.boringreport.org/app/all/645d396cf7c90670355a6c7b https://www.boringreport.org/app/all/645d396cf7c90670355a6c7... the headline is "Supreme Court Decisions in Two Cases" missing any of the stuff about corruption in the original headline "Supreme Court sides with ex-Cuomo aide and Buffalo developer in disputes over corruption convictions". (also, that click jacking to prevent copy/paste is a PITA)
• sha16 3y ago
  Nice work on the app! Reminds me of a news aggregator I worked on (inshapemind). What's your tech stack like?
• perrygeo 3y ago
  You've thrown out many subjective terms here: "catchy", "relevant", "sensationalist", "essential". How do you intend to define these and hold yourself accountable? How are you planning to keep your biases or the emergent biases of the underlying tech in check? "just hand it to OpenAI and :shrug:" is not a responsible answer.
• taylorius 3y ago
  Now here is an app that ought to be held high as having real, and potentially enormous benefit to the world. (Though I wont hold my breath for any online media sources to write about it.) :-)
• TheCaptain4815 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • haldujai 3y ago
    A black-box LLM which is probably inherently biased from its training data ascribing racist labels to individual humans and ranking them sounds like a horrendous idea you’d read about in an Orwell novel. Do you have any evidence suggesting modern day journalists are extremely anti-white and anti-Asian? That’s an incredibly bold statement to make.
    • TheCaptain4815 3y ago
      This will be a combination of numerous fine-tuned models, def not using a default LLM. A bold statement but one I believe is correct. Even Elon Musk, the richest man on the planet, believes this. Guess we'll see, my main priority is ensuring it's accurate and as unbiased as possible. It must work on every news site, both left and right wing.
      • haldujai 3y ago
        I don’t think it’s a given that finetuning address pretraining bias, most LLMs you would have access to are trained on very similar and biased corpora, see any Anthropic or OpenAI alignment paper. It’s conceptually possible for extensive finetuning + MoE to work accurately enough for this premise to be feasible but it seems incredibly unlikely with what’s available today. In any case, using a non-explainable AI model to call individuals racist based on their professional work product (which has significant real-world consequences) is still a horrible idea. This doesn’t carry the same impact as mislabeling tweet sentiment. So we’ve gone from most of us to Elon Musk and yourself? Musk (whose wealth is irrelevant but is second as an FYI) is one of the worst appeals to authority you could be making on this argument.
        • TheCaptain4815 3y ago
          I’m thinking a multi model approach from classification of a “bias” to the rewriting. In a perfect world I’d also incorporate a database of scraped tweets and one day video dialog. Idk about you, but I’d love to see the most racist tweets from a NYT or WSJ journalist, along with the articles they’ve written, a score associated with their content, etc.
• gregman1 3y ago
  Could you please add news.ycombinator.com to the feed?
• 0x445442 3y ago
  What’s it do about news worthy content that’s not reported?
• hgsgm 3y ago
  Hey after I click "Desktop Android" when I am on Android, please don't show a full screen ad for an iOS app
  • wkat4242 3y ago
    Yeah especially when they can detect I'm not even on iOS in the first place.
• int_19h 3y ago
  This is surprisingly good already for an early product. I'd be willing to pay a subscription fee for something like this. Have you considered extending it further so that instead of tackling news articles individually, it would try to find and aggregate / juxtapose everything prominent that is published about some particular news item in a similar "boring" manner?
• zorak8me 3y ago
  Yes! Can you make a plug-in that reads articles and replaces headlines with the story lead (aka what the headline would have been 30 years ago)?
• hinkley 3y ago
  I'd settle for an app that merely identifies all of the overwrought elements in a story and color codes them, so that we can teach people that these sources are a negative influence on their lives. Don't rephrase it, just show me all of the sentence fragments that need to be rephrased. Or better still, make it a 'lint' tool that rates articles and websites by the density of manipulative verbiage they use. These sites will piss you off and teach you nothing in the process. These sites will piss you off but actually teach you something. These sites will placate you (I'm looking at you, Ted Talks).
• akira2501 3y ago
  You can't copy and paste on desktop. That's thoroughly frustrating, it's understandable, but a more suitable mechanism should be found than strictly disabling it. From A Random Article[0]: "In the second case, the court ruled in favor of Louis Ciminelli, a Buffalo developer convicted for taking part in rigging the bid process and property fraud. The justices reversed a lower court ruling based on a theory of law that the government later abandoned." That might be "boring" to the point of "uninformative." It also gives me strange reminders of the book "Brave New World," and I think most of the authors so edited might feel the same way. I would presume to _add more_ to the article then to _take away_ from it, in some cases, to the point of blinding the reader from any fact whatsoever. [0]: https://www.boringreport.org/app/all/645d396cf7c90670355a6c7b https://www.boringreport.org/app/all/645d396cf7c90670355a6c7...
• lxe 3y ago
  Can I just have a newsletter to subscribe? Why do I need an app?
• roycebranning 3y ago
  this is like honest trailers for the news
• zzzeek 3y ago
  OpenAI's training is basically the entire internet. And we know when it comes to deciding if a story really is "that bad" or if it's hyperbole, the internet is really good at giving us a clear picture on that. Police shootings? ah well he was acting funny, they had to shoot him. School shootings? so many more people die of cancer each year. Fascist / authoritarian leaders on the rise? Here's 5 subtle and pointless ways Hitler was different and therefore NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT. Global warming? The jury is still out. "Reasonable" discourse on campus being "cancelled"? OH YES CANCEL CULTURE IS RAMPANT! Yeah, AI can totally decide what's real and what's not. Sounds great
• eBombzor 3y ago
  Make a plugin for YouTube click bait titles
• SamuelAdams 3y ago
  Honestly awesome, but you don’t need AI for this. Just get a script to remove all the adjectives and adverbs from an article and you’re about 80% de-sensionalized.
• jeremy_wiebe 3y ago
  A cool idea. Question for the engineers working on this: Does this just summarize one article or at a time or cross reference multiple different sources for the same event?
• methods21 3y ago
  Just came across Otherweb also. Was working on similar as a hobby project, more interested in back-end than front end, so cool to have on mobile.
• komali2 3y ago
  This is a pretty cool way to tackle this problem, but I don't think there's any "easy" solution to this problem space, which I visualize as: News media needs to make money. To do so it needs eyeballs. Eyeballs, despite our best efforts and intensions, can't help but be drawn to sensation (and blood). The news media thus selects for sensation and blood. The add-on effect of this that makes it all matter: recency bias as well as some other cognitive quirks we all have mean that when the news media selects for sensation and blood, we start to believe the universe is a lot more sensational and bloody than it really is. This is demonstrable: publish a story about a freak one in a million train accident and people stop riding the train and start taking their cars, despite risk of accident in car being by every way of measuring it drastically higher. I'm not saying that news media shouldn't talk about train crashes, I'm saying I'm not sure we've figured out yet how to remind people that the world is actually mundane. People watch the news to "be informed," but in actuality their perspection of reality is being warped. The news would have you believe crime is going up or down based on whether it makes a good story, when (depending on where you live) the relatively minor adjustmens in these statistics really don't affect you, every walk to work statistically speaking will leave you unmolested. The media would have you believe that there are riots across the country in response to the cops killing an unarmed person, again. When in reality, most protests are really quite boring, just a lot of people walking around and maybe occasionally chanting. If there even is a local protest. I don't know what it will take to remind people that the world is boring, but right now the news media is motivated against this, because the angrier and more scared we all are, the more we click in.
• baran1 3y ago
  fantastic. could you please add a way to filter out a topic/person never want to read about?
• ftxbro 3y ago
  This is the kind of app that I imagine would get popular, then it gets bought out, then the new executives would turn to each other and put a negative sign somewhere in the code turning the newly acquired app into a sensationalizer that does the opposite of its original purpose, for more engagement and corporate metrics.
  • thethimble 3y ago
    We need a similar app that removes existentially cynical themes from HN comments
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• austinjp 3y ago
  Very nice. Although perhaps you could do well to remove some sites from your intake. For example, while the following link is mild compared to its source material, it's hardly devoid of sensationalism: https://www.boringreport.org/app/all/645a8edbcdaefdcdfe3806b8 https://www.boringreport.org/app/all/645a8edbcdaefdcdfe3806b...
• jschveibinz 3y ago
  I like it! It would be great if the app could “bin” all articles by news topic, e.g. “Supreme Court Decision…”. Google News tries to do this. This would clean it up and make it even more “boring.” Otherwise, thank you very much!
• calibas 3y ago
  The title from Boring Report: > The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Performance on Switch Article's title: > Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom’s Performance On Switch Sounds Like A Minor Miracle I find the Boring Report summary to be much more informative that the article, it's like they trimmed away all the fat. The fact that the game runs at 20-30 FPS doesn't seem like a "minor miracle", by 2023 standards that's barely acceptable. And I understand the limitations of the Switch hardware, I'm not trying to insult Nintendo or the Zelda games, but I have hard time using the word "miracle" to describe the performance of a game that runs at 20-30 FPS.
  • skeaker 3y ago
    Disagree. If you understand that the switch hardware is very limiting, you understand that the game runs despite that, and you understand the usage of hyperbole to emphasize how bad the switch hardware is for 2023, the original title should make perfect sense. It's also more informative on what the article will contain since you can infer that it will specifically talk about the hardware and its limitations, whereas the shortened title makes it sound like a plain benchmark.
    • calibas 3y ago
      It's not that you're explicitly wrong, it's that you and the article are putting a very positive spin on what is objectively mediocre performance. I could just as easily put a negative spin on it, and suggest there's something wrong with the fact that the Switch can barely run modern games. For the record, I own a Switch and I'm thinking about buying the new Zelda game... I just like facts more than spin.
      • skeaker 3y ago
        I care more about the loss of information than the spin in the title. The new title objectively gives you less information about what the article will actually contain even if it is less biased. The natural extreme of this would be a program that strips the titles of articles out entirely: It would be guaranteed to remove all bias from titles every time, at the cost of obfuscating what the actual contents of the article will be.
• jonnycomputer 3y ago
  I endorse! I think that 90% of what people respond to are the headlines, and the headlines are almost always sensationalist attempts to grab attention, and that this distorts peoples views of the world in dysfunctional ways.
• jonnycomputer 3y ago
  Actually like this idea, but it also made me think of doing an AI app to transform all language into double-plus good Newspeak
• kennethologist 3y ago
  Great execution. Question: How do you intend to make money from/monetize this? The reason I ask is because I have several "pet" projects like this I've been meaning to develop but with the time cost and financial cost it has to be something I can at least cover the server and maintenance costs.
  • clnq 3y ago
    I would like to pay for a news aggregator like this, especially if it had more topics. $1 a month would be easy to part with and would cover GPT costs quickly with a relatively small number of users. I would also like to see an RSS reader that does the same to my own feeds, but that could be cost-prohibitive.
• absoluteunit1 3y ago
  I came across this gem on HN recently that targets a similar issue with news: https://www.newsminimalist.com/ https://www.newsminimalist.com/ Absolute gem, have been using is everyday now
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• koinedad 3y ago
  Love the idea!
• synergy20 3y ago
  can I access it via boring newsletter in emails
• sreeramvenkat 3y ago
  Another option is to watch Doordarshan - Indian national news. https://www.youtube.com/@DDIndia https://www.youtube.com/@DDIndia
  • potamic 3y ago
    Wouldn't recommend at all. Journalist bodies have been warning about the compromisation of Doordarshan by the government. They have stopped subscribing to the Press Trust of India, which is a highly reputed Reuters like agency, in favour of an RSS aligned, government friendly agency. https://thewire.in/media/naj-duj-hindusthan-samachar-prasar-bharati https://thewire.in/media/naj-duj-hindusthan-samachar-prasar-...
• aledalgrande 3y ago
  I like this idea. Another cool idea, only for the lulz, could be to have different personas rewrite the articles, like Peter from Family Guy or Karen from Will & Grace.
• wraptile 3y ago
  I've been reading boringreport for few days now thanks! Here's some constructive feedback: - The world section is super weird especially where important geopolitics are mixed in with "someone dies in a car crash in the UK". - The web app is pretty bad for what could be much better off as a static text document. Expanding articles is unnecessary slow. Why do I have to wait 3 seconds to get 1 extra sentence and a link? Why abbreviate 3 sentences into half of a sentence at all? The full article also comes up at the bottom of the screen while locking out the rest of the app - trully weird. Honestly, it's not very usable at the current state.
• mcintyre1994 3y ago
  I like this idea, but I feel like the summary sometimes strips away too much context to remain useful. For example the current top story is “Fact Check: Claims Made by Former President Trump” and it includes sections like “Trump's attempts to blame then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for January 6th security failures were found to be false.” That doesn’t tell me what he was claiming or how it was shown to be false. Whether or not someone will trust that conclusion will just depend on whether they tend to trust CNN, or their pre-existing bias on Trump/Jan 6/Pelosi. Reading the original article his claim was that Pelosi was in charge of security as speaker of the house, and that is false because that’s the responsibility of the Capitol Police Board. I think that’d be a more useful summary of that section and a human wouldn’t have stripped away the specifics quite so much.
• usgroup 3y ago
  Wikipedia current events portal. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
  • philipwhiuk 3y ago
    Generally about a week out of date.
• CursedUrn 3y ago
  Good idea, but the desktop layout is horrible. It looks like a mobile app, with too much whitespace everywhere and not enough content. I'd like to see more than 1.5 lines of text per story.
• george_sp 3y ago
  I think that transformed news by language models is just another hole to jump in. I'm definitely tired of the internet being filled with mostly junk nowadays. I just don't like the idea of learning things via a language model. I prefer to filter this myself. Maybe it's more effort but to me feels more valuable. I mean we whine all the time about Google directing your searches to specific places. This feels the same of worse.
• number6 3y ago
  This could be used to gender articles or degender articles.
• barracuda6544 3y ago
  Great idea. I wish the teasers were complete sentences, not truncated. I also wish headers and teasers were complete and not click-baity. A reader should only need to click on the article for more details, not to figure out what it is about.
• guerrilla 3y ago
  This is a nice idea. I always wanted to start a newspaper where I just remove as many value judgements as possible
• halotrope 3y ago
  Looks really good! Please apologize for plugging in the comments, we are doing something very similar with https://markets.sh/ https://markets.sh/. The news are not only summarized and clustered by stories but we are also building a relationship of the clusters and connecting it to e.g stocks and economic data. We are also plotting news coverage over time (looking to add sentiment and metadata soon.). We made this all indexed/queriable in realtime via a chat feature So that you can follow up on questions (need to be signed up tho). API is also available for automatic retreival. Here are some examples: Musk Legal Issues: https://markets.sh/stories/elon-musk-s-legal-issues-2023-05-02-01-48-26 https://markets.sh/stories/elon-musk-s-legal-issues-2023-05-... TikTok Ban: https://markets.sh/stories/tiktok-ban-2023-05-11-01-16-03 https://markets.sh/stories/tiktok-ban-2023-05-11-01-16-03 Bard: https://markets.sh/stories/google-bard-ai-chatbot-2023-05-11-07-14-43 https://markets.sh/stories/google-bard-ai-chatbot-2023-05-11...
• bdishdodhj 3y ago
  one have to ask, if this is A) so good people want it, and B) viable, then why haven't this existed yet with the current way of writing news?
• satisfice 3y ago
  "Sensationalism" is not a bug. It's an essential aspect of useful news. Those of you who think it isn't... let me guess... You didn't major in sociology, anthropology, or psychology? Those of you who respect sociology/anthropology/psychology and yet still think that "sensationalism" (presented in quotes because that is a socially-constructed, loaded term) is something that distracts you from real news, I'd like to hear some of your nuanced thoughts on this. Because it seems to me that one man's "sensationalizing" is another man's "helping you understand the relevance of recent events to your life." And that's quite important.
  • whythre 3y ago
    Seems to me it’s just a hyperbolic arms race in a pretty naked attempt to generate clicks at all costs. I am quite content to figure out how the news effects me without breathless editorializing in the title.
  • KoftaBob 3y ago
    What would be an example of a headline that you think people would label Sensationalist but that you would describe as "helping you understand the relevance of recent events to your life." ?
• justinzollars 3y ago
  Personally speaking, I don't think I would ever use this because the media is already heavily filtered, adding a second filter won't help me personally. Its really almost impossible to know anything - you have to have boots on the ground, or go to the source. Some topics aren't even reported, and often the author doesn't understand the subject, or the author is so bias facts are omitted.
• svenjr 3y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0Justt93iU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0Justt93iU
• jonathanstrange 3y ago
  I'm not against such kind of experiments but there should be very strict legislation to label any kind of AI-generated or processed content as such. I hope that lawmakers catch up quickly enough to make this happen at least in the EU.
• einpoklum 3y ago
  If you take biased news sources controlled or strongly influenced by corporate/government entities X Y and Z, and de-sensationalize them, you'll still get biased sources controlled or influenced by X Y and Z. Just saying.
• comrad 3y ago
  Crypto is no longer cryptography but digital currencies. AI is no longer artificial intelligence but algorithms and text generators.
  • hackernewds 3y ago
    that's a glorious way of saying "UIs with outputs from static prompts to GPT"
• Pete-Codes 3y ago
  Great news - even the newspapers I enjoy sensationalise
• AuthorizedCust 3y ago
  I just shared this with the Dull Men’s Club on Facebook. The share looks kind of ugly. No images. You should add Open Graph tags so that the share looks good on social media. You can see the share here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/dullmensclub/permalink/1244958436160695/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/dullmensclub/permalink/12449...
• shazeubaa 3y ago
  Finally, a news app for me, bravo! Minor nit: please place the date, time, and byline at the tip of articles — useful for sharing.
• bobx11 3y ago
  This is awesome. I have been hoping for this for a long time. It reminds me of reading a paper newspaper from the 90s. It’s all about information being shared, not clickbait. Thanks for making this!
• RNCTX 3y ago
  I would think that after a couple of years of COVID people would have learned that hiding from culture isn't a solution to bad culture.
• meltedcapacitor 3y ago
  Can this tech be used to make a concise version of Money Stuff by Matt Levine? He does not need de-sensationalizing but he badly needs summarising, which seems adjacent. That Matt Levine refuses to use the services of an editor is one of the greatest tragedies of our era.
• ncarroll 3y ago
  If anyone is looking for non-sensationalist news edited by humans, I'd like to offer a shoutout to the newsletter put out by https://join1440.com/ https://join1440.com/. I've been reading it now for a couple of months and, after comparing their choice of stories to cover and the ones covered in the national news (US and Germany), I'm feeling ready to leave the mainstream and let 1440 curate for me. So far they have not missed offering me an interesting and un-opinionated summary of what the mainstream outlets I've been watching consider the most important story of the day. It's a 5 minute read and is published every day except Sunday.
  • pohl 3y ago
    Sounds interesting. Just out of curiosity, how would they cover something like the recent "town hall" that CNN hosted for DJT?
    • ncarroll 3y ago
      It was not a top story but listed under Politics and National Affairs with this text: "Former President Donald Trump appears on CNN town hall forum in what is considered the first major television event of the 2024 presidential campaign (More) | See all 2024 presidential candidates so far (More)" (More) is a link to further information. Top story for that day (today) was Title 42 Ends and second was Santos Charges Unsealed
      • pohl 3y ago
        Yeah, "desensationalizing" doesn't really work when the peril should be the lede, does it.
        • ncarroll 3y ago
          I'm not sure how one would desensationalize Donald Trump. For my needs, 1440 handled it just fine. Title 42 affects an international audience, Santos charges are newer news than the old news spouted so emphatically at the Town Hall and the third story, about inflation easing is also non-repetitive. The loudest and most outrageous voices manage to be heard even without amplification.
• pohl 3y ago
  I wonder how it would "desensationalize" something that probably ought to be framed more urgently than the press typically does, like the threats against democracy by creeping authoritarianism and white nationalists. Maybe that's an another app idea: remove "both sides" and "horse race" nonsense.
  • nailer 3y ago
    I suspect you might participate in the sensationalism the app was built the prevent. Outside the prison system, white nationalists hold very little influence in the US.
    • pohl 3y ago
      They have explicit support from the top of the party. They're actively defended by it.
      • nailer 3y ago
        Which specific white nationalists or white nationalist groups have explicit support from the top of which party?
• lordswork 3y ago
  I would love this as a browser plugin to apply to the news sites themselves, including HN.
• renjimen 3y ago
  Great idea! I’ll be trying this out as my news source. One suggestion (maybe you’re already doing this), but it’s not just sensationalism but also the bias towards negative events being reported that could be addressed. “If it bleeds it leads” is a famous adage in the news world. I would love to have control over the share of negative events I see in my feed. Contrary to the popular news, the world is a far healthier and safer place than it was in the past.
• philipwhiuk 3y ago
  I'm not sure that https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/christie-downgraded-watchdog-culture-criticised-26897577 https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manches... is well summarized by "The Christie Receives CQC Rating". (also overriding my mouse buttons to prevent me selecting text? How very passe.)
• elSidCampeador 3y ago
  great work! Do you plan on adding some sort of a subscription model for accessing this, or will it be supported by donations all the way?
• amai 3y ago
  Reminds me a bit of https://goodnews.eu/en/ https://goodnews.eu/en/
• amai 3y ago
  To make it even more boring, don‘t use scrolling and instead let people swipe/leaf through the news pages. It is also easier on the eyes, if the lines of text don‘t move.
• abridgett 3y ago
  Google weather desperately needs this whenever it reports weather from "The Sun" (awful awful "newspaper"). Today: "Brits to bask in 20C sun" (that's 68F) Yesterday: "Yellow thunderstorm warning..set to spark travel chaos" Just a tad over the top! Genuine weather extremes in the UK are pretty rare :)