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Show HN: Clean News - A cleaner curation of world news events
Hello HN,
This a small side project I built a few months ago and I find myself using it quite often to stay up to date so I thought I should share.
Its updated every few hours.
Feedback welcome.
https://cleannews.fyi https://cleannews.fyi
- ranger_danger 2y agoWhat does "clean" mean in this context?
- sumeruchat 2y agoClean in this context means clean from clickbait headlines and presenting information more factually
- unsnap_biceps 2y agoHow do you determine factually? Or do you filter out anything that isn't described as factual? For example, you have "Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says North Korea has become directly involved in the war, with a senior Ukrainian intelligence official saying around 3,000 North Korean troops are now in Russia, and are training for deployment to Russian-occupied territories. (Politico)" which I have no clue if this is factual. How did you determine that it's factual?
- sumeruchat 2y agoWhen i say factual i mean a description thats straightforward and objective. No sensationalism or misleading framing to provoke an emotional reaction
- mattcantstop 2y agoAre you changing the titles to remove anything emotional or misleading manually, through AI, or some other way?
- sumeruchat 2y agoThe source I am using is already doing a good job at that but i plan to use more sources (for example reddit) and use gpt to remove misleading titles if there is enough interest in the project.
- axelthegerman 2y agoFully makes sense plus I appreciate the source right there in the title so you can use that as well to decide how trustworthy it might be. Well done
- sumeruchat 2y agoThanks for the kind words :)
- defrost 2y agoI worked in the energy+mineral intelligence domain developing work that was subscribed to by investors and later sold to S&P (of the index). The "is it factual" rule here is simpler than you may think* - in your example, can it be verified by multiple credible sources that * Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said "as quoted", and that * A senior Ukrainian intelligence official said "as quoted" If so then it's fine to report that .. it's factual that they made the statements, whether what they said is also true is a seperate matter that may or may not be addressed in another reported snippet. In the aggragator case here they're not even making the claim that "Volodymyr Zelenskyy said {X}" .. instead they are asserting as fact that "Politico reported that {Y}" .. which can be verified by a secure link to the Politico source. * Until recently ... Today, of course, there's highly credible in appearence generated video of public figures saying things they never said - this is the current challenge. The means to address that is to chain reported news to sources and develop better tools to probe that chain for BS. A work in progress.
- sumeruchat 2y agoThats interesting. Will use this definition in the about page in the future :)
- ranger_danger 2y agoWhat's considered "credible" is also going to be endlessly argued as well. Same for clickbait.
- Mobleysoft 2y agoThis is awesome. Reminds me of the drudgereport when it was good. Only recommendation would be a way to see the article content summary without click through if I want a bit more info but not enough to click through and face ads. Food for thought.
- sumeruchat 2y agoThanks! Yeah thats coming soon within a month (using gpt4o).
- rsingel 2y agoPlease don't. Journalism is work. The current site is a nice and fair summary (though I think the attribution to the original sources rather hidden) with easy links to the original source. If yu start doing automated summaries, you are taking nearly all the value of someone else's work.
- sumeruchat 2y agoYeah fair I have had similar thoughts on this subject. Maybe some kind of ai companion that translates news into your local language and can answer your questions directly with voice would be something interesting.
- zeagle 2y agoPerhaps one piece of news seems to be positive and most seem about death and war. I respect the site and effort but I would worry about putting myself in such a headspace. There is positive stuff in this world too just don't lose sight of it!
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- mattcantstop 2y agoI had the same perspective. This seemed more like a running "who was bombed today" news feed. Those events are important and meaningful, but it's not something I would come back to frequently as I have found it is not healthy for me to bombard myself with sad news which is outside of my sphere of influence. I do like the simplicity and interface, however.
- slg 2y ago> This seemed more like a running "who was bombed today" news feed. Those events are important and meaningful, I beleive staying informed about world events and geopolitics is important, but some of these stories don't even have that redeeming value. The 4th story is about the death of 5 Russian mountain climbers in Nepal. In what world is that one of the most important stories for a mainstream English speaking audience? I agree the design of the site is good, but the specific news chosen leaves a lot to be desired.
- sumeruchat 2y agoI hear you. This could be the most important improvement. Making sure the news is not too negative while also telling the most important stories.
- rexpop 2y agoI expect adults to govern their own self-care, but I can't expects adults to do their own journalism. We will encounter, as our awareness of the world expands, turbulent and traumatizing information. This isn't something to be criticized--it's unavoidable up to and including our own mortality. The responsible adult does not bury their head in the sand but, instead, interrogates the foundations of their own security. Smell a flower. Take a bubble bath. Listen to some jazz. Hug your loved ones. But don't cork the fountain of truth.
- matthew-wegner 2y agoHow would you compare/contrast this to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events ? Edit: You appear to be scraping it, actually?
- sumeruchat 2y agoYes and it is a pretty good MVP using that :)
- matthew-wegner 2y agoYou might want to give appropriate credit! And by "might" I mean specifically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_the_Creative_Commons_Attribution-ShareAlike_4.0_International_License https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_the_Creative...
- sumeruchat 2y agoGood point will add that to the footer asap.
- jestersarmed 2y agoI was today years old when I learned about that site. Thank you!
- itohihiyt 2y agoThanks for this, never knew it existed. Wondering now if there's region specific current events.
- airstrike 2y agoPretty cool stuff. If I were building this, I'd add some tagging system so users could filter what they want to see. Politics, business, sports, entertainment, etc. Right now it seems heavily weighted towards world politics with a sprinkle of Victoria's Secret Specifically I'd make it like little tags that you can click on to filter for or click on an x to filter out, something like that (think like how you can "solo" or "mute" any given track on a DAW)
- sumeruchat 2y agoNoted. I was thinking of those filtering tags in the top bar as well.
- senectus1 2y agoCan this have a RSS feed or do I need to scrape it?
- sumeruchat 2y agoNoted will add a simple rss feed asap.
- senectus1 2y agolegend! I look forward to it.
- mmooss 2y agoThank you. How do you choose which articles go where? At least one is outdated - the launch of Europa Clipper. For me, clustering articles by topic would make it much more efficient, so I could browse by topic. Easier said than done, of course, unless you are manually curating it.
- sumeruchat 2y agoHmm I would say should be doable by ai models. Will add some clickable topics / tags to the top bar
- transformi 2y agovery biased and unrealiable sources though...
- VWWHFSfQ 2y agowho are the unbiased and reliable sources
- whaaaaat 2y agoEvery news outlet is a biased source. You cannot have a news outlet that is unbiased. Being an editor necessarily implies making choices about what gets published and what does not -- it's fundamentally a human judgement call. Human judgement calls cannot be free from biases.
- Gualdrapo 2y agoCan't tell how things are looking on desktop right now, but after seeing it on mobile I wish texts had a bit bigger font. Otherwise it's a nice job, congratulations.
- sumeruchat 2y agoThanks. The text size is a bit tricky because preferences differ but will think about it.
- airstrike 2y agoI think the issue with the text is more so its length than its size. Make each headline shorter and you fix the issue on mobile. I've added this piece of feedback elsewhere
- sumeruchat 2y agoRight making the titles shorter is definitely a good next step
- LoginSmith 2y agoThanks for that.
- rNULLED 2y agoi like it. how do you want to monetize?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- llm_trw 2y ago>1. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says North Korea has become directly involved in the war, with a senior Ukrainian intelligence official saying around 3,000 North Korean troops are now in Russia, and are training for deployment to Russian-occupied territories. (Politico) This is not news this is propaganda, fix your filters if you want people to use your service.
- whaaaaat 2y ago> Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says X > a senior Ukrainian intelligence official says Y and Z Do you doubt the veracity of these two claims? The headline there actually reads as very clear statements of fact -- two people made several claims. The headline, notably, does NOT make any claims about the veracity of what Zelenskyy or the intelligence official said.
- llm_trw 2y agoCongratulations, you figured out how propaganda invented in the 1950s works. You're only 80 years behind.
- loxias 2y agoI don't know if I would trust the implicit editorial lens of popularity on Wikipedia as my only window into the world.
- tantalor 2y agoWho said "only"?
- matthew-wegner 2y agoIt's a 1:1 scrape of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
- sumeruchat 2y agoI am adding more sources asap. As many readers have pointed out the wikipedia event source is very negative news indeed
- xgboost3d 2y ago[dead]
- sumeruchat 2y agoThanks for this I am playing with some different ways to make this better with AI and definitely will take a looksie!
- shadowmanifold 2y agoI love it. The only thing I would want different is to maybe give control for the number of stories on the page so I could only view 10 at a time if I wanted? For me it seemed like more effort to skim than HN but I am not sure why that is. My first impression though is this is better than anything I use currently for news. Really a testament to what complete trash "the news" has become.
- jayknight 2y ago>For me it seemed like more effort to skim than HN but I am not sure why that is. For me it's the length of the headlines. HN headlines tend to be 10-12 words max. Headlines on this site are 3-4 times longer, and are significantly harder to parse (for me at least). The headlines on the actual article look to be more concise. For example, the first link right now is "At least 16 people, including the mayor of Nabatieh, Lebanon, are killed in an Israeli Air Force airstrike on a municipal building in Nabatieh, with Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati condemning the attack. (BBC News)" and when you click it you see the much more concise "Mayor and 15 others killed in Israeli strike on Lebanon council meeting". If it's trying to be a 1-sentence summary of the article, instead of a headline, I don't find that very helpful.
- sumeruchat 2y agoYeah I hear you this is going to be the next improvement
- sumeruchat 2y agoI think its because the titles are a bit too verbose like another user pointed out. I will work on that next
- xtracto 2y agoReminds me of boringreport.org . I would seriously consider also allowing filtering by type of news.
- sumeruchat 2y agoOkay tags on top bar are coming soon.
- AK42 2y agowould be great to add a couple features if this goes: - user ranking/votes for the most important items - horizon scanning for emerging hot topics or trends (unknown unknowns) - best of all... curated "clean news" that is AI & human recommendations for the topics I care about at a price
- sumeruchat 2y agoYeah the end goal indeed is to have ai driven fully clean news that is unbiased. But some steps to get there slowly. I think upvoting could be a cool next idea indeed to figure out what is more important. Sort of like hacker news.
- pronouncedjerry 2y agomostly negative, tragic news - either war or mass casuals.
- sumeruchat 2y agoThis is a common feedback I will see what I can do there.
- benterix 2y agoThank you for the site. After reading a few headlines I started to have the impression the world is waiting for Putin to die, we could have at least a chance for at least one war to stop (there is no chance he will stop it while being alive).
- airstrike 2y agoOne more piece of feedback: I'd remove the numbers next to the headlines and pass them through your AI model to rewrite them more like what you see in the news, e.g. > 10. Attorney General of Spain Álvaro García Ortiz is charged by the Supreme Court for revealing secrets about a tax fraud case involving the boyfriend of the president of the Community of Madrid Isabel Díaz Ayuso. However, García Ortiz announces that he will not resign. (RTVE) becomes > Spain AG García Ortiz Charged with Tax Fraud Leak, Won’t Resign (RTVE)
- sumeruchat 2y agoHmm good feedback. Making the titles shorter is definitely a good idea moving forward and will be a good next step. Thanks
- Gud 2y agoI run a similar site, but more focused on tech/finance. Still early alpha, https://www.stonkys.com https://www.stonkys.com Feedback appreciated
- ispaceman 2y agoI find it's hard to read. And it's slow to load. What is built with?
- whaaaaat 2y agoCan I recommend increasing the text contrast a little for the metadata under the links for accessibility? #666 on #ddd is a contrast ratio of 4.2:1, which might be difficult for some readers. Even moving to #555 on #ddd would move you into passing WCAG AA. Moving #454545 would pass WCAG AAA contrast ratios, and you could be pretty confident that nearly all readers would find it much easier to read!
- sumeruchat 2y agoThis is great feedback I will improve the contrast there. What do you think about text size?
- ispaceman 2y agoIs it ok to share my site. To anybody who wants to follow local gov news in US try this one: https://rategov.us https://rategov.us I am focus on Martin county now: https://rategov.us/?adr=Jensen%20Beach%2C%20FL https://rategov.us/?adr=Jensen%20Beach%2C%20FL You can join me to help with other counties.
- sumeruchat 2y agoThanks everyone for checking out my little website. It will forever be free although I will play with one sponsored ad at the top to monetize it at some point. From the feedback here are the next steps. 1. Making the titles shorter with an ai model. 2. Tagging articles and putting the tags / topics on top bar for filtering. 3. Attributing sources like wikipedia in the footer. 4. Adding some more sources and have a minimum amount of positive stories. There are ongoing wars at the moment but it cannot be too depressing to read news either. 5. Improving contrast of the subtitles. 6. After titles are shortened have a way to see a very short summary (similar to the current title) somewhere 7. And finally add login and upvoting so we can rank stories better. From what I understand people like the design so that will remain unchanged. Feel free to suggest anything I missed
- sumeruchat 2y agoAlso 0. Add Rss feed