5 ms·

Something that has been making the sponsorship rounds now is Ground News[0] which I have found very useful with just the free tier. But given how many people I

Something that has been making the sponsorship rounds now is Ground News[0] which I have found very useful with just the free tier. But given how many people I have seen sponsored by them, I wonder if there is some catch, especially because I can’t imagine that many people sign up for the paid service. I can’t think of what that catch would be though, they do not have unique access to personal data, and I haven’t seen anything that would indicate that they have any information agenda. [0] https://ground.news https://ground.news

briffle 2y ago
ground.news is not a plugin to the browser though. its a web site (and app) that aggregate news from multiple sites, and let you see multiple sides to an issue. I don't pay for many apps (I usually detest subscriptions) but pay for this one.
ThalesX 2y ago
I've built a local (for my country) news aggregator that basically clusters news and summarizes them based on multiple sources and gives me the rundown of the most important things, and things that can be found between conflicting sources. It's mostly a pet project for myself as it doesn't seem to have a lot of stickyness without the clickbait. I gave the 'product' to friends and some of them told me "oh, you should do it like ground.news where I can see left, center, right". This idea turns me off so much. Why would I care if it's deemed left, center or right by some commitee. Just give me the information that's there in most sources and it's probably be going to be close to some objective overview of the situation.
- pixl97 2y ago
  > Why would I care if it's deemed left, center or right by some commitee. Because at the day information can be political. >the information that's there in most sources While I don't use ground news myself, aggregators and classifiers like them can show you when and where stories are being published in very lopsided manners. When a story is only really being published by one side you can use that as another bit of information. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance
  - ThalesX 2y ago
    > Why would I care if it's deemed left, center or right by some commitee. >> Because at the day information can be political. Umm. Yes. Which is precisely what placing it left / center / right amplifies. > the information that's there in most sources >> While I don't use ground news myself, aggregators and classifiers like them can show you when and where stories are being published in very lopsided manners. When a story is only really being published by one side you can use that as another bit of information. Sure, it's another bit of information. I think more important are the facts. Did this actually happen? If so, what happened? The tl;dr of what happened should give me a pretty good idea, without having to become a reporter myself, especially if covered by both sides. I think this is more of an issue of an union, than the 'argument to moderation' or 'false balance' might appeal to. If I'm left, and report or something and you don't. That's probably high noise. If you're right and report to something I don't. That's probably high noise. If we both report on something, and we report differently on 80% but we have the same 20%. I'd say that 20% is high signal. What if we cut out the left / center / right ideas and just take as many sources as we can? Then extract what's common between them. Wouldn't that have some sort of higher signal to noise ratio than any single viewpoint? Of course, I'm willing to accept I'm wrong. From my personal experience so far, I'm much less inclined to extremes than I was since starting to use this system.
- chatmasta 2y ago
  Ground.news also gives the information that is present in only one side, which is just as high signal – if not higher – as showing the overlap IMO. They have a feed for “stories with equal coverage” and “stories covered mostly in left-leaning sources” and “stories covered mostly in right-leaning sources.”
  - ThalesX 2y ago
    I'm seaching for 'equal' on the home page and finding no results, nor for 'feeds'. Could you help me identify those locations? It's always confusing to me when I go to their home page and would appreciate it. I think the equal coverage might be what I'm actually looking for.
    - 0xCMP 2y ago
      I think they're referring to https://ground.news/blindspot https://ground.news/blindspot
      - chatmasta 2y ago
        Yes, that’s exactly it (and aptly named).
- quickymonster 2y ago
  I think you misunderstand the feature. Ground news tells you the bias of publications that have published the news item not the slant of the news item itself. It lets you see how much news gets completely ignored by the right and left (the right is way worse) when it isn't favorable to their cause. It's also really interesting to sample both sides and see how wildly the facts get slanted as you get further from center. The publishers are biased, not the news item.
  - ThalesX 2y ago
    I think I understand this feature pretty well. What I'm arguing for is taking the common information between all news sources (without having to place them in left / right / center) is much higher signal to noise. Honestly your paranthesis that "the right is way worse" is already too political for my taste. It makes me feel dumb for even writing this reply. Alas, these are my thoughts. News should be news. What happened and when. Not some attack vector against a group of people or another.
    - HelloMcFly 2y ago
      > What happened and when. "What" is often a matter of definition and framing, especially if you also want news to include "to what effect" which is not always black-and-white. "Why" is an answer that also must be answered, but will often come through a political lens. News cannot be free from a political lens if "why" and "to what effect" are considered, and probably can't be free from some element of a political lens even if just sticking to "what".
      - ThalesX 2y ago
        > if you also want news to include "to what effect" I don't. I want to be able to draw my own conclusion as to the effect of what happened might be. > News cannot be free from a political lens if "why" and "to what effect" are considered, and probably can't be free from some element of a political lens even if just sticking to "what". I have no interest in the "why" and "to what effect". I have an interest into "what" so that I can draw my own conclusions. Though thank you for your thoughts, it helps me understand the people calling for political sides better.
- throawayonthe 2y ago
  [dead]
mossTechnician 2y ago
I did see one YouTuber mention Ground News: FriendlyJordies. https://youtube.com/watch?v=bfHx4CfKFqQ https://youtube.com/watch?v=bfHx4CfKFqQ
- spauldo 2y ago
  Ground News sponsors a few of the people I watch. Out of the channels I watch I've probably seen them the most on Dr. Becky (an astrophysicist) and Pracical Engineering.
johnnyanmac 2y ago
>because I can’t imagine that many people sign up for the paid service. I It's new media, and in the grand scheme of things, youtuber sponsorships are dirt cheap compared to traditional means. The news model is well established by this point of ads + no-ad premium subscrition, so I don't think there's many potential dark arts here. It also feel everpresent simply because they are smartly targeting youtubers covering politics. And US politics is a burning hot topic right now.
overfeed 2y ago
> I wonder if there is some catch Ground News is a startup that had 3 rounds of funding it total. If it sees significant uptake, it will become a juicy acquisition target for any influence-peddlers you can imagine, in addition to the usual data collection and ad-monetization risks.
- Asraelite 2y ago
  Just came across your comment when googling this and was wondering if you had any thoughts. My understanding is that when startups have the insane levels of advertising on Youtube that Ground News does, it's because they're expected to eventually monopolize the market and generate huge revenue in the long run. How would that work for Ground News? $2.50/month subscriptions for news aggregation seems a bit un-unicorny, even with data collection and other forms of soft monetization. Do you think it's actually that viable, or are they going to massively pivot?
buckle8017 2y ago
If you look into the founding of ground news in 2018 it looks an awful lot like an intelligence agency operation.
- rurp 2y ago
  Care to elaborate? Sounds potentially interesting but I doubt many people are going to do a deep research dive based on a vague single sentence post.
lolinder 2y ago
I've found that sponsorship quality varies dramatically by channel. I never saw a single sponsorship for Honey, but I see a ton for Kiwico and Ground News. I can't speak for Ground News, but Kiwico is a sponsor of basically every educational YouTube channel, and it's actually just that good and totally worth it for kids of the right age.
NalNezumi 2y ago
I'm curious about answer to this too. I don't use it, but offhand mentioned it to my dad and it took him 30min of scouring before he purchased a subscription. (to my big surprise) I hope it's just an "good" product that will (like every SaaS) be plagued by enshittification 5 years down the line. Either case, it's hopefully a silver lining to my dads "don't trust MSM" tendencies. (fortunately he's too academic to go full conspiracy crazy but you never know)
totallynothoney 2y ago
The catch is that the premise of the service is faulty. Their segmentation of news organizations according to bias, can be obviously be biased itself. That's not a problem necessarily, but the service promotes itself as neutral while it's VC funded. You are part of a demographic that will be propagandized in the future to recoup costs.
londons_explore 2y ago
I bet their investors are willing to pay a lot for a userbase alone. Get a substantial number of users, and it can be used to extract money from publishers to be part of the service, and the information provided can be swayed to investors objectives.
markovs_gun 2y ago
I think the problem is that in the current political climate, especially in the US, trying to present news qs "unbiased" effectively has a right wing bias because it legitimizes the extreme right by equating it with the predominantly moderate liberal opposition.
dspillett 2y ago
> But given how many people I have seen sponsored by them Given how many parrot exactly the same story, practically word for word, about how they personally find it so useful, is a useful barometer of whether I should trust any recommendation from those channels. It was called astroturfing in my day, I don't consider it any more trustworthy in its new name “influencing”.
mrguyorama 2y ago
The catch is that ground news fully accepts and perpetuates the stupidity of American political news interpretation by insisting on "right" vs "left". It's probably not a nefarious scheme though, they just saw the clear market opening for "News that people think is impartial" from all the liberals that need to keep on top of the narrative that Fox News or New York Post publish but don't want to waste hours a week watching talking heads, and from all the blatant conservatives who need to validate their belief that the general conservative narrative for anything is "not political"
mbs159 2y ago
Friendlyjordies on YouTube made a great video [1] about ground.news about a month ago, worth a watch. I share the view that the left / right classification for news is useless. There always was some kind of bias / agenda to news, even before the days of the internet and social media. Also, the Democrat party in the US is for the most part, a center or center right party, so the classification of left / right for US news is kind of pointless. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfHx4CfKFqQ&t=914s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfHx4CfKFqQ&t=914s
immibis 2y ago
Ground News doesn't sound too good to be true. How they're affording all these ads, though - if it's not a legit business through and through, then maybe the next possibility is that they want to be paid to hide or promote certain stories once everyone trusts them.

briffle 2y ago

ground.news is not a plugin to the browser though. its a web site (and app) that aggregate news from multiple sites, and let you see multiple sides to an issue. I don't pay for many apps (I usually detest subscriptions) but pay for this one.

ThalesX 2y ago

I've built a local (for my country) news aggregator that basically clusters news and summarizes them based on multiple sources and gives me the rundown of the most important things, and things that can be found between conflicting sources. It's mostly a pet project for myself as it doesn't seem to have a lot of stickyness without the clickbait. I gave the 'product' to friends and some of them told me "oh, you should do it like ground.news where I can see left, center, right". This idea turns me off so much. Why would I care if it's deemed left, center or right by some commitee. Just give me the information that's there in most sources and it's probably be going to be close to some objective overview of the situation.

pixl97 2y ago
> Why would I care if it's deemed left, center or right by some commitee. Because at the day information can be political. >the information that's there in most sources While I don't use ground news myself, aggregators and classifiers like them can show you when and where stories are being published in very lopsided manners. When a story is only really being published by one side you can use that as another bit of information. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance
- ThalesX 2y ago
  > Why would I care if it's deemed left, center or right by some commitee. >> Because at the day information can be political. Umm. Yes. Which is precisely what placing it left / center / right amplifies. > the information that's there in most sources >> While I don't use ground news myself, aggregators and classifiers like them can show you when and where stories are being published in very lopsided manners. When a story is only really being published by one side you can use that as another bit of information. Sure, it's another bit of information. I think more important are the facts. Did this actually happen? If so, what happened? The tl;dr of what happened should give me a pretty good idea, without having to become a reporter myself, especially if covered by both sides. I think this is more of an issue of an union, than the 'argument to moderation' or 'false balance' might appeal to. If I'm left, and report or something and you don't. That's probably high noise. If you're right and report to something I don't. That's probably high noise. If we both report on something, and we report differently on 80% but we have the same 20%. I'd say that 20% is high signal. What if we cut out the left / center / right ideas and just take as many sources as we can? Then extract what's common between them. Wouldn't that have some sort of higher signal to noise ratio than any single viewpoint? Of course, I'm willing to accept I'm wrong. From my personal experience so far, I'm much less inclined to extremes than I was since starting to use this system.
chatmasta 2y ago
Ground.news also gives the information that is present in only one side, which is just as high signal – if not higher – as showing the overlap IMO. They have a feed for “stories with equal coverage” and “stories covered mostly in left-leaning sources” and “stories covered mostly in right-leaning sources.”
- ThalesX 2y ago
  I'm seaching for 'equal' on the home page and finding no results, nor for 'feeds'. Could you help me identify those locations? It's always confusing to me when I go to their home page and would appreciate it. I think the equal coverage might be what I'm actually looking for.
  - 0xCMP 2y ago
    I think they're referring to https://ground.news/blindspot https://ground.news/blindspot
    - chatmasta 2y ago
      Yes, that’s exactly it (and aptly named).
quickymonster 2y ago
I think you misunderstand the feature. Ground news tells you the bias of publications that have published the news item not the slant of the news item itself. It lets you see how much news gets completely ignored by the right and left (the right is way worse) when it isn't favorable to their cause. It's also really interesting to sample both sides and see how wildly the facts get slanted as you get further from center. The publishers are biased, not the news item.
- ThalesX 2y ago
  I think I understand this feature pretty well. What I'm arguing for is taking the common information between all news sources (without having to place them in left / right / center) is much higher signal to noise. Honestly your paranthesis that "the right is way worse" is already too political for my taste. It makes me feel dumb for even writing this reply. Alas, these are my thoughts. News should be news. What happened and when. Not some attack vector against a group of people or another.
  - HelloMcFly 2y ago
    > What happened and when. "What" is often a matter of definition and framing, especially if you also want news to include "to what effect" which is not always black-and-white. "Why" is an answer that also must be answered, but will often come through a political lens. News cannot be free from a political lens if "why" and "to what effect" are considered, and probably can't be free from some element of a political lens even if just sticking to "what".
    - ThalesX 2y ago
      > if you also want news to include "to what effect" I don't. I want to be able to draw my own conclusion as to the effect of what happened might be. > News cannot be free from a political lens if "why" and "to what effect" are considered, and probably can't be free from some element of a political lens even if just sticking to "what". I have no interest in the "why" and "to what effect". I have an interest into "what" so that I can draw my own conclusions. Though thank you for your thoughts, it helps me understand the people calling for political sides better.
throawayonthe 2y ago
[dead]

mossTechnician 2y ago

I did see one YouTuber mention Ground News: FriendlyJordies. https://youtube.com/watch?v=bfHx4CfKFqQ https://youtube.com/watch?v=bfHx4CfKFqQ

spauldo 2y ago
Ground News sponsors a few of the people I watch. Out of the channels I watch I've probably seen them the most on Dr. Becky (an astrophysicist) and Pracical Engineering.

johnnyanmac 2y ago

>because I can’t imagine that many people sign up for the paid service. I It's new media, and in the grand scheme of things, youtuber sponsorships are dirt cheap compared to traditional means. The news model is well established by this point of ads + no-ad premium subscrition, so I don't think there's many potential dark arts here. It also feel everpresent simply because they are smartly targeting youtubers covering politics. And US politics is a burning hot topic right now.

overfeed 2y ago

> I wonder if there is some catch Ground News is a startup that had 3 rounds of funding it total. If it sees significant uptake, it will become a juicy acquisition target for any influence-peddlers you can imagine, in addition to the usual data collection and ad-monetization risks.

Asraelite 2y ago
Just came across your comment when googling this and was wondering if you had any thoughts. My understanding is that when startups have the insane levels of advertising on Youtube that Ground News does, it's because they're expected to eventually monopolize the market and generate huge revenue in the long run. How would that work for Ground News? $2.50/month subscriptions for news aggregation seems a bit un-unicorny, even with data collection and other forms of soft monetization. Do you think it's actually that viable, or are they going to massively pivot?

buckle8017 2y ago

If you look into the founding of ground news in 2018 it looks an awful lot like an intelligence agency operation.

rurp 2y ago
Care to elaborate? Sounds potentially interesting but I doubt many people are going to do a deep research dive based on a vague single sentence post.

lolinder 2y ago

I've found that sponsorship quality varies dramatically by channel. I never saw a single sponsorship for Honey, but I see a ton for Kiwico and Ground News. I can't speak for Ground News, but Kiwico is a sponsor of basically every educational YouTube channel, and it's actually just that good and totally worth it for kids of the right age.

NalNezumi 2y ago

I'm curious about answer to this too. I don't use it, but offhand mentioned it to my dad and it took him 30min of scouring before he purchased a subscription. (to my big surprise) I hope it's just an "good" product that will (like every SaaS) be plagued by enshittification 5 years down the line. Either case, it's hopefully a silver lining to my dads "don't trust MSM" tendencies. (fortunately he's too academic to go full conspiracy crazy but you never know)

totallynothoney 2y ago

The catch is that the premise of the service is faulty. Their segmentation of news organizations according to bias, can be obviously be biased itself. That's not a problem necessarily, but the service promotes itself as neutral while it's VC funded. You are part of a demographic that will be propagandized in the future to recoup costs.

londons_explore 2y ago

I bet their investors are willing to pay a lot for a userbase alone. Get a substantial number of users, and it can be used to extract money from publishers to be part of the service, and the information provided can be swayed to investors objectives.

markovs_gun 2y ago

I think the problem is that in the current political climate, especially in the US, trying to present news qs "unbiased" effectively has a right wing bias because it legitimizes the extreme right by equating it with the predominantly moderate liberal opposition.

dspillett 2y ago

> But given how many people I have seen sponsored by them Given how many parrot exactly the same story, practically word for word, about how they personally find it so useful, is a useful barometer of whether I should trust any recommendation from those channels. It was called astroturfing in my day, I don't consider it any more trustworthy in its new name “influencing”.

mrguyorama 2y ago

The catch is that ground news fully accepts and perpetuates the stupidity of American political news interpretation by insisting on "right" vs "left". It's probably not a nefarious scheme though, they just saw the clear market opening for "News that people think is impartial" from all the liberals that need to keep on top of the narrative that Fox News or New York Post publish but don't want to waste hours a week watching talking heads, and from all the blatant conservatives who need to validate their belief that the general conservative narrative for anything is "not political"

mbs159 2y ago

Friendlyjordies on YouTube made a great video [1] about ground.news about a month ago, worth a watch. I share the view that the left / right classification for news is useless. There always was some kind of bias / agenda to news, even before the days of the internet and social media. Also, the Democrat party in the US is for the most part, a center or center right party, so the classification of left / right for US news is kind of pointless. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfHx4CfKFqQ&t=914s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfHx4CfKFqQ&t=914s

immibis 2y ago

Ground News doesn't sound too good to be true. How they're affording all these ads, though - if it's not a legit business through and through, then maybe the next possibility is that they want to be paid to hide or promote certain stories once everyone trusts them.