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I, strangely enough, agree with Most of what Aaron says. And I'm the founder of a news company. I worry about this attitude on a macro scale, but it's hard to

I, strangely enough, agree with Most of what Aaron says. And I'm the founder of a news company. I worry about this attitude on a macro scale, but it's hard to argue with on a micro one. I spend most of my day following what's going on in the world, and it hasn't added much value to my life. But I worry about everyone not caring. Not because that would kill my company (I started it because I hate news in its current form too), but because there are times when public outrage changes things. It's like voting - my vote doesn't matter, but on aggregate it's everything. I'm convinced that the goal of a good news publication should be like Google - to get you in and out the "door" as quickly as possible understanding what you need to know. We're rebuilding everything around that. A publication one can consume in thirty seconds with the most important stuff, ruthlessly curated and fact-checked. No entertainment gossip or puff pieces or PR pitches. (To get it as an email sign up at https://grasswire.com https://grasswire.com) I'm looking forward to reading what others think on this subject.

samastur 12y ago
I guess I must be too dense, but I simply do not know how to use grasswire. I'm stuck with live feed on left which shows me exactly the kind of useless "breaking" stuff I want to avoid and popular feed on the right which I don't seem to be able to control beyond either providing fact-check or comment. What am I missing?
- austenallred 12y ago
  What you're looking at is kind of like a backend - consider it the "talk" page for Wikipedia. It's a little bit chaotic this early in the morning, but our algorithm pulls in the "breaking" stuff on the left, and the most upvoted stuff flows to the top of the "popular" page. Grasswire users fact-check stuff for accuracy, and comment on whether or not/why it's important. The site is mostly for news junkies. It's a little bit hectic right now because a bunch of people from HN are just upvoting random stuff to screw everything up, and it will take the power users a minute to sort through it. The result is at the end of the day, the best stuff curated and fact-checked by a couple thousand people, and we send that out to the everyday person in an email they can digest in 30 seconds. We're adding a short, editable description to each news item to give some background, and allowing anyone to submit external stuff, so it's still a work in progress, but that's the gist of it.
  - bovermyer 12y ago
    Very interesting concept. I signed up; we'll see where it goes. One thing to note, though - on the left I'm seeing a number of duplicated entries, with the duplicates immediately after the original. I'm using Firefox, if that matters.
  - aidos 12y ago
    I really like this. I too am sick of seeing stuff promoted in everyday media which is clearly fabricated. Admission. I think I up-voted some comments by accident. It's not obvious what that large up arrow does (now that I say it out-loud I think it's probably pretty obvious!) and there's no way to undo the operation. Sorry. Are there plans to add a frontend to it?
    - austenallred 12y ago
      Well once I push these code changes in the next few minutes you should be able to click on the upvote again to remove it. For now, don't worry about it :) We see the "frontend" as a daily email that goes out or an app with a daily push notification that says "Hey, here you go, the best news of the day in 30 seconds." So the hours of work that the people are putting in on the back-end really just reduces the amount of time for the end user. We could probably hire five people to do that, but it's important to us that it's democratic and open.
      - aidos 12y ago
        That all makes sense. In terms of a frontend I was thinking of a read only type system. At lunch time I come to HN to entertain myself. Occasionally I jump over to bbc news (which is pretty dire) or aljazeera. It would be great to have a page I could drop into to get the digest.
        deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
  - glial 12y ago
    The site looks slick, but it doesn't have some features I'd expect and want from a news aggregation site. I can't find any way to search for news about specific topics, for example.
Mikeb85 12y ago
> ruthlessly curated and fact-checked The problem with curated news is that we can be consuming propaganda and not know it. Even as it stands now, we hear of certain news in the world, but not others, and it severely affects our understanding of the world.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  Damned if you do, damned if you don't. We're consuming propaganda either way. Media outlets chose what to write about and what not to cover, then stories that match people's biases tend to get disproportionately popularized. I hope that this fact-checking feature can at least do something against news sites publishing obvious lies and misinformation.
chrisloy 12y ago
I think what you're trying to do at Grasswire is interesting, but I feel like here you're arguing against the very point that Swartz was making. I think of all people he is the last one that you could accuse of not caring, and yet he claims not to have read the news for his entire adult life. The difference is that he voraciously read books [1] and took what I guess was a long view of issues of interest, which I think is what he is promoting here. That said I still like the idea of being able to "touch base" with the news as it were - something that I can scan quickly and, if I'm disciplined enough, filter down to the bits that are actually relevant to me. Most days, hopefully, that's nothing at all. [1] e.g. http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/books2010 http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/books2010
TeMPOraL 12y ago
I just registered. Great work! It's dense, but I think dense is good - it's about information after all. Also, I love the "fact-check" feature. I'll try to use it for a few days and see if it enhances my life in any way.
grey-area 12y ago
I think the problem with news is that it is has become driven by the imperatives of Google (a company which makes money from advertising). Those imperatives lead inexorably to a thirst for page-views and page-rank, and horrible sites like buzzfeed. I've noticed this evolution in previously respected publications like The Guardian or The Independent in the UK (much Guardian coverage nowadays is centred on clicks, as are initiatives like the i-100). Here are some tenets to which I think any news company aspiring to change the field and report news responsibly should think about: Popularity is poisonous and the enemy of the good - what is good or even factually right is often not popular Context is key - without context, a fact can be meaningless or actively misleading (e.g. the most liberal senator in the senate, 45 minutes from a chemical war from the dodgy dossier). On the ground observation is key - this is something modern tech has changed in a very positive way, though it does also allow for rumours and misinformation. Analysis is key - without analysis from informed observers, lots of news is hard to digest and understand - it provides context Balance is an illusion - Opinions always colour analysis and the facts reported, we should be up-front about this - every org and person has them. Fact checking with primary sources is key - how can you possibly fact-check factoids that your readers are constantly upvoting? How can you possibly fact check an opinion? National news is often horribly biased, and national newspapers usually pander to the government/demographic they serve, especially in time of war. Most public outrage is wrong or at least ill-founded - we have representative and informed democracy to try to avoid the rule of the mob. Quick news is the antithesis of thoughtful, incisive news There's plenty of buzzfeed-esque junk out there trying to recycle news and readers as quickly as possible, and it is neither viable in the long term nor is it good for news or for readers. So I disagree completely (as does the article I think) on what you consider to be a good news publication. PS Your website doesn't even show me what it does before it asks for email, you might want to consider changing that. I tried a fake account and looks like some kind of buzzfeed reuters mashup, and I'm afraid guilty of a lot of the sins Aaron points out.
slau 12y ago
It's apparently not possible to use a space in the password. Please don't limit the characters or length of a password. Thanks.
- tom-lord 12y ago
  My company considers one of its systems "more secure" because they enforce a policy that all passwords must contain 8+ non-space characters. The implementation? "Must be 8+ characters; must not contain spaces." I've expressed my view on this (and similar password-related policies) many times, but apparently it's all simply a box ticking exercise for pen testers...
  - sarciszewski 12y ago
    There are much better ways to enforce this validation. Shoot me an email if you'd like any assistance. Also, https://github.com/dropbox/zxcvbn https://github.com/dropbox/zxcvbn is amazing.
    - alexbecker 12y ago
      I wonder why my searches never turned this up. I ended up making my own: https://github.com/alexbecker/password-strength https://github.com/alexbecker/password-strength
    - tom-lord 12y ago
      That looks really cool - I haven't seen it before, thanks! The "offending system" I mentioned, however, is our old PHP application that I don't really work on. (I mainly develop much more modern Rails stuff!) Like I said, the primary concern of the company is simply to keep pen testers happy - and their criteria for a "secure" website is, in my opinion, often misleading or even downright wrong. But if I ever get the chance to genuinely improve the system, I'll definitely look into using this.
- austenallred 12y ago
  Interesting. We'll get that fixed.
bryanlarsen 12y ago
The sign up process didn't ask me where I was from and/or what I was interested in. For general world news with a reasonable frequency and good digests I've got The Economist. It's the national, local and specialist news that I'm missing.
- austenallred 12y ago
  Right now it's world/international news only. We'll be building out other sections as we scale, but need to nail this down first, and there's a lot of work we still need to do on that.
MrBuddyCasino 12y ago
Great landing page, I'm sure conversion rate is good. But the visuals don't make me want to stay, even with the mini-tutorial its a little annoying. Crowd-sourced fact checks are an interesting idea, I'm not sure it works for news. You need to be fast and thorough, which is hard. I'd love to have reliable background information for long-running issues, like the Ukraine crisis. Maybe this will be easier, as the value can accumulate over a longer time period. I wish you good luck, we need better news!
- austenallred 12y ago
  Thanks for the feedback. What "visuals" are you referring to that don't make you want to stay? It's tough for me to grasp what someone wants/needs to stick around. Right now we have a pretty good core of hardcore news junkies that come every day, and maybe that's OK for the curation/fact-checking side of things, but what do you want/need? We're adding a "background" area to each news item. That was an issue that I didn't really have at first because I sit there and watch the news all day, but turns out not everybody is like me :). That may take a couple weeks along with all of the other changes we need to make, but it will be in there.
ta82828 12y ago
Asking me to sign up before I've even looked at the page is annoying (to me). http://tabcloseddidntread.com/ http://tabcloseddidntread.com/
- austenallred 12y ago
  Yeah, originally everything was open, we didn't even require a login to upvote/comment/etc. Then some folks from ISIS came on and started trying to muck everything up, so we had to throw a gate on it (banning by IP was just too chaotic). We'll add some more info to the gate soon.
  - ta82828 12y ago
    I don't know what you can do on your site, because I didn't want to sign up, but you can look at HN without having to sign up and you still need an account to vote or to comment.
    - austenallred 12y ago
      Yes, that will be how it works in the future, but we haven't had time to build out the non-logged-in states of everything. So it's a hacky solution, but we just threw up a wall for now.
some_furry 12y ago
Minor bug: When I sign up, it immediately reports a failure (Username not available) for a split second before going forward with the registration without a hitch.
dodyg 12y ago
How about not forcing me to register before I can see the site?
baby 12y ago
> I, strangely enough, agree with Most of what Aaron says. And I'm the founder of a news company. People should re-read this and understand that this is the best way of doing marketing for your startup. "I agree, here's my solution".
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
sparkzilla 12y ago
I don't think you agree with Swartz at all. You used an article that explains why someone does not read the news to promote your news site. According to the article, Swartz wasn't looking for an alternative way to consume news: he decries the news industry as a whole. I'm all for self-promotion on HN when it's relevant, but Grasswire appears to be exactly the kind of thing Swartz would not be interested in. If you were selling books or long-form journalism I could understand your post, but as it stands it's blatant self-promotion. And I say that as the founder of a news company.
- austenallred 12y ago
  I started the news site because I have the same frustrations Swartz has. Most of the news is bullshit and a worthless time-suck. All of the examples he uses, all of the websites out there, feel completely irrelevant to me and not interesting whatsoever. I disagree with him that it's 100% - I think it's just 99.9%, and that .01% is valuable. Perhaps that's a major difference, but Swartz's point was that it's not valuable enough to waste time on. I'd like to think that if he could spend 30 seconds to get that .01% of important news he would feel differently. But, of course, we'll never know.
  - sparkzilla 12y ago
    I find it interesting that someone who is making a news site would say that most of the news is "bullshit and a worthless time suck". Are you really saying that just 0.1% of the news on your site has value? Perhaps you should take Swartz's advice and stop fighting to improve something that has so little value to you.
    - austenallred 12y ago
      > I find it interesting that someone who is making a news site would say that most of the news is "bullshit and a worthless time suck." Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. 99.9% of news is garbage, .01% of news is valuable. I want to make it easy for people to get that .01%. > Perhaps you should take Swartz advice and stop fighting to improve something that has so little value to you. I think news is badly broken, and I'm trying to fix it. I don't understand what problem you have with that.
JoshTriplett 12y ago
> It's like voting - my vote doesn't matter, but on aggregate it's everything. Circle of concern versus circle of control. Pay attention to things proportionally to the amount of control you have over them, rather than worrying disproportionately. (And if you want to care more than that about something, find a way to have more influence on that something.) If you have a vote on something, you have a non-zero but very tiny amount of control over it; spend time educating yourself appropriately. But the vast majority of news stories discuss items that should not in any way affect the actions of the people watching them. Also, considering that later in this thread you explicitly describe your service as being for "news junkies"...
- austenallred 12y ago
  That's a really good frame of reference, I think. Thank you for that. I consider our service like Wikipedia - there is a small collection of people who are just abnormally fascinated by the news - the 1% of news junkies who want to see what's happening, vet it, and tell you if it's wrong. The biproduct of that is that the 99% of "normal people" get a news digest that contains only the most important info, that's easily digestible. So the current website is for news junkies, just like the "talk/edit" part of Wikipedia is for... encyclopedia junkies? The daily email and coming read-only stuff is what I hope is appropriate for 99% of people, including someone like Swartz.
  - JoshTriplett 12y ago
    A vetting process seems like a useful filter, but it's not a sufficient one. Vetting doesn't necessarily affect stories that are factually accurate but irrelevant. What is your definition of "important"? Or, more importantly, what definition of "important" does your community of "news junkies" apply? Because almost by definition, those "news junkies" have a different idea of what's important than other people do.
    - austenallred 12y ago
      There are two main functions on the site. One is a fact-check, the other is an upvote. People are told to upvote the most important info - we define "most important" as "having the most affect on the citizens of the world." Of course, that's very difficult to quantify, and there may be some bias of the news junkies, but I think the end product is pretty great (though not perfect yet). Of course that's just me, and I'm probably biased as well, but there have been times when I have said the news coming out of grasswire is complete shit, so I'd like to think I'm at least trying to be honest with myself.
nosuchthing 12y ago
Regarding your vote not mattering, what about "Instant Run-Off Voting" [1] ? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting
Redoubts 12y ago
I just signed up, and all I see is the equivalent of twitter posts for #ISIS, #Ferguson, and #Ukraine -- for both "Live Feed" and "Popular Feed". Am I missing something?
webXL 12y ago
> A publication one can consume in thirty seconds with the most important stuff If you don't allow the user to define "important", it's the same thing. You're just replacing the editors with random fact-checkers who are most likely regurgitating the headlines editors put on their screens. I was surprised I couldn't filter by region. I think Aaron's point was that if it doesn't affect me, why should I follow it?

samastur 12y ago

I guess I must be too dense, but I simply do not know how to use grasswire. I'm stuck with live feed on left which shows me exactly the kind of useless "breaking" stuff I want to avoid and popular feed on the right which I don't seem to be able to control beyond either providing fact-check or comment. What am I missing?

austenallred 12y ago
What you're looking at is kind of like a backend - consider it the "talk" page for Wikipedia. It's a little bit chaotic this early in the morning, but our algorithm pulls in the "breaking" stuff on the left, and the most upvoted stuff flows to the top of the "popular" page. Grasswire users fact-check stuff for accuracy, and comment on whether or not/why it's important. The site is mostly for news junkies. It's a little bit hectic right now because a bunch of people from HN are just upvoting random stuff to screw everything up, and it will take the power users a minute to sort through it. The result is at the end of the day, the best stuff curated and fact-checked by a couple thousand people, and we send that out to the everyday person in an email they can digest in 30 seconds. We're adding a short, editable description to each news item to give some background, and allowing anyone to submit external stuff, so it's still a work in progress, but that's the gist of it.
- bovermyer 12y ago
  Very interesting concept. I signed up; we'll see where it goes. One thing to note, though - on the left I'm seeing a number of duplicated entries, with the duplicates immediately after the original. I'm using Firefox, if that matters.
- aidos 12y ago
  I really like this. I too am sick of seeing stuff promoted in everyday media which is clearly fabricated. Admission. I think I up-voted some comments by accident. It's not obvious what that large up arrow does (now that I say it out-loud I think it's probably pretty obvious!) and there's no way to undo the operation. Sorry. Are there plans to add a frontend to it?
  - austenallred 12y ago
    Well once I push these code changes in the next few minutes you should be able to click on the upvote again to remove it. For now, don't worry about it :) We see the "frontend" as a daily email that goes out or an app with a daily push notification that says "Hey, here you go, the best news of the day in 30 seconds." So the hours of work that the people are putting in on the back-end really just reduces the amount of time for the end user. We could probably hire five people to do that, but it's important to us that it's democratic and open.
    - aidos 12y ago
      That all makes sense. In terms of a frontend I was thinking of a read only type system. At lunch time I come to HN to entertain myself. Occasionally I jump over to bbc news (which is pretty dire) or aljazeera. It would be great to have a page I could drop into to get the digest.
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
- glial 12y ago
  The site looks slick, but it doesn't have some features I'd expect and want from a news aggregation site. I can't find any way to search for news about specific topics, for example.

Mikeb85 12y ago

> ruthlessly curated and fact-checked The problem with curated news is that we can be consuming propaganda and not know it. Even as it stands now, we hear of certain news in the world, but not others, and it severely affects our understanding of the world.

TeMPOraL 12y ago
Damned if you do, damned if you don't. We're consuming propaganda either way. Media outlets chose what to write about and what not to cover, then stories that match people's biases tend to get disproportionately popularized. I hope that this fact-checking feature can at least do something against news sites publishing obvious lies and misinformation.

chrisloy 12y ago

I think what you're trying to do at Grasswire is interesting, but I feel like here you're arguing against the very point that Swartz was making. I think of all people he is the last one that you could accuse of not caring, and yet he claims not to have read the news for his entire adult life. The difference is that he voraciously read books [1] and took what I guess was a long view of issues of interest, which I think is what he is promoting here. That said I still like the idea of being able to "touch base" with the news as it were - something that I can scan quickly and, if I'm disciplined enough, filter down to the bits that are actually relevant to me. Most days, hopefully, that's nothing at all. [1] e.g. http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/books2010 http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/books2010

TeMPOraL 12y ago

I just registered. Great work! It's dense, but I think dense is good - it's about information after all. Also, I love the "fact-check" feature. I'll try to use it for a few days and see if it enhances my life in any way.

grey-area 12y ago

I think the problem with news is that it is has become driven by the imperatives of Google (a company which makes money from advertising). Those imperatives lead inexorably to a thirst for page-views and page-rank, and horrible sites like buzzfeed. I've noticed this evolution in previously respected publications like The Guardian or The Independent in the UK (much Guardian coverage nowadays is centred on clicks, as are initiatives like the i-100). Here are some tenets to which I think any news company aspiring to change the field and report news responsibly should think about: Popularity is poisonous and the enemy of the good - what is good or even factually right is often not popular Context is key - without context, a fact can be meaningless or actively misleading (e.g. the most liberal senator in the senate, 45 minutes from a chemical war from the dodgy dossier). On the ground observation is key - this is something modern tech has changed in a very positive way, though it does also allow for rumours and misinformation. Analysis is key - without analysis from informed observers, lots of news is hard to digest and understand - it provides context Balance is an illusion - Opinions always colour analysis and the facts reported, we should be up-front about this - every org and person has them. Fact checking with primary sources is key - how can you possibly fact-check factoids that your readers are constantly upvoting? How can you possibly fact check an opinion? National news is often horribly biased, and national newspapers usually pander to the government/demographic they serve, especially in time of war. Most public outrage is wrong or at least ill-founded - we have representative and informed democracy to try to avoid the rule of the mob. Quick news is the antithesis of thoughtful, incisive news There's plenty of buzzfeed-esque junk out there trying to recycle news and readers as quickly as possible, and it is neither viable in the long term nor is it good for news or for readers. So I disagree completely (as does the article I think) on what you consider to be a good news publication. PS Your website doesn't even show me what it does before it asks for email, you might want to consider changing that. I tried a fake account and looks like some kind of buzzfeed reuters mashup, and I'm afraid guilty of a lot of the sins Aaron points out.

slau 12y ago

It's apparently not possible to use a space in the password. Please don't limit the characters or length of a password. Thanks.

tom-lord 12y ago
My company considers one of its systems "more secure" because they enforce a policy that all passwords must contain 8+ non-space characters. The implementation? "Must be 8+ characters; must not contain spaces." I've expressed my view on this (and similar password-related policies) many times, but apparently it's all simply a box ticking exercise for pen testers...
- sarciszewski 12y ago
  There are much better ways to enforce this validation. Shoot me an email if you'd like any assistance. Also, https://github.com/dropbox/zxcvbn https://github.com/dropbox/zxcvbn is amazing.
  - alexbecker 12y ago
    I wonder why my searches never turned this up. I ended up making my own: https://github.com/alexbecker/password-strength https://github.com/alexbecker/password-strength
  - tom-lord 12y ago
    That looks really cool - I haven't seen it before, thanks! The "offending system" I mentioned, however, is our old PHP application that I don't really work on. (I mainly develop much more modern Rails stuff!) Like I said, the primary concern of the company is simply to keep pen testers happy - and their criteria for a "secure" website is, in my opinion, often misleading or even downright wrong. But if I ever get the chance to genuinely improve the system, I'll definitely look into using this.
austenallred 12y ago
Interesting. We'll get that fixed.

bryanlarsen 12y ago

The sign up process didn't ask me where I was from and/or what I was interested in. For general world news with a reasonable frequency and good digests I've got The Economist. It's the national, local and specialist news that I'm missing.

austenallred 12y ago
Right now it's world/international news only. We'll be building out other sections as we scale, but need to nail this down first, and there's a lot of work we still need to do on that.

MrBuddyCasino 12y ago

Great landing page, I'm sure conversion rate is good. But the visuals don't make me want to stay, even with the mini-tutorial its a little annoying. Crowd-sourced fact checks are an interesting idea, I'm not sure it works for news. You need to be fast and thorough, which is hard. I'd love to have reliable background information for long-running issues, like the Ukraine crisis. Maybe this will be easier, as the value can accumulate over a longer time period. I wish you good luck, we need better news!

austenallred 12y ago
Thanks for the feedback. What "visuals" are you referring to that don't make you want to stay? It's tough for me to grasp what someone wants/needs to stick around. Right now we have a pretty good core of hardcore news junkies that come every day, and maybe that's OK for the curation/fact-checking side of things, but what do you want/need? We're adding a "background" area to each news item. That was an issue that I didn't really have at first because I sit there and watch the news all day, but turns out not everybody is like me :). That may take a couple weeks along with all of the other changes we need to make, but it will be in there.

ta82828 12y ago

Asking me to sign up before I've even looked at the page is annoying (to me). http://tabcloseddidntread.com/ http://tabcloseddidntread.com/

austenallred 12y ago
Yeah, originally everything was open, we didn't even require a login to upvote/comment/etc. Then some folks from ISIS came on and started trying to muck everything up, so we had to throw a gate on it (banning by IP was just too chaotic). We'll add some more info to the gate soon.
- ta82828 12y ago
  I don't know what you can do on your site, because I didn't want to sign up, but you can look at HN without having to sign up and you still need an account to vote or to comment.
  - austenallred 12y ago
    Yes, that will be how it works in the future, but we haven't had time to build out the non-logged-in states of everything. So it's a hacky solution, but we just threw up a wall for now.

some_furry 12y ago

Minor bug: When I sign up, it immediately reports a failure (Username not available) for a split second before going forward with the registration without a hitch.

dodyg 12y ago

How about not forcing me to register before I can see the site?

baby 12y ago

> I, strangely enough, agree with Most of what Aaron says. And I'm the founder of a news company. People should re-read this and understand that this is the best way of doing marketing for your startup. "I agree, here's my solution".

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

sparkzilla 12y ago

I don't think you agree with Swartz at all. You used an article that explains why someone does not read the news to promote your news site. According to the article, Swartz wasn't looking for an alternative way to consume news: he decries the news industry as a whole. I'm all for self-promotion on HN when it's relevant, but Grasswire appears to be exactly the kind of thing Swartz would not be interested in. If you were selling books or long-form journalism I could understand your post, but as it stands it's blatant self-promotion. And I say that as the founder of a news company.

austenallred 12y ago
I started the news site because I have the same frustrations Swartz has. Most of the news is bullshit and a worthless time-suck. All of the examples he uses, all of the websites out there, feel completely irrelevant to me and not interesting whatsoever. I disagree with him that it's 100% - I think it's just 99.9%, and that .01% is valuable. Perhaps that's a major difference, but Swartz's point was that it's not valuable enough to waste time on. I'd like to think that if he could spend 30 seconds to get that .01% of important news he would feel differently. But, of course, we'll never know.
- sparkzilla 12y ago
  I find it interesting that someone who is making a news site would say that most of the news is "bullshit and a worthless time suck". Are you really saying that just 0.1% of the news on your site has value? Perhaps you should take Swartz's advice and stop fighting to improve something that has so little value to you.
  - austenallred 12y ago
    > I find it interesting that someone who is making a news site would say that most of the news is "bullshit and a worthless time suck." Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. 99.9% of news is garbage, .01% of news is valuable. I want to make it easy for people to get that .01%. > Perhaps you should take Swartz advice and stop fighting to improve something that has so little value to you. I think news is badly broken, and I'm trying to fix it. I don't understand what problem you have with that.

JoshTriplett 12y ago

> It's like voting - my vote doesn't matter, but on aggregate it's everything. Circle of concern versus circle of control. Pay attention to things proportionally to the amount of control you have over them, rather than worrying disproportionately. (And if you want to care more than that about something, find a way to have more influence on that something.) If you have a vote on something, you have a non-zero but very tiny amount of control over it; spend time educating yourself appropriately. But the vast majority of news stories discuss items that should not in any way affect the actions of the people watching them. Also, considering that later in this thread you explicitly describe your service as being for "news junkies"...

austenallred 12y ago
That's a really good frame of reference, I think. Thank you for that. I consider our service like Wikipedia - there is a small collection of people who are just abnormally fascinated by the news - the 1% of news junkies who want to see what's happening, vet it, and tell you if it's wrong. The biproduct of that is that the 99% of "normal people" get a news digest that contains only the most important info, that's easily digestible. So the current website is for news junkies, just like the "talk/edit" part of Wikipedia is for... encyclopedia junkies? The daily email and coming read-only stuff is what I hope is appropriate for 99% of people, including someone like Swartz.
- JoshTriplett 12y ago
  A vetting process seems like a useful filter, but it's not a sufficient one. Vetting doesn't necessarily affect stories that are factually accurate but irrelevant. What is your definition of "important"? Or, more importantly, what definition of "important" does your community of "news junkies" apply? Because almost by definition, those "news junkies" have a different idea of what's important than other people do.
  - austenallred 12y ago
    There are two main functions on the site. One is a fact-check, the other is an upvote. People are told to upvote the most important info - we define "most important" as "having the most affect on the citizens of the world." Of course, that's very difficult to quantify, and there may be some bias of the news junkies, but I think the end product is pretty great (though not perfect yet). Of course that's just me, and I'm probably biased as well, but there have been times when I have said the news coming out of grasswire is complete shit, so I'd like to think I'm at least trying to be honest with myself.

nosuchthing 12y ago

Regarding your vote not mattering, what about "Instant Run-Off Voting" [1] ? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting

Redoubts 12y ago

I just signed up, and all I see is the equivalent of twitter posts for #ISIS, #Ferguson, and #Ukraine -- for both "Live Feed" and "Popular Feed". Am I missing something?

webXL 12y ago

> A publication one can consume in thirty seconds with the most important stuff If you don't allow the user to define "important", it's the same thing. You're just replacing the editors with random fact-checkers who are most likely regurgitating the headlines editors put on their screens. I was surprised I couldn't filter by region. I think Aaron's point was that if it doesn't affect me, why should I follow it?