
Google Assistant’s latest feature: “Tell me something good” - Mereruka
https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/21/google-assistants-latest-feature-delivers-just-the-good-news/
======
rbanffy
Let me tell you a story of one of the largest news portals in Brazil,
ig.com.br.

At the time, it was run by a very clever guy who came from the advertising
world. He came up with an idea, the "Good News Day". It was to be tied to some
ad campaign I don't quite remember now, but it was a day when the news portal
could only publish good news.

The editorial staff protested, of course. It's their job to offer news as
factually correct and unbiased as humanly possible and they were very unhappy
with the idea. In the end, however they relented.

It was about 4AM when a mayoral candidate from a city near São Paulo, was
murdered, seemingly for political reasons. Under protests, they held the
release.

By 10 AM a plane hit the World Trade Center.

At that point they just published everything and completely ignored the
directive. Nothing similar was ever issued again.

To this day, the people who were there regard such initiatives as extremely
dangerous.

~~~
petra
So people in Brazil won't know about 9/11(maybe the biggest news event in
recent history), for a day. how is it dangerous ?

And i say that as an Israeli, we don't lack drama in our news.I don't listen
to the news, and i don't feel i'm risking myself.

~~~
untog
> So people in Brazil won't know about 9/11(maybe the biggest news event in
> recent history), for a day. how is it dangerous ?

Well, how many people in Brazil had relatives in NYC? Proportionally speaking
not many, I'm sure. But some. And their news provider would have
overwhelmingly let them down that day. If you move the same principle to an
NYC news provider it would be a catastrophic service failure.

~~~
PerfectElement
This was a single online news provider, among dozens of popular news outlets.

~~~
untog
Yes, but I'm talking about this as a general principle (as is the person I
replied to I assume, given that he said "people in Brazil won't know about
9/11", not "people in Brazil will need to find an alternative news source to
find out about 9/11".

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lostimpo
This headline was somewhat misleading for me. I interpreted it as some kind of
potentially undesirable filter on an existing feature, but it's just an
additional command.

The feature is essentially "Hey Google, tell me something good" and Assistant
reads out a positive news story. I asked twice and it told me a story about
Parkinson's research and how Utah reduced chronic homelessness. It seems like
a feature of questionable usefulness but neat nonetheless.

~~~
dang
We changed the headline to make it less misleading, as the site guidelines
ask:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

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bobmarley1
ITT: People who only read headlines.

"To activate the feature, Assistant users in the U.S. can say, “Hey Google,
tell me something good” to kick off the daily briefing of happy stories."

This is NOT a filter Google puts on your news intake. It IS a gimmick that
people can activate like asking it to tell you a joke.

~~~
fixermark
Exactly. The primary difference (to me personally) being that I'll probably
activate this at least once a day. ;)

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5Zio
Please read the article folks. The headline is misleading and and why I
usually don't bother with Techcrunch articles.

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bearble
Today my wife and I woke up to, "A Colorado man has been convicted of killing
his wife and children."

I would LOVE a feature to disable these types of headlines, this certainly IS
NOT it.

~~~
Alex3917
I had a kid a couple months ago, and now pretty much all of my Google News
recommended stories are about kids near me being murdered.

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amhokies
What about a feature to read just the headlines of articles, since that seems
to be what most people do.

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augustocallejas
The downside to just good news:

[https://qz.com/307214/heres-what-happened-when-a-news-
site-o...](https://qz.com/307214/heres-what-happened-when-a-news-site-only-
reported-good-news-for-a-day/)

~~~
lmilcin
Good news don't typically require instant reaction and thus are not urgent.
Our brains are wired to prefer urgent over important.

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smrtinsert
This is absolutely terrible idea. Studies should be conducted regarding
curation of content. As we learned recently, what you read briefly online can
change the entire world.

~~~
cirenehc
That's not what this article is saying. It's not curating anything...

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mdrzn
"Tell Me Something Good isn't supported in this region" I mean, it's not like
I want national positive news, just give me some happy news.

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thrill
I want a feature that delivers Iowahawk-level snark before telling me the news
headline.

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ProAm
I dont think google makes good editorial decisions.

~~~
lostimpo
From the article:

> The stories are selected and summarized by the nonpartisan nonprofit
> Solutions Journalism Network, an organization that helps train journalists
> to better cover how people are responding to problems and how those actions
> can have positive results.

Google is not choosing the stories.

~~~
ProAm
How can that organization be nonpartisan when one of the founder is: "Courtney
E. Martin is an American feminist, author, speaker, and social and political
activist" [1] Like I said I have zero faith in Google presenting me not
biased, self-interested news.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Courtney_E._Martin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Courtney_E._Martin)

~~~
jerf
"Non-partisan" is just a obfuscatory way of saying "has politics I agree
with".

This is not targeted at any particular side; I see all sides use the term this
way.

~~~
ProAm
Absolutely.

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itake
awesome! one more command to memorize :)

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jumpman500
Wow. Now they're proud of putting people into information bubbles. This
company is showing more and more how disconnected they are from reality and
why people are starting not to trust them anymore.

~~~
fixermark
It's not clear to me how this new option is putting people in an "information
bubble" any more than a person deciding to buy a copy of "Chicken Soup For the
Soul" instead of "Mindhunter." Can you clarify?

~~~
jumpman500
Google is deciding that they can know what good news is. Facebook/Google have
never tried to put people in information bubbles they just create the systems
that enable people to do it to themselves. Everything is avoidable online, but
we keep making it harder and harder for people to remain unbiased and share
common truths.

------
lmilcin
I find it very unsettling that search engines seem to be filtering information
based on its knowledge of the user. I understand the article describes a
different feature that does basically some kind of mood analysis that does not
require the knowledge of the user and, at least currently, must be explicitly
invoked by the user.

I have noticed that at some point search engines like Google or Youtube
started only showing me results that match my political views. It was actually
quite difficult to find any opposing view points.

Now, I think this leads to radicalization as people are further "strengthened"
in their opinions seeing that "the Internet agrees" with them.

~~~
ams6110
There's no real political agenda at work here. They are just showing you
suggestions for things they think you will watch, so they can serve more ads.

~~~
lmilcin
It may not be political agenda but it has consequences. If left only sees left
opinions and right only sees right opinions, how people are to agree on
anything if they are never exposed to arguments from other side?

As bad as people are at being unbiased, this is only making things worse, on
gigantic scale.

~~~
eropple
YouTube is really quite happy to serve me "right opinions".

They involve guys like the one who's a subject of this video:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ahuj1B0ow4U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ahuj1B0ow4U)

That dude, literally that dude, showed up in my recommendations pretty
regularly until I explicitly blocked him. Now I get fellow chuds like Sargon
of Akkad and the like; I have to "nope" at least one fascist or at the minimum
white-supremacist channel out of my recommendations a week.

~~~
eropple
(And to the--edit: before looking at his comments, I said "well-meaning" here,
I retract that--hellbanned poster who replied to me: I am not being facetious,
I am being _descriptive_. Homeboys thinking Nazis had some good points are
very comfortably called _fascist_ , thanksforplaying.)

