
Show HN: Not Depressing News - armatav
https://www.notdepressing.com/
======
simias
The first thing I notice browsing the homepage is that these "not depressing
news" are often feel-good stories that can be uplifting but also aren't very
intellectually stimulating, e.g.:

>Thanks to ‘Super Mom’ Saving Her Husband’s Life, He Opens His Eyes in Time to
See His Son’s Birth

That's super nice to hear but it barely qualifies as "news" as far as I'm
concerned.

Meanwhile those that seem more interesting are not that uplifting to me, for
instance:

>Donations Pour Into Northwest Iowa Library After Man Burns LGBTQ Books

So that means that somebody burned LGBTQ books in the first place? That's
pretty messed up.

>A Christian woman who was sentenced to death in Pakistan for blasphemy has
won her appeal and been acquitted in a landmark ruling.

Somebody was sentenced to death for blasphemy at some point in this day and
age? That's not uplifting at all.

I guess I'm a glass half-empty kind of guy.

I do sympathize with the intent here, it's true that actual news can be very
depressing. My personal "not depressing news" involves reading about sciences,
in particular astronomy. Questioning the way our world functions,
contemplating the scale of the universe (both in space and in time) is really
soothing to me.

~~~
travisjungroth
Reddit's /r/upliftingnews suffers from the same problem.

"Woman held captive in basement entire life visits Yosemite."

I don't feel uplifted, and that's not news.

~~~
eecks
The real story is that the woman was held captive for her entire life - which
is bad news!

------
bitexploder
On the one hand, I will compliment this and say what a good idea is this is.
The world is becoming, on average, a less violent, more prosperous place since
the industrial revolution. Fewer people starve and there is much less armed
conflict. People need to be reminded of this. But it can be a really dangerous
game to live in an bubble and turn blinders on to reality. I hope everyone can
take this "not depressing" news dose and also keep an eye on reality. Final
thought: Being depressed by the news, any news, is a choice. Depression from
the news is often from a feeling of powerlessness over the situation. But what
you can control are your emotions and your decision to be depressed by the
news. Channeling Epictetus here. He would just tell us to decide not to be
depressed and focus on what you can control. Politics got you down? Vote. Get
others to vote. Become involved. Local politics are important, etc. That is my
thoughts, hopefully that seems balanced. That said, bookmarking this site and
I will see how it evolves.

~~~
crispyambulance
I think the intent is solid.

But using curation by someone else in an attempt to solve the problem of
overwhelming malaise in one's news feed just won't "scale" (sorry for using
that valley buzzword). How much can any entity curate on a day-to-day basis?
How does one decide what's actually worthy? Didn't we see this before in the
early web when Yahoo thought it could categorize everything? Can we trust
_anybody_ (other than ourselves) to white-list what we see?

As a twitter user, I've found using the "muted words" feature to be somewhat
helpful, my list is _very_ long and includes not only the people and issues I
despise (president cheeto-satan, etc), but also their opposition which I
generally agree with. Yeah, it's "leaky", every once in a while I get mug shot
of somebody I'd rather not see, but it does mitigate the never ending stream
of despair.

In general, I think individuals would do better to limit their news feeds by
themselves, either through the discipline of sticking to trusted sources, or
by more draconian measures of filters. Cable news, of course, is a no-go
dumpster-fire.

~~~
amanaplanacanal
Back before the rise of our newer technology, curation seemed to work pretty
well. Most folks in the US had access to three or four TV channels, one or two
local papers, and a handful of national newspapers and general interest
magazines.

I'm not sure that particular genie is going back in the bottle, though.

------
elektor
For those that are interested in positive/uplifting news, I've been following
a few newsletters that have similar content:

1)
[https://www.goodgoodgood.co/goodnewsletter/](https://www.goodgoodgood.co/goodnewsletter/)
(From a recently funded Kickstarter) 2)
[https://www.theguardian.com/info/2018/feb/12/about-the-
upsid...](https://www.theguardian.com/info/2018/feb/12/about-the-upside-a-
guardian-series) (From the popular newspaper The Guardian) 3)
[https://tinyletter.com/inbetternews](https://tinyletter.com/inbetternews)
(More cute news/ GIFS of animals) 4)
[https://www.positive.news/](https://www.positive.news/) (UK based positive
news)

~~~
Ptyx
[https://twitter.com/HumanProgress](https://twitter.com/HumanProgress)

------
Karuma
So, you're just taking the list from
[https://www.reddit.com/r/UpliftingNews/](https://www.reddit.com/r/UpliftingNews/)
?

You should at least name/link them somewhere...

~~~
ohashi
It looks like it's just UpliftingNews but uglier than reddit (which is kind of
impressive). I think for it to be an MVP it has to be more than just scraping
some community's content. Otherwise this is just an RSS view of one subreddit
- I'd rather get the subreddit and all the comments and content surrounding
it. No real added benefit from this site.

~~~
gitgud
I agree, not sure what all the fuss is about. The internet is filled with
sites of nothing but links to other sites...

The big revolution was web 2.0, where interactivity was enabled and
encouraged. That's the reason I go to specific sites, the content is what you
make yourself these days, not what gets posted to you...

------
ramigb
Putting "not" to negate a negative isn't always a great idea. "Not Depressing"
still has the word depressing, versus "uplifting",pleasant or even hopeful
these words will always be much better.

~~~
gyvastis
Why do you care about the name? You'd go to that kind of place for the content
not because of the title anyway.

~~~
thecatspaw
because first impressions count

------
PaulHoule
There are many interesting questions around this.

Is the purpose of news to manipulate your mood?

If that is the case it competes with video games, sports, fiction, etc.

Is the purpose of news to inform?

In that case "current events" competes with an understanding of past events.

I was listening to an evangelical preacher the other day about the book
"Romans" written by my namesake and how the apostles are getting their asses
kicked in roman jails and preaching with anger against immorality (beyond the
pale today in the west) such as polygamy and slavery.

Then I was reading about how the Polish and Japanese both learned how to write
at the same time in the same way. I felt the dread hanging over Arlington
National Memorial and was shocked to discover who had owned the land it was
on.

This 1971 book

[https://www.amazon.com/Information-Machines-Ben-H-
Bagdikian/...](https://www.amazon.com/Information-Machines-Ben-H-
Bagdikian/dp/0060902582)

predicted that we would have "news on the web" in the 1980s and has a much
deeper analysis of that entails than most books written since.

He sees a fundamental problem in "news" that the gatekeeper function has to be
done efficiently and quickly. Of all the things that happened today, the
"news" is one in a billion or so.

That selection is necessary to create a feeling of shared reality. (I saw CNN
at 5:14 and my Uncle Nic saw it at 7:31 and we saw "the same thing")

That selection is also violence against reality itself.

------
aptwebapps
Not to be a downer, but the current top story is "Thousands of Native voters
in North Dakota getting free IDs". The reason that's necessary is not _not_
depressing.

It's sort of like "Man who fell off click only broke both legs".

~~~
mooseburger
Nothing wrong with voter ID, nearly all developed countries do it.

~~~
js2
The U.S. has a long history of voter suppression, of which using IDs to limit
who can vote is one tactic. For some of us, that's depressing. This is off-
topic though so I won't comment further.

------
Aeolun
There is indeed ‘not’ depressing news on the page. In fact, there isn’t any
news at all.

Is this a practical joke? Or is the website broken?

~~~
wodow
In the latest Firefox, the console informs me

> The resource at
> “[https://www.reddit.com/r/upliftingnews/new.json?sort=new?”](https://www.reddit.com/r/upliftingnews/new.json?sort=new?”)
> was blocked because content blocking is enabled.

This is due to Firefox's built-in content blocking / tracking protection [1],
not a plugin.

[1] [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-
protection](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-protection)

~~~
SquareWheel
Soo, it's just poaching content from reddit?

------
stareatgoats
I really like this idea, and have long thought of doing something similar, the
reason being that most/all existing services that I've come across so far
don't do a good job at it. They can actually be even more depressing than
normal news (to me).

One reason reason is that the "positive news" are often reported against
something really depressing, don't point to sustainable solutions and so
defeats the purpose. In essence I believe "positive news" must either turn a
slightly blind eye to the vast number of problems facing humanity (without
being essentially just pictures of cats), or mainly bring up such problems if
a true solution has been found (not "eating more raisins may reduce cancers in
mice").

If this problem could be solved (by heavy manual curation?) I believe a
service like this could actually take off.

~~~
humanetech
I have been thinking about this too, and posed an idea some time ago, to the
Humane Tech Community [0], named "Turning the Weapon Around" [1].

The gist is to use our existing social media channels, that generally -
through their algorithms - reinforce negative sentiments and divisiveness
(because that keeps us engaged best, as Max Stossel explains very well in his
recent Medium article [2]) to create a network of people that do the opposite:
Post, share, like and comment on positive news.

This would work best if it were supported by an app that faciliates this. Our
community is thinking about such app, a decentralized one, which we'll use for
our crowdsourced Humane Tech Awareness program.

[0] [https://community.humanetech.com](https://community.humanetech.com)

[1] [https://community.humanetech.com/t/idea-turning-the-
weapon-a...](https://community.humanetech.com/t/idea-turning-the-weapon-
around-raising-awareness/423)

[2] [https://medium.com/@maxstossel/how-everyone-lost-their-
mind-...](https://medium.com/@maxstossel/how-everyone-lost-their-
mind-e1cede28a30)

~~~
stareatgoats
Hey that's really cool! Thanks for the link to Humane Tech Community, looks
promising and will definitely check it out. Good luck!

------
armatav
Hey HN,

I'm looking for some feedback on NDN, it's a little MVP that will eventually
give you only the not-depressing news from all over the web - it's seeing
quite a bit of retention, and I'd like to know what you think! I'd like to
turn it into a product, but it's pretty hard to see where to go.

~~~
thrmsforbfast
A lot of your news is not just "not-depressing". It's actively uplifting. In
fact, most of the stories on the front page are "feel good" stories.

It'd be cool/useful if you could provide news on the important issues of the
day that's simply "not-depressing". I.e., factual and detached and doesn't
elicit emotion, but not explicitly feed-good.

(e: forgot to say: nice work!)

~~~
armatav
Thanks! Yeah I'm thinking of adding a sentiment slider after I get a large
amount of news sources going, as well as a "which sources I want to see"
selection.

------
bromley
My wife has been running a somewhat-related twitter account for a few years:

[https://twitter.com/happyanimalnews](https://twitter.com/happyanimalnews)

I am, of course, a big fan :)

------
geff82
I just bookmarked your site in the hope that you will find the energy to
continue this for a long time.

The interesting thing is that there is a big gap between our personal life and
what we read in the news. While what we read in the news is often terrible,
depressing stuff, our personal life is usually good, mostly manageable and not
threatening at all. For most of us, life is worth living. And
notdepressing.com caters to that reality, even gives the reader hope that
everything will turn out well.

No, your website is not a replacement for the news sites we all are used too.
But it might become a wonderful addition. Keep it going!

~~~
armatav
Thanks man, the only issue right now is that I really have no idea what to add
other than more sources/news articles.

~~~
Double_a_92
Regional filtering? So you can see everything that happened near you.

------
legionof7
My high school runs a podcast that does a similar thing, we talk about
positive news and interview people who've made a positive impact on the world
(we've done Austen Allred and Turbovote).

[https://anchor.fm/somethinggoodhappened](https://anchor.fm/somethinggoodhappened)

Love to have you on sometime! :)

~~~
armatav
I'd love to be on! Sounds awesome - email me at notdepressingnews@gmail.com

------
esotericn
Doesn't work at all for me on FF63.

A quick look at the dev console - I think tracking protection blocks it from
loading reddit which it wants for whatever reason.

Probably a 'proxy through the back-end' job.

edit: I just realised I have reddit's DNS blocked. Oops. FF still brings up
tracking protection regardless I think.

~~~
armatav
All good man - I'll take a look ASAP

~~~
xeonoex
I'm having an issue on Firefox 63 as well. No content is loaded. Works fine in
Chrome.

------
stdclass
Something similar from David Byrne:
[https://www.reasonstobecheerful.world/](https://www.reasonstobecheerful.world/)

------
szilardboy
Reddit is blocked by most if not all major ISPs in Indonesia, which breaks the
site without the use of a proxy.

Maybe scrape Reddit server-side? I’m not too sure if that would work but just
a suggestion.

I really like the idea, though.

~~~
solarkraft
Maybe use a VPN? The issue is clearly with indonesian ISPs.

~~~
gitgud
It's not the user's fault, they shouldn't need a VPN to read an uplifting news
site... That's just depressing...

~~~
solarkraft
Agreed, the fault is with the ISPs. It seems that they are not actually
providing internet service.

------
specialist
I'm now doing eldercare.

Are there any Happy Stuff TV channel(s) that I can program as defaults?
Knitting, kittens, panda bears, food, travel, museum tours, antiques, etc.

An easy default channel for those people who use TV as company, background
noise. (For examples: my mom, her boyfriend, my uncle.)

The default channels (Fox, CNN, local news, crime shows) are horrifying. Fear,
outrage, gore, drama, political ads.

No wonder the boomers are acting insane.

Of course, I change the channel to some happy stuff, if I can find it. Which
delights my mom and her boyfriend. But such programming is not 24/7\. When the
segment is over, cue channel surfing, and it's right back to horror show.

I don't have TV, so don't know how to Chromecast, Roku, Apple TV. (I've been
reading up, but haven't experimented yet.)

Tangent: I just discovered my mom's been paying $250/mo for triple play.
Outrageous. But given the givens, I'd happily pay $100/mo for curated
commercial free Happy Stuff TV cable channel package.

~~~
edc117
Similar boat, have to look after my parents now and the difference between my
father watching Fox News (well...any news these days) regularly and not is
night and day. He's far more angry with it on, its just nonstop outrage and
cynicism. I'd love to find something that would satisfy his desire to 'stay
current' without the overreaction and FUD, but maybe he'd just go looking for
it anyway.

------
gitgud
No offence to the developer, but isn't this like propaganda? I mean you're not
just choosing to _only_ see the _best_ in world, but you're letting someone
else define what _is_ the best (or not depressing). Just seems a little weird
to me...

~~~
conradk
That's the case with any newspaper though, isn't it? We should always cross-
check and verify, listen to multiple opinions and look at a variety of sources
if possible.

~~~
snaky
The main purpose of newspapers used to be exactly an opposite. You choose the
particular newspaper, by editorial board views closest to yours, and just get
an information. You don't have to cross-check everything - that's what you pay
for subscribing to newspaper. You outsource the job to the editors.

~~~
conradk
The part "by editorial board views closest to yours" says it all. All
newspapers have views. They choose what is "good" or "bad" based on their
views. That's why cross-checking is essential.

------
tontonius
From time to time there tends to arise a demand for news that are not "bad" or
depressing or paints the world in a somber palette. However, I'm often
reminded of this quote by George Orwell:

“Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything
else is public relations.”

Perhaps news are inherently skewed towards the negative side, and that's the
way it should be.

~~~
specialist
Orwell didn't anticipate the infotainment industrial complex.

Marshall McLuhan correctly recognized that overstimulation, the outrage
machine, shuts down critical thought. What McLuhan calls "auto-amputation".

~~~
vntok
Aldous Huxley did however, cf Brave new world

------
toss1
Great Idea love it!

I'll second the idea of providing straight info on major current events too,
tho that might take a big editorial/journo staff...

More immediately, while Chrome populates nicely, Firefox just comes up with
the main page with [Top Today] and [New] blank. I'm also running NoScript but
w/restrictions lifted on all sources on your site.

~~~
armatav
Yeah straight info on major stuff would be good.

That's interesting - I have no idea why that could be the case - I'm googling
around to help it.

~~~
smacktoward
You want Memeorandum:
[https://www.memeorandum.com/](https://www.memeorandum.com/)

~~~
toss1
Looks good - thanks!

------
forgotmypw
>You need to enable JavaScript to run this app.

:(

~~~
vntok
Here is how to enable JavaScript: [https://www.enable-
javascript.com/](https://www.enable-javascript.com/)

~~~
forgotmypw
Thanks, but I'd rather not.

------
mettamage
I like it. If you would like to share any insights in how you've built this,
I'm quite curious. Perhaps it goes without saying, but if you prefer not to
say for whatever reason, then I respect that.

~~~
elektor
Someone mentioned this above but this scrapes headlines from Reddit's
r/UpliftingNews.

------
mixedCase
You might wanna check this:

    
    
      Unhandled Rejection (TypeError): Cannot read property 'children' of undefined
      App._callee2$
      src/App.js:72
        69 | let topTen = []
        70 | 
        71 | let newPostsRaw = await axios.get("https://www.reddit.com/r/" + subreddit + "/new.json?sort=new?")
      > 72 | let newPosts = newPostsRaw.data.data.children
        73 | ^
        74 | // console.log(newPosts)
        75 |

~~~
armatav
I'll take a look ASAP

------
isoskeles
For the observer:

Don't worry, this is still politically slanted. It's "not depressing" that
donations pour in after some wacko burned "LGBTQ books" (for children, left
out of the headline; also, exactly four books).

Not sure I have time for that much news, depressing or not. And I definitely
don't need to be told that it's the opposite of depressing that some people
are getting into a tit-for-tat over LGBTQ children's books, a subject I'd love
to hear nothing about ever.

~~~
armatav
It's just scraping everything right now - I'm working on a proper filter for
it.

------
fiatjaf
Sincerely, I feel depressed reading that the government is away things to
people (as the money ultimately will leave my pocket for that); or that a new
drug may solve many problems (as I feel I'll have to do my own research to
evaluate these claims now); or that a dog had cancer and lots of people were
worried about it; or that Snapchat is getting praised for anything.

------
Tempest1981
I would like something that filters either Google News or Apple News (app),
and removes all stories of murders and abuse.

I understand that a small % of adults behave badly, but I’m not sure that
reporting each instance isn’t actually making the problem worse. Or
desensitizing us. I guess morbid curiosity sells.

I would also like to exclude most Trump news. But still know what’s going on
in the world.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
The trouble with the vast majority of Trump "news" is that it's not really
news - if I wanted to know the content of each and every one of his tweets I'd
just follow him on Twitter. It's very lazy journalism.

~~~
amanaplanacanal
Sure, but it feeds the outrage machine and leads to more ad views. Win-win!

------
newnewpdro
Living in a news bubble isolated from the depressing news of the time inhibits
the negative feedback lagely responsible for making change from reaching the
public.

Aren't people's news feeds on social emdia already effectively doing this? And
it's part of the problem.

------
ryanmercer
"not derpessing"

1st yeah ok

2nd 'Remote Canadian town has been in isolation for a year'

3rd 'a bunch of people have diabetes and alzheimers'

4th 'some dude was unemployed and in a closet'

5th 'some dog lost a leg'

6th 'dude burns LGBTQ books'

7th 'A Christian was sentenced to death'

Yeah man... I'm not seeing this 'not depressin'g part.

------
amingilani
Needed this. Right now my city (heck country's) cellular services have been
been suspended on account of the thousands of people rioting & torching public
and private property to protest the acquittal of a woman in a blasphemy case
by the Supreme Court.

Just more of the same, I guess.

~~~
armatav
Yikes dude, glad my little project helps

------
hapless
“None of the news that’s fit to print”

~~~
armatav
That's a really good tagline

------
MilnerRoute
Just FYI: Firefox and Edge both give me a warning about it not being secure.

"The owner of www.notdepressing.com has configured their website improperly.
To protect your information from being stolen, Firefox has not connected to
this website."

------
stuhinze
So you just built a barebones, frankly sort of ugly UI around an RSS feed of
/r/UpliftingNews/?

Is this a bootcamp application project? How did this end up on the front page?

------
gvajravelu
Great idea! Thanks for trying to make the world a better place.

~~~
smackay
Indeed. This, [https://phys.org/news/2018-10-portugal-wild-circus-
animals.h...](https://phys.org/news/2018-10-portugal-wild-circus-animals.html)
made my day. Portugal is a little on the conservative side and taking the kids
to see the elephants at Christmas is very much a tradition. This law is going
to raise eyebrows and open some eyes. The date of 2024 seems rather far away
but given the cultural impact this will have it's rather pragmatic.

------
ThomPete
You should call it Great News

------
seymour333
Wait, dogs can get cancer? Fuck. That is super depressing.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
I think actually every living animal can get cancer. Except maybe sharks, or
is that an urban legend?

~~~
zimpenfish
Alas, they do.

[https://www.livescience.com/41655-great-white-shark-
cancer.h...](https://www.livescience.com/41655-great-white-shark-cancer.html)

> Scientists have known for more than 150 years that sharks get cancer. And
> yet the belief persists that the animals don't suffer from the disease.

------
jraph
"You need to enable JavaScript to run this app."

Depressing.

------
megaman8
Great concept! I really hope this catches on.

------
pwenzel
Can you please, pretty please, add an RSS feed?

~~~
edgartaor
He is using Reddit /r/upliftingnews as source so you subscribe to;
[https://www.reddit.com/r/upliftingnews.rss](https://www.reddit.com/r/upliftingnews.rss)

------
sbussard
The design needs some work for desktop, plz

------
RickJWagner
I like it. Especially the Red Hat story.

~~~
mikekchar
Yeah. That blew my mind. I'm not actually sure it's not depressing. Will IBM
maintain Red Hat's open source policies? It seems _very_ unlikely...

------
armatav
Well, it got yoinked off the front page. Sucks.

[https://imgur.com/a/coYjsZ4](https://imgur.com/a/coYjsZ4)

------
armatav
Wow this is going pretty high actually

------
mooseburger
Nice idea. Basically the opposite of this excellent short story:
[http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-
controversial/](http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/)

------
bwhthd
Looks empty to me

