
Show HN: Slower News - galfarragem
https://github.com/slowernews/slowernews
======
jasode
_> Articles are hand selected. Everything that calls my attention and passes
the «trivia filter» _

Let me respectfully comment that the above explanation _doesn 't actually mean
anything to me_ because I don't know what articles you _rejected_.

That's the same problem I have with people's lists of "best" book
recommendations: _I don 't know what supposedly great and well-regarded books
the curator disliked or found useless_. That "negative" list that nobody ever
volunteers is probably more useful than seeing _" How to Win Friends and
Influence People"_ repeatedly on everyone's list.

If I knew you well as a longtime friend -- or -- you were already an
established authority on digesting news (e.g. Chomsky, Hitchens, etc), then I
could forego looking at your rejections. But since I don't, the only way to
know if your "pass" filter is useful to me is if I weigh it against your
"rejects".

~~~
kylebenzle
I make book lists and this is GREAT advices. From now on I will have an
addendum at the bottom that lists ALL the books for that list that were
rejected, thank you!

~~~
Zhyl
I mean while this is a flippant response, this does highlight something that
doesn't really exist at the moment: second order derivative lists.

You make a list and then I prioritise and filter your list.

Making a list of your top 100 books implicitly rejects all other books. Me
taking your list of 100 books and rejecting a load with justification gives a
lot more information about what I value in the books and, moreover, which of
your values I disagree with.

We _kind_ of have this with comment trees but it will often be the case that
someone publishes a list (e.g. all of the episodes of Black Mirror in order of
preference or all Studio Ghibli films in order of preference) and then the
comments will take issue with the inclusion of certain items, exclusion of
certain items or the placement of certain items. What you rarely get is the
commentator publishing their own version of the list and what you never get is
the commentator creating a completely derivative list.

------
jrochkind1
So that's a lot of fancy language to say it's... a manual blog aggregating
stuff interesting to the editor? We definitely used to have a lot of those a
few years ago, you remember, pre-facebook, fair enough.

It's usually helpful if you explain more about your scope of interest for
selecting content, I don't really understand what the words mean here.
"relevant trends, micro-trends and edge cases for borderline nerds"\-- Not
sure if this is implied within the field of software development, or just...
general human knowledge? Not sure the difference between a trend or a micro-
trend, edge case in... what, or if it's meant to be applicable to full-on
nerds or just borderline nerds...

~~~
galfarragem
It's hard to curate articles (at least in subjects where we are not
specialists) for a different audience than ourselves. So I pick the group
where I feel I fit in.

~~~
jrochkind1
Sure. I don't feel you've been successful in describing what that audience is
in a way that makes sense to anyone else, or in describing what about this
project you think makes it interesting or novel.

It's basically just a list of links you personally find interesting then? That
can be said more clearly. I'm not totally sure what would make it novel as a
project, lots of people have assembled public lists of links interesting to
them before, yes?

------
elcapitan
One of the most annoying things to me in current journalism is how news and
facts and opinion pieces get more and more conflated. Probably because the
pure "news" is readily available to everyone, so the respective media just
take those news, put their spin on it and cater it that way to their audience
as a way to create a "product".

Unfortunately this linkblog (that's what it is) isn't really much different,
it's a collection of opinion pieces that the author agrees with.

When I want reasonable, global news, I usually just go to
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events),
which is quite balanced and linking sources and Wikipedia articles about the
topic.

~~~
mitchdoogle
This Wiki link is awesome! It is way more useful to get an idea of major news
trends over time than OP's blog

------
roadbeats
Slow news definitely has value for people who prefers them. The best thing I
did last year was to delete all my social accounts (except HN) and subscribe
to hard copy of The Economist. It comes weekly, covers all important events
around the world and gives good level of depth on the subjects. I would not
consider switching to a digital source though. Paper is better, goes better
with dumbphones :)

~~~
Funes-
I'm glad you're better off after taking that decision, which is definitely a
brave one nowadays. When do you get the paper delivered? I feel like I'd
prefer to read it on the weekends. I might think about doing something
similar. I already use a dumbphone, as well.

~~~
roadbeats
The Economist shows up in my mailbox on every Friday regularly. I live in
Berlin, not sure about their delivery to other places.

~~~
ploika
Mine arrives on Tuesday afternoons in Dublin, posted from Germany in fact.

If I renew my subscription I'll go digital only, because my physical paper is
only in-date for a couple of days before the new issue is out on the website
and app.

------
Funes-
A single page containing a huge list of links, ordered by subjects which you
necessarily have to scroll through, with no dates attached to them as well as
lacking the date the list was last updated as a whole. And, to top it off, the
author seemingly wants to include ads [0].

I'm all for slowly consuming relevant (i. e. relevant to me, personally) news,
but I can't get behind the execution on this project.

[0] At the very top of the page: "Dear sponsor, this text link could show us
your great product!".

~~~
52-6F-62
I have to agree. While I applaud the effort and see a slow news digest as a
great project idea, I think this could use some refinement.

The very purpose of "news" is timely publication. As it stands, this seems
more to be a digest of subjects and articles of personal interest and little
more.

On the subject of ads—I see no problem with that. It appears they want them to
be static ads which is a refreshing move.

I encourage the creator to keep working on it.

------
RankingMember
How'd this one get past your hand-selected filter? It's literally just a link
to a meme (linked to under the heading "Demography"):

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

~~~
nkrisc
There are also some quite sinister undertones that could be read into that,
whether it was intentional or not.

~~~
mlavin
I think it's very intentional. As hackneyed as the phrase is, the current
political atmosphere has seen this rise of demographics change as a feared
thing.

~~~
nkrisc
Yes, my personal interpretation of it is that it is a dogwhistle, but I was
being charitable. Then again, a good dogwhistle is plausibly deniable as
inoccuous.

Which really make me reconsider everything this person might have chosen to
share on this site, and how "newsworthy" it really is.

------
rhacker
I'd be more interested in an automated news aggregator that timelines top
issues, so that you can see the updates. The timeline would be intelligent
enough to know when news articles cross into other areas. Sorta like a Git
branch looking tree.

Like the dems races linked up to the COVID-19 outbreak, where it largely was
not linked up a week ago.

Although I think everything falls into the COVID-19 trunk at this point.

The timeline would have 1 sentence summaries using some kind of NL summary
tool.

------
choward
I love that the first part of the docs is a "WTF is this?" section.
Unfortunately the paragraph that follows doesn't answer the question at all.
And that "Colophon" section at the bottom... What? Anyway, after reading the
readme, I still have no idea what this project is.

~~~
time0ut
It is just a static HTML page with lists of links to articles the author
thought were interesting. I remember making something like this 20 years ago
to use as my homepage.

------
cyborgx7
Props for listing the biases. Specially self-described centrists are prone to
thinking their viewpoint is the unbiased one. At least from my experience.

Edit: One question. You say "new articles are easy to spot" but how do I spot
them?

~~~
galfarragem
New links will have a different color for a few months.

------
jmiskovic
You didn't want to spend so much time reading news, so you started curating
news for others? Hm.

The site has nice and cozy design, good work. By the way, "Facebook is
becoming an «independent nation»" is a dead link.

------
onlyrealcuzzo
I just want to say that I've been thinking of making almost exactly this for a
couple of years now. I'm glad someone did it [=

You're getting a lot of hate, but I really think there's a lot of value in
something like this.

The reason I never pursued it very far is I'm not sure how you make a
meaningful amount of money out of it.

I feel like you either stay small or get big and evolve into the problem you
set out to solve.

~~~
mitchdoogle
A lot of hate is deserved. You have to have a huge ego to think that a list of
articles you found on the internet is worthy of anyone's attention. There is
next to no value here.

------
QuelqueChose
If you'd allow me to respectfully suggest an edit to the (IMO cleverly
written) by-line of the site.

> This is, somehow, a slowly updated news-aggregator with relevant trends,
> micro-trends and edge cases for borderline nerds, that don't want to miss
> out, _nor_ spend a shit-ton of time distilling trivia.

------
mikesabat
I like this idea if it focuses on a specific subject, but I don't think it
works as an aggregator.

During the 2016 election there was a FB Messenger app called purple, which
would send out 1 message per day with the news on the election. It allowed me
to ignore all the headlines and clickbait because I knew that Purple would
tell me everything real and useful.

With news aggregation, what I find interesting is highly personable to me so
trusting a human to figure this out doesn't seem like the ideal approach.

Obviously google news is nailing this, but leans towards clickbait. Something
like pocket offering this customized aggregation could be cool if they were
optimizing for me saving articles, not just clicking on them. Of course Pocket
does have suggestions and I completely ignore them.

------
BrunoBernardino
Congrats on trying to slow down in general!

I built a slow news aggregator for people to control their own news (via RSS
feeds). It’s at [https://focusd.co](https://focusd.co) in case that helps you
with your curation for the aggregation

------
peterwwillis
At first I thought this was a machine learning project that sampled news over
a period of time and rejected nearly-identical articles that pop up over the
same amount of time. "important news! bill gates gives 5 million to fight
COVID!" that pops up on 50 news sites a few hours apart could be rejected,
while a lone article that only appears in one or two places would appear as
non-trivial. Apply filter on HN articles and you get just the unique, non-
trending stuff. Sample over 24 hours and you have the most popular non-
trending articles.

------
friendlybus
What's the point of news that's not new. This is a museum for articles that
support a curator's worldview without the attached communities, timely context
and broad appeal of HN or Reddit. Rewatching Friends or The Office is not
meant to inform me about the state of the world.

This idea as a platform might work better. Giving me (the user) the ability to
sculpt my own mirror or museum for the world's news with powerful categories
might be more helpful. Thinkspot has gotten closer to a better news source
than a Slow News application.

~~~
kqr
The idea behind the more general movement of slow news is

1\. Given time to read and write proper investigative journalism, one doesn't
have to resort to copy-pasting descriptive "news" from wire organisations.

2\. With hindsight, it is easier to pick out which stories turned out to be
significant, and which did not.

3\. By revisiting past events, one can begin to unwind what greater
consequences they had.

Essentially, slow news is a way to better understand what matters in the
world. It won't let you talk about the latest soap opera star in the
breakroom, but that's not news anyway, in my opinion.

I'm not sure the author agrees with this, but it's an attempt at answering
your question about the value of slower news.

~~~
friendlybus
Quality journalism that takes a month to unpack requires journalism done by
the greatest writers, someone who can pack a lot of information into a very
small amount of content.

An article (from OP's website) titled 'Poor kids need summer jobs, Rich kids
get them' is interesting for a moment to the majority of readers and few
readers who have kids looking for summer jobs will find relevant information
in the article. The article mentions Brexit and UBI which are inevitably going
to age. A month or years after release I would find better information in
books on the topic or ongoing conversations with people following the topic.

Hindsight is easier on a target that stands still and less interesting too. We
can unveil the significance of long running stories in the stream of
consciousness format on HN or Reddit by revisiting stories that are repeatedly
relevant.

When I want information that transcends time I go to philosophers,
intellectuals, scientists, professionals in the field that have written years
of accumulated knowledge into a book. I don't see what a news article seeks to
provide that will age well. It's not aiming at creating information that ages
well.

------
kevmo314
This seems like it would be more useful to me as an email newsletter? At least
I don't think I'm going to remember visiting once a month... Convenient that
it's already js-free.

------
kuu
There are a lot of negatives comments on this article but somehow it reached
the front page. Interesting...

~~~
jrochkind1
I too am curious what quirk of the HN algorithm resulted in this on the front
page.

------
franky47
Interesting project, I like the Wisdom TL;DR Guide [1] (collection of quotes
and maxims) that comes with it.

[1] [https://github.com/slowernews/wisdom-tldr-
guide](https://github.com/slowernews/wisdom-tldr-guide)

~~~
pauletienney
Thank you for your comment. I would have missed it. I created a small
repository of quotes and display a random one each time I open a new Terminal
window. This list of quotes will perfectly complete my collection. Kudo to the
curator (op ?).

------
dt3ft
Shameless plug: I made 20-things.com in order to try and make something like
reddit but much slower. Limited to 20 things in a 24 hour period. Still work
in progress. Fishing for ideas and feedback.

~~~
dt3ft
Edit: today I noticed a bug where SMS was not being sent to US numbers because
they were being sent from alphanumeric "number" which is not supported. If you
tried to register, please try logging in again and you should receive the SMS
token.

------
Tepix
Looking at the articles I find a large percentage of them to be trivia.

If you just want the most significant news, reading Le Monde diplomatique
(english edition) will do it.

------
webscout
Recently subscribed to briefingday.com as recommended per Kevin Kelly.
Similar, "slow" approach, but comes as a daily newsletter.

------
AnyTimeTraveler
I like this. It does scratches my itch as well.

------
juliend2
It would be great to add an RSS feed.

