
Show HN: Agon.i – a different perspective on news - HekaHouse
https://play.google.com/apps/testing/house.heka.agoni
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HekaHouse
Agon, Greek root of the word agony, means contest or fight. The ancient Greeks
considered agon to be one of the fundamental building blocks of life. Agon
could occur internally, such as fighting against your responsibilities by
playing a game on your phone, or externally. The personification of contests
such as the ancient Olympic games was called Agon. In more general terms agon
represents a contest of wills, be it in debate, art or physical exertion.

With our app agon.i we hope to revive the spirit of Agon with regard to our
consumption of news. We host and publish previews of news articles from around
the world. Unlike other news aggregation services, we make no attempts to
monitor you or discover what you want to see. We believe that such an approach
creates an echo chamber environment.

Instead agon.i draws content from GDELT updates (Global Database of Events
Language and Tone), a dataset designed for scientific analysis of news
published online. This data feed provides approximately 3000 articles every 15
minutes. We collect the feed and filter it to English articles we can cleanly
parse for a title and photo, then submit each of them to IBM’s Watson for
topic identification.

Along with each article agon.i presents the option to concur with the articles
sentiment or to contest it, the only requirement being you either post your
reasoning or agree with reasoning someone else has posted. Once you have
staked out your position you are then able to discuss your position or that of
others through threaded replies.

All of this communication is completely anonymous, you are assigned a persona
when you make your first response on an article and it will remain with you
throughout any interactions you have there.

Check out our beta test and let me know what you think!

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kseistrup
What is the requirement of this app? I signed up as a beta tester, but Google
Play says that “This app is incompatible with all of your devices” (two
android phones and one android tablet).

Is it because I'm not US based that I cannot install the app?

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HekaHouse
Guessing it is because you are not in the US?

I opened it up to all countries with the latest update.

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HekaHouse
Hmm it should be available for anything above Android 4.4, maybe I did
something wrong with the beta.

Will look into it now.

