
Credder Wants to Create an Equivalent to “Rotten Tomatoes” for News - imartin2k
https://mondaynote.com/credder-wants-to-create-an-equivalent-to-rotten-tomatoes-for-news-94467294e57b
======
rooam-dev
Good luck to them if course, but I am not sure this will work. Couple of
reasons come to my mind:

1\. How will I know that news have been reviewed by qualified people?
Technically this should be news agency/source's job.

2\. By the time the score will depict the news' quality, the damage may be
already done.

3\. RT is based on people's opinions, but news should be fact checked.

What I think it should do, is to score the publishers instead... some kind of
publishing performance history. Although the most effective would be to have
some kind of liability for spreading/posting fake news, this would make
publishers to do more fact checking before fast publishing.

All above is just my IMHO.

~~~
devy
Yep. Rating news is a terrible idea. The news should ideally be as objective
as possible (or otherwise it's called "Fake News"), they don't always come out
as a popular / most highly rated one. Movies, on the other hand, are highly
subjective.

Elon Must has a similar idea where he wanted to rate journalists but later he
gave up.[1]

[https://www.inc.com/brian-hart/elon-musk-wants-to-let-
public...](https://www.inc.com/brian-hart/elon-musk-wants-to-let-public-rate-
journalists-heres-why-its-a-truly-terrible-idea.html)

Ultimately, you as an individual have to decide, do you trust a startup / news
rating site to tell you what it is to believe ? My answer to that is
absolutely not! I want to do my own research before believing anyone. (Yes I
understand some people will be different than that.)

~~~
mncharity
I'm a life-long (but intermittent) NYT reader. Coverage of SpaceX (in NYT,
WSJ, and WaPo) changed how I think of journalism.

Faced with the usual issue of good newspapers getting every topic you know
about not-quite right, variously wrong, I used to explain it by an analogy. It
was like when newspapers closed their foreign offices. Loss of ground truth,
of sanity checking, of insight and nuance. An abundance of misinterpretation
and missing the point. My analogy was that for science, and tech policy, and
diplomacy, and engineering, and manufacturing, and so much else, the foreign
offices were closed. Generalist journalists, not embedded in the various
professional communities of expertise, writing from afar, and getting it
variously wrong.

What struck me about SpaceX coverage was the process failure. Not the getting
things wrong - that was unsurprising. But there was no sign of learning, of
process improvement. For instance, there was a successful short-term
disinformation PR campaign targeting the press (around Zuma satellite failure
attribution). But afterwards, there was little sign of recognition,
reflection, remediation. No sign that they wouldn't fail just as hard if the
same thing was done again a month later. And journalistic devices to pursue
quality, seemed not just poorly executed, but inadequate to need.

So my new analogy is with medicine. Like journalism, medicine has long had
folk practices for pursuing quality. But medicine has had it's "oh, shit"
moment. The realization that medical error was a leading cause of mortality.
That even easy and important standards of care were failing to be consistently
executed. That there were decades of experience in other fields, on how to
engineer process to systemically achieve quality and avoid failure, to which
medicine had been oblivious. Journalism seems still oblivious.

So I suggest that journalism as a profession, and even the best of newspapers
as institutions, have not yet realized just how badly they are failing. Or
recognized the need for, or even the possibility of, systemic process
improvement.

Perhaps the existence of the OP project might help with that.

~~~
devy
Feel free to write your own content - publish your own knowledge by
contributing to the media outlets - NYT has tons of contributing writers who's
full time job is not in journalism!

~~~
mncharity
Nifty. This suggestion seems to nicely illustrate what journalism seems to be
missing. I see it as analogous to...

Think you can operate our press without losing fingers? Great - we're often
looking for replacement operators. Does the machine have guards? Well, we have
both a day and a night watchman, why?

Think you can operate without ever leaving sponges and instruments behind in
patients? Great, set yourself up as a barber surgeon and go for it. Do we
count sponges? You'll have to talk to accounting, but they're not that
expensive, why?

And so on.

Responding to operator errors with "well, just stop doing that". Responding to
pervasive systemic failures with "well, maybe we need better operators".
That's being oblivious to a half century of progress, to minimum standards and
best practices, across multiple industries.

Some years back, someone said their first-tier newspaper didn't even have a
process for tracking errors. Despite an institutional self-image of caring
about quality. ISO 9000 has not hit journalism yet?

------
josefresco
This, and many other concepts based on "vetting" news assumes that the
audience cares. A significant portion of the audience does not care, and is
instead looking for news that validates their worldview, and furthers their
(and their chosen political party's) goals. So basically these services will
cannibalize the part of the audience that does care about truth, turning
people against each other over marginally skewed articles. Meanwhile, the
other site is happy to share falsehoods, because it helps them ... win.

~~~
TeMPOraL
It's even worse.

For most people, news is just a social object. Something to talk about with
family, co-workers, etc. Whether or not any particular story is true doesn't
matter - what matters is that everyone in their circle is aware of the
described event (whether they read the same story, or a different one).

Humans are pretty good at fact-checking and critical thinking when getting it
wrong means some immediate loss. But most news stories are irrelevant to
almost everyone's lives, and those few that are, don't have a direct and
immediate impact.

~~~
wutbrodo
That's what I find so disgusting about this tendency of many people. If I
don't care enough about an issue to be rigorous about it, then by definition I
don't care enough about it to 1) vote based off of it or 2) spread my
uninformed opinion about it (when I do talk about it, I'm clear that I have
only a tentative, uninformed model of the situation).

People have often defended the average voter with "people have busy lives and
don't have time to think about this stuff" (and as you point out, don't really
have the will to), but I've never understood how it's defensible to treat
policies that affect other people's lives as idle fun.

~~~
chocolatebunny
An individual may not be that well informed when voting but the collective of
all votes is supposed to average out to something more reasonable. There was a
story about a bunch of people who were guessing the weight of an ox in a state
fair
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Galton#Variance_and_st...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Galton#Variance_and_standard_deviation))
where people were generally not very well informed but the average weight
guessed was pretty accurate. There are a lot of reasons why democracy as it
stands today doesn't work as well but I don't think ill informed voters is one
of them.

~~~
wutbrodo
Sure, and that's the core value proposition of democracy, but it doesn't
address my complaint. This over-simplified model isn't quite relevant in the
face of the huge incentives to screw with voters' epistemology that voting
creates. There was no small-ox constituency trying to push voters towards
estimating lower, because it didn't matter, while modern culture is suffused
with politics, and not symmetrically with respect to every issue. There's a
reason that my original comment was disgusted by the tendency I'm describing,
instead of modeling it as stupidity: a voter would have to be unbelievably
dumb to think that their gut feeling is even remotely useful when it comes to
1) complex topics 2) that they haven't bothered to inform themselves about, 3)
for which there are a huge amount of resources dedicated to skewing their
views on the issue.

> There are a lot of reasons why democracy as it stands today doesn't work as
> well but I don't think ill informed voters is one of them.

I agree with you in that I don't think it's a "voters these days" problems as
much as a "most people's moral reasoning is horrifically stunted, in any
population and time period". This is a baseline flaw of democracy, and one of
the things that made Churchill call it "the worst form of government, except
for all others that have been tried". But the inevitability of it across a
population doesn't mean it can't be criticized at the individual level.

------
keiferski
Taking a look at the Rotten Tomatoes “Top 100 Films of All Time” list [1], I’m
not exactly sure why it’s a model to be replicated. It’s extremely obvious
that “top” means “popular and/or most advertised.”

[1]
[https://www.rottentomatoes.com/top/bestofrt/](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/top/bestofrt/)

~~~
dagw
_It’s extremely obvious that “top” means “popular and /or most advertised.”_

In RTs case, "Top" means films no one dislikes it and everybody thought it was
at the very least OK. The "problem" with genuinely great films is that they
can often be divisive and challenging and generate a lot of strong opinions in
both directions, and thus they'll never rate as well on RT.

~~~
michaelt
Looking at the RT top 100 list, 76 films are from 2010 or later, 6 from
2000-2009, and 18 from earlier.

Were films a lot more divisive before 2010?

~~~
darkpuma
> Were films a lot more divisive before 2010?

Honestly? Yeah, I think so. I'm not saying RT's rankings necessarily reflects
this, but I think modern movies _in general_ are a lot less daring than what
hollywood used to produce. Probably after 2008 or so, but near enough to 2010,
it seems they stopped taking risks on movies and really started to search out
the lowest common denominator to have the greatest shot at mass market appeal,
even when that meant gutting the plot, degrading the sophistication of
dialogue. SFX budgets have gone through the roof, movies are filled with
explosions and vivid colors, but little that stimulates the mind. Even the
exceptions that most would hold up as poignant movies are generally quite
mundane, almost always appealing to the most popular public sentiments.

Consider _Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)_ at number 7 on that list, and _Mad Max
(1979)_. 2015 has no shortage of explosions and vivid colors to keep anybody
glued to their seat and eating popcorn; the movie watcher doesn't have to put
forth any amount of effort to enjoy it, they could walk in half way through
the movie, look at their smartphone 90% of the movie, and still enjoy the
small slivers of the movie they did see because the movie was made to be as
widely accessible as possible, even to philistines who don't pay attention to
movies they pay to watch.

 _Mad Max (1979)_ on the other hand doesn't make it onto this Top 100 list. RT
gives it 90% from critics and 70% from audiences, which hints at why. 1979 is
not as easy for the casual modern _tech-induced attention deficit disorder_
afflicted movie consumer to enjoy. It's very far from non-stop action; it asks
the viewer to pay attention even when things aren't exploding on screen. It's
excellent, but the industry won't make another Mad Max like that again in the
foreseeable future. They don't take risks like that anymore; not when
littering the movie with 500% more explosions is so cheap and is so effective
at shoring up the profit potential of a movie.

------
joeblau
I wrote something that was trying to do this a back in January that was called
desational[1]. What I did was very basic but the process I did went as
follows.

1\. Break up news articles into sentences

2\. Pay Amazon MTurkers to tag sentences as `news` or `not-news`

3\. Train a text classifier based on the results for Mturk

4\. Process new articles using the trained model to identify and strip out
parts pf the article that are sensational.

5\. Give the article a percent score and a letter grade about how much "news"
is actually in the article based on the percentage of sentences that were
identified as news.

I ran it for a few weeks on tech news, but then I figured that the news
industry is not a business I really want to be in. The source code is all just
sitting up on GitLab.

[1] -
[https://desational.gitlab.io/desational.com/](https://desational.gitlab.io/desational.com/)

~~~
DamnInteresting
Very interesting idea. However, having dabbled with Bayesian classifiers
myself, I suspect that your decision to break the article into sentences may
be a fatal flaw...both the Mturkers and the classifier lose out on valuable
context that way. I know because I took a a similar approach in one of my own
projects, and the classifier could never gain enough 'confidence' to classify
things, even after thousands of trainings.

The approach might work pretty well if you broke it down to paragraphs, where
some context is preserved, but the more context you provide, the better the
classifier will perform, often for surprising reasons. For example, I built
one classifier that was performing poorly until I re-trained it without
stripping HTML and headers; after that it performed splendidly. Upon
examination I found that tokens such as domains and IP addresses in headers
and links were hugely influential (and rightly so) in the classification.

Just something to consider. :) Apologies if I incorrectly assumed that your
classifier is Bayesian.

~~~
joeblau
No need to apologize. I'm actually not using a generative classifier like
Bayes. I'm using Conditional Random Fields which is a discriminative
classifier. I found that based on my training set, CRF produced higher
accuracy.

That being said, I've also thought of way more ways to make the processing of
the articles a lot better. I had an idea using an LSTM and another idea which
would use an RNN to map the sensational article to a non-sensational article.
The only problem with some of these approaches is that they would require
someone to read an article and write a non-biased form of the article.

I do like your approach, do you have any results from what you've found
tinkering around?

------
duwease
I want to bring a note of positivity here -- while most comments seem to be
poking holes in the concept, all also seem to acknowledge the need for such a
service to be successful.

This is a domain that I've also put a lot of thought into over the years, so I
hope something succeeds. And some things do. Keep in mind that Wikipedia
caught a lot of flak for being unreliable or impossible at first, but nowadays
they have a robust editorial process for contentious subjects that I'd
consider the gold standard for any such practical applications on the
internet.

~~~
gambler
_> while most comments seem to be poking holes in the concept, all also seem
to acknowledge the need for such a service to be successful._

Speaking plainly: anyone who believes you can get better news through some
kind of external meta-review process is a fool. Probably a fool who also
thinks the review process should validate journalists that share their
political biases, because that's what it's all about these days.

You cannot test quality into the product. News sources are supposed to cross-
validate each other in the first place. Clearly, that have stopped working
some time ago.

The only thing that can save news now is an overhaul of its financing and
discovery models.

 _> Wikipedia caught a lot of flak for being unreliable or impossible at
first, but nowadays they have a robust editorial process for contentious
subjects_

Hah.

------
krapp
What will happen here is what happens with all sites which attempt to curate
news or check facts: people who disagree with the site's conclusions will
write it off as propaganda. Using "professional" journalists or "domain
experts" at all will be a red flag for people who believe mainstream media and
science only serves political and corporate interests.

~~~
jerf
I have seen many efforts at "grading" news.

I have not yet seen one that isn't just a news site that grades whether or not
the news is in alignment with some ideology, with the occasional fig leaf
tossed out for some particularly egregious error to try to appear even-handed.

The closest I've seen are some news grading sites that are fair for a couple
of months, but because a pure ideology site.

As near as I've been able to tell, discarding all such sites (not just the
ones that disagree with your ideology, but "all sites" is a superset of that)
is the rational move.

------
bko
> In order to be vetted as an individual critic, you should meet the following
> guidelines: Written

> • Consistent output for a minimum of two years.

> • Demonstrated film/TV coverage at a publication outside of a self-published
> website. If you are a self-publishing critic, your reviews should reflect
> our key values.

Having journalist rate other journalists won't serve as a good filter on the
actual quality of reporting. They may pick up on technical errors, but it
doesn't address the large problem with modern reporting, which is inaccuracies
or misstatements on technical topics. I'd rather have a review system of SME
specific to the topic discussed.

For instance, an article written on some AI breakthrough would be critiqued by
researchers in that field.

I understand that would be more difficult as it would greatly increase the
number of reviewers required, but on the flip side a single reviewer would
likely be more representative of her industry. I frankly don't care what other
journalists think about the work of their peers since they all have the same
biases

~~~
richmarr
> _... it doesn 't address the large problem with modern reporting, which is
> inaccuracies or misstatements on technical topics._ __

If I was going to pick a journalism problem to solve, the accuracy of
technical details would not be it.

If I could solve one or both of (a) funding and (b) deceptive balance, then I
would quite happily sell 'technical accuracy' down the river.

~~~
amanaplanacanal
Yes, funding is the biggest one. "If it bleeds it leads" is a terrible way to
give your readers or viewers a real picture of what is going on in the world.

------
overthemoon
What value does Rotten Tomatoes provide? Is review aggregation really the
model for truth we want to use? "A lot of people find this
reliable/unreliable" tells you exactly that and nothing more. This is an
attempt to cram the huge, complex enterprise of discourse into some kind of
boolean true/false reliable/unreliable binary it cannot fit neatly into.
Disinformation and tribalism are social problems that aren't waved away with
technological solutions.

At the end of the day, I'm not interested in startups as truth gatekeepers.
It's empty when it comes to movies--it's downright disingenuous when it comes
to the news. It provides the veneer of objectivity by being a technological
solution, but the enterprise's foundation is still ideological. I trust them
as little as any other outlet that can't honestly assess and describe their
own viewpoint.

At best, you're adding another layer that will itself become ideologically
polarized. If this or similar platforms succeed, we'll see a proliferation of
them by people who feel like it is too <ideology> or not enough <ideology>.

------
josteink
Someone’s always negative in these threads, so this time it might as well be
me.

First of all: that headline really has an apples and oranges feel to it.

Basically Rotten tomatoes worked because it merely curated and aggregated
something which already existed in abundance: movie reviews, deriving a
consensus based on that.

Doing the same for news, will depend on something which has yet to exist at
any meaningful scale: news reviews (and what would that even _be_?).

So not only must it prove its value (and neutrality) as an aggregator, but it
will also have to encourage the creation of something entirely new (news
reviews) at scale, because otherwise it won’t have anything to curate.

I’m not holding my breath.

------
mcv
Considering how easily Rotten Tomatoes is gamed, including for political
reasons, I'm not sure I want my news to be gamed the same way.

------
jellicle
And if you have questions about the credibility of Credder, you can just check
the Credder ratings on Verrit, which is itself verified by Truther and
Accurit, which are backed up by Credder. Solved!

News trustworthiness is not a technical problem and cannot be solved by
technical solutions. News: something you don't know. Verifying news: asking
people to opine about the trustworthiness of _something they don 't know_.

> "Here's an opaque cardboard box. In it is a banana. Now rate my news story
> on its accuracy. NO, you are not allowed to open or inspect the box in any
> way. Also, a lot of you have strong political opinions about bananas. Ready,
> GO!"

Garbage in, garbage out.

Far too gameable, a fundamentally insoluble problem to begin with.

------
ai_ia
I have had this idea for so long.

A Crowd-News Watch Dog which basically works like a wikipedia + archive.org +
IMDB for News Reporting. There you can have profile for journalists or any
content writers. You can basically see what a journalist has wrote about in
her/his entire life. Political inclinations deducted from writings by crowd.

The article written can be critiqued in the platform using a set of pre-
defined set of rules. If the reporter is found employing strawman or fallacies
or incorrectly reporting based on botched data/ statistical mumbo-jumbo, the
commentary can be added by anyone and verified by other community members.

I think it can keep rampant fake news and/or politically-charged posts
masquerading as neutral pieces in check.

~~~
nukeop
This would very quickly devolve into either a hardcore bullying platform, or a
banfest of everyone who criticizes the favorite people of the site's owner,
his friends, and moderators.

~~~
ai_ia
If an argument put forward by the article doesn't abide by journalistic
principles and is bad and crtiques offer why it is bad with coherent counter-
argument, I believe there can be a middle ground somewhere.

------
saltvedt
I'm solving a very related problem with
[https://cited.news/](https://cited.news/)

It's a news aggregator based on Wikipedia references.

------
chillingeffect
It would be much more valuable to supply chains of evidence in news stories.
So often, articles are treated as isolated islands with unresolved references
and only loose links to previous events. News could be so much more credible
if it had extensive underpinning of every exertion.

For example, in Europe, news stories almost always include a map of the local
area. But one could do much better with timelines showing how each article is
a step along an unfolding story, empowering readers. In theory, readers can go
do all the research themselves, but the cost is quite high. That's almost
exactly what the WWW was designed for! It could also includes links to wiki-
like pages of every individual related to the story.

But obviously the big question is market. Especially these days, people don't
_want_ evidence, only emotional crack. People for whom the information is
actually financial valuable pay for accurate information in their niche. So
the real challenge is to motivate people to focus on reality instead of their
outrage addiction. That's a cultural goal and more likely to be a non-profit
enterprise. :(

------
TomMckenny
Maybe this project will help the general public start reading reality based
media.

But we do have this already. Done by experts. It's called the Pulitzer.

The people in a democracy must have access to information. Once a public is
persuaded to reject reality based media, democracy becomes irrelevant. Thus
the campaign to denigrate it in the dozen nascent autocracies. Again, I hope
this project helps reverse that.

------
ilaksh
People in this thread do not seem to appreciate the real threat to society
that censorship and propaganda pose.

A widely used news rating site will be used to suppress political dissent and
alternate views.

Maybe take a look at history and the world. Do you think that Chinese
authorities would like a tool installed on everyone's computer that could rate
the trustworthiness of a news article or site? Of course they would love it
because they could just downgrade any reporting that was critical of the
party.

Based on the number of young people who seem to be begging for authorities to
control their information, it appears that the China model is coming to the
United States.

~~~
unityByFreedom
I'm with you.

------
rchaud
I get the methodology but, what is the demand for this type of product? RT
makes sense because there are too many movies coming out at any one time, and
you need something to build a shortlist from.

But news? Are users so spoiled for choice that they need a journalist's
opinion on what's worth reading? This doesn't even seem like an anti fake-news
play, since the people that consume and share that stuff aren't actually
interested in news, just whatever can be used as a stick to beat the political
opposition with.

~~~
beaconstudios
presumably it's marketed as anti fake news but the reality is it will be
politically biased towards one faction. That's usually how these things play
out.

~~~
amanaplanacanal
The thing is, even if it's not biased, as soon as something is published which
is inconvenient for one side or the other all the partisans are going to
_claim_ it's biased. As they already do.

~~~
beaconstudios
That's where providing the evidence comes in - you'll never convince your
opponents but for skeptics and critical thinkers they can determine for
themselves if the evidence supports the perspective.

------
silveira
People who want falsified narratives about reality don't care about these
ratings. They will even go beyond and create their own "alternative facts"
seal and go with that.

~~~
phil248
True, as we already know from the myriad fact-checking sites.

------
Circuits
I like the idea but I don't know if I agree with the proposed approach to
reviews. Personally, at a minimum, I would like to see the following from
every reviewer:

A structured summary- background, objectives, data sources, synthesis methods
used, results, limitations, conclusions and the implications of important
findings drawn by the article.

In more detail:

An introduction that presents the problem and the issues dealt with. An
assessment of the methods which describes the research and the evaluation
process; specifies the number of studies references and gives a brief
evaluation of their validity. A description of conclusions/results and their
quality based on identifiable and preconceived academic/professional metrics.
A strong summary of conclusions, limitations of those conclusions and the
outcomes of the procedure used for the research.

I would really love to see reviews of reviews as well as a reviewers rating
system (individual reviewers should have their own ratings) but given the
limited number of reviewers that maybe asking too much.

------
gabbygab
Perhaps they should have used a better example than rotten tomatoes.

RT is owned by NBCUniversal and is terribly unreliable as a movie ratings
aggregator. At one point it was a very useful site, but now it is useless.
Might as well ask disney, nbc or studio execs on which movies to watch. We
know that RT has lied and fudged ratings for financial or other purposes. It
has the same problem as NewsGuard. It is controlled by industry insiders to
benefit themselves and the industry. Would anyone trust an oil company ratings
company controlled by oil companies?

Rather than a "rotten tomatoes" for news, I'd rather have a "meta" news or
wiki site which has a running list of all the fake news that news companies
have pushed out. Make it part curated and part user driven. Let users provide,
comment and even contribute to it.

Make it listable by news companies and journalists. So we can see which news
companies and which journalists have pushed the most fake news to the american
public.

------
CodeSheikh
IMHO, journalism is slowly dying. These days you find more "opinion-based" or
"make-it-viral" news pieces than proper investigative journalism. Services
like this can help but at the same time they can create further segregation of
true news vs poor news if most of the critics start growing to be biased.

~~~
wsc981
I agree, I feel many times you can get more solid news from sources like
Twitter. Especially how Western media covered Syria annoyed me to no end. To
me the news coverage in my country seemed mainly aligned with Western
political interests.

But I was happy to be able to follow at least 2 journalists [0][1] that were
"on the ground" in Syria for some good solid investigative reporting.

\---

[0]: [https://twitter.com/jenanmoussa](https://twitter.com/jenanmoussa)

[1]: [https://twitter.com/HaraldDoornbos](https://twitter.com/HaraldDoornbos)

------
darepublic
Rather than create an RT for news, just create a better news outlet please. A
new form of news would be the more revolutionary startup imo. I think any RT
style news review site will end up being regarded much as Politifact is today
-- valued only by those who agree with its ratings.

~~~
holler
what would you like to see in this new news outlet?

~~~
darepublic
well right now in news we get stories with the different points of view, and
just the points of view talking past each other. I want news that deals in raw
hard to get data, and that monitors the data continually on a day to day
basis. ie. for disaster relief in a country, to report neighbourhood by
neighbourhood how much is being received and by who and in what quantity.
basically it would require a ton of work, and would be much easier to achieve
that level of coverage in a single city at first -- but basically try to have
omniscience source of knowledge, and where knowledge is being blocked or
obfuscated to identify that.

------
_bxg1
This is just going to descend into review-bombing chaos (look at what happens
to games on Steam, and then think about how much more biased people are about
news sources).

A much better idea would be a curated news source registry that does objective
fact-checking and scores news sources based on various criteria, with the
relevant research/scoring mechanisms shown openly so people can verify the
results themselves. Like Snopes meets Charity Navigator
([https://www.charitynavigator.org/](https://www.charitynavigator.org/)).

------
laythea
In my opinion, this doesn't really offer any value as the only way to get a
good understanding of the news is to read from lots of different places and
come to a view. Using this strategy then consuming a truly "random" site is
better than consuming pre reviewed site as there is no bias in selection or
outcome.

It's not like films, where each one is independent (except marvel and dc
comics obviously :)

------
Dirlewanger
A RT for news isn't going to fix the broken medium that is online journalism.
Basic research, fact checking, editing/proofreading, journalistic integrity --
all things we take for granted with the news have been discarded in favor of
more and more clicks/profits.

If anything, we need a new model for how news is manufactured/distributed in
the age of the Internet.

------
Kaveren
I place no value in review aggregators. They don't tell you anything useful.
It's much better to find your own individual sources that you can trust over
time, and they can earn or lose reputation with you based on the quality of
their reporting. This isn't limited to news.

I definitely don't trust a consensus of journalists to tell me a study is
misinterpreted.

------
specialist
"Fake news" is such an easy problem to solve: Just sign all the work. So you
can verify who said what. Done.

Don't see a signature, and it matters to you, just hit "next".

\--

Efforts to establish truth, factualness, credibility, whatever cannot succeed.
Because humans don't work that way.

The people who watch Alex Jones (for instance) don't care about your truth. So
stop trying.

------
chungleong
Jesus, as though there isn't enough vain people working in the news business
already. Society needs fewer trophies.

------
who-knows95
isn't this what elon musk was talking about?

:[https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/25/elon-musk-may-actually-be-
ma...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/25/elon-musk-may-actually-be-making-a-
website-to-rate-journalists-for-credibility-and-core-truth.html)

------
gustavmarwin
That's a step in the good direction, I think curating the news is going to be
a very precious service. I'm looking forward to decentralised ways of
achieving this though, such as with [https://civil.co/](https://civil.co/)

------
vinw
If you like this, then you might also like spidr[0]

"SPIDR is an AI-powered news aggregator that uses text analysis to group
similar news together. The aim is to provide fast access to relevant news from
different viewpoints."

[0] [https://spidr.today](https://spidr.today)

~~~
DonHopkins
I dunno -- the name "credder" sounds much more authoritative and trustworthy
to me than "spidr", because they didn't leave out the penultimate "e".

~~~
vinw
But in spidr's favour I've been able to use it for quite a while whereas
credder is still just an idea.

------
esalman
Like academic publications, every news article should be published along with
acknowledgement of funding, conflict of interest and maybe data availability
statement. It is a lot easier to judge a news article when you know who own
the publication and such.

------
kosei
Sort of reminds me of the website SpinSpotter. Great idea, but had trouble
finding a real audience for its product.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpinSpotter](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpinSpotter)

------
tomohawk
How would this pick up on the problem where stories such as the Mueller
investigation are hyped and mischaracterized for a long period of time, and in
the end Breitbart ends up being more correct on the story than most other news
outlets?

------
jmnicholson
We're effectively creating the rotten tomatoes for science at scite.ai. We
rely upon a deep learning model to classify citation statements as supporting,
contradicting, or mentioning.

------
lucideer
This seems like a broader, more ambitious version of Snopes. If successful, I
wonder would it replace it? Or could this be something Snopes could expand its
existing community to handle?

~~~
ceejayoz
Snopes is a great model for why this will fail, though. They'll be dismissed
as "fake news" by one side or another on anything controversial.

Hell, I've seen folks met with offended "did I ask for criticism?!" responses
when they drop a "no, Bill Gates isn't going to give you a million dollars for
forwarding that chain email" Snopes article in someone's Facebook comments.

------
bg4
I'd love to see this in combination with Knowhere News
([https://knowherenews.com/](https://knowherenews.com/)).

------
Mindstormy
Isn't this kind of already a thing?
[http://www.emergent.info/](http://www.emergent.info/)

------
dancemethis1
So... A website clearly intended to be a parody due to its name, but still
taken seriously by people that didn't get it?

------
sharkjacobs
I hope they're paying close attention to Rotten Tomatoes' problems with
politically motivated review bombing.

------
OscarTheGrinch
4\. Will be gamed by groups of bad actors.

------
LifeLiverTransp
I cant wait for the first social civil war side trying to apply pressure to
that approach.

------
ryanmarsh
I thought that was what /r/worldnews was for?

------
DonHopkins
Dear Credder.com: thank you for using a penultimate "e" before the final "r".
Such a breath of fresh air! (Was it because Creddr.com was already taken? ;)

------
Causality1
Isn't this the same crap Elon Musk was talking about when the media was
roasting him for unsafe conditions at Tesla and calling rescue divers
pedophiles?

------
trophycase
Until it is bombarded by fake reviews?

------
catchmeifyoucan
How do they make money

------
mmmchipotlemmm
What is the evidence that people want 'trustworthy' news?

------
unityByFreedom
Like Musk's pravda?

------
cat199
give the user control of the reputation ranking, and you might have something
here..

------
bargl
I think I posted this somewhere else but here it goes.

I want a system that rates journalists not news. I want to see my previous
ratings of this journalist and be able to base it on that.

I want the ability to rate a pieces objectivity.

I want to see ratings from users who have been proven to know how to rate
objectivity.

I want a system that uses Machine Learning to break me "out of" my information
silos by promoting the opposite opinion, and saying as much. "Because you
like, Capitalism here's an argument for Socialism."

I want a system that making ratings less of a popularity contest by limiting
them in a meaningful way (this is pie in the sky I'll take the first two).

I don't think it's possible to create the things I want, but that's what I
want. Not Reddit for news. I've seen how that works.

------
ObscureMind
How is that having journalists reviewing the work of other journalists won't
lead to corporatism?

------
NoblePublius
This seems far too complicated. The UX of Dissenter (boo, hiss, I know,
control yourself) is simple by comparison, doesn’t involve another destination
site, and doesn’t involve a committee deciding whose reviews are more worthy
of consideration than others. What Id prefer is a ranking system of journalist
merit: does this story cite anonymous sources? Is this story original
reporting? Does this story simply repackage someone else’s original reporting
with an editorial headline? Is it news, editorial, or opinion? What
corporations advertise with the parent company? These are objective measures
of newsworthiness and Credder would track none of them by default.

