
Show HN: A political news aggregator you can comment on - kaczordon
https://www.newscomment.us/
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chishaku
The only visible comment is... not good.

How would one go about seeding a political news site with constructive
comments?

As good as HN can be for discussion, many/most? political threads (especially
pandemic or protest related lately) devolve very quickly.

Tough problem. Kudos for shipping.

~~~
kaczordon
Agreed, it's the community that makes it useful. I mainly made this for my
friends to use, was curious what HN users would think, although didn't expect
such a toxic comment so soon...[edit] I'm leaving that comment up for a bit as
it illustrates the problem I think. Perhaps a minimum word count with a valid
word filter would help push people in the right direction or gamification,
something like the
tribunal([https://leagueoflegends.fandom.com/wiki/The_Tribunal](https://leagueoflegends.fandom.com/wiki/The_Tribunal))
from League of Legends to ban toxic members.

~~~
11thEarlOfMar
HN has built-in community sculpting. That comment would be downvoted and
possibly even deleted by HN mods.

How about a requirement to post support for the comment. I.e., reasoning
behind the statement with links to sources, kind of like Wikipedia. We do it
as a convention on HN, but maybe making it a requirement is appropriate for
polarized topics:

"My opinion is xyz because abc and you can clearly see that abc is proven by
this quote: ' _my quote from the below linked article_ '

From: www.thebelowlink.com/intelligentreasoning.html

~~~
DoreenMichele
_That comment would be ...possibly even deleted by HN mods._

This assertion runs counter to everything I understand about how HN moderation
operates. I don't believe the HN mods do any such thing.

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01100011
Political comments suck. > 90% of them are just rehashed talking points and
they quickly devolve into echo chambers for the dominant voting bloc. I'd much
rather see an aggregator using something like an argument map.

~~~
asdfman123
/r/moderatepolitics on reddit is halfway decent. It's definitely liberal, but
the way people discuss things is moderate, if that makes sense. It's not
complete partisanship, and occasionally beliefs get questioned.

Reddit and Hacker News both solve the problem of "how do you host a site to
allow for political discussion?"

To get good debate, you have to curate a social community by effective
moderation. You see it on reddit all the time -- some communities are utter
trash, and some are much better. It's a social problem, not a technological
one.

~~~
klenwell
A variation on this theme: make people frame their comments as falsifiable
predictions. This is what Philip Tetlock advocates with his Superforecasting
concept and sorta implemented here:

[https://www.gjopen.com/](https://www.gjopen.com/)

The hitch: making good falsifiable or verifiable predictions is tough and
time-consuming. Evaluating and judging them requires even more moderation.

And let's face it: most online comments are not about advancing the public
discourse. They're about getting a quick dopamine hit.

~~~
afarrell
Sometimes, it is about thinking-out-loud about an idea.

That is to say, getting multiple dopamine hits as you type a long comment and
imagine people on the internet being impressed by a comment you wouldn't be
motivated enough to journal about.

~~~
chishaku
This is a really good point.

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kaczordon
I got pretty tired of seeing political news/discussion on my facebook so I
made a dedicated site for it that aggregates news headlines, inspired by
hacker news. Lemme know what you think or if there are any features you think
would be useful on a site like this.

~~~
searchableguy
Seems very US centric. Where are you getting your data from? Facebook?

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Minor49er
The TLD indicates that it is intended for US politics.

~~~
searchableguy
Ah, missed that. Good luck to OP. I think aggregating political content
without extensive filtering is radioactive material so I would be curious
about how they plan to tackle this.

~~~
kaczordon
Yeah US centric since that's what I'm most familiar with. I'm also very
interested in gaming mechanics so I'm looking into ways of game-ifying
constructive user submissions but without active moderation it is probably
impossible.

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evo_9
It’s perhaps better to rebrand this as an unbiased or third party political
news site or something like that. That’s the cool part of this, as others have
pointed out it’s going to devolve rapidly into a political flame war cesspool.

Love the aggregation part of it though, nice job!

~~~
kaczordon
Thanks! I agree I did build this trying to include sources from left, right
and center so that someone could get a sense of the climate in a quick glance
without being in the FB news algorithm bubble. Getting people to use it is
another thing entirely.

~~~
evo_9
I think that’s a really smart approach. The bulk of the country are near
center not the extreme edges. A site that organically gathers and represents
that middle effectively would be beneficial to everyone.

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site-packages1
This seems like reddit except people don't submit the stories themselves? So
far the comments are of very poor quality, but to be fair that's a small
sample size (6), or maybe a large sample size (100% of the comments on the
site).

~~~
kaczordon
Basically yeah, a simple news feed without an algorithm but with the option of
filtering by popular stories of the day.

~~~
site-packages1
That’s cool. If this were my project, I’d be spending long days seeding
comments myself under different usernames with different POVs, and trying to
get a handful of legitimate thoughtful users on there. Not an impossible task,
good luck!

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nvr219
I do everything I can to do the opposite of read comments on political news
articles so if you make the opposite of this product I'll subscribe.

~~~
kaczordon
I was hoping for it to be more of a long form style place for aggregating
opinions. Perhaps a minimum word count to ensure only more thought out
opinions would be allowed.

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ajoy
We do the aggregation part :
[https://www.thefactual.com/news](https://www.thefactual.com/news)

We tried a forum with comments before and it's not easy. But we did learn a
lot of lessons and plan to introduce a version of it soon.

~~~
evo_9
Nice but you guys might want to create a sort of ‘low-fi’ interface like this.
It’s a ton easier on the eyes esp mobile and is a nice change from the typical
news site.

~~~
ajoy
We had a hard time showing users why we are different from other
aggregators/curators.

Eg. we extract 3 most information dense sentences from article, we show
different political perspectives, we analyze the articles and score them, we
group related articles to a story into a cluster etc.

It's a fine line between showing too much and showing too little.

We also plan on building an app soon.

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the_arun
How do you make money? ads?

~~~
kaczordon
Or sponsored political thinkers giving an opinion people would want to read.
Not really concerned with that right now, just wanted to make something I’d
want to use myself.

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artembugara
How do you aggregate news?

~~~
kaczordon
I picked a few RSS feeds of news sources on the right, left and center based
off of [https://www.adfontesmedia.com/interactive-media-bias-
chart/](https://www.adfontesmedia.com/interactive-media-bias-chart/)

~~~
basch
some of my favorite lists of sources, for your inspiration

[https://www.memeorandum.com/lb](https://www.memeorandum.com/lb)

[https://redef.com/charts/sources/total](https://redef.com/charts/sources/total)

[https://aldaily.com/media/](https://aldaily.com/media/)

[https://longform.org/archive/publications](https://longform.org/archive/publications)

