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.
A basic start: bigger font size, drop the underscore (text-decoration: none), change the font color to black or dark gray. You can do a lighter color on hover to make it clear it's a link.
Not perfect, but I think it's better than what's live right now. You can browse for a nicer font, too. Plenty of free choices at Google Fonts.
In this case, all you need to do is add "display: flex; align-items: center" to your a tags. After that I'd probably get rid of the margin-bottom on them too. Finally, to visually center everything vertically, remove the margin-top on the img inside the a.
A bonus of using display:flex is that it'll fix the wrapping problem where long links wrap underneath the image. With flex, the text will stay on the right, in its own "column".
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.
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.
Do you have a main audience (i.e. age range, field of work) you're shooting for? What do you care about seeing in the news? How do you discern between truly good news and 'puff pieces'?
One thing I've actually liked is the approach of organizing news of the sad with the good. Deregulation nation ( https://deregulationnation.substack.com/welcome ) is an example where the newletters are organized by bad/better/good/great - it's focused around a core topic (environment/Trump) and written by hand.
I don't have a main audience that I'm shooting for, but I think this will attract younger folk - I care about seeing anything other than sensationalism. That's kind of cool, I'll take a look at their site!
Recently some people rescued a kangaroo from drowning and gave the marsupial some mouth to mouth resuscitation. I shared this story with animal loving members of the family and we were all moved by it, reassured that humanity was out there in this cruel world.
However, was it news?
This was news in the broader sense of the word but really it was just a human interest story (and maybe a kangaroo interest story).
If we look at the divers rescuing boys from a cave story that Elon Musk got so badly wrong then the same criteria can be applied. Yet their rescue certainly was news. But we didn't give as much scrutiny to the thousands of people rescued in Japan from floodwaters at or around the same time. My Japanese neighbours could have done with less of Elon Musk that week and more of Japan. For them the good news of the rescue in Thailand was at a cost of hearing good (and bad) news from Japan.
Invariably there is a political aspect to the news beyond human interest stories.
For instance, if Donald Trump choked on a pretzel (heaven forbid) and had to leave office due to the calamity then some people would be absolutely delighted, for them this would be 'good news'. Same goes with news regarding the economy. If house prices go up then this is good news to the rent-seeking class but it is not good news for those that are not on the housing ladder and have to pay more money to the rent-seeking class.
Even sport has the same problem, if Burkina Faso beat Brazil in the World Cup then a lot of people would be absolutely gutted, it would not be received as 'good news'.
Given that you are not in control of the content and are stuck with what you have got in that aspect (copying from Reddit) you might want to do what others in this comment section have suggested - remove the 'not' and the 'depressing' from the title. There is a double negative going on there. My suggestion is to go for something where you don't have to limit yourself to mere human interest stories, take a side but leave the politics aside. If you went with something like 'underdog news' then you would be able to take the side of 'Burkina Faso against Brazil' without a problem, plus you could do a nifty logo. You could also engage with your audience on this basis, get them to mod up/down stories based on whether there was some epic struggle going on with a clear underdog. Small child beating grand master at chess? Clearly epic for the underdog. You can sidestep the Trumps/Brexits of the world with this type of a spin and not decide what is and what isn't 'non depressing'.
Do you have to curate this, or is it dependent on other curated websites to generate the news? Some sort of ML-backed reading of each story to determine not-depressing vs. depressing? I could see aggregating different curated sites as a potential liability.
Was fun to read all the items on your page. Great work!
This MVP is dependent on Reddit, I'm going to start working on a scraper that runs a sentiment analysis on articles (or something) to provide the same effect from every news source available.
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.
This scrapes from Reddit currently (I just built this) - I'm doing this to check traction - and I'm working a an algorithm that I can feed news sources and any 'happy subreddit' to and get the same effect.
Upliftingnews overpowers any other subreddit when you mix them together, so it makes sense to do just them for the MVP - I'd like to scrape from as many news sources as possible in the future, but I've got work to do for that.
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.
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...
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!
The twitter account you linked to is run by Cato Institute, a climate change denying libertarian think tank founded by Charles G. Koch and funded by the Koch brothers. I would not characterize that as uplifting.
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.
Reality is not simple to decipher in an environment of info overload.
Imagine walking into a huge library. Every book has descriptions of complex problems. Some books have solutions. Some books don't. But you can only read one book at a time. In that library you can focus on the book that matches your needs and skills. And the world doesn't seem too crazy.
Now imagine the same library, but with a thousand different people shouting at you to come look at the problem in some book they picked just up. What kind of reality are you going to experience in that library?
I would argue experiencing that reality is also a choice. Unless I am doing research or actively in search of information, I read one of a very few web sites. HN, NY Times, WaPo, and Electoral Vote. I don't feel under-informed. I deleted Facebook and only use things like Twitter/LinkedIn/Instagram to keep in touch with an extremely small circle of people, mostly I just email and call folks. That is just how it is. I don't think our brains are meant to drink from the firehouse that is the Internet. It is addicting and counter to what most on HN want in terms of deep work and productivity.
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.
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?
Dan does it on a daily basis right here on HN. It's his job, and he's ruthlessly effective at it.
You'd be surprised how much something can scale when you put someone smart and motivated in charge of scaling it. http://paulgraham.com/ds.html
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.
Prosperous for whom? There are people who are struggling to make ends meet, have their houses dispossessed, can't get steady jobs or afford housing, in student debt they can't pay, facing racism and violence from the state now and segregation in the recent past so its a matter of individual experiences and perspectives.
There are entire countries in the middle east that have been destroyed with millions dead, millions of refugees, families and infrastructure destroyed and set back a hundred years without consequences. And more are threatened as we embrace this new 'violence free' world.
On one side there are sweeping claims without evidence of the world getting 'better'. These kind of wide assertions would need a lot more data points and discussion by historians, economists and sociologists to get to some kind of 'truth' that is not propaganda.
Fortunately there are detailed works by academics like Piketty, Stiglitz and others with real data on stagnant wages and inequality over 40 years, on how gains are going to a small minority worldwide for those who are interested. Some may want to feel better because the current system favours them and that's perfectly valid. But sweeping claims about improvements sound as credible as the trillion dollar sv elite wanting to solve the worlds problems while failing to address the homelessness in their backyard.
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).
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.
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.
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.
That's pretty much what I'm aiming for while I build it out behind the scenes - I just want the option to not get slammed in the face with some crazy depressing stuff.
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.
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.
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.
I suppose I should point out that although the quote is often attributed to Orwell, there's no evidence that I know of the said it. A similar quote is also attributed to Harold Evans, during his time as Sunday Times editor.
> Perhaps they are, but news also heavily sensationalizes and dramatizises in order to sell clicks.
I don't think that's true if you choose your news with even a modicum of care. Read the Economist, and you won't ever hear of starving children. Unless they become statistically relevant, which points to certain problems with the wish for "positive news".
In other quality outlets, you're more likely to read the human-interest stories of crime & suffering. But there's still a vast difference to the blatant exploitation of emotion by tabloid.
That's most pronounced in the decision what to cover, and how much space to devote to it: national newspapers do not splash gruesome sex crimes on A1. They do get mentioned when they rise above what happens every day, but receive treatment in proportion to their relevancy.
You can argue that some terrorist attack is not relevant to your life, because the chance of dying under such circumstances is still astronomically low. But by that standard, almost everything is irrelevant: once a story becomes directly relevant to you, you're also likely not care about the reports of it very much. Not just for the punny reason that you are dead, but also (if you're less directly involved) because you no longer need to be informed of the event.
That little contradiction proves the wisdom of the media's long-standing approach: they set a low bar, and let readers decide which articles to spend time with.
There's also an obvious analogy with schooling here: you're unlikely to ever need 90% of what you learn in school. But that's a rather terrible argument against today's curricular, because, as it turns out, everybody ends up needing 10%, and those 10% rarely overlap.
Similarly, it'd be a mistake to restrict your news coverage to what's immediately relevant to your life. At the very least, you need some information on what's going on within the wider community every two years when you're asked to make an informed decision at the ballot box. Because if you don't know what's going on, the only feedback loop connection politicians' careers with their actions is gone.
People often struggle with this connection: the act of voting is so small and rare, and I am just one of so many. In that way, one feels entirely powerless. But acting on that impression and shutting out bad news, or not voting, still represents a grave dereliction of duty. Because collectively, that minor act is all of it, representing roughly 100% of the legitimacy of democracy. It does not even take 100% of people to abstain from getting involved to turn a society into a banana republic: once participation drops below, say, 80%, you start to see a roughly proportional increase in appeals to some supposed "silent majority" supporting every minority candidate or opinion.
As a final observation, I'll point to the NYT long-form features such as [0] to show that quality media does a far better job of grappling with the nuance and contradictions of life. I think there's vastly more excellent journalism out there than people acknowledge, and disparaging the "mainstream media" with the accusation of shoehorning facts into a single, collectively-decided narrative is itself an illegitimate generalization. To use an example that's not the elephant in the room, look at the US' changing attitudes toward drug dependency for an example of the political process working better than most people give it credit for: we are today seeing the inflection point of a decades-long process relying on the initiative by people on the ground and, often in a feedback loop, journalists giving them the light of day changing the collective story ("narrative") from crime to disease. You and I may believe we came up with our opinions on this (and any other) issue completely independently, and through a logical process combining stringent empiricism with sound principles. But that'...
I agree, there are still some good news sources in the traditional print media. It is unfortunate that US society has reached the point that they are all now seen by a large chunk of the population as partisan and untrustworthy.
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.
It's a perfectly valid rhetorical device. It's called "litotes", and it often conveys a distinct meaning compared to "collapsing" the negatives into a single positive. It's been used liberally by figures such as Homer, Jonathan Swift, Robert Frost, Fredrick Douglass and Shakespeare (as well as pretty much every great writer throughout history).
For instance, saying "it's not without issues" usually means something different from "it has issues". In the former case, you probably intending a meaning something similar to "it's has issues, but none of them are serious", while the latter conveys just what it says. The exact thing your trying to communicate obviously varies with context, but it is generally distinct from the "collapsed case"
In this particular case, "Not depressing news" puts an emphasis on the fact that most news is depressing, and that this site is different. "Uplifting news" does not communicate that as effectively.
Now, it's true that George Orwell complained about a similar construction in Politics and the English Language, but that book is full of terrible ideas about language, and you're doing yourself a disservice if you take any of his advice too seriously.
> For instance, saying "it's not without issues" usually means something different from "it has issues".
Interesting that you go on to say that "it's not without issues" is milder than "it has issues". To me it's the opposite, like a short form of "Is it without issues? No way!" I guess it depends on context and, particularly, how much sarcasm can be detected in the tone of voice (if said out loud).
> In this particular case, "Not depressing news" puts an emphasis on the fact that most news is depressing, and that this site is different. "Uplifting news" does not communicate that as effectively.
In any case, I agree with this simple explanation.
Your username implies that you're from the UK. Isn't this a well-known cultural difference between British and... just about any other culture? I know we Dutch people get caught by that quite often.
(Funny enough, in the Groningen region the expression "kon minder" ("could be worse") is often used as high praise. Whatever it applies to is implied to be fantastic, almost perfect, in a "but don't get cocky about it" kind of way)
You're right. Actually, I remember a story [1] of a British army commander asking his American superior (on a UN mission) for help by saying "Things are a bit sticky, sir". Unfortunately this was taken to mean that everything was fine, so no reinforcements were sent.
I understand that the Dutch are very much at the other end of the spectrum - very direct and straightforward.
Honestly, after living abroad for five years in total (with one year back in the Netherlands inbetween), that "direct and straightforward" part feels like it has been co-opted as an excuse to not bother with looking at things from the point of view of someone else and reaching out.
> Isn't this a well-known cultural difference between British and... just about any other culture?
At least in French, litotes are meant to amplify the negative.
The classical example being in Le Cid, "Go, I don't hate you" from Chimène to Rodrigue (who just killed her father), meaning "I love you".
Other example can be found, "Not OK" meaning totally unacceptable, "Not bad" meaning excellent, or "Not stupid" meaning very clever. Of course, all litotes can be interpreted literally, and you often need context or tone to convey the meaning
Yeah, the change of meaning is often very subtle, and people can sometimes disagree on the direction of the change.
Usually though, the device is used to express a kind of understatement. Compare these statements:
He's not bad looking
He's good looking
Which one would you say is stronger? I think most people would say that the affirmative "He's good looking" is stronger than the first version. Another example:
It's not without flaws
It's flawed
If you say "not without flaws", you're usually saying something like "it's good despite its flaws", so that version understates the case compared to the other one.
Again, though: my point was mostly that the meanings are distinct and that language is not mathematics. You can't just replace two minus signs with a positive one and expect the to get the same thing on the other side. Nor should you follow any simple "rule" like that blindly.
I don't think that authors you mentioned would have bothered using this as a creative flourish if it was just meant to be interpreted in an extremely literal way. The whole fact that they bothered means that there's some alternative meaning, whether the slightly sarcastic one I understand or something else.
"It's not without issues" to me means I might object to parts of it but overall I'm positive, or I feel the issues can be accommodated, tolerated, or corrected.
"It has issues" is to me a stronger, more general objection to the whole thing.
ramigb probably spends a not-insignificant amount of time trying to determine what functions and variables do based on what others have named them. This leads to thinking that names are important.
It’s kind of annoying that this is the top comment. “Not + [Negative Term]” has a distinctly different logical meaning than “[Positve Term]”. It means “everything except [Negative Term], while [Positive Term] means [Only Positive Term] unless otherwise qualified.
The default hypothesis should be that OP deliberately intended the more inclusive “Not + [Negative]”, not that that this was an accidental misnomer.
Natural language is not well described at all with analogies to first order logic. Centuries of thought on the philosophy of language have well established this.
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.
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.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 236 ms ] threadI'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.
Not perfect, but I think it's better than what's live right now. You can browse for a nicer font, too. Plenty of free choices at Google Fonts.
End result would be something like this: https://i.imgur.com/c7YJCN9.png
Maybe align the text with the image as well, although vertical aligns are always a big pain to implement haha.
In this case, all you need to do is add "display: flex; align-items: center" to your a tags. After that I'd probably get rid of the margin-bottom on them too. Finally, to visually center everything vertically, remove the margin-top on the img inside the a.
A bonus of using display:flex is that it'll fix the wrapping problem where long links wrap underneath the image. With flex, the text will stay on the right, in its own "column".
Thanks!
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!)
One thing I've actually liked is the approach of organizing news of the sad with the good. Deregulation nation ( https://deregulationnation.substack.com/welcome ) is an example where the newletters are organized by bad/better/good/great - it's focused around a core topic (environment/Trump) and written by hand.
No clue how to monetize it though.
Didn't know Twitter people needed relief from negativity, I should do more research.
I don't really know how to self promote on Twitter. You will need to figure that part out yourself.
> You need to enable JavaScript to run this app.
Disabling uBlock Origin and noScript for the site doesn't change this situation.
However, was it news?
This was news in the broader sense of the word but really it was just a human interest story (and maybe a kangaroo interest story).
If we look at the divers rescuing boys from a cave story that Elon Musk got so badly wrong then the same criteria can be applied. Yet their rescue certainly was news. But we didn't give as much scrutiny to the thousands of people rescued in Japan from floodwaters at or around the same time. My Japanese neighbours could have done with less of Elon Musk that week and more of Japan. For them the good news of the rescue in Thailand was at a cost of hearing good (and bad) news from Japan.
Invariably there is a political aspect to the news beyond human interest stories.
For instance, if Donald Trump choked on a pretzel (heaven forbid) and had to leave office due to the calamity then some people would be absolutely delighted, for them this would be 'good news'. Same goes with news regarding the economy. If house prices go up then this is good news to the rent-seeking class but it is not good news for those that are not on the housing ladder and have to pay more money to the rent-seeking class.
Even sport has the same problem, if Burkina Faso beat Brazil in the World Cup then a lot of people would be absolutely gutted, it would not be received as 'good news'.
Given that you are not in control of the content and are stuck with what you have got in that aspect (copying from Reddit) you might want to do what others in this comment section have suggested - remove the 'not' and the 'depressing' from the title. There is a double negative going on there. My suggestion is to go for something where you don't have to limit yourself to mere human interest stories, take a side but leave the politics aside. If you went with something like 'underdog news' then you would be able to take the side of 'Burkina Faso against Brazil' without a problem, plus you could do a nifty logo. You could also engage with your audience on this basis, get them to mod up/down stories based on whether there was some epic struggle going on with a clear underdog. Small child beating grand master at chess? Clearly epic for the underdog. You can sidestep the Trumps/Brexits of the world with this type of a spin and not decide what is and what isn't 'non depressing'.
Was fun to read all the items on your page. Great work!
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.
You should at least name/link them somewhere...
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...
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!
1) https://www.goodgoodgood.co/goodnewsletter/ (From a recently funded Kickstarter) 2) https://www.theguardian.com/info/2018/feb/12/about-the-upsid... (From the popular newspaper The Guardian) 3) https://tinyletter.com/inbetternews (More cute news/ GIFS of animals) 4) https://www.positive.news/ (UK based positive news)
- https://www.facebook.com/thehiddengood/
- https://thehappynewspaper.com/
:(
Imagine walking into a huge library. Every book has descriptions of complex problems. Some books have solutions. Some books don't. But you can only read one book at a time. In that library you can focus on the book that matches your needs and skills. And the world doesn't seem too crazy.
Now imagine the same library, but with a thousand different people shouting at you to come look at the problem in some book they picked just up. What kind of reality are you going to experience in that library?
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.
Dan does it on a daily basis right here on HN. It's his job, and he's ruthlessly effective at it.
You'd be surprised how much something can scale when you put someone smart and motivated in charge of scaling it. http://paulgraham.com/ds.html
I'm not sure that particular genie is going back in the bottle, though.
There are entire countries in the middle east that have been destroyed with millions dead, millions of refugees, families and infrastructure destroyed and set back a hundred years without consequences. And more are threatened as we embrace this new 'violence free' world.
On one side there are sweeping claims without evidence of the world getting 'better'. These kind of wide assertions would need a lot more data points and discussion by historians, economists and sociologists to get to some kind of 'truth' that is not propaganda.
Fortunately there are detailed works by academics like Piketty, Stiglitz and others with real data on stagnant wages and inequality over 40 years, on how gains are going to a small minority worldwide for those who are interested. Some may want to feel better because the current system favours them and that's perfectly valid. But sweeping claims about improvements sound as credible as the trillion dollar sv elite wanting to solve the worlds problems while failing to address the homelessness in their backyard.
https://anchor.fm/somethinggoodhappened
Love to have you on sometime! :)
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.
That's interesting - I have no idea why that could be the case - I'm googling around to help it.
Just always looking for more sources...
Just more of the same, I guess.
Pakistan.
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.
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.
https://imgur.com/a/coYjsZ4
Maybe scrape Reddit server-side? I’m not too sure if that would work but just a suggestion.
I really like the idea, though.
“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.
Leaving out the good traits of a person to paint him as a monster, even though it might have been an honest mistake.
I don't think that's true if you choose your news with even a modicum of care. Read the Economist, and you won't ever hear of starving children. Unless they become statistically relevant, which points to certain problems with the wish for "positive news".
In other quality outlets, you're more likely to read the human-interest stories of crime & suffering. But there's still a vast difference to the blatant exploitation of emotion by tabloid.
That's most pronounced in the decision what to cover, and how much space to devote to it: national newspapers do not splash gruesome sex crimes on A1. They do get mentioned when they rise above what happens every day, but receive treatment in proportion to their relevancy.
You can argue that some terrorist attack is not relevant to your life, because the chance of dying under such circumstances is still astronomically low. But by that standard, almost everything is irrelevant: once a story becomes directly relevant to you, you're also likely not care about the reports of it very much. Not just for the punny reason that you are dead, but also (if you're less directly involved) because you no longer need to be informed of the event.
That little contradiction proves the wisdom of the media's long-standing approach: they set a low bar, and let readers decide which articles to spend time with.
There's also an obvious analogy with schooling here: you're unlikely to ever need 90% of what you learn in school. But that's a rather terrible argument against today's curricular, because, as it turns out, everybody ends up needing 10%, and those 10% rarely overlap.
Similarly, it'd be a mistake to restrict your news coverage to what's immediately relevant to your life. At the very least, you need some information on what's going on within the wider community every two years when you're asked to make an informed decision at the ballot box. Because if you don't know what's going on, the only feedback loop connection politicians' careers with their actions is gone.
People often struggle with this connection: the act of voting is so small and rare, and I am just one of so many. In that way, one feels entirely powerless. But acting on that impression and shutting out bad news, or not voting, still represents a grave dereliction of duty. Because collectively, that minor act is all of it, representing roughly 100% of the legitimacy of democracy. It does not even take 100% of people to abstain from getting involved to turn a society into a banana republic: once participation drops below, say, 80%, you start to see a roughly proportional increase in appeals to some supposed "silent majority" supporting every minority candidate or opinion.
As a final observation, I'll point to the NYT long-form features such as [0] to show that quality media does a far better job of grappling with the nuance and contradictions of life. I think there's vastly more excellent journalism out there than people acknowledge, and disparaging the "mainstream media" with the accusation of shoehorning facts into a single, collectively-decided narrative is itself an illegitimate generalization. To use an example that's not the elephant in the room, look at the US' changing attitudes toward drug dependency for an example of the political process working better than most people give it credit for: we are today seeing the inflection point of a decades-long process relying on the initiative by people on the ground and, often in a feedback loop, journalists giving them the light of day changing the collective story ("narrative") from crime to disease. You and I may believe we came up with our opinions on this (and any other) issue completely independently, and through a logical process combining stringent empiricism with sound principles. But that'...
Marshall McLuhan correctly recognized that overstimulation, the outrage machine, shuts down critical thought. What McLuhan calls "auto-amputation".
For instance, saying "it's not without issues" usually means something different from "it has issues". In the former case, you probably intending a meaning something similar to "it's has issues, but none of them are serious", while the latter conveys just what it says. The exact thing your trying to communicate obviously varies with context, but it is generally distinct from the "collapsed case"
In this particular case, "Not depressing news" puts an emphasis on the fact that most news is depressing, and that this site is different. "Uplifting news" does not communicate that as effectively.
Now, it's true that George Orwell complained about a similar construction in Politics and the English Language, but that book is full of terrible ideas about language, and you're doing yourself a disservice if you take any of his advice too seriously.
Interesting that you go on to say that "it's not without issues" is milder than "it has issues". To me it's the opposite, like a short form of "Is it without issues? No way!" I guess it depends on context and, particularly, how much sarcasm can be detected in the tone of voice (if said out loud).
> In this particular case, "Not depressing news" puts an emphasis on the fact that most news is depressing, and that this site is different. "Uplifting news" does not communicate that as effectively.
In any case, I agree with this simple explanation.
(Funny enough, in the Groningen region the expression "kon minder" ("could be worse") is often used as high praise. Whatever it applies to is implied to be fantastic, almost perfect, in a "but don't get cocky about it" kind of way)
I understand that the Dutch are very much at the other end of the spectrum - very direct and straightforward.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/apr/14/johnezard
At least in French, litotes are meant to amplify the negative.
The classical example being in Le Cid, "Go, I don't hate you" from Chimène to Rodrigue (who just killed her father), meaning "I love you".
Other example can be found, "Not OK" meaning totally unacceptable, "Not bad" meaning excellent, or "Not stupid" meaning very clever. Of course, all litotes can be interpreted literally, and you often need context or tone to convey the meaning
Usually though, the device is used to express a kind of understatement. Compare these statements:
He's not bad looking
He's good looking
Which one would you say is stronger? I think most people would say that the affirmative "He's good looking" is stronger than the first version. Another example:
It's not without flaws
It's flawed
If you say "not without flaws", you're usually saying something like "it's good despite its flaws", so that version understates the case compared to the other one.
Again, though: my point was mostly that the meanings are distinct and that language is not mathematics. You can't just replace two minus signs with a positive one and expect the to get the same thing on the other side. Nor should you follow any simple "rule" like that blindly.
I would go for "He's not bad looking" being stronger - but then again I'm from the UK :-)
"It has issues" is to me a stronger, more general objection to the whole thing.
The default hypothesis should be that OP deliberately intended the more inclusive “Not + [Negative]”, not that that this was an accidental misnomer.
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.
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
[1] https://community.humanetech.com/t/idea-turning-the-weapon-a...
[2] https://medium.com/@maxstossel/how-everyone-lost-their-mind-...
Is this a practical joke? Or is the website broken?
> The resource at “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
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.