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Ask HN: Any viable alternatives to Google News?

24 points by metadat ↗ HN
I hate how unclear the degree of echo chamber is with Google News. It also keeps showing me the same articles for days or weeks after I've already seen and read them.

Are ther any real contenders out there? Ideally it'd aggregate all news across the globe and let me browse by region, perhaps with automatic translation for non-english articles.

The idea of a global, non country-centric front page is highly appealing to me (I want to deprogram myself from the western slant, it possible).

28 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 64.9 ms ] thread
PaulHoule
I think of that song by the Talking Heads Psycho Killer that has the line "Say something once, why say it again?" which sometimes seems like the most sensible thing anyone has every said.

That is, a "news" application should work a bit like Tinder. News articles should slide through and be either accepted or rejected: you should never see the same article twice in the "new" feed.

This counts for sites like HN and reddit too.

Andaith
I want to see events, and then when I click on that event, I want an autogenerated blurb kind of like the autotldr bot on reddit, then I want to see all related article titles sorted by quality(Not sure how to quantify this though. Least clickbaity headline, most informative article, etc etc).

I'd also like events to not appear until either X amount of articles about them, OR X amount of time has passed. I'd rather be slightly delayed and read something informative than see 2 dozen first-to-be-printed articles with no substance.

Then I'd be happy to swipe away the event, and everything related to it, like you describe.

wolpoli
You could also consider building your own by adding various RSS feeds into your own RSS aggregator software/service and using that as your front page.
metadat
Absolutely, but if that's required I might as well go and build a full-fledged product around it. There is definitely lots of opportunity to improve and explore the space. It's hard to imagine that nobody except Google has done this so far.
dflock
There are/have been plenty of products in both the news aggregator and the feed aggregator spaces, but it seems like there's almost no revenue available, so they tend to come and go.
assttoasstmgr
I quit using the totally-not-biased Google News over 5 years ago when nearly all top headlines were consistently sourced from The Huffington Post. This was logged-out by the way.

For the uninitiated, it is a glorified opinion blog. Don't take my word for it; to quote Wikipedia, "HuffPost is an American news aggregator and blog... created to provide a liberal alternative to the conservative news websites such as the Drudge Report."[1]

I place them one step above BuzzFeed, which pumps out quality hard-hitting journalism such as "Quiz: How Much Random Vagina Knowledge Do You Have?"[2]

Don't worry, "articles were randomly chosen by a computer program". That's when I realized that Google News was programmed to be an echo chamber, otherwise such biased unverified opinion wouldn't consistently bubble up to the top and masquerade as "news".

I use Bing News[3] now. It's not perfect, the signal-to-noise has gotten slightly worse over time but at least it's sourced from legit news outlets.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HuffPost

[2] https://www.buzzfeed.com/audreyworboys/how-well-do-you-know-...

[3] https://www.bing.com/news

no-dr-onboard
For the person about to reply that you can “hide outlets”: doing so only marginally improves the experience. I’ve personally hidden over 20 outlets with overtly leftist biased writing. My feed is now only obscure local channels that are owned by the same company. Google News refuses to permit socially conservative viewpoints (Fox News doesn’t make that list for me) to make up a user’s personalized feed.
assttoasstmgr
They shouldn't be promoting any news source over another. A true unbiased news aggregator should spit out articles like a bingo cage. Once you rank sources, or include opinion masquerading as news, it's manipulation of the media. When you deliberately bury all sources you disagree with, you are de facto creating an echo chamber. It's enraging that they tried to pass themselves off as unbiased with the vague statement about the ordering of the articles being "chosen by a computer program"; I noticed that statement no longer appears.
lovelearning
In my country, it does the opposite — full of content from rightwing publications. Perhaps it's not Google injecting its bias but an emergent outcome of the ideology prevalent in society and media in our respective countries.
mtberatwork
> Google News refuses to permit socially conservative viewpoints (Fox News doesn’t make that list for me) to make up a user’s personalized feed.

This isn't true. I just looked up a few conservative publications, from the center-right to the heavy-on-conspiracy and they all show up as available news sources.

gnicholas
Google News these days shows more of a variety of perspectives. I use it in incognito and see headlines from across the political spectrum. Most of the right-leaning news is from Fox though, which is unfortunate.
jarenmf
Brave just released brave news but it seems very passive, there aren't many options to tune it to your liking.
freedude
One single site will always have the echo chamber problem. In order to better understand the complex issues facing our country I have attempted to find alternative viewpoints.

The key to obtaining value from any reporting organization is realizing there are many viewpoints and the one from which I see the world is incomplete at best. Thus why I am looking at the news and avoid echo chambers.

Some worth checking...

https://summit.news/ https://www.zerohedge.com/ https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/ https://themostimportantnews.com/ https://jonathanturley.org/ https://brownstone.org/ https://winepressnews.com/what-is-the-winepress/

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CaptRon
Facebook has a news tab too. https://www.facebook.com/news/learn-more
death916
I dont think someone complaining about an algorithm influencing their news is going to want to use FB. Although i dont use FB anymore so maybe their news is great.
CaptRon
Yeah FB has a bad brand name but I actually find their news tab to be pretty unbiased. It’s also basically the only way I hear about local news since I don’t watch broadcast tv.
lizardactivist
I mean, do read the western outlets too, and when they accuse all the other outlets of being "propaganda" just ignore it and read anyway. Now you have multiple opinions on topics and subjects, and can decide where you want to stand.

rt, cnn, south china morning post, telesur, spiegel, etc.

dingosity
I'm a fan of https://www.aljazeera.com/. It's free, reasonably unbiased (though not completely) and isn't afraid to be constructively critical of western governments. You won't get critical news about the Emirates; I guess some topics are off-limits.