I got a lot of my headlines from reddit. Due to the impending death of my favorite app (Sync for Reddit) however, that’s coming to an end.
I’m now realising my Reddit experience had deteriorated slowly, just doomscrolling the hours away wasn’t healthy and I’m even kind of glad this is a good reason to end it. However, reddit has been really useful for news, especially the comments (taken with the right amount of skepticism) could be very informative.
I hope Lemmy builds something similar, but the defederation of beehaw’s news has been a setback.
What would be a good alternative, going forward, for getting news and backgrounds from varied, trustworthy en unbiased sources?
Maybe not directly an answer to your question but I don’t believe Reddit was a trustworthy and unbiased news source. Hell it wasn’t even that varied imo with news mainly being about what’s happening in the US with a focus on politics. Tbh I really don’t know what a good news source would be that thicks all your boxes.
Yeah but the truth of the matter usually came out in the comments
Sure I agree with that. The problem is that the comments also often include statements without sources, plain out wrong information, etc. Much of which can also be highly upvoted. So even with the context of the comments finding unbiased good news requires you to be very sceptic and isn’t always straightforward. Additionally each subreddit has its own target audience which will also inherently result in some bias in both the news that is posted as the comments on said news. But tbh a perfectly unbiased news source probably does not exist as we are all human.
You’re right you gotta bring your bucket of salt for all them pinches, but it was often the case that if someone posted a bullshit answer there’d be a repudiation to it; if that one was bollocks? Someone else chimed in. Eventually you have enough to aggregate some semblance of the truth.
The pitfall is relying on votes to do the vetting for you, and reluctance to research under your own power in lieu of citations. Cumbersome work, but if you really want the real picture it’s never 100% painless.
I agree that there was generally a consensus in the comments, but that doesn’t mean the consensus was correct. Often, different subreddits would come to different conclusions. I think there is a big risk of falling in to the “conformation bias” trap when relying on community consensus.
In not sure if there’s a better way to determine the truth, though.
Good practice, I think, to never be certain, but if you’re up for making your own investigations you usually got pointed in the right direction(s)
I found it difficult to describe how exactly the comments were informing, sometimes even moreso than the article itself, but this is exactly it.
RSS feeds from PBS and NPR
As someone that’s never used RSS, how does it work?
You install an RSS reader app on your phone or computer and subscribe to the feed links. Those contain some metadata for each story and a link to the content. The RSS reader will display everything in a readable way.
Is there an RSS reader with built in comment sections?
No, that’s kind of antithetical to how rss works.
The RSS protocol is basically just a list of links. So each content producer publishes their own list, to which people subscribe. Comments stay in their respective communities.
For example, you could have an rss feed from a reddit sub, and another from a lemmy community, and another from a newspaper.
Of course you could build an app with its own comment section, but as I said that would kind of undermine the elegance of RSS.
What XML link do you use for them?
Thank you!
No problemo
Both of them have truly neutral coverage, as in they report based on fact and reality and don’t limit what they write in order to maintain some false sense of neutrality. Many news sites nowadays play down objective fact in order to maintain “neutrality” between one side of the political spectrum that believes in evidence and statistical fact and one that expressly does not.
This of course means that they’re seen as being “anti-Trump” or “anti-Republican” but in actuality it’s reality itself that is anti-Trump and they just report reality.
I would caution against putting so much faith in them both so strongly. They both favor American establishment liberal politics, which is transparent to many due to the fact that a lot of Americans agree with those politics, and that they appear very reasonable in comparison to whatever tf Republicans are up to on a given day.
It’s not a bad thing that they tend to have a very dry and straightforward tone, but all outlets are biased, and it’s important to remain critical at all times if you want to have an accurate picture of a current event.
Oh fully agree, of course. Every once in a while I see a neoliberal dipshit in their opinion columns making some abhorrent take, but generally they’re significantly better than WaPo, NYT, CNN, Fox, CNBC, NBC, or CBS.
Some other good ones are Reuters, Al Jazeera, and the Associated Press, which of course each come with their own set of biases as well. Reuters is also fairly establishment liberal, Al Jazeera is useless for any news about the Middle East, and AP’s opinion and analysis columns lean pretty conservative.
My comment was more in the sense that a “neutral” news site is one where they do not suppress facts because those facts favor a perceived “side” of a debate, which is becoming increasingly common as major political parties in the US and abroad start pushing outright falsehoods in their rhetoric.
Fair enough, that’s actually close to the mix I have in my RSS reader, although I also would add the SCMP and teleSur as well
I’ll take a look at those! I should really consider setting up an RSS feed for news coverage. Kinda been meaning to for a while, do you have an RSS reader that you prefer?
Liferea works well for me, but if you aren’t using Linux then we can all long for Google Reader to come back lol. https://miniflux.app/ also looks good but takes some setting up it looks like.
Also be aware in advance that teleSur is Cuban/Venezuelan/Bolivian state media, but it sounds like you have decent enough media criticism skills to appreciate their point of view in comparison to the US-based outlets.
Thanks for the recommendations and info! That’s another thing on my to-do list, I’m planning on making my main PC do dual-boot with Windows 10 and Linux and once Windows 11 gets forced I’m done with Microsoft (but that’s a whole other conversation lmao).
If you want as close as possible to true “neutrality” – which is to mean verifiable fact-only reporting without commentary, you’re going to need to go to the wire services directly – the AP and Reuters are the largest.
I’ve started using newsminimalist.com It’s one of the most useful LLM based services I’ve seen. It’s an aggregator that uses ChatGPT to identify the significance of stories and group the articles on different sites about that story together and then summarise them.
I don’t want to spend hours every day reading news, but I do want to keep up to date with major events and it’s been good for that.
Wow this is pretty neat, have you encountered often that it hallucinates news and such?
No, because the primary purpose of the LLM is to choose among news stories on existing news sites and just group them together put them in order - not so much opportunity to make stuff up.
It’s also doing summarisation, but that is something LLMs do pretty well and in that constrained way also don’t hallucinate (in my experience).
I use an app called Artifact that aggregates news from many sources into a FYP and categories. There’s even comments for each article.
I’m going to try it
I’ve been using Artifact lately as well and it’s been pretty good. You can tell it things you’re interested in and it’ll show you articles from different sites. It’s been great.
That looks pretty cool, thanks!
Artifact looks good, but after playing with it for a while I don’t think I can deal with the account if ads and autoplaying videos in articles on an unfiltered internet… Might try opening everything in an ublock-fortified external browser, but that’s a bit of a pain tbh.
@Radicalized I saw some articles on artifact bearing the sign ‘rewritten using an AI’ and backed out of using the app to avoid that
If I can ask: what are your concerns about AI?
You’ll have a harder and harder time avoiding AI content over even the next few months. ~14% of Americans have tried GPT directly, and nearly 85% use apps with AI integrated directly into the app (whether they know it or not).
The folks who put a disclaimer on their articles are at least trying to be transparent about it. But maybe you know something I don’t about AI content, so I figure I’d ask.
i suspect that some folks have concerns about AI derived articles - it’s software so it can be programmed to have a certain bias when “reporting” - despite the fact that actual human journalists are very biased in and of themselves.
or it could be people that have basically wasted their lives in journalism are very angry and are lashing out again AI because their livelihood and entire identity has been automated.
Nothing is “rewritten using AI.” There is a button at the top of each article that gives you an AI-generated summary of the article, but the article remains untouched and wholly visible.
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Check out ground news. It is a news aggregator, but with a twist: it aggregates all articles on the same event from various sites so you can see how the event is portrayed by different sites.
ground.news is great.
There’s also allsides.com, which has a similar idea.
I was just going to link that! Two articles on the topic:
https://www.thefactual.com/blog/what-are-the-best-nonpartisan-news-sources/
https://www.makeuseof.com/top-unbiased-news-sources/
I tried my hand at creating a magazine https://kbin.social/m/neutralnews
Haven’t done a lot with it, though. But it was in response to the same dilemma as OP
Nice to know which side an article is leaning towards, I enjoy Ground news.
Damn thats a good call. What a great site.
Thanks for the tip, trying it now, very interesting concept
no source is truly unbiased, but I am also curious about where to find news/worldnews - there’s a few non-beehaw options but they’re not updated that often.
for tech stuff I always default to arstech, cnet, and slashdot, but I honestly dont feel like navigating between all of the various disparate news websites on a daily basis - or even a weekly basis to be honest.
I honestly dont feel like navigating between all of the various disparate news websites on a daily basis - or even a weekly basis to be honest.
This is a perfect use case for a feed reader.
any suggestions on a good feed reader?
I like FeedMe (Android). Syncs to my Feedly account so I can also look at the web on my desktop
For years I’ve heard feed readers were better than reddit, I suppose now is the time to test!
To be honest, I’ve tried a couple of times, but I miss reading comments. Some sites of course have comments but it’s not the same.
Honestly they are quite different, there are pros and cons. A feed reader shows purely what you are subscribed to, and there is no algorithm that rates which links you should see first. You have to curate your own feeds.
@tallwookie @Trusting I quite like NetNewsWire with Inoreader as a sync backend
I self host TinyTinyRSS (ttrss).
I just discovered https://newsnotfound.com/ and I quite like it! Well worth checking out. :)
I like brutalist.report.
It shows the headlines of many news sites in a clean way: just text links. It also has filters for tech, science, politics, etc.
Edit:typo
very cool
This is exactly the type of thing I’d hoped to find. Bookmarked.
I use feeder on android and have an RSS feed with news sources. You have to find them first and then see of they have and RSS feed.
Also you can make an RSS feed from mastodon if they toot their stories or use nitter to transform their twitter to a feed.
I have seen mentioned Feeder a lot as of lately, I have been using Feedly since all the Google RSS BS (heh, sounds familiar doesn’t it?) And never looked for everything else (then came Reddit, then Lemmy lol) I never got rid of Feedly though, I tried othes like Flipboard but that one never catched my eye.
What would Feeder provide me that Feedly does not?
I use FeedMe and connect to Feedly. That way I can add unlimited categories, Feedly only allows 3 on the free plan. Works like a charm.
Thanks for the heads-up, although I’m not entirely sure what you mean by categories…
I remember I created my folders in Feedly as topics and put all the related sources there 😅
Just subscribe to RSS feeds from your new sites.
I use InnoReader, which I prefer to Feedly. Syncs Free plan allows you up to 150 feeds and shows ads (which you can easily get around).
I’m currently using Feedly. I subscribe to news outlets that I trust, and just read what I’m interested in there
Thanks for suggestion Inoreader! I’ve just had a look and it looks great, in particular with their pre-made collections.
I use Flym News Reader (Android app). It’s open source and you can find it on F-Droid and GitHub. It’s not updated anymore but it has the best combination of features (and I’ve tried a lot of RSS readers). You can easily add news sources because it has a built-in feed search (when you hit the “add feed” button). It can also import OPML feed collections.
The context I got from reddit comment threads was invaluable. I hope to find something similar in the federated wilderness.
Very interested in others folks answers. Honestly, I follow a lot of people on Mastodon who share news. I also follow hashtags for my local area (and here on threadiverse, subscribed to communities focused on my local area). This seems to work okay but isn’t quite the firehouse I’m used to.
I think it’s best to never read the news, you’ll find about stuff that actually affects you naturally anyway.
Focus on communities for your hobbies and career instead.
I very actively followed news and politics a couple of years ago, and had been doing that for a long time. One day I just got completely fed up, and stopped. And holy shit, I’ve been so much happier and harmonious since then. Strongly recommend, 5/7
I’d argue that one should not stop reading the news forever because you’ll just become increasingly disconnected from what happens around you. As with all things, reading news in moderation and not doomscrolling is the way I think.
Yeah agreed. I think limiting it - great, yes, 100% do that. I tend to look through important news things on Sundays (usually via scrolling through a few sites - SBS, BBC, Al Jazeera, and then doing a bit more research about topics that interest me), and then not really engaging outside of then.
I’m not into ignoring the news and figuring that important things will naturally come through to me, both because there are important things that happen which won’t necessarily come up in regular conversation, and also because people - no matter how much I trust them - are going to give their own spin on things. So you both risk missing out on important news, and gaining important news through a skewed lens.
(I don’t mean to imply that the media doesn’t skew the lens of news, which is why I visit a few different sites.)
Absolutely agree with your approach. Also not being aware about news at all might make those in power get away with passing nocive legislation without much resistance from the population.
But you naturally will hear about important stuff anyway or see it on headlines in the supermarket, etc.
Like when the Ukraine war started, the Ukrainians and Russians had a flame-war on the company slack.
And if we really were going to die by climate disaster, nuclear war, pandemics, etc. isn’t it better not to know until it happens anyway?
You can’t spend your life worrying about things that will materialise decades from now, or are going on thousands of miles away. Focus on your own life and your own family and community.
I think Kbin replies are broken because I had to go to your profile to see your reply to me.
Anyways, I don’t think being reasonable up to date with whatever happens in your country or in the world means “worrying about things that will materialize decades from now or are going on thousands of miles away”.
For example, not watching news at all (I usually never use the TV nowadays) might make me miss some bad legislation that was/will be passed. I might miss protests against such things. Or I might be more prone to believing fake news about a certain topic (war in Ukraine for example).
But I completely agree one should not be 24/7 worrying about news.But the protests make no difference anyway so why bother?
And why does your opinion on Ukraine matter, are you an admiral or field marshal? Can you change anything anyway?
Better to spend that time learning new songs on guitar, playing new video games, discovering new movies, or areas to go hiking, cities to go travelling, cooking and restaurants, etc. - actually enjoy life. It is short.
I beg to differ, protests matter. At least here (Romania) they made those in power revert some bad legislation after seeing massive protests. Don’t mean to insult or anything, but this apathic approach towards civil society is a big factor in eroding democracy.
Again, if enough people think a certain narrative then it will affect the events.
You can both have a decent awareness of things around you and enjoy life to its fullest in my opinion.Noi si francezii ce le avem cu protestele
I like to keep up to date enough on the things my government chooses to do so that I can make an informed choice the next time I vote.
I just avoid the news. Sometimes it just “appears”, like hearing a radio somewhere, then I’ll listen to a little bit. Sometimes it’s quite surreal once you’ve been out of the loop long enough.
If anything important happens I have a friend who’s politically active and in the loop, he’ll tell me. Second-hand news is the best.
This. And you see how some stuff is just sensationalised bullshit.
Like I heard a little bit about the debt ceiling “crisis” - was like, I bet they’ll just make an agreement right before like last time… and then weeks later that’s exactly what happened.
There’s so much sensationalism and doomerism, it really isn’t healthy.
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I find Aljazeera as biased as fox news can be. Aljazeera is a impressive news network, but I would absolutely not recommend them as a news source.
go to ground.news, they have news from both sides of the spectrum and label them as such and it’s kind of like a reddit for news?? world news specifically tho
While i like the idea on principle, I think they have a lot of bothsideism on their site. Dividing everything into “left” or “right” is not a really valid approach.
That’s such a leftrightcenterupdownist perspective. Shoulda known better than to cheat a friend and waste the chance that I’ve been given. So I’m never gonna dance again the way I danced with youuu oh oh.
Now tbh I don’t read ground news. I have a friend who does. I don’t care about news. I dislike reading about world drama. It’s tiring and unnecessary. Life goes on all the same. News are coarse and get everywhere. Not like here. Here everything is soft and smooth.
