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?
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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 just discovered https://newsnotfound.com/ and I quite like it! Well worth checking out. :)
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
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.
The context I got from reddit comment threads was invaluable. I hope to find something similar in the federated wilderness.
Reuters and the Associated Press are probably the most neutral and trustworthy news agencies.
Edit: My bad, they aren’t news aggregators, I still highly recommend them, though.
NewsNow.com it’s kind of a proper news aggregator as opposed to Reddit being a community led link aggregator
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.
Damn thats a good call. What a great site.
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
Removed by mod
I need to find a new way to scroll through random news as well, I used to like browsing world news and other random threads that hit the front page. Feed readers sound like something I should look into.
for regular news article style news I use feedly and just have selected all the usual news organizations. for less formal “news” I was using reddit, but now I’m starting to use kbin I guess haha. I still use twitter as well.
I started using feedly, it’s good! But then I realised I didn’t actually want the news, I wanted people having conversations about the news haha
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 found it difficult to describe how exactly the comments were informing, sometimes even moreso than the article itself, but this is exactly it.
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.
I use an app called Artifact that aggregates news from many sources into a FYP and categories. There’s even comments for each article.
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
That looks pretty cool, thanks!
RSS feeds from PBS and NPR
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.
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?
What XML link do you use for them?
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.
