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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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.
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 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
That looks pretty cool, thanks!
@Radicalized I saw some articles on artifact bearing the sign ‘rewritten using an AI’ and backed out of using the app to avoid that
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
The context I got from reddit comment threads was invaluable. I hope to find something similar in the federated wilderness.
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
Thanks for the tip, trying it now, very interesting concept
I just discovered https://newsnotfound.com/ and I quite like it! Well worth checking out. :)
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!
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.
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.
@tallwookie @Trusting I quite like NetNewsWire with Inoreader as a sync backend
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Feedly is my new frontpage
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
yup. it’s good for news like actual proper official official news. I use it to keep tabs on general political news as well as gaming news. but otherwise a lot of what i wanted was just the informal “hey this is a new thing lets talk about it” and the socialization that came with that.
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.
Anything wrong with going to a news site directly? I find https://www.theguardian.com/au and https://www.abc.net.au/ work well for keeping on top of news but your country would surely have equivalents.
Hacker News has long been one of my main news sources. The majority of postings are tech-related but there’s a lot of more general content and the moderation is very good. https://news.ycombinator.com/ . I generally use Feedly to browse it.
For excellent, in-depth analysis of world events/politics/economics there’s the UK-based publication The Economist - https://www.economist.com/ - which is a paid service (expensive!) but has a lot of free content on the site, esp. if you’re signed-up, even as a free user. It’s not an aggregator though - more like a better NY Times without all the stupid fluff.
