Happy to answer any questions.
(below is the project description I used when posted about it on Reddit)
The problem I have with most news sites is that I can't read only important news: an article about a virus outbreak is followed by some celebrity gossip or another smartphone release.
But even on sites that focus on important events articles are posted every day and there are always "top headlines" — even on days when nothing important happened.
I am forced to make a choice: waste time going through unimportant updates or ignore the news and miss important events.
So I built a web app that I think solves this.
It uses AI (ChatGPT-4) to read the top 1000 news every day and rank them by significance on a scale from 0 to 10 based on event magnitude, scale, potential, and source credibility.
The results are posted on the site: https://www.newsminimalist.com/
I also run a newsletter where I post summaries of all the news with a score over 6.5. On average that's 1-3 articles per day, but sometimes it is 5, and sometimes — none at all. In that case, I just send an email saying that nothing important happened that day.
You can read previous issues here: https://newsletter.newsminimalist.com/
Let me know if you have any feedback or ideas. I'm considering adding new features and looking for direction.
I have no control over it, but let me know if there are any problems with it — I'll see what I can do.
( I used ChatGPT to help me find it, via https://smartynames.com/ )
Recent example: https://newsletter.newsminimalist.com/p/tuesday-april-25-3-m...
Q: Could you please add RSS? I’d use this every day if I could get it in Feedly. (NM found it in a comment https://rss.beehiiv.com/feeds/4aF2pGVAEN.xml)
Q: Why’d you choose 6.5 as the default? Sorry if you answered that already.
Even if only English language sources are considered, there are available ones for non-English-speaking countries, example from Spain https://english.elpais.com/
I would love a simple mobile app, it's just easy to tap your news app on a phone, ideally with a way to customize the notification timing. I have certain moments each day when I want to consume this type of content (breakfast, lunch break)
A small community driven comment section with Karma system would also be nice. I like to discuss news and it enables knowledgeable people to add some additional insights. See the dutch tech news site for inspiration. they explain their karma system here: https://tweakers.net/info/faq/karma/#tab:1-2
It's a nice idea and looks like it's implemented well. My problem is probably that different things are significant to different people. Following that thread leads to filter bubbles, of course.
For big international (usually bad!) news I tend to go to Wikipedia Current Events: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
Could News Minimalist have an option to only show good news with some significance? I think that might be popular and quite useful for the mental health of lots of people.
Good things do happen but they're under-reported because death, destruction and conflict draw more clicks & views. A way to surface the less depressing news would be welcome.
> Have you made any attempt at quantifying its biases?
I haven't. I can share ChatGPT's evaluation of sources credibility, maybe that will give people some insights. For example, Reuters got 9.5 (out of 10), Lifehacker 7, Oprah Mag 3.
> where it focuses most of its reporting. (Economy and the US from a first glance?)
I'd say today is just US and economy-heavy day. There were many days when other categories and geographies made the top (I especially enjoy these). One example: https://newsletter.newsminimalist.com/p/tuesday-april-25-3-m...
I will definitely sub to News Minimalist if the same is possible.
Added "good RSS" to the TODOs.
Will try to improve it.
I actually created a site - https://detoxed.news - with a very similar philosophy a while back, though with a much simpler implementation. It periodically scrapes Wikipedia's Current Events Portal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events) and presents that information in a nicer format.
I think there's definitely a sweet spot where you keep well-informed about current events and happenings in the world, without wasting your time on the 24 hours new cycle.
> For each article ChatGPT estimates:
> Magnitude: how big was the effect;
> Scale: how many people the event affected;
> Potential: how likely is it that the event will cause bigger events;
> Credibility: how credible is the source.
Then I do `Credibility * cbrt(Magnitude * Scale * Potential)`
cbrt = cubic root
Maybe the formula could be improved but I was satisfied with the result, so kept it that way.
Where and how are you getting the ~1000 news articles you feed to GPT4? I think it would go a long way for transparency to list that somewhere on the website. Also, are you using international news agencies? Quite a lot of them publish an English feed too.
I would also love to see the difference it would make given a different geographical prompt ("in the context of China/India/Asia/Europe... How would you are this article") and political ideology prompt ("how would you rate this article for a Republican/Democrat/Libertarian/Socialist...")
Alternatively (or complementary), I would recommend https://ground.news/ which looks like a classic news outlet, but they pick only the relevant info and more importantly explains where the news fits in the political spectrum.
For example this piece of news gets less than 5:
https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-may-run-short-cash-aft...
Yet it’s certainly important, affecting a large number of people, and matching other criteria.
As someone who works in media I agree with the premise this comes from, but the implementation is a typical examples of the complexities and nuances that LLMs do not get. Also you’re just under the illusion to escape an agenda, but you’re just swapping human agendas for a technobabble view of journalism that is arid as it can possibly get.
I bet spam algorithms didn't like that I sent email to 30 people yesterday and 900 people today. Good problem to have :) Please check your spam folder if you don't see today's issue in inbox.
I don't know what algo it uses, but it basically grabs top headlines, aggregates similar stories with their headlines (so you can see how other news sites headlined the same news), and then most importantly presents a plaintext version of the article that is accessible without visiting the news site directly.
It's honestly the best news site I've ever used, and would recommend it a thousand times over. I also believe I found out about it on HN a few years back
$ whois com.
% IANA WHOIS server
% for more information on IANA, visit http://www.iana.org
% This query returned 1 object
domain: COM
organisation: VeriSign Global Registry Services
address: 12061 Bluemont Way
address: Reston VA 20190
address: United States of America (the)
DNS was originally a DARPA project, and was implicitly US focused from the very beginning of the internet, because it was a US project. ".com" carries that legacy because it predates the concept of country-specific TLD's.
A similar idea exists in reddit: /r/news is very US-focused, even though it's not called "US news". Since Reddit is an American site with an (at least initially) predominantly American audience, it's not surprising at all that things are American-biased by default unless explicitly named accordingly.
If we were all using Minitel instead of The Internet, we would have similar bias where services would be biased towards France unless shown otherwise, because Minitel was a French technology.
The point is, it's not explicitly a problem that somebody puts up a website and it's US-centric. Nobody owes the world an international version of whatever project they want to make, and you don't need to get upset that they only bother to cater to a US audience.
That said corporation lets non-US entities buy domain names doesn't change this fact.
Similarly, if a site with a .tv address published articles explicitly about Tuvalu, in the Tuvaluan language, you probably wouldn't complain about a Tuvaluan bias, right? After all, it's a Tuvaluan TLD. The fact that lots of companies around the world use .tv addresses for other reasons that have nothing to do with Tuvalu, doesn't change the fact that it's a Tuvaluan TLD.
If you want more information on this, the intro in the Wikipedia article on .com is quite informative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.com ... particularly:
> The domain was originally administered by the United States Department of Defense, but is today operated by Verisign, and remains under ultimate jurisdiction of U.S. law.[2][3][4] Additionally, as the Internet was invented in the United States, most American businesses and enterprises have used the .com domain instead of a more U.S.-specific .us.
Quick suggestion: parse the URL to determine which media organization published the content, and then allow for users and/or the LLM to leverage info from Media Bias/Fact Check[1] to determine if a source is valid. I'd like to see how it arrived at the conclusion of why the article got it's given score.
I would 100% pay something like $2 month for a daily feed of ranked headlines with links.
I (somewhat ashamedly) get most of my knowledge of current events through reddit, because it's more convenient than aggregating that knowledge myself. However, I also completely agree with the idea that a collective of Internet users is not the best tool for aggregating news, as many popular news/current event subreddits have devolved into echo chambers and astroturfing.
The point of saying this is that I know my approach to collecting knowledge about current events is flawed so I'm okay with replacing it with something else that isn't perfect: it just has to be better and more reliable than my current method.
Any chance of updating the RSS feed item "summary" to something more useful than "significant news" and title to something more than the date? Or maybe an RSS feed of the newsletter format?
(I do see some of the older items have titles that include some info on what's included)
Basically, I think the ideal RSS feeds would be _two_: 1. RSS feed of every item that hits the 6/10 threshold (title and link to original, summary not too important, either same as title or paragraph summary of what the article is about) 2. RSS feed of the newsletter (title: "May 4 2023 - significant news", link: newsletter page, summary: list of article titles)
I suppose versions of #1 with diff thresholds could be nice, but I'd probably only use the default threshold.
Background: I run a bot that sends RSS feeds into discord channels (easily followable to any discord server) and this particular feed seems potentially quite handy for good news info. Probably overlaps with https://whatthefuckjusthappenedtoday.com/ but that automation probably means it can catch breaking news faster than a manually-curated site like that.
Those were the days.
Yeah RSS it not great currently. Replied about it here with more info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35820032
Oh, exactly the same problem. The straightforward implementation would make me broke in month :)
Had to make several optimizations to make the bill reasonable. Not all of them worked, some greatly reduced the quality of significance estimations.
Reducing number of tokens was super fun, forgot about it :D