I don't think you agree with Swartz at all. You used an article that explains why someone does not read the news to promote your news site. According to the article, Swartz wasn't looking for an alternative way to consume news: he decries the news industry as a whole. I'm all for self-promotion on HN when it's relevant, but Grasswire appears to be exactly the kind of thing Swartz would not be interested in.

If you were selling books or long-form journalism I could understand your post, but as it stands it's blatant self-promotion. And I say that as the founder of a news company.

What Grasswire is attempting to create is the furthest thing from what current media outlets offer. That's why it's relevant.

And for accusing someone of dropping links you sure seem to drop a lot of links to your news site Newslines. Newslines seems to be little more than a celebrity gossip engine. Are you attacking Grasswire because you see them as a competitor?

I add links to my site and blog posts when they are relevant to the discussion, unlike Austin's link here, which is actually contrary to the point raised in Swartz article.

My site is not a competitor to Grasswire. Grasswire is an attempt to fact check news streams. Newslines is a news archive with no fact checking at all. As I said, I used to run a fact-checking site, so I have some experience in the area, and a continuing interest in how fact-checking may work.

I am interested in all of the new news entrants, and you will see my comments on posts about Infobitt, Grasswire, Inside.com and other sites in many places across the net. That said, I have not directly criticized his site, and only said that I think fact checking in general is over rated. Unfortunately, Austen has taken my comments as a personal attack on him. He should grow a thicker skin.

I think getting feedback, positive or negative, from the community is extremely valuable. Your observation that my site is "a celebrity gossip engine" is useful to me, even though you intended it as an insult. Thanks.

I started the news site because I have the same frustrations Swartz has. Most of the news is bullshit and a worthless time-suck. All of the examples he uses, all of the websites out there, feel completely irrelevant to me and not interesting whatsoever.

I disagree with him that it's 100% - I think it's just 99.9%, and that .01% is valuable. Perhaps that's a major difference, but Swartz's point was that it's not valuable enough to waste time on. I'd like to think that if he could spend 30 seconds to get that .01% of important news he would feel differently. But, of course, we'll never know.

The article decries constantly checking up on the news filling your mind with things that do not actually effect you which leads you to a more unproductive day. I signed up for grasswire a couple minutes ago and at the first moment I'm bombarded with a twitter-like feed of random news events all that have nothing to do with me.

How is this addressing the frustrations you claim to have in common with Swartz?

It's not just Aaron Swartz (he's wrong about this part).

Many people think the news is completely junk:

http://dobelli.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Avoid_News_Par...

http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/10/01/the-low-informatio...

http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/why-tv-news-is-a-waste-of-human-...

http://www.stansberryradio.com/James-Altucher/Latest-Episode...

I find it interesting that someone who is making a news site would say that most of the news is "bullshit and a worthless time suck". Are you really saying that just 0.1% of the news on your site has value? Perhaps you should take Swartz's advice and stop fighting to improve something that has so little value to you.

> I find it interesting that someone who is making a news site would say that most of the news is "bullshit and a worthless time suck."

Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. 99.9% of news is garbage, .01% of news is valuable. I want to make it easy for people to get that .01%.

> Perhaps you should take Swartz advice and stop fighting to improve something that has so little value to you.

I think news is badly broken, and I'm trying to fix it. I don't understand what problem you have with that.

But what about the other .09%?

I suggest that you develop a thicker skin when dealing with feedback. Not everyone thinks what you are doing is helpful or beneficial. I can't speak for Swartz, but his article clearly says that he considered ALL news to be bad and even unhealthy, including your 0.1%. So to claim common ground, or to speak for him, is self-serving.

As for Grasswire, I think your solution to trying to improve the news won't work. As someone who previously ran a collaborative fact-checking site (which included a factcheck watch that monitored the main fact-checking sites), I think fact checking is over-rated. Most people are not really that interested in fact-checking the news, or in even reading fact checks. Fact checks themselves are in most cases just as biased as the reports they claim to fact check.

Nonetheless, I am genuinely interested to see how it works out for you.

It seems to me that you could be a bit better at criticizing; you give this guy a hard time for having a thin skin, but you're being really antagonistic. I agree that his original post in this thread seemed a bit sales-pitch-y, and I resent that too, but you come off as being on full attack. Chill out a little, people will probably pay MORE attention, rather than writing you off as an angry competitor.

I am not a competitor (see post above).

For anyone reading this thread later, I should point out that my response above was to a now-deleted part of Austen's mail that accused me of stalking him on the net, and told me to stop commenting on his posts.

I think what you're trying to do at Grasswire is interesting, but I feel like here you're arguing against the very point that Swartz was making. I think of all people he is the last one that you could accuse of not caring, and yet he claims not to have read the news for his entire adult life. The difference is that he voraciously read books [1] and took what I guess was a long view of issues of interest, which I think is what he is promoting here.

That said I still like the idea of being able to "touch base" with the news as it were - something that I can scan quickly and, if I'm disciplined enough, filter down to the bits that are actually relevant to me. Most days, hopefully, that's nothing at all.

[1] e.g. http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/books2010

Asking me to sign up before I've even looked at the page is annoying (to me).

http://tabcloseddidntread.com/

Yeah, originally everything was open, we didn't even require a login to upvote/comment/etc. Then some folks from ISIS came on and started trying to muck everything up, so we had to throw a gate on it (banning by IP was just too chaotic). We'll add some more info to the gate soon.

I don't know what you can do on your site, because I didn't want to sign up, but you can look at HN without having to sign up and you still need an account to vote or to comment.

Yes, that will be how it works in the future, but we haven't had time to build out the non-logged-in states of everything. So it's a hacky solution, but we just threw up a wall for now.

> It's like voting - my vote doesn't matter, but on aggregate it's everything.

Circle of concern versus circle of control. Pay attention to things proportionally to the amount of control you have over them, rather than worrying disproportionately. (And if you want to care more than that about something, find a way to have more influence on that something.) If you have a vote on something, you have a non-zero but very tiny amount of control over it; spend time educating yourself appropriately. But the vast majority of news stories discuss items that should not in any way affect the actions of the people watching them.

Also, considering that later in this thread you explicitly describe your service as being for "news junkies"...

That's a really good frame of reference, I think. Thank you for that.

I consider our service like Wikipedia - there is a small collection of people who are just abnormally fascinated by the news - the 1% of news junkies who want to see what's happening, vet it, and tell you if it's wrong. The biproduct of that is that the 99% of "normal people" get a news digest that contains only the most important info, that's easily digestible.

So the current website is for news junkies, just like the "talk/edit" part of Wikipedia is for... encyclopedia junkies? The daily email and coming read-only stuff is what I hope is appropriate for 99% of people, including someone like Swartz.

A vetting process seems like a useful filter, but it's not a sufficient one. Vetting doesn't necessarily affect stories that are factually accurate but irrelevant.

What is your definition of "important"? Or, more importantly, what definition of "important" does your community of "news junkies" apply? Because almost by definition, those "news junkies" have a different idea of what's important than other people do.

There are two main functions on the site. One is a fact-check, the other is an upvote. People are told to upvote the most important info - we define "most important" as "having the most affect on the citizens of the world."

Of course, that's very difficult to quantify, and there may be some bias of the news junkies, but I think the end product is pretty great (though not perfect yet). Of course that's just me, and I'm probably biased as well, but there have been times when I have said the news coming out of grasswire is complete shit, so I'd like to think I'm at least trying to be honest with myself.

It's apparently not possible to use a space in the password. Please don't limit the characters or length of a password. Thanks.

My company considers one of its systems "more secure" because they enforce a policy that all passwords must contain 8+ non-space characters. The implementation? "Must be 8+ characters; must not contain spaces."

I've expressed my view on this (and similar password-related policies) many times, but apparently it's all simply a box ticking exercise for pen testers...

There are much better ways to enforce this validation. Shoot me an email if you'd like any assistance.

Also, https://github.com/dropbox/zxcvbn is amazing.

I wonder why my searches never turned this up. I ended up making my own: https://github.com/alexbecker/password-strength

That looks really cool - I haven't seen it before, thanks!

The "offending system" I mentioned, however, is our old PHP application that I don't really work on. (I mainly develop much more modern Rails stuff!)

Like I said, the primary concern of the company is simply to keep pen testers happy - and their criteria for a "secure" website is, in my opinion, often misleading or even downright wrong. But if I ever get the chance to genuinely improve the system, I'll definitely look into using this.

Interesting. We'll get that fixed.

I guess I must be too dense, but I simply do not know how to use grasswire.

I'm stuck with live feed on left which shows me exactly the kind of useless "breaking" stuff I want to avoid and popular feed on the right which I don't seem to be able to control beyond either providing fact-check or comment.

What am I missing?

What you're looking at is kind of like a backend - consider it the "talk" page for Wikipedia.

It's a little bit chaotic this early in the morning, but our algorithm pulls in the "breaking" stuff on the left, and the most upvoted stuff flows to the top of the "popular" page. Grasswire users fact-check stuff for accuracy, and comment on whether or not/why it's important. The site is mostly for news junkies. It's a little bit hectic right now because a bunch of people from HN are just upvoting random stuff to screw everything up, and it will take the power users a minute to sort through it.

The result is at the end of the day, the best stuff curated and fact-checked by a couple thousand people, and we send that out to the everyday person in an email they can digest in 30 seconds. We're adding a short, editable description to each news item to give some background, and allowing anyone to submit external stuff, so it's still a work in progress, but that's the gist of it.

I really like this. I too am sick of seeing stuff promoted in everyday media which is clearly fabricated.

Admission. I think I up-voted some comments by accident. It's not obvious what that large up arrow does (now that I say it out-loud I think it's probably pretty obvious!) and there's no way to undo the operation. Sorry.

Are there plans to add a frontend to it?

Well once I push these code changes in the next few minutes you should be able to click on the upvote again to remove it. For now, don't worry about it :)

We see the "frontend" as a daily email that goes out or an app with a daily push notification that says "Hey, here you go, the best news of the day in 30 seconds." So the hours of work that the people are putting in on the back-end really just reduces the amount of time for the end user. We could probably hire five people to do that, but it's important to us that it's democratic and open.

That all makes sense. In terms of a frontend I was thinking of a read only type system. At lunch time I come to HN to entertain myself. Occasionally I jump over to bbc news (which is pretty dire) or aljazeera. It would be great to have a page I could drop into to get the digest.

Very interesting concept. I signed up; we'll see where it goes.

One thing to note, though - on the left I'm seeing a number of duplicated entries, with the duplicates immediately after the original. I'm using Firefox, if that matters.

The site looks slick, but it doesn't have some features I'd expect and want from a news aggregation site. I can't find any way to search for news about specific topics, for example.

Ya, it's still an infant. We're adding tagging, but it will be a couple of weeks

Great landing page, I'm sure conversion rate is good. But the visuals don't make me want to stay, even with the mini-tutorial its a little annoying.

Crowd-sourced fact checks are an interesting idea, I'm not sure it works for news. You need to be fast and thorough, which is hard.

I'd love to have reliable background information for long-running issues, like the Ukraine crisis. Maybe this will be easier, as the value can accumulate over a longer time period.

I wish you good luck, we need better news!

Thanks for the feedback. What "visuals" are you referring to that don't make you want to stay?

It's tough for me to grasp what someone wants/needs to stick around. Right now we have a pretty good core of hardcore news junkies that come every day, and maybe that's OK for the curation/fact-checking side of things, but what do you want/need?

We're adding a "background" area to each news item. That was an issue that I didn't really have at first because I sit there and watch the news all day, but turns out not everybody is like me :). That may take a couple weeks along with all of the other changes we need to make, but it will be in there.

> ruthlessly curated and fact-checked

The problem with curated news is that we can be consuming propaganda and not know it.

Even as it stands now, we hear of certain news in the world, but not others, and it severely affects our understanding of the world.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

We're consuming propaganda either way. Media outlets chose what to write about and what not to cover, then stories that match people's biases tend to get disproportionately popularized. I hope that this fact-checking feature can at least do something against news sites publishing obvious lies and misinformation.

I think the problem with news is that it is has become driven by the imperatives of Google (a company which makes money from advertising). Those imperatives lead inexorably to a thirst for page-views and page-rank, and horrible sites like buzzfeed. I've noticed this evolution in previously respected publications like The Guardian or The Independent in the UK (much Guardian coverage nowadays is centred on clicks, as are initiatives like the i-100).

Here are some tenets to which I think any news company aspiring to change the field and report news responsibly should think about:

Popularity is poisonous and the enemy of the good - what is good or even factually right is often not popular

Context is key - without context, a fact can be meaningless or actively misleading (e.g. the most liberal senator in the senate, 45 minutes from a chemical war from the dodgy dossier).

On the ground observation is key - this is something modern tech has changed in a very positive way, though it does also allow for rumours and misinformation.

Analysis is key - without analysis from informed observers, lots of news is hard to digest and understand - it provides context

Balance is an illusion - Opinions always colour analysis and the facts reported, we should be up-front about this - every org and person has them.

Fact checking with primary sources is key - how can you possibly fact-check factoids that your readers are constantly upvoting? How can you possibly fact check an opinion?

National news is often horribly biased, and national newspapers usually pander to the government/demographic they serve, especially in time of war.

Most public outrage is wrong or at least ill-founded - we have representative and informed democracy to try to avoid the rule of the mob.

Quick news is the antithesis of thoughtful, incisive news

There's plenty of buzzfeed-esque junk out there trying to recycle news and readers as quickly as possible, and it is neither viable in the long term nor is it good for news or for readers. So I disagree completely (as does the article I think) on what you consider to be a good news publication.

PS Your website doesn't even show me what it does before it asks for email, you might want to consider changing that. I tried a fake account and looks like some kind of buzzfeed reuters mashup, and I'm afraid guilty of a lot of the sins Aaron points out.

The sign up process didn't ask me where I was from and/or what I was interested in. For general world news with a reasonable frequency and good digests I've got The Economist. It's the national, local and specialist news that I'm missing.

Right now it's world/international news only. We'll be building out other sections as we scale, but need to nail this down first, and there's a lot of work we still need to do on that.

I just registered. Great work! It's dense, but I think dense is good - it's about information after all. Also, I love the "fact-check" feature. I'll try to use it for a few days and see if it enhances my life in any way.

How about not forcing me to register before I can see the site?

Minor bug: When I sign up, it immediately reports a failure (Username not available) for a split second before going forward with the registration without a hitch.

> A publication one can consume in thirty seconds with the most important stuff

If you don't allow the user to define "important", it's the same thing. You're just replacing the editors with random fact-checkers who are most likely regurgitating the headlines editors put on their screens.

I was surprised I couldn't filter by region. I think Aaron's point was that if it doesn't affect me, why should I follow it?

> I, strangely enough, agree with Most of what Aaron says. And I'm the founder of a news company.

People should re-read this and understand that this is the best way of doing marketing for your startup. "I agree, here's my solution".

Regarding your vote not mattering, what about "Instant Run-Off Voting" [1] ?

[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting

I just signed up, and all I see is the equivalent of twitter posts for #ISIS, #Ferguson, and #Ukraine -- for both "Live Feed" and "Popular Feed". Am I missing something?