> 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.