this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy

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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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[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago (6 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Damn thats a good call. What a great site.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

ground.news is great.

There's also allsides.com, which has a similar idea.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I think it's best to never read the news, you'll find about stuff that actually affects you naturally anyway.

Focus on communities for your hobbies and career instead.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

I very actively followed news and politics a couple of years ago, and had been doing that for a long time. One day I just got completely fed up, and stopped. And holy shit, I've been so much happier and harmonious since then. Strongly recommend, 5/7

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I’d argue that one should not stop reading the news forever because you’ll just become increasingly disconnected from what happens around you. As with all things, reading news in moderation and not doomscrolling is the way I think.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Yeah agreed. I think limiting it - great, yes, 100% do that. I tend to look through important news things on Sundays (usually via scrolling through a few sites - SBS, BBC, Al Jazeera, and then doing a bit more research about topics that interest me), and then not really engaging outside of then.

I'm not into ignoring the news and figuring that important things will naturally come through to me, both because there are important things that happen which won't necessarily come up in regular conversation, and also because people - no matter how much I trust them - are going to give their own spin on things. So you both risk missing out on important news, and gaining important news through a skewed lens.

(I don't mean to imply that the media doesn't skew the lens of news, which is why I visit a few different sites.)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

Absolutely agree with your approach. Also not being aware about news at all might make those in power get away with passing nocive legislation without much resistance from the population.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

But you naturally will hear about important stuff anyway or see it on headlines in the supermarket, etc.

Like when the Ukraine war started, the Ukrainians and Russians had a flame-war on the company slack.

And if we really were going to die by climate disaster, nuclear war, pandemics, etc. isn't it better not to know until it happens anyway?

You can't spend your life worrying about things that will materialise decades from now, or are going on thousands of miles away. Focus on your own life and your own family and community.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I think Kbin replies are broken because I had to go to your profile to see your reply to me.
Anyways, I don't think being reasonable up to date with whatever happens in your country or in the world means "worrying about things that will materialize decades from now or are going on thousands of miles away".
For example, not watching news at all (I usually never use the TV nowadays) might make me miss some bad legislation that was/will be passed. I might miss protests against such things. Or I might be more prone to believing fake news about a certain topic (war in Ukraine for example).
But I completely agree one should not be 24/7 worrying about news.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (3 children)

any suggestions on a good feed reader?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I like FeedMe (Android). Syncs to my Feedly account so I can also look at the web on my desktop

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

For years I've heard feed readers were better than reddit, I suppose now is the time to test!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

I self host TinyTinyRSS (ttrss).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

@tallwookie @Trusting I quite like NetNewsWire with Inoreader as a sync backend

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

I'm currently using Feedly. I subscribe to news outlets that I trust, and just read what I'm interested in there

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I like brutalist.report.

It shows the headlines of many news sites in a clean way: just text links. It also has filters for tech, science, politics, etc.

Edit:typo

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago (4 children)

RSS feeds from PBS and NPR

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

As someone that's never used RSS, how does it work?

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago (3 children)

I use an app called Artifact that aggregates news from many sources into a FYP and categories. There’s even comments for each article.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

I'm going to try it

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

That looks pretty cool, thanks!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

@Radicalized I saw some articles on artifact bearing the sign 'rewritten using an AI' and backed out of using the app to avoid that

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I expect it'll take a while for kbin / the fediverse to acquire, and me to find, segments focused on some of the niche areas I had on that other site, but ehh. I knew there would be costs in leaving.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

yup. I used reddit a lot for more niche stuff, and so far kbin and the fediverse hasn't quite captured the same things just yet

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

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.

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