[graybeardhacker]

I pay for the Ground News app. It's an aggregator that (somehow) gets me all the articles on a topic, shows me how factual each source is and which way they lean politically. It summarizes the articles so I can ignore the click-bate headline and know whether I want to read more.

I'm honestly not sure why this isn't the standard. It solved all my news problems and fills all my news needs.

I'm honestly not sure what these tiny news sites that have paywalls are thinking. The chances of me paying a monthly fee for news from a single source, let alone a tiny, local, single source, are less than zero.

[mrguyorama]

Ground news is a YC alum isn't it?

It's almost certainly going to get enshittified eventually, but more than that, it purposely pushing a false "Left vs Right" narrative about news. That's part of the problem.

Also the way they summarize every story into just a few bullet points (which, if it isn't already written by AI, surely will be) IMO is actively downplaying important issues, in an attempt to defuse false energy in reporting of less important issues. Artificially downplaying serious stuff is as detrimental as artificially overplaying non-serious stuff.

The Google Pixel "news" feed has the same problem now that it does AI "summaries"

Like it's great that they aggregate a lot and show you articles from publications you wouldn't otherwise see, but I just cannot trust them in the future.

[freetime2]

Does it give you access to the full content? Or just link through to the article (which may be behind a paywall)?

I would be willing to pay for content, but not for an aggregator.

[tinfoilhatter]

> ... shows me how factual each source is and which way they lean politically.

Fact-checkers and whatever you call people that gauge political biases aren't impartial sources of information. Someone pays their bills and those people typically have agendas besides delivering objective truth.

I'm not suggesting that paying monthly fees or paywalls are a solution to the problem either.

The real solution is to stop reading the news IMO. Let these companies go out of business and get replaced by something better. If one must read the news, just use an aggregator and archive.is for bypassing paywalls.

[mmooss]

> Fact-checkers and whatever you call people that gauge political biases aren't impartial sources of information. Someone pays their bills and those people typically have agendas besides delivering objective truth.

That's meaningless: It's like saying everyone is a liar or everyone is violent, or a potential murderer or everyone's partner is an adulterer. Yes, anyone can, everyone lies, nobody is perfect - but some people are 'honest' and some are 'liars' and there is all the difference in the world.

[tinfoilhatter]

It's not though? People aren't doing fact-checking out of kindness, they're doing it because they're being paid to do it. The people paying them expect a certain outcome from their fact-checking activities, and objectivity doesn't really factor into the picture, but ensuring a certain narrative prevails, does.

Pretending that a news story is factually correct because someone is getting paid to check it for accuracy is asinine. The fact checkers themselves have biases and aren't objective sources of truth, same with the people supplying their paychecks.

The fact that people have the capacity to lie and be violent, but that not everyone is a liar or a murderer is obvious and doesn't need to be stated.