[austenallred]

Tomorrow we launch https://grasswire.com to the public. It's in private beta now, but it's a newsroom for the internet. Basically a hacker news full of news junkies and reporters. They ruthlessly curate and fact check the world's most important news.

The end result is a daily (or weekly) email that gets sent out. It's digestible in thirty seconds, contains only important news, and has been fact checked by thousands of people to ensure accuracy. No agenda, no celebrity gossip, just facts and sources.

I would be honored if you would check it out.

[Paul_S]

"In February 2015, the news will be completely turned over to you. Access is first-come, first-served. Reserve your space now."

How do I do that? It's March and all I can see is that text.

[austenallred]

We were going to launch on the 28th, then we realized it was a Saturday. Whoops! So we're launching Monday.

Just drop your email in the field and we'll send out an email tomorrow that you're in.

[Tinyyy]

There is indeed a problem with adblock on the site. It’s funny that I saw the email form for a split second before it was blocked, so I spent the past 10 minutes figuring out how to let it pop up.

[spurgu]

Email field doesn't show for me on Chrome, on Firefox it does.

[etimberg]

Looks great, thanks for sharing :)

[mrottenkolber]

That's interesting. I've thought of a similar project (except with submitting articles written by readers). I have thought a great deal about how to maintain content diversity while making use of the collective effort of people to pick content.

How (if at all) do you ensure that your platform won't become a hostile, self-preserving, lowest common denominator mind/meat ball? (E.g. like HN.)

From my experience controversial views require a strong form of protection from the violent inertia of the masses, because otherwise sharing individual ideas becomes numbingly difficult.

On the other hand, a single party can not be allowed to force their minority view onto the the common mass. E.g. discourage brute forcing a view.

I have witnessed various forms of view-exchange-models:

* "mostly unguided": The 4chan/b model. Pros include shelter from censorship and diverse views, cons are brute forcing views onto the forum is easy.

* "strictly moderated": E.g. wikipedia or stackoverflow. Won't talk much about these, in case of wikipedia it makes sense, but generally for a discussion platform this is the worst case as it defeats the whole purpose.

* "naive (or incompetent) governing": E.g. HN, turn view visibility into popularity contest for instance. Many ways of getting it wrong, each with different motivations and results but generally: Turns community against itself, creates a hostile and violent environment, monoculture, perpetual dishonesty. This is another really bad approach. I believe it was popularized because it seems to work as long as only your best friends use the platform. Ergo the "community degraded" excuse.

* "sensible governing": ???. Find good ways to compile a fairly selected subset of a possibly large amount of views to be able to be consumed by a single person.

I had one idea that I quite liked: Have a pool of volunteering peers for review. Randomly divide incoming submissions among pool for review. E.g. send a submission to a random subset of reviewers. I think the smaller the subset the better. E.g. if you have 128 peers, send it to three random peers. If any one of those peers "likes" the submission, include it in the "newspaper". Possibly send it to more people for review to establish prominence in the newspaper.

Ideals I wanted to implement: Minority views shouldn't have to compete with a horde of people who like cat pictures. It should be difficult to game the system. The process should be transparent, it is good to know that "everybody found X important and somebody found Y important".

One final note:

> "Introducing the Internet's missing newsroom"

This discourages me a ton. Please don't over impose yourself a the missing link or your only savior. The most you can hope for is to be a viable addition to my sources. If you don't realize that then you are incompetent to be a viable source.