Continuing the discussion from Discussion thread for the "Polls only" thread (Part 3):
Has anyone here subscribed to Ground News?
They don’t do reporting, they are an aggregator. They promise to give you a range of reporting from different parts of the political perspective, with some curation as to what is being shown to whom, and which sources are reliable.
Both Randy Rainbow and Tom Scott are sponsored by them on YouTube. Tom Scott have a pretty good sales pitch in his latest video
I tried it for a few days but it didn’t stick. It just felt like another version of allsides.com.
I think fundamentally it was not valuable to read MAGA World’s take on things; it’s not like every story had two equal sides worth hearing, more just that we’ve all learned to live in our own little reality bubbles, and it frankly was not very interesting to hear about the other ones. It just made my already cluttered news feed even more cluttered and full of useless right wing screeches. I think this might’ve been more valuable in the 90s and 2000s when things weren’t so polarized, but these days, it just feels like you’re reading the mythologies of a religion you don’t believe in.
This idea that you can get a more balanced view of things by looking at a broad range of news sources just doesn’t work when most of them are part of dying conglomerates anyway or extremist clickbait. It’s like trying to eat a balanced diet when you’re limited to the Nabisco aisle. The news sources themselves, plus the people they’re usually reporting on, and mostly not anchored to reality. Mostly you just walk away with a reinforced “yep, we’re fucked” view every time you use the app.
Both groundnews and allsides had poor/limited topic customization (the ability to choose what topics I want to hear about, and more importantly, don’t want to hear about). That’s the one thing I actually wanted out of a news aggregator. Old Google News used to do it well, but they changed it to be more spamvertising a few years back.
I have not found a good replacement yet. Groundnews wasn’t it.
I just occasionally skim the AP headlines these days. It’s like 90% Trump this or AI that, not really worth keeping up to any great degree. AP themselves are cutting newspaper reporting, buying out their reporters’ jobs, and moving to more video.
They make a big deal of rating various sources to provide “balance”. Meh. I don’t find that useful. However I do enjoy their article selection. They provide news stories I don’t see on any of my other feeds. It is nice to find a place that isn’t so US centric. Though that is hard to find right now since the US is dominating the global news so much.
It reminded me of the 1440 site, in that the news was so bland, it wasn’t interesting any more.