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Sources should really be evaluated on a multi-dimensional axis:

- Factuality (low -> high)

- Partisanship (low -> high)

- Political orientation: social issues (left -> right)

- Political orientation: economic issues (left -> right)

- Political orientation: foreign policy (left -> right)

etc.

Sources like NPR are decisively not centrist w.r.t social issues and partisanship. There has been a distinct change in their reporting over the last ~decade.

(also, I'm aware the left-right scale is very lacking. Economics itself has so many dimensions that left/right is meaningless there.)



It'd be nice, but I can't see it being effective at changing broad consumer behavior. Giving people more information to make a choice doesn't do much value when they're already making poor choices based on the already existing information.

Put another way, I wish we had the nuanced shit to sift through where some nice multi-dimensional analysis could save the day. But the issue is people are consuming shit that is demonstrably shit from the first whiff/taste. I can't see how having some pretty vectors to showing them where their shit lives in shitspace is going to be helpful.


I don't think anyone could (or even necessarily should) design a service like this for the masses. (Designing anything with the masses in mind is probably a way to end up with a mediocre product regardless, but I digress.) This would be more for people like us and the typical HN crowd: interested in truth and nuance for the sake of knowing the world accurately.

The problem with people consuming low-information, rage-baiting, distorted, highly-partisan slop masquerading as news is a problem I don't have the first idea on solving. The issue isn't even with the existence of the shit itself: that sort of content has always and will always exist, regardless. The issue is with (i) the volume of people consuming and accepting it, and more importantly, (ii) how much influence that garbage has on the national discourse and policy. For example, Musk consumes that sort of content and then feeds it into Grok (hello, MechaHitler), which then propagates to elected officials and the electorate and has real-world consequences in policy.




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