2024 is going to be something else. One feature I’ve had in the back of my mind for a while is a news section in Micro.blog curated by a journalist. We just aren’t big enough to hire anyone for this. Maybe volunteers? No algorithms, no misinformation.
@manton hiring a full time role would be a big deal yeah; but are you big enough to hire a freelancer for a day/week, something like that?
@manton are you prepared for micro to be labelled biased towards one political view sooner or later? Coz that will happen. In 2024 you will not remain “unbiased”.
@manton If I'm being honest, I don't feel like a news section fits on Micro.blog. The emphasis is on inter-personal sharing and conversation. As we enter what will undoubtedly be an extremely polarizing year, it will be nice to have a place on the web that doesn't put headlines front and center. There are plenty of other places to get news. I value your desire to make a news site without misinformation though. But that could also become difficult; some things are more easily fact-checked than others. My two cents.
@manton I don’t know. There’s not a shortage of new sources out there for those who want that and you might be opening yourself up to a lot of controversy. Not least over what would be labeled misinformation.
@manton Love the idea! Maybe you could partner with some org already doing that work, happy to distribute their fact-checking expertise? Ground? All Sides? Snopes? A nonprofit I don’t know of?
@manton My $0.02 — I would not be excited by this. However, I'm also more interested in further improvements to the blogging aspects of micro.blog more than the timeline. News doesn't need more venues.
@jthingelstad Good feedback. The blogging part will always be our priority. Mostly I’m wondering about how so many people get their news from retweets and the impact of that.
@jabel True. Might not be a good idea which is kind I’m why I’m thinking out loud about it. Or maybe, it’s a good idea but only if done right, which is very hard.
@manton Wikipedia’s “In the news” section is really cool for this. Plain headlines on big stuff that happened recently. A quicker source for similar things would be great.
@manton I like that you’re thinking about other ways to resist society’s reliance on algorithms, but I would steer clear of the idea altogether.
It risks transforming your service from a place of personal experiences and stories into one of politics and (perhaps angry) debate, plus you’d need to think about the inherent (and perceived) bias of the news that is being delivered and the person who is curating it. I see it as the same issue as when Facebook went from the timeline to the news feed—it was never the same. Even if you do you select an appropriate person, can you expect them to look reliably beyond their own preferences to include diverse (or even competing) reports?
There’s also the question of whether you could offer enough international and foreign-language content, beyond American stories.
@manton Hi, if you want to do some i18n stuff someday in the future. I hope I could help do something for free, I'm from China. No other reasons, just because I like micro.blog, and I learned a lot from the book.micro.blog, thank you first, :)
@martinfeld All good points, especially international news. Might be too much of an influence on what people blogged about.
@manton Thanks for reading my reply! Didn’t want to rain on the parade but I also love what you do with this service and would hate to see you take on unnecessary stress. 🙂
@manton I would like to see a news based social network but I don't think it fits in with Micro.blog.
@manton FWIW, I'm not enthused by the idea, partially because one of the things I value about micro.blog is that, while news floats by here, I hear far more about what's happening in people's lives, and I value the "touch grass" aspect of that.
That said, if you do decided to go ahead, and I can help out in any way as a former journalist and current journalism lecturer, I'm happy to volunteer some time — and possibly some time from students, if that would be useful.
@manton Not a perfect fit, in my opinion.
And <rant>, considering some part of the news, the breaking part, is time sensitive, maybe fixing the broken pipes would be a great first step. Getting the 8AM news at noon kinda defeats the purpose. </rant>
@manton I quite like that, by and large, this corner of the internet is a lovely break from ‘the real world’. I mute and block elsewhere and like that I don’t have to do that here to avoid certain subjects.
@manton I would advise against. This is just a personal opinion. Looking in from the outside, my feeling is that the core micro.blog platform does not work as well as it used to. My guess is that the rapid changes in the Fediverse are causing issues here and there. I understand how tough it is sometimes running a small business but rightly or wrongly, it seems like the core platform needs your focus at the moment. The social side of micro.blog for me is finding and interacting with people I’d be happy to meet up with for a coffee and chat. I get my news elsewhere.
@manton was thinking about this overnight-- one way to approach this might be to allow any (or paying) users to create and share Discover-style curated collections of posts, around any topic, theme, or mood. Give people the tools to create a "news" section, and maybe someone will?
@manton I see a lot of sentiment to keep news out of the timeline here. As someone who's been fairly critical of the Discover timeline and search it occured to me after reading your musing that another aspect of my own discontent with the public facing micro.blog timeline is that it feels unreal. Almost like the early versions of The Matrix, too pleasant, too nice. The curated Discover feed is overwhelmingly fluffy and pillowy: pets, food, travel photos, scenery, etc. Another, harder description would be fake, bland, overly protective, and biased towards priviledged life. There's a whole world going on and it's not all ice cream, coffee and snuggles.
I've said before I love the features of micro.blog as a federated ActivityPub blog host. But I've not been able to find "my people" here or feel connected to this timeline because the people that post on topics I might find interesting are curated out of my view. But I do think that by cutting out the option for a full feed and only offering the heavily currated Rated G Discover feed you're presenting a lopsided, unreal world. Not really misinformation but also not reality.
Personally that means I just use the Timeline far less. I know that by design it is very unlikely to find my interests. On a level, I certainly understand the choice but I do think it reflects the bias of living in a walled off, priviledged world.
@manton apparently a LOT of people are getting their news through Facebook and I find this minblowing considering that people can visit news sites independently without the news for Facebook to control the "feed". I wish Micro.blog stays out of this type of service. You could build a directory of news sources and make them available for a subscription so that they appear in my timeline but this is the most that you should do.
@manton I second everything @martinfeld said. Maybe an opportunity for a separate app or service on top of Micro.blog if it’s a scratch you need to itch, rather than part of the core experience. If that even works for the idea you’re kicking around.
@manton I can't say it better than @martinfeld already has. I came to Micro.blog specifically because it wasn't the endless battleground of negativity that can be found literally anywhere else.
@rossk This is really interesting and reminds me a little of Bluesky's custom feeds, which I think have been successful over there.
@Denny Hmm, did I design Micro.blog this way because I already live in a privileged world, or is Micro.blog the walled off world that I built to escape every other social network in the real world? 😉 On a serious note, I think the solution to what you're asking for is to have more recommendations of people to follow in the larger fediverse. We could even curate people based on topics. I feel strongly that a full firehouse is never the answer unless you want to read spam all day.
@manton I’d like to respectfully ask that you do not include this feature. There are already plenty of places to go and find the news - and not only online. Micro.blog feels to me more like personal interactions. The news might come up in those interactions, but it is not front and center.
After the recent disagreement that took place here, with a couple of people now having left the platform, my fear would be that the news being present on Micro.blog could act as a catalyst for further outrage.
Let’s concentrate on the blogging and associated features. Doing them well.
After the recent disagreement that took place here, with a couple of people now having left the platform.
Who left?
@manton I'm sure you have read all the discussion points. I echo the community's concerns. I would say NO to news section.
I'll echo most people here to say that an official News section doesn't sound like the best idea.
More broadly, why focus just on the news? A feature to let any user curate posts and/or other users would be interesting. I can see how counting up the number of times a post has been selected for curation could lean towards being a "like", but those numbers shouldn't be public.
I love posts like this where I can find a bunch of new people to follow whom I'd rarely see in the Discovery feed. But having a good search function would be even better.
@manton Your reply here did not show up in my mentions - both on the web & iOS app. I only noticed it when I clicked on the conversation that it was a part of.
@crossingthethreshold Sorry to hear that. I didn’t intend for them to quit. I was communicating with Jason last night and thought we decided to agree to disagree. Robert, though, was trying to kick me off.
@manton I would prefer no news section, for the many good reasons already mentioned in this thread. On a couple of personal notes, micro.blog is the only social site I participate in because it does create space for more restorative social interactions than the endless shouting everywhere else. I love my work, which is human-services related, but it's emotionally intense and you see a lot that is very sad. I really appreciate hearing about people's lives in non-emergency situations. I worry that a news section would drown that quieter place out. To me this is an online place that gives me some of the respite I need. I can't think of another online place quite like it.
@annahavron Thank you. That's really good to hear. I don't want to do anything that takes away from that aspect of Micro.blog.
@manton My main concern with this is "news" would probably end up really being "US news" and this would be unappealing and maybe a little unwelcoming for users from other countries.
@manton I don't have a strong prior for or against; I suspect maybe there might be more micro blog users who would want it but aren't chiming in since the balance of responses is decided against. But the suggestion from @Annie provokes an idea for you and the time to incubate on: if there were a way to save custom searches for the kinds of news we want, then each user could in effect have one or several dedicated news feeds. I for one would love to have one, e.g., that gives me what folks on MB are linking to on a handful of themes (sports, US politics, music).
I don't know how that works on the backend. But a saved search of "(Links categorized A, B, and C; Links from domains D, E, but not F), that I can pop into and out of as I'm catching up on things.
I should stress given how many other things you all are working on, this is probably very low priority. I'm ok with that and just spitballing ideas.
@manton Cheers! Also, something I don't say often enough: I love MB and appreciate all the work that goes into it. Thanks for cultivating something really good.
@maique @wfm Thirded, I also see the stability and reliability of the platform has taken a bit of a hit lately (both for myself and others). Apart from the new feature/app being released on the horizon, perhaps it's time for a Micro.blog "Snow Leopard" version that strictly focuses on the core. I too wonder if ActivityPub is having an impact, since it's well known for being a very chatty and network-heavy platform.
@manton @odd @wfm @maique Yeah, this loose analogy was sadly the best I could come up with. My general point behind it was to echo the seemingly overwhelming majority of the thread: news would be a step back, IMO. Especially when there are much more important things that contribute to the stability, functionality, and ethos of the platform.
@abc @manton stepping in here towards the end of the discussion, but for me I came for the blogging, the bloggers and the small independent team that is MB. I’m not sure the idea would fit, and I agree with many that have said that there is plenty of others places on the internet to get whatever you want. Not all platforms have to proved everything for everybody. And in fact, the limited (even somewhat filtered) view (as in database) on the internet is its advantage. This is a nice place to dip in now and again, helping restore faith in humanity, risking that for more eyes would be a shame. My 2c.
@manton Do we have a 'news' emoji already? As a way to filter / view only news-related posts that people already make? Would this parallel the 'Discover' section that is also hand-picked?
@herself We don't really have a news emoji, but there probably should be something like that. I didn't really explain what I had in mind with news headlines as a distinct feature… Yeah, it would be more like a parallel to Discover. If we ever do that (probably won't!) it would need a bunch of special support.
@manton I reckon that could work :) -- especially if there was then a way for our news-allergic colleagues (probably including me, haha) to filter out news-flagged items!
