HACKER Q&A
📣 metadat

Any viable alternatives to Google News?


I hate how unclear the degree of echo chamber is with Google News. It also keeps showing me the same articles for days or weeks after I've already seen and read them.

Are ther any real contenders out there? Ideally it'd aggregate all news across the globe and let me browse by region, perhaps with automatic translation for non-english articles.

The idea of a global, non country-centric front page is highly appealing to me (I want to deprogram myself from the western slant, it possible).


  👤 assttoasstmgr Accepted Answer ✓
I quit using the totally-not-biased Google News over 5 years ago when nearly all top headlines were consistently sourced from The Huffington Post. This was logged-out by the way.

For the uninitiated, it is a glorified opinion blog. Don't take my word for it; to quote Wikipedia, "HuffPost is an American news aggregator and blog... created to provide a liberal alternative to the conservative news websites such as the Drudge Report."[1]

I place them one step above BuzzFeed, which pumps out quality hard-hitting journalism such as "Quiz: How Much Random Vagina Knowledge Do You Have?"[2]

Don't worry, "articles were randomly chosen by a computer program". That's when I realized that Google News was programmed to be an echo chamber, otherwise such biased unverified opinion wouldn't consistently bubble up to the top and masquerade as "news".

I use Bing News[3] now. It's not perfect, the signal-to-noise has gotten slightly worse over time but at least it's sourced from legit news outlets.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HuffPost

[2] https://www.buzzfeed.com/audreyworboys/how-well-do-you-know-...

[3] https://www.bing.com/news


👤 PaulHoule
I think of that song by the Talking Heads Psycho Killer that has the line "Say something once, why say it again?" which sometimes seems like the most sensible thing anyone has every said.

That is, a "news" application should work a bit like Tinder. News articles should slide through and be either accepted or rejected: you should never see the same article twice in the "new" feed.

This counts for sites like HN and reddit too.


👤 fgcoppola
Doesn't have as much content as Google News but I just discovered https://newsasfacts.com/ and it's exactly what I wanted in a news site.

👤 wolpoli
You could also consider building your own by adding various RSS feeds into your own RSS aggregator software/service and using that as your front page.

👤 unraveller
Have you tried searching "news" into a.. search engine? Once you do you can press the "news" tab. It gives up to the minute news feed from the best web scrapers in the business.

https://search.brave.com/news?q=news

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=news&iar=news&ia=news

https://github.com/iorate/uBlacklist


👤 gnicholas
If you're looking to avoid the western slant, you could check out Rest Of World: https://restofworld.org/

👤 dingosity
I'm a fan of https://www.aljazeera.com/. It's free, reasonably unbiased (though not completely) and isn't afraid to be constructively critical of western governments. You won't get critical news about the Emirates; I guess some topics are off-limits.

👤 jarenmf
Brave just released brave news but it seems very passive, there aren't many options to tune it to your liking.

👤 sacrosanct
Sumi.news is handy. The default is quite lengthy but you can customise it https://sumi.news/

👤 richardsocher
At you.com we think it's important you can choose your news sources so our news section and apps let you that via you.com/apps eg https://you.com/search?q=news&fromExtension=true

👤 freedude
One single site will always have the echo chamber problem. In order to better understand the complex issues facing our country I have attempted to find alternative viewpoints.

The key to obtaining value from any reporting organization is realizing there are many viewpoints and the one from which I see the world is incomplete at best. Thus why I am looking at the news and avoid echo chambers.

Some worth checking...

https://summit.news/ https://www.zerohedge.com/ https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/ https://themostimportantnews.com/ https://jonathanturley.org/ https://brownstone.org/ https://winepressnews.com/what-is-the-winepress/


👤 lizardactivist
I mean, do read the western outlets too, and when they accuse all the other outlets of being "propaganda" just ignore it and read anyway. Now you have multiple opinions on topics and subjects, and can decide where you want to stand.

rt, cnn, south china morning post, telesur, spiegel, etc.


👤 galfarragem
Native brave browser news[0] is a good option. It appears as a feed, you can easily choose your sources or even add RSS sources if you want.

[0] https://brave.com/brave-news/


👤 marpstar
I’ve been using https://brutalist.report/ to keep up with general headlines.


👤 rasengan0

👤 CaptRon
Facebook has a news tab too. https://www.facebook.com/news/learn-more