Kite News

UX is nice enough but suffers from same curation (center-right leaning, tech industry-directed) that makes anything like this fundamentally pointless in the long term. Designed to keep readers within the acceptable window of mainstream media that manufactures consent for war, genocide, income inequality, and other suffering at home and abroad. For example: this site taught me that there is only one (unnamed) sticking point on the Gaza ceasefire agreement! Gee, I bet it’s really going to happen this time. Also to offer an Israel section at all, let alone without a corresponding Palestine section, is dubious.

That is indeed a problem and an unsolvable one. All major news sources are in the business of manufacturing consent. They're not trying to manufacture the exact same consent, but mash them together... you get a general direction, not unlike the ones we see at cattle ranches.

But those news are still useful. There is still real information coming from it, and of better quality than all those alternative channels (which are in the business of, I guess we could call, "disrupting consent", but often with shadowy interests).

What I think one must do is to get good at separating the wheat (facts) from the chaff (analysis). The "chaff" part can be rejected completely, but I find it interesting to analyze it. This sometimes allows one to derive an intent behind the consent manufacturing process.

That being said, even though the information that it mashes together is flawed, I find that there's good value in this new Kite thing. Removing the attention stealing part of news, however flawed these are, is still a great service.

tl;dr: It sounds like we agree that the UX is good but the aggregation is bad.

To call the problem unsolvable is dismissive and makes the whole endeavor of aggregating news pointless.

The mainstream sources are in fact manufacturing the exact same consent by defining the acceptable polarity of discourse on any given topic. There are plenty of non-major news sources that offer a different perspective from the mainstream but aren’t fringe in any sense. Someone as plain as Amy Goodman comes to mind. By ignoring them all and saying the mainstream sources are of “better quality” leaves me curious to know which alternative sources are on your radar as well as your overall satisfaction with the news presented on the site.

The problem with this site specifically is it is not mashing everything together to get a general direction. It curates a specific set of sources to provide a center-right direction while explicitly ignoring the left of center POV.

Let’s assume this takes off and people find it an easily digestible way to read the news. Readers trust the product and decide that if they want to learn more about a story they can click the source links, since those must also be trustworthy. And by extension, alternative sources may not be trustworthy. Based on what you’re saying I think we both agree that these are bad conclusions, since mainstream sources routinely lie or create narratives that allow for war, death, antisemitism, Islamophobia, etc., while alternative outlets may have heavily sourced, deeply detailed reporting that wouldn’t get picked up by major press. Facts presented in a story from either type of outlet may be doctored in many ways for any number of purposes, so it’s not so simple to say a number or a survey result or anything else is “wheat”, or that any analysis is “chaff”.