One person's fake news is another person's entertainment. The problem is not a technical issue. It is a cultural issue. ML cannot solve a cultural issue.
Google News seems to have something in place with the "Interested in? / Not interested" underneath some story abstracts.
The Information is an unpopular, I think even blacklisted, news source here due to their paywall. But they do a really great job writing a very terse and high signal two-sentence takeaway for each article. I'm not a subscriber anymore (too pricy IMO), but here are some recent examples:
Surge-Price Builder Leaves Uber By Amir Efrati · Monday Oct 17, 2016
> THE TAKEAWAY: One of Uber’s secret weapons in recent years was an economics professor, Keith Chen. He overhauled Uber’s surge-price algorithm and made other key contributions that helped riders, and Uber, save money.
How Dropbox Doubled Down on Business Market By Steve Nellis · Thursday Sep 15, 2016
> THE TAKEAWAY: Dropbox founder Drew Houston has come to terms with the fact that his company probably isn’t the next consumer tech giant like Facebook or Google. That was reflected in a decision halfway through last year to sharpen the company’s focus on the business market, including shutting off consumer-focused apps like Carousel.
I would love to have that for all tech news.
There are ML systems out there for summarization. I wonder how long until the systems are good enough to provide this as well. The examples I've seen (e.g., Summly, which uses SRI tech, IIRC), are likely good enough if you just want the facts. I still want it to be well-written.
Ouch. I just checked out the subscription rates for The Information. AFAICT, you can't even see the rates without supplying your name and email address. :/
Edit to add: From other sources on the internet, it looks like subscription rates are $399/year.
I do remember the rates being hard to find as well: $39/month or $399/annual [1]. They do offer you half-price initially etc for a few months.
I suppose what I meant is technically not microtransactions (mostly just used in the context of in-app purchases) but micropayments [1]. I've added ko-fi [2] to my personal site but no one has actually done it yet.
they rewrite all the headlines to get rid of clickbait nonsense and actually save you the click in some cases if their summary is enough.