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Comment by _jal | Hacker News Reader

Newspapers used to serve the function of establishing a shared set of knowledge about the world to readers. There was a limited range of options, depending on where you were - usually a couple local papers and a couple national ones.

Personalized news feeds destroy that commonality. Undoubtedly, those limited options were (and are) biased, and more solid information is available today. But that commonality had a value independent of conveying information.

Aside from all of that, I don't want news sources trying to predict what I want to read, because a major aspect of my news reading is looking at how various sources are spinning things. I read a lot of material I disagree with. "Services" that try to guess how I prefer to be gaslit are counterproductive.

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> Personalized news feeds destroy that commonality.

The web and partisan cable news channels have long since done away with that commonality. It's dead, buried, and cold in the ground. That's why it feels like one side of the political spectrum is living in the world of Fox News, Newsmax, OANN, and so on, while the other side is living in the world of CNN, MSNBC, Huffington, Vox, and so on.

There are some very good attempts [0] to make media bias more visible, but people who have already decided that Fox and Newsmax are centrist and OANN is right-leaning are not going to evaluate things fairly anymore.

[0]: https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-chart

I find that site too simplistic, since it does not try to gauge accuracy, only bias.

The Adfontes Media Bias chart uses a two-axis system, plotting accuracy against bias, and inevitably ending up with most sources on an inverted-V shape: https://adfontesmedia.com

The Adfontes chart is clever, but I always thought it must be distorted in and of itself -- they seem afraid to label any right-leaning source as "fact reporting", and any left-leaning source as "contains misleading info". The split is very visible in their article rankings[0]. What I trust most is Pew Research's (they are fairly centrist [1]) examination of the partisanship of a news outlet's audience, see: https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2020/01/24/democrats-... (note that there are several pages. I've linked to page 2.)

Unfortunately, Pew's list is not consistently updated like the Adfontes chart and other media-bias checking sites.

[0]: https://adfontesmedia.com/interactive-media-bias-chart/

[1]: https://www.allsides.com/news-source/pew-research

I recently discovered https://ground.news/ which has a nice display of left/right coverage for each news article.

I have friends across the political spectrum, but these days there is no shared commonality at all. Not just no commonality about what's good and bad, but no commonality about what is reality and what isn't. I can't even chit-chat small-talk with my conservative friends about current events anymore, because their idea of what is happening around the world is totally different than mine. I'll bring up some recent event that was reported on widely in the mainstream media, and he'll have no idea what I'm talking about because his sources of news never even mentioned it. And to his point of view, talking to me just shows I have a different set of gaping "reality blind spots".

If you ever had a friend growing up whose family was devoutly religious, you might have seen something similar: They run in totally different circles, all their friends are from their church, they take their kids to totally different movies, listen to totally different music. Can't talk sports with them because they literally can't name a football team. No culture overlap at all. Totally siloed off in their own world. That's what's happening with all this personalization and alternative news sources now, but instead of a small group of very religious people, it's 30-40% of the country!

Strongly agree. Local newspapers contain “common myths” that underpin society: a local shared understanding of the world, where the technical veracity of that understanding is secondary to its promulgation. That is being lost by hyperpersonalisation at the cost of community bonding. If you think that’s a good thing, consider whether you trust (or even know) your neighbours.

The tragedy of the commons is that nobody cares about the maintenance of the common good: I posit that the common good ought to include shared myths. Historically, this meant shared worldview and religion. Today, we are challenged to find other bases for trust in one another.

This is the issue. If you are already down a rabbit hole of beliefs you are going to keep seeing articles from news services biased towards your way of thinking. Things that continue to constantly confirm how you feel about the world.

In an ideal world news organizations would just provide both sides of a side, but unfortunately in todays world news agencies seem incredibly polarized and twist stories to suite their agendas. This now makes personalized news feeds even more scary and further contributes to the kind of polarization we see happening now. People seem more divided then ever in the last 20-30 years.

I am not sure what time frame you're thinking of, but in my home country for most of the last centuries there were plenty of newspapers, often expounding news with a strong political bias, i.e. partys had their own newspaper.

Personalized news feed are making this worse, but it's not a new thing.

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