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Comment by Macha | Hacker News Reader

I will miss some of the Ukraine news as twitter was good for that, but that's about it for me at this point.

Yes, I was going back to Twitter for some days to follow updates on the Prigozhin road trip last week. But the quality of the news had noticeably deteriorated compared to the past, as Twitter's algorithm now promotes blue checks above everything else, so you now get updates from such notable experts on the Ukraine (as well as, I bet, many other topics) as David Sacks, Mario Nawfal, and Kim Dotcom.

Upon reading the last sentence of your post, I almost reflexively downvoted you before I caught myself. My god, what a hellscape.

Most of the news, images, and video originates from Telegram. Even if you don't want an account you can view channels without logging in... For example: https://t.me/s/pilotblog, but there are usually t.me watermarks on videos so you can find plenty of others.

As someone who’s been consuming a lot on Twitter and Reddit, can you recommend a decent set of telegram channels that I could follow to stay up to date?

Not really, since I try to not follow it too closely for my own sanity's sake. The channel I mentioned is Denys Davydov, a Ukrainian who also has his own Youtube channel where he posts updates.

If you want the most up to date stuff you would probably have to follow some Russian and Ukranian channels, Telegram has built in Google translate to make that slightly easier. Reddit is probably a good place to start to find some.

I follow Davydov on YouTube, but I tend to avoid most of the telegram channels that a lot of YouTube people suggest because they tend to use it as a place where they can share combat and violent footage that YouTube doesn't allow.

While I'm interested in following the war, I don't have a desire to watch combat footage so I've been a little hesitant to jump into his telegram channel.

I kinda get the sense that it's probably not super easy to find a telegram channel that doesn't post war footage.

Here's a Mastodon server that mirrors many Ukraine-related Twitter accounts: https://fed.celp.de/@uanews

(Who knows how long it will keep working, of course.)

Doesn't seem very neutral.

I don't understand. Are you saying you want an aggregator that does 50/50 Ukrainian and russian tweets?

Imagine asking for 50% Allied / 50% Axis news.

No no, you don't understand, the war was started by Poland! They attacked Germany in the Gleiwitz incident, you have to get unbiased news from both sides to properly assess the situation and stay truly neutral and enlightened.

Imagine thinking the Allies didn't also use dishonest propaganda during WWII.

So? Neither am I.

Most English-language content about the Ukranian war is slanted in favor of Ukraine. This is partially because of the relevant military alliances (Europe and the USA support Ukraine) but much more because Russians are the aggressor here. War isn't clean or simple, but there are clearly good and bad guys in this one. The Russian justifications for the war are 100% pretextual and invalid, just like they were in 2014.

I'm not sure why anyone wants "neutrality" to mean 50/50 airtime, instead of attempting to present the best available picture of the world, even if it's not favorable to one side.

It has stopped working. It was using nitter.

It's also not a great list. Igor Sushko, for example, is very susceptible to posting unverified things that later turn out to be false.

A much better list is Noah Smith's at: https://twitter.com/i/lists/1492242776825552896. Yes, you now need to log in to see it, unfortunately.

Public Twitter lists seem like the sort of thing that's quite scrape-able though, even behind a login wall. With sufficient caching & semi-randomised access it should be fairly hard to detect which account is doing the scraping.

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