To be honest, when people start talking about "echo chambers" it's usually because they are upset that I won't listen to bigoted alt-right hate.
For me this term has gained a really negative connotation. I understand the problem but hearing the same tired ranty talking points repeated is not helping my state of mind. If that means I am in an "echo chamber", so be it. Alternative viewpoints, fine, when there is something to build on. But there are limits. When differences in opinion are too extreme debating them is only causing agitation and polarisation, in my experience.
I understand the point but I wouldn't use the term "echo chamber" anymore.
I like this service by the way. I've been thinking of making something myself by using an AI to filter news feeds by the topics I'd be interested in. Edit: Just found out it is very configurable, that's great! My original point was that the default is very US centric in its news choice but this can be simply modified.
Sometimes those external viewpoints are extreme, and your instinct might be to ignore them. But I would rather know that they exist and what they are, than to completely isolate myself from them. Isolation only leads to worsening of the effects caused by echo chambers (us vs. them mentality, resentment, hatred, etc.). The antidote is awareness, which eventually could lead to communication, which eventually could lead to acceptance and tolerance, which eventually could lead to Kumbaya and a happier place to live for everyone.
To be honest, I'm nowhere near this acceptance path as I would like to be. But I think it's the only solution to the divisiveness and tribalism that has been part of humanity since the beginning. Part of me is hopeful that we will eventually overcome this nature and learn to coexist peacefully. Tragically, the technology we've built that was meant to bring us together, has only driven us further apart.
Anyway, this is a great initiative by Kagi. 100% spot on about the problems, and the approach seems reasonable. I've been meaning to start consuming news from ground.news as well, which is another attempt at fixing these issues. Best of luck to them both.
'Go find your own news/views/facts! The mainstream is bad! The echo chambers: oh no!'
I definitely want a massive diversity of views and opinions. But I'm severely anti-interested in people crusading against consensual reality, anyone who seems to dance around truth. So many alternate views obscure reality.
It's not scalable to go assess all points of view (as how RFK proposed for how individuals should approach medicine). There aren't feedback measures broad enough to delve into whether these are true realities or fabricated ones. There aren't signals abundant enough, we don't share broadly as a public or have trusted agents to help us navigate truth from untruth if we wander broadly. I'd like to see more accountability, more ways of the public registering its own back reaction, its own trust or distrust responses, that anyone can check out
There's so much villainy, so much preying upon people's attention, ruling them up. And telling people that truth is a lie, that the main story is false, that there's a secret truth out there: it's an incredible lure that hooks so many in, and that ability to lie and fabricate is breaking civilization, and breaking people's hearts and minds. The people spinning these bespoke alternate realities are one of the top threats to civilization & order & reason & our decency today.
However, this tool doesn't let you ask questions or dig deeper into the context, it's mostly summaries and headlines. Asking questions is actually one of the best ways to avoid echo chambers. But then again, whoever controls the model controls the narrative. That's exactly why Google and Microsoft have poured billions into this tech. Without Microsoft's infra (and "the Gates demo"), ChatGPT probably wouldn't even exist, or it'd just be another research project.
The only downside I see in trying to improve news is that news conglomerates often sue developers or big tech companies. Google, for example, was sued over its Google News operations.
Funny, I think usually see it in the context of people who are upset that people are stuck listening to what they perceive as bigoted alt-right hate.
> Alternative viewpoints, fine. But there are limits
I've found that, in my Twitter feed curation anyways, I like having people around who I agree with on some things but disagree on other things. Or, I need to have some kind of a personal connection to them. Either way, there needs to be something to bridge who I am now to the stuff I disagree with. If it's not there then the stuff I disagree with will never make sense or land, and hanging around it will either turn me off even more or just stress me out, like you're saying.
I think that's a fair way to strike the balance.
Maybe you're in an echo chamber when it comes to echo chambers then? I usually hear the term related to social media algorithms, and usually implied is that we're all being chambered, left, right or otherwise.
For example, I live in Boston and very liberal. I did not grow up in this area though, and I have noticed that among some of my friends that have... they have zero idea what most of this country is actually like. Even just other more moderate liberal people that don't have the "luxury" of living in a big city that largely shields us. Something that I feel like we saw in particular during the last election.
I totally get not caring about, and not wanting to see, the alt-right hate. I don't want to be constantly reminded that people hate me just for existing.
I am not sure what an alterative word for this is, and I think it goes farther than just trying to tune out the alt-right hate.
The idea that a city is comprised of human beings, just living closer together, really doesn’t compute for some people for some reason.
I think everyone would be better off trying to understand how others live.
It's refreshing to see that the Kagi founder isn't on a political correctness crusade and chooses to focus on product.
How do you get more centrist and status quo than freaking joe biden, hillary clinton and kamala harris? Name one "extreme" position they held.
This is also an echo chamber
[0] https://www.joshbarro.com/p/bluesky-isnt-a-bubble-its-a-cont...
Good observation! Just like people who talk about peace treaties or cease fires are always enemy agents trying to weaken our resolve. But they can't fool you and me, we're smarter than that.
Just to pick one easy example, the confederate states of america employed agents to advocate for peace treaties and cease fires during the civil war. By all reasonable classifications, they were "enemy agents trying to weaken our resolve".
Would some people have benefitted from a peace treaty? Of course. Would everyone have benefitted equally? Obviously not.
All I can say is America and its region of influence is in its own set of echo chambers
This doesn't sound it would accomplish much. You're essentially starting a euphemism treadmill. Start calling it a foo, right-wingers will start complaining that everything is a foo.
The solution is learning (and teaching others) that if a term is co-opted by a group who abuse it for their own goals, that doesn't retroactively change the intended meaning when the term is used by other groups in good faith. It's obvious what Kagi meant here, and that's all that should matter.
I won't be friends with assholes, but, for some reason, there's this sort of expectation to humor crazy people. I'd rather just call you crazy and move on. Bonus points if we don't interact in the first place.
Probably not "upset", per se. Most likely frustrated that you bother weighing in on topics for which you maintain a deliberately narrow view.
Agreed, though they aren't necessarily using that term in recent years. Nowadays they tend to use terms that evoke "echo chamber" without actually saying it, like "woke mind virus" and "groupthink". And while I agree with some of the other comments that "echo chamber" has since been more used to refer to algorithms, this might be a result of being on Hacker News, which is an echo chamber in itself. I do have a somewhat instinctual aversion to the term "echo chamber" though given its prolific use as a thought-terminating cliche.
/s
> As always, Democrats tried to demonize spending reductions as attacks on the poor, though any voter who looks at what the bill actually says will find commonsense reforms
> the BBB helps families tremendously
> Democrats have spent a decade praying Trump would shatter the Republican coalition, but instead he’s strengthened it, clarifying the party’s aims and defying the fringes.
> He listens to libertarians and family-policy engineers, but he wouldn’t allow narrow concerns to veto a bill that protects the border and lowers taxes for essentially everyone.
Glad I got a perfectly well-balanced look at the pros and cons of this piece of legislation.
I don't think a service like this is impossible, but it cannot be done with LLMs. They are the worst possible tool for news, all they can do is generate text that looks like legitimate news but is inevitably wrong. Again, please don't do this. Think about the massive amount of lies you will spread if this gains a large user base. I've been a subscriber for years, but I will cancel my subscription in a few days if you don't do anything about this. I can't let you use my money to create this societal catastrophe.
Edit: I see there is a GitHub issue raising the same problems, hopefully you can respond there with what you're doing about this: https://github.com/kagisearch/kite-public/issues/97
One thing that would be interesting to explore would be a feed that integrated over a longer timeframe. For example, I subscribe to the guardian weekly, and I like it much more than the daily homepage. News that survives a week tends to be more newsworthy, and there's more scope for the beginnings of retrospective analysis. It would be interesting to be able to play with that timeframe - what does a 3 day window look like, or a 1 month one?
I'm a happy subscriber to Tangle News, and its founder has spent a lot of time about about how he wants to bridge ideological divides in a way that echoes "We strive for diversity and transparency of resources and welcome your contributions to widen perspectives." He talks about looking for language to avoid those divides: where one side might speak of illegal aliens and other side might speak of undocumented immigrants, Tangle picked the term unauthorized migrants.
He did a little TED talk about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=543mYKKh1EE
Anyways, just curious how you'll approach this issue. I'm interested in your project and wish you all the best!
Keep up the good work!
First, it's a great idea! The "introductory" speech is interesting then... the result is really disappointing :-(
You see: I'm French (and European). So, I don't necessarily consider that "Trump" is the center of the "World" (actually quite the opposite). However, on the "World" tab, 50% of the news are about "Trump". I would have thought that the aim of this kind of newsfeed is to challenge Trump tactic's of "newsroom saturation". In particular in that tab (Trump can be the alpha & omega for the USA tab)
(P.S. been paying for Kagi search since January, very happy with it)
You can use the website and even make it a web app if you want. We’ll be releasing a mobile version that will be better suited but will have the same features :)
Although it would be great to know if some money goes back to the original sources...
> The world is simmering gently, marked by active regional conflicts, deadly protests, and a severe flood, yet tempered by budding Gaza ceasefire talks and cooperative diplomatic meetings.
> While trade disputes and political probes contribute to tension, no large-scale escalations or catastrophic events push the situation beyond the usual range of global unrest.
I wonder how this is calculated and what would push the meter from normal over elevated to serious/extreme.
Financial: can't pay with Monero or cash, can't just buy Privacy Pass tokens instead of generating them from my account. Usability: can't access other features than Search with Privacy Pass, looking for a location doesn't pop a Maps widget, missing useful/cool search widgets from google and ddg (coinflip, rng, minigames, weather), bad Tor Browser integration (requires installing an add-on), bad/missing Mastodon search
But resources are being funneled towards replacing Google the company/stack instead of Google the search engine/app, so it begs the question if search is still really the top priority or not
Maybe a site like this should try to root-out the "root source" of information - official press releases or press conferences, eye-witness accounts.
I think some editorializing is worthwhile to place things in context and to decide what information to put together into a readable article, but things could be more explicit and should always link to the source material.
I'd personally pay for that. It feels like 90% of the "news" I see these days is just some site telephoning what a different reporter said. I regularly see "study finds x" articles that completely bury the original academic source. Often, "politician said x" articles that spend a lot of time going over everyone's reactions to whatever the politician said without letting me have the full video or press release where he actually said it.
This would also fix an issue I'm seeing on Kite where some stories seem to be the same thing from different angles (one article about the Texas floods is directly above an article about how the Texas floods are "testing FEMA", and there are two separate articles for the recent Trump-Netanyahu deal, one in World and one in USA. X's CEO resigning is three different articles in different feeds. The Business tab has two different articles about Trump tariffs that could really be one article).
Feature request:
Mark the headline as read once I tap or click on it. When I collapse a headline, would it be possible to change the text colour to grey? I don't like having to do manual tasks when I’m just trying to read the news.
Amazing tool, thanks!
I saw it here on HN a couple of years ago and found it pretty good. I hate the current state of news. Titles are usually pure clickbait and half of the article's content is filling text for ad prints.
Kite actually got me to look at Kagi again. Joined the Trail, and downloaded Orion. Turns out Webkit Browser can actually be good with Multi Tab usage. It is just Desktop Safari implementations sucks.
Will try to run it for a few months and see how it goes. I really hope Kagi would succeed.
https://github.com/kagisearch/kite-public/blob/main/src/inde...
My pendulum has swung so far away from react and its ilk that this is refreshing to see.
There are deeper challenges too, like lack of consistent taxonomy/topic naming, which makes things messy even when categories are present.
I still believe you're better off curating your own feed instead of delegating to AI, but I'm curious to see how Kite evolves.
I'm experimenting with these ideas at https://alexsci.com/rss-blogroll-network/ and https://alexsci.com/blog/rss-categories/ . I hope to publish some more recent ideas soon.
Disagreed. News never changed. It was always exactly like this. The Pulitzer award was created because journalists lied and caused an assassination and the spanish war.
The thing that changed is social media is letting everyone fact check the journalists and we're catching them in their lies. We are ushering in a new era of professionalism and truth in journalism and it's not going well at all.
Here in Canada we have a funny one happening right now. Another whistleblower from the CBC was forced to involuntarily resign. Now the CBC is saying they refuse his resignation that he's a slave and must continue working for them. So his lawyer has to bring a human rights lawsuit.
>World doesn't live in echo chambers. The reality emerges from the collision of different viewpoints and perspectives - that's how we separate signal from noise.
Or at least it shouldnt be this way.
>This multi-source approach helps reveal the full picture beyond any single viewpoint.
Grabbed the RSS, thanks!
I'd say the velocity and reach of it certainly has changed. A world leader tweeting fresh insanity to millions of people every couple hours wasn't a thing during earlier eras.
You're describing social media where that's happening. Not journalism or news.
You might argue that social media == news. That's likely true, but that makes journalists the antiquated news.
That's not true. Bias and agenda have always existed, but there was a time when news sources clearly distinguished facts from opinions. In the US the shift arguably happened in 1987 when the fairness doctrine was abolished, and for-profit media companies were given freedom to publish anything they wanted. The 24/7 news cycle was established, and news sources operated under incentives to keep consumers' attention above everything else, including journalistic integrity.
> The thing that changed is social media is letting everyone fact check the journalists and we're catching them in their lies. We are ushering in a new era of professionalism and truth in journalism and it's not going well at all.
That's a bold take, if I ever saw one. You're actually saying that social media is a good thing for journalism?
If anything, social media exacerbated the free-for-all problem of reporting. Suddenly, everyone was a news reporter, with zero moral or integrity obligations. On the contrary: the larger the audience of a social media influencer, the more incentivized they are to infuse their content with bias and agenda. Companies, advertisers, and governments love that influencers can be easily bought. This is far from a "new era of professionalism and truth in journalism". What a skewed perspective you have.
And now with AI tools, the world is even more flooded with (m|d)isinformation than ever before.
There's nothing inherently flawed about traditional news media. It just needs to be strongly regulated to report facts rather than opinions[1]. This regulation is literally impossible on social media. Journalism is not something anyone with a social media account can or should do. I'm not saying that journalism can't exist on social media—it certainly can. But on its own it's not a place where journalism can thrive.
I would go a step further and make journalism a licensed profession, with its own variant of the Hippocratic Oath. Making the line between fact and fiction as clear as possible is essential to living in reality. Otherwise, words can be weaponized and people can be manipulated into thinking and acting in ways that are beneficial to those in power.
[1] To counter the argument "who gets to be the arbitrer of truth?", it's quite easy to determine when a news story is opinionated: it's loaded with adjectives and language that is crafted to elicit an emotional response in the consumer. Journalism, on the other hand, reports events that happened. It succinctly answers who, what, when, where. It doesn't describe why, or tries to put a spin on the facts. Those events can be easily fact checked. In fact, if everyone was doing journalism, every news story would be exactly the same. The differences are the bulk of the bias and agenda.
It's plausible that pre-1987 that journalism was better but I very much doubt it. There's tons of Vietnam war era journalism that was terribly bad.
>That's a bold take, if I ever saw one. You're actually saying that social media is a good thing for journalism?
Depends on your point of view. From government point of view it's terrible. If it's journalists being held accountable for their lies and agendas, way worse. These journalists will obviously hold anti-social media positions due to this.
But from the consumer of news point of view it's a fantastic improvement. Today i read an article about a 'prohibited night-vision' in Canada but there's literally no such thing in Canada. All night vision is legal in Canada.
>If anything, social media exacerbated the free-for-all problem of reporting. Suddenly, everyone was a news reporter, with zero moral or integrity obligations.
That's how freedom of the press works correct. If you dont have moral and integrity, good luck getting an audience.
>There's nothing inherently flawed about traditional news media. It just needs to be strongly regulated to report facts rather than opinions[1]. This regulation is literally impossible on social media. Journalism is not something anyone with a social media account can or should do. I'm not saying that journalism can't exist on social media—it certainly can. But on its own it's not a place where journalism can thrive.
The government regulating the news is literally the opposite of freedom of the press.
>I would go a step further and make journalism a licensed profession, with its own variant of the Hippocratic Oath. Making the line between fact and fiction as clear as possible is essential to living in reality. Otherwise, words can be weaponized and people can be manipulated into thinking and acting in ways that are beneficial to those in power.
So the government will revoke freedom of the press and license journalists? Just dont do that in my country, thanks.
>[1] To counter the argument "who gets to be the arbitrer of truth?",
You want the government to license journalists. You want to make the government the arbiter of truth.
Here are my suggestions
1- Add ability to have different languages. The feed should allow having one language or more and move between them or mix them
2- It is better if feeds with different languages keeps their our json file for contributing to be easier but build curated one automatically for them
3- This currently does not support RTL languages (or content languages in any of them)
4- It is good if the user can ban certain keywords because of the news fatigue about them. I might want the tech category but don't want to hear about LLM news
5- While the diversity of feeds is good in general. Sometimes you would want to block a certain website feed. Kite should support this in some sense.
I understand that this might be beyond the envisioned view if it as generic news app but I think it should be more personal.
Additionally, if someone writes an op-ed or commentary, the author is expressing their personal opinion. So why should I buy a newspaper that does not align with my political or personal opinions? I thought that was the point.
From a reader's perspective, it would be beneficial to have a scoring and warning system that identifies poor journalism or indicates when something is a commentary or op-ed rather than objective journalism. Based on that, I can adjust, where I get my news from.
Basically, every newspaper works like this. Isn't it? And when I read two or three different newspaper, that fact-checks every article and mark opinions as commentary, there is no "echo chamber" right?.
No, representations, not reality is what is obtained from this process. Reality is the encompassing whole where these processes happen and whose absolute actual relevant interpretation is beyond what the most sophisticated educated intelligent human will either be able to grab.
I agree this is being very picky about words, and generally speaking, sure shame on me to bring to much focus on such a triviality. But in this specific case of a public announcement of how a company is going to greatly improve news, I feel like it's very relevant that they consider their words with caution.
All that said, good chance to them in the endeavor, that's a nice goal.
So AI-summarized version of /r/worldnews?
I know people love Kagi, but I really don't know how it is better than other news sources except the UI.
I also just started reading Kagi's changelog. I'm glad I subscribe, these folks rock!
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.
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”.
Because the significance is determined by an LLM, it surfaces many stories that are usually missed by major media.
For news consumption. I'm not the author. But saw it here on HN dome time ago, and found it pretty good.
Can you add RSS feeds as well?
More news websites need to take a leaf out of Kagi.
Edit: The RSS feed is here:
I'm guessing it's free for now so people can test it and give feedback, since it's still an MVP. But based on the website, once the app is fully released, you'll have to pay for it. So don't get your hopes up, especially with apps that rely on expensive LLMs.
Showing ads or sponsored links is one business model. Charging a subscription to remove them is a different one (like what Twitter recently did).
That rss feed seems to be specifically for the world category. Anyone know if there are other feeds? Edit:nvm you can find each feed at the bottom of the page.
The first item I clicked on as a test was "Texas floods raise alarms over weather service cuts" in the Science section. Here are all the issues I found in about 2 minutes, again on the first and only item I've looked at:
- The first image is from the New York Times, but it links to an AP article that doesn't contain the image.
- "The Guadalupe surged more than 30 feet in five hours, overwhelming campsites and low-lying neighborhoods." These figures are wrong, all sources I can find say 30 feet at most, over a time period of much less than 5 hours.
- "A Trump-backed spending bill passed the House with a 22 % cut to NWS operations and satellite procurement." No idea what bill this is talking about or where this number came from, despite some effort to find out. Some sources say the local NWS had lost 22% of its staff, maybe the LLM saw this number somewhere and threw it in here for fun.
- "Kerr County’s applications for federal hazard-mitigation grants in 2017 and 2018 were rejected, leaving it without sirens or modern river gauges." This is very misleading wording, the grant applications were denied by Texas, not by the federal government.
- "“We know the river rises, but we can’t warn people with equipment we don’t have.” - Judge Rob Kelly, Kerr County" This is a hallucinated quote attributed to a real person. He never said the "we can’t warn people with equipment we don’t have" part, nor did anyone else. This is an incredibly serious issue and it is deeply irresponsible to release a product that does this.
- The second image is a graphic that says Disaster 101. It is from a link inside a Grist article about the floods for another article about general disaster preparedness. However, Kagi links it to a Reddit post about Ted Cruz. Kagi's caption is "Trees partially submerged along the swollen Guadalupe River on July 4, 2025.". This is lightly paraphrased from the caption of a completely different image in the Grist article.
- The Perspectives section cites three real articles, but hallucinates their content including quotes that don't exist in the articles. I won't quote them fully here because this post is already pretty long.
- "At least 110 people are confirmed dead and 161 remain missing; survivors urgently need clean water, temporary shelter and mental-health support as temperatures climb above 100 °F." Are temperatures above 100? I don't think this is true.
- "Doppler radar gap: Hill Country sits at the edge of overlapping radar beams, making river-level gauges crucial for flash-flood warnings." This is completely made up as far as I can tell.
- "Lead-time metric: NWS aims for 15-minute flash-flood warning lead-times; staff fear this could shrink if vacancies and equipment gaps grow." Could not confirm this, and 15 minutes seems like an absurdly short goal. I can't believe this is true.
- "A recent AP-NORC poll found that 76 % of Americans trusted National Weather Service forecasts before the Texas disaster, one of the highest confidence levels for any federal agency." This is a lie, the poll didn't even ask a question about trust in forecasts.
This is just the surface-level issues that are easy to spot, I did not get into more technical claims that would take domain knowledge to fact check, and I did not mention overall "editorial" decisions about what was and was not included in the story, which were also very bad.
I have been a Kagi customer for a long time and I like the search engine, but I will probably cancel my subscription if you don't take this down. I can't have my money funding a literal fake news engine.
Tbf it was different during his first term when every word he uttered made front-page news but rarely set off an actual major chain of events. That’s when I learned to tune out.
I appreciate this is likely coincidence, but my my news sources are far more varied.
Not a single left wing source as far as I can see. Everything contained within the pro-capitalist echochamber.
No Jacobin, No Novara Media, No WSWS.
Just another way of rearranging the same pro-market propaganda.
As a paying Kagi subscriber, it's deeply disappointing to see this.
Thanks for the idea.
I love the search product - thank you for keeping the internet usable!
