What is News Minimalist

Articles rated below 3 usually cover sports, entertainment, and small local news. Articles with rating 5+ cover significant world events that shape the world.

Every day, only a handful of articles get a high rating. If nothing significant happens, the feed will be short by design.

This is easily the best use of GPT I've yet seen, because you're using it to limit the mountains of sensationalist attention-seeking stuff out there, instead of adding to it.

u/JustinHanagan (Reddit)

Isn't significance subjective?

I separate significance from importance (or relevance).

Importance is subjective. News about the health of my family members is important to me, but they are not significant to the world.

Significance is objective. It's about how much the event affects humanity as a whole.

How is significance determined?

This is done in two steps.

First, a larger, smarter (and more expensive) model analyzes thousands of historical news stories and estimates the following seven factors for each:

1. Scale: how broadly the event affects humanity;
2. Impact: how strong the immediate effect is;
3. Novelty: how unique and unexpected is the event;
4. Potential: how likely it is to shape the future;
5. Legacy: how likely it is to be considered a turning point in history or a major milestone;
6. Positivity: how positive is the event;
7. Credibility: how trustworthy and reliable is the source.

The factors are then combined into a single significance score and normalized to a 0-10 scale.

Second, a smaller (and cheaper) model is trained to replicate the results given by a smarter model, so the scoring could be done at scale.

Why is positivity a part of the score?

News sources have a negativity bias: they overreport negative news and underreport positive news.

This factor has a very low weight (1/20 of the score) and is used to simply bring back the ratio to 50:50.

It doesn't change the whole distribution much, but makes a huge difference in the 5+ range: without it, this range mostly consists of news about wars and natural disasters. With it, it has more scientific discoveries and tech advancements.

Every news site has some notion of top items, but you’ve done it 10x better. The de‑duplication of similar stories, great summaries, and super clean interface are amazing. Bravo! It really feels like you solved news aggregation.

maliker (HackerNews)

Why is there so much news on {topic}?

I got this message about different topics at different times: COVID, war in Ukraine, climate change, US debt ceiling, etc.

I see several factors that contribute to this:

• "Hot topics" are more likely to be covered by multiple sources. The more sources are covering the topic, the more variance there is in the description of the events, and the more likely it is that the topic will make the top.
• Even with the totally random topic distribution, there are going to be stretches where the same topic is covered multiple days in a row. I just used a random number generator to emulate 10 rolls of a die. The numbers I got are: 6 2 6 4 6 1 2 5 1 2. Notice how number 6 is rolled three times in the first five rolls. Even total randomness does not guarantee variability. And journalists don't choose topics randomly; they follow public interest, which means these stretches will happen more often and last longer.
• Some topics are just more significant. ChatGPT doesn't have a topic fatigue, like people do (remember how everyone got tired of COVID news at some point?). If something is more significant, it will give it a higher score consistently and indefinitely.

I understand that this leads to less interesting feeds. But that's the point — we already have algorithmic feeds that entertain us. I want to build a feed that informs us.

Is there an RSS?

Yes. There are two feeds:

1. Basic feed is free. It is basically a newsletter available via RSS. It covers news with a significance score over 5.5. That's ~10 stories per week on average.
2. Personal feed is a part of premium plan. It allows you to choose news categories and countries, block keywords, gain access to non-trending stories and more.

Who made it?

Hi! My name is Vadim, I am a solo software engineer from Vancouver, Canada.

The project was born out of personal pain — I wanted to read only important news, but there was no way to do that. An article about a virus outbreak was too often followed by some celebrity gossip or another smartphone release.

I tried to solve the problem with GPT-3 (the top model at that time) by asking it to estimate the significance of some news stories.

The results were horrible. For some reason it wildly overestimated the significance of the tragic, personal stories, completely missing the essence of what makes the news significant. I wasn't able to fix it with any amount of prompt-engineering.

And then GPT-4 came out in March 2023 and changed everything overnight. It seemed like it actually listened to me and understood what I was asking for.

After a month of work, the first version was born. News Minimalist had its first successful Hacker News post, and I realized that a lot of people had the same problem I had.

To cover the cost of running ChatGPT (GPT-4 was very expensive at that time), I launched a premium subscription. It was extremely bare-bones, but enough people subscribed to cover most of the expenses, allowing me to focus on the project full-time.

Like most tech founders I made a mistake of focusing too much on the technical side of the project and completely ignored marketing for a while.

But I think it eventually paid off. After 1.5 years of scoring improvements, it finally fulfilled my original dream — being able to read only important news.

How to follow the project?

If you want to follow the project, you can subscribe to the newsletter, follow me on Twitter, or simply visit the site when you want to read the news.

And if you want to fully control what news you read and support the project development, check out the premium.