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 happened, the feed will be short by design, saving you time and keeping your mind clear for more important things.

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 the humanity as a whole.

How is significance determined?

Since the very first version, I made probably over a hundred iterations on methodology. It can likely be improved even more.

Currently, significance score is calculated as a combination of five factors:

1. Scale: how many people the event affected;
2. Impact: how big was the effect;
3. Novelty: how unique and unexpected was the event;
4. Positivity: how positive is the event.
5. Credibility: how trusted is the source;

Why is positivity a part of the score?

News sources have negativity bias and overreport the negative news and underreport the 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.

FAQ

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 dice. 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 write on topics randomly, which means the streches are going to happen more often and will be 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 has news with significance score over 5.5. That's ~10 stories per week on average.
2. Personal feed is a part of premium plan. It allows choosing news categories and individual significance thresholds for these categories — for example, technology 5+, sports 6+, etc.