wkat4242
imiric
Echo chambers exist in all communities, and you may be in one whether or not you're aware of it. The only way to step outside of them, if you're at all interested in doing so, is to experience what's happening in other communities.
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.
jauntywundrkind
Reciprocally though, the mainstreamification of alternative facts has been a constant drumbeat for a decade now.
'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.
imiric
I agree that the intentional spreading of disinformation is harmful to civilized discourse. It's definitely not practical to give it the same attention as you would factual information. But I think we can do something about it.
The reason disinformation dominates our communication channels is because the people who engage in it are given the same voice and platform as reliable sources of information. I'm not a believer in censorship or deplatforming, but we should attack this from the other side. Make factual sources even more prominent, give them more visibility, and make the signal louder than the noise. The way to fight (m|d)isinformation is to drown it with factual information.
The first step towards this is to establish trustworthy sources of information, both in the form of traditional media and online. This can be done by making news outlets non-profit public services, and journalism a licensed profession. An international standards body with independent oversight can be established to hold official news outlets accountable. By removing the profit incentives and ensuring that reporting is done with transparency and integrity, the public will rely on official sources more than random social media influencers. The noise will continue to exist, but it won't matter if people know who can be trusted.
I don't see another way out of our current situation. Those who believe that the truth will float to the top among the noise, and that people are smart enough to tell them apart, are deluding themselves. This will only get worse now that we have AI out in the wild, and it's easier than ever to generate content that appears accurate. If nothing is done about this we will continue to regress into chaos, while the 1% in power only grow richer and more powerful. Perhaps we are past the point of no return already.
pyman
The best way to avoid echo chambers is to actively seek out a mix of perspectives, even the ones you don’t agree with. But only very intelligent people do this. A tool like this can help by providing multiple sources and showing different sides.
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.
null
pyman
Having said that, I honestly believe the world needs more founders like Vladimir Prelovac. Once this product is out, I'll be more than happy to pay for it and support it.
Brendinooo
> when people start talking about "echo chambers" it's usually because they are upset that I won't listen to bigoted alt-right hate.
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.
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esperent
> when people start talking about "echo chambers" it's usually because they are upset that I won't listen to bigoted alt-right hate
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.
nerdjon
I get where you are going and I do agree with you, but I think there is some validity to still calling it an echo chamber.
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.
redserk
I grew up in a rural area and the same phenomenon happens against cities.
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.
mossTechnician
For additional context, it's difficult to separate press releases by Kagi from the views of its founder, who has been criticized[0] for partnering with Yandex after Russia invaded Ukraine, and for other statements involving politics and tech[1].
throw-the-towel
That "politics and tech" thread made me trust Kagi more, not less.
polytely
i honestly don't see much different between this and for example using windows whilst Microsoft is providing the compute that powers the ongoing genocide in Gaza. I Observe the BDS boycot by not giving MS money directly but avoiding all the companies that use Microsoft would be kinda ridiculous
TiredOfLife
Didn't know that. Kagi has been added to never touch pile.
arandomusername
Is it partnership or do they just simply use yandex as a data-feed among many other sources?
It's refreshing to see that the Kagi founder isn't on a political correctness crusade and chooses to focus on product.
Kbelicius
> It's refreshing to see that the Kagi founder isn't on a political correctness crusade and chooses to focus on product.
What does waging wars and committing war crimes have to do with political correctness? Please help me understand. Besides, Kagi is heavily politicized, their moto is "humanize the web". Can't really see how one can be for humanizing the web when they have no problems financing regimes that dehumanize actual humans.
saubeidl
There is no such thing as being apolitical. "Just focusing on the product" is implicitly supporting the status quo.
FeloniousHam
I liked Josh Barro's characterization of BlueSky: "Bluesky Isn't a Bubble. It's a Containment Dome."[0]
[0] https://www.joshbarro.com/p/bluesky-isnt-a-bubble-its-a-cont...
jimmydoe
> talking about "echo chambers" it's usually because they are upset that I won't listen to bigoted alt-right hate.
All I can say is America and its region of influence is in its own set of echo chambers
Asraelite
> I understand the point but I wouldn't use the term "echo chamber" anymore.
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.
freediver
Kagi founder here. This is prematurely shared and not ready for prime time yet. Official launch with mobile apps will happen soon. Thanks!
burkaman
Please, please reconsider this product and take it offline for now. The vast majority of "information" in these stories is complete garbage. You are making up numbers, facts, quotes, and entire narratives. I made a list of examples (from just one single story) in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44520841.
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
msqinfo
I've built a similar product (https://www.mosaique.info), but it doesn't rely on LLMs (except for generating a very short summary). I think it offers a wider set of opinions and is much more exhaustive.
dartharva
Looks like your option has a much smaller set of topics. Science, Technology, Economics and Regional news are largely absent
lemming
I'm very interested in this, I'm a long term kagi subscriber with the free t-shirt!
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?
msqinfo
Sorry to plug my product again (from the comment above), but mosaique.info offers filters for three days, a week, a month, and a year (among others).
Brendinooo
What kind of editorial policies will you have about how you frame stories and what kind of words you will use?
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!
tigroferoce
Ah, sorry I spoiled it out. I saw on Reddit and thought it was great (like a lot of other Kagi things).
Keep up the good work!
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olivierduval
Hi
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)
freediver
It is not by choice, but because that is what all major world outlets are writing about (and Kagi News has super diverse selection of sources). What makes an event 'significant' is number of publishers writing about it.
vulkoingim
I'm with you on that one. An option to exclude certain words/topics/individuals would be great.
mvieira38
Your feelings against news focused on America are valid, but there's no denying that the second Trump administration is such a world-shaking event, in a scale not foreseen by mainstream media or markets, that it would be weird not to have it everywhere. "President of the richest country in history unilaterally tariffs the entire world without approval of Congress" is, like it or not, a bigger headline than Europe's endless regulatory arguments
olivierduval
Actually, I dont need a "smart newsfeed" to hear about Trump. Smart is not about who is doing the show every day, it's about what's important and may be missed
jastuk
As another European, I second this. I avoid Trump "news" like a plague. This was 50% Trump; 8 out of 10 was US.
nticompass
Is it ok to use it, or should I wait until it's officially announced?
(P.S. been paying for Kagi search since January, very happy with it)
yannicklesuisse
Kagi News (formerly Kite) Product Manager here,
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 :)
MaysonL
Will you have an RSS feed that can be integrated into Tapestry (mobile app by Iconfactory)?
msdz
It's existed for months by now, and has been usable for nearly as long. I'd say you can decide if you need extra fluff like native apps or further "polishing" at this point.
viraptor
Looks awesome though. I'm already on board with where this is going.
Although it would be great to know if some money goes back to the original sources...
josters
Intrigued by the World Tension Index (you can enable it in the settings under the Experimental tab) which currently reads Mild/24°:
> 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.
mvieira38
Remember when we paid for Kagi because it was "search"? I was basically an unpaid sponsor of them for the last year or so, but damn this constant pipeline of new shiny stuff is getting on my nerves. How can a company focus on building a good search engine with a good index and algo if they are also developing a translator, an LLM assistant and now a damn news app? Please, Vlad, just build different companies and stop piping my money to these other offerings I didn't ask for
davikr
Having to use Google for translation services sucks, and I use the Assistant everyday. I hope Kagi keeps building more stuff with my money.
mvieira38
Different strokes, I guess. I just think search is still not there as a full Google replacement and a lot of nice-to-haves are being put on the backburner (maybe forever) for more and more features unrelated to search (I wrote out a few of those in another reply)
carlosjobim
Who offers a better search engine?
mvieira38
No one from what I can tell, that's why I still pay and give a damn. But they are missing a lot of desired features:
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
carlosjobim
My philosophy in life is that if nobody else does it better, then I'm not going to complain about the people who are doing something.
Would I prefer they do only the search engine? Sure, but until anybody else makes something equivalent, I'm not going to complain.
Same for Apple. Are they wasting time and money on things which doesn't make sense? Sure, but in the past 20 years no other of their billion dollar competitors have even tried to make a decent laptop.
freediver
You forgot browser and email. Have some faith, young padavan.
ks2048
I clicked on a story and at the bottom, it lists "sources" (19 in this case). Following one of these sources (a lesser-known site), there is an article, and at the end it says "REUTERS". So, I guess its source was another source.
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.
mvieira38
Offering a non-editorialized solution for news in 2025 is the opposite of what I thought Kagi stood for. They make a "small web" feature and the best fediverse search index, both to highlight human created content, but then make an AI news aggregator? Are we supposed to form communities and read stuff written by people or are we not?
cosmic_cheese
Maybe derivative articles could be placed under the source article hierarchically, with some kind of badge on each sub-article indicating percent of significant difference.
onionisafruit
That would be great. I get frustrated when I want to read more about a news event and find that all the additional articles just rehash the same information. Instead I want to find other articles about the same event that have additional information.
soerxpso
> 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'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).
pyman
I love it. This is the only site I want to read the news on.
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!
xtracto
Have a look at https://www.boringreport.org/app
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.
pyman
Also, how's the Orion browser connected to all this? The https://kagi.com homepage has a mix of everything: search, AI assistant, browser, now news. Are these separate products? Will I have to pay for this? It's not very clear.
captn3m0
I made something quite similar, and was just using <details> tag instead with grey coloring on open (that was persisted to localstorage).
tareqak
How is Kagi compensating the sources for its news beyond the sources section at the bottom of each story (the part that appears after clicking a headline)?
presbyterian
I can't find where it specifies how the news is "distilled". I assume it's an LLM summarization, given Kagi is in the AI business in other ways, but it would be nice if they could clearly state that. Knowing who or what I'm listening to is a fundamental part of being able to trust it or not.
dflock
If you could mash this together with this: https://www.newsminimalist.com/ - that would be great.
onionisafruit
Thanks for showing this to us. The significance score is interesting. I like what kagi has done here, but news minimalist might be my real find from this post.
yakhinvadim
Founder here, thanks for the shout out!
ksec
Damn I was hoping Kite would be done with Crystal as well. I was actually working on a similar hobby project that is 80%+ similar even the Today In History! But the AI summary and execution is just so much better.
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.
8organicbits
I've been thinking a lot about LLMs for RSS categorization. The long tail of feeds have interesting content but rarely tag posts with categories. Planets (like https://planet.ubuntu.com/) are good for finding feeds that post about a certain topic, but without per-post-category metadata, you get off topic stuff mixed in.
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.
nop_slide
Love seeing this is a true “SPA”, a literal single index.html page built using one of my favorite little libraries Alpine.js
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.
> 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
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.