> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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].
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
> 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.
Yandex is connected to Russia's government similarly to how Google/Microsoft/Amazon/etc are connected to US's government, and perhaps Israel's government. Should he stop dealing with those companies too?
> 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.
I said this before in another comment a while ago, but we have echo chambers in real life: they're called friends.
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.
There are echo chambers on both ends of the political spectrum (and for various subcultures) but it’s obvious they are real if you are in the centre and find yourself politically homeless between two progressively extreme groups who are doing the same shit with different flavours.
Extreme in their lack of interest or tolerance of opposing viewpoints that drowns out meaningful conversation.
The kind of thing that allowed Biden to get so far into the re-election cycle, etc. My favorite recent example is one ive heard from numerous people in real life, is suggesting that the main reason Kamala lost was because she was a woman. Or confusion at all the Texas border counties flipping to Trump. Dems dropped the ball in so many obvious ways and its deeply frustrating that its still difficult to have serious conversations about it. The reality is many of my left leaning friends are still deep in echo chambers they can barely see; its quite different from my right leaning friends who feel a bit closer to delusional on a few particular issues (ie consistently discard and avoid incorporating relatively mundane facts such as low murder rates vs "this is the most dangerous time ever for a child to be outside").
> Extreme in their lack of interest or tolerance of opposing viewpoints that drowns out meaningful conversation.
Again, this is.. biden or kamala or clinton? Are the people in power in this political power advocating for extreme positions or acting intolerantly?
Is it intolerant to refuse to consider the idea of deporting 65 million american citizens of latino descent? What is the correct response for this in your world?
As for Dems and balldropping, this is an extremely complicated subject that is way too broad and deep for this little text box, but before any discussion took place, I'd have to advance the argument that, given the behaviour of the various major news organisations during the last decade or so, I'd have to ask, were people voting based on what democrats actually did, or what they were told they did?
The state of the left in general, which is effectively what led to Kamala (a bad candidate) leading the Democratic Party instead of someone that had a more legitimate chance of winning. The example I provided was the (otherwise smart) people I know saying "We just can't have a woman candidate" as though _that_ were the reason she lost. It's difficult to have that conversation - they look at you like a complete jerk when you suggest... no that's not the reason she lost. Which is what OP was getting at.
> Is it intolerant to refuse to consider the idea of deporting 65 million american citizens of latino descent? What is the correct response for this in your world?
What is the intent of this exactly? This isn't the issue swing voters I know of reference in thinking Biden / D's were bad on immigration. They would refer to the surge in (illegal) immigration.
> I'd have to ask, were people voting based on what democrats actually did, or what they were told they did?
One of (or the?) Kamala's first network appearance involved her opening with responding to "What would you do different" with "Nothing in particular... and I was involved in a lot of the important decisions". It is difficult to even imagine what would lead to her saying such a thing if not an echo chamber but, certainly that kind of thing impacted a lot of swing voters. 2020-2024 was a very bad time for a lot of people. You need to tackle that head on.
> 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.
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.
You say this like you think you're making some kind of clever point.
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.
Exactly, I'm with you. People who claim to "advocate for moderation" or for "depolarization" are always enemy agents or AI bots who get paid a salary from the enemy to try to weaken us. We must stand firm in our psychological self defence, and only listen to verified and trusted sources and people. We have to diligently prune our friend groups and family from those who have been infected with wrongthink and started working for the enemy. They get together when we think they're at the dentist to plot against us, it could even be your own spouse!
The point I'm making, which you are either unable or unwilling to grasp, is that being moderate is not the same thing as being correct. Sometimes the right position is an extreme one. Fighting hitler is a pretty easy example.
There's a particularly annoying form of cowardice that involves refusing to take a position and then pretending this is some kind of moral high ground.
Jesus Christ, the sarcasm is thick. You even used the word "wrongthink".
It's not a conspiracy or anything like you're describing, it's that moderate politics is often just... wrong. Believe it or not, there's sometimes a right answer, and a wrong answer. And if you go "in the middle" you end up being wrong.
I mean, take a small gander a history. There's usually a right answer... and a wrong one. Typically, in the moment, the people don't know that. So some construct middle-ground that they believe seems reasonable. Then, we look back on it, and say "what the fuck were you thinking". And that's how we end up with bullshit like the 3/5ths compromise. Seriously, what the fuck was that?
Point being, simply being moderate or depolarized doesn't save you. Consider that, in some countries right now, moderate positions are pro-genocide. Because that's how far gone the politics in said country are.
I don't think anyone thought the 3/5s compromise was morally correct, people either didn't care or were willing to live with it in pursuit of another goal.
> I don't think anyone thought the 3/5s compromise was morally correct
I disagree, they absolutely thought it was morally correct because morals progress throughout history.
What I think people miss is that slavers were evil people doing evil things. No, they were normal people doing normal things. And that's much more scary.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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)
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.
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
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
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 :)
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.
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.
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
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)
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
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)?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Perhaps I don't understand it correctly, but doesn't journalism mean examining a topic from different perspectives based on evidence?
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?.
That's great. As a long time kagi subscription (with free t-shirt because I forgot to order) I think this needs some polishing
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.
>The reality emerges from the collision of different viewpoints and perspectives - that's how we separate signal from noise.
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.
I’ve also been experimenting with a curated webdev related newsfeed based on HN submissions: lessnews.dev
The goal is not to keep users on the site. If some dev visit the site once in a while, and finds a link useful, that’s it.
I like this a lot. A suggestion, I think it would be good to have a 'latest update' date on the articles, indicating the latest update of any source used. I understand this could be difficult but it would be nice.
When they first got mentioned, I started aggregating their links. Just now did a quick analysis to look if they've changed something. At the beginning Kite contained a lot of rt.com (Russian propaganda) and a few other discutable sources. rt.com has not surfaced since May 22, which is good. Hope they'll reconsider Kagi's Yandex integration as well.
UX is nice enough but suffers from same curation (center-right leaning, tech industry-directed) that makes anything like this fundamentally pointless in the long term. Designed to keep readers within the acceptable window of mainstream media that manufactures consent for war, genocide, income inequality, and other suffering at home and abroad. For example: this site taught me that there is only one (unnamed) sticking point on the Gaza ceasefire agreement! Gee, I bet it’s really going to happen this time. Also to offer an Israel section at all, let alone without a corresponding Palestine section, is dubious.
That is indeed a problem and an unsolvable one. All major news sources are in the business of manufacturing consent. They're not trying to manufacture the exact same consent, but mash them together... you get a general direction, not unlike the ones we see at cattle ranches.
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.
tl;dr: It sounds like we agree that the UX is good but the aggregation is bad.
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”.
I’d call this performative news consumption. Information overload is mainly a result of legitimate complexities in the world. It took only a little while to find in today’s item about Hamas a timeline describing October 7th as “the beginning of the current conflict”. A very neat and comfortable summarisation, that also happens to be vehemently rejected by many people. It’s very silly.
Overly AI processed stories from suspect sources (BoingBoing is a source for tech business news vs CNBC, NYT, Reuters etc?) and days old stories (Grok antisemitic posts) ranking high, Prime Day sales as 'news'. Not good first impression. Moving on.
If this is not meant to be an echo chamber, why is "Bay" one of the default categories? Most people don't live in the SF Bay Area. Most people who don't, don't even know what "Bay" would mean. I only know because I spend enough time in tech circles to 'get it'.
This currently has an extremely serious hallucination (aka lying) problem, and I am begging people to not use AI-written "news" services. AI aggregation of links to real stories is maybe ok, but you cannot trust anything that claims to be "summarizing" sources while actually just making things up.
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.
>an endless stream of clickbait that destroys our ability to think deeply and clearly.
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.
>News never changed. It was always exactly like this.
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.
>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.
> News never changed. It was always exactly like this.
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.
>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.
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.
> It's plausible that pre-1987 that journalism was better but I very much doubt it.
Thankfully, you can look up archive footage and print media to confirm this. Or talk to people who lived it.
> There's tons of Vietnam war era journalism that was terribly bad.
I didn't say all of it was good. I said that that the line between fact and opinion was clearer. I'm not that old, but I remember when newspapers had an editorial section. This was a single-page essay about popular topics written by senior editors that was clearly labeled as an opinion piece. This meant that the rest of the paper was not an opinion, and contained purely facts.
After media companies became for-profit organizations, the editorial didn't make sense, since they could fill the entire edition with opinions. And, wouldn't you know it, if they reported more of a certain type of event and gave it a specific spin, they would get more eyeballs, and more profit from advertisers. Outrage media and spin doctors were born.
> 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.
You have a twisted perspective that governments, and somehow by association journalists, are the only ones with an agenda, and can't be trusted.
While that might be the case, what makes you trust a random social media influencer more? Influencers are even more susceptible to being corrupted by whoever's sponsoring them. At least with propaganda from governments and traditional media you know what their agendas are. I know what to expect from Fox News and CNN. It's practically impossible to know the type of agenda of a million different voices all shouting into the void.
> That's how freedom of the press works correct. If you dont have moral and integrity, good luck getting an audience.
Wow. Are you new to the internet? That statement is blatantly false if you check any social media site.
> The government regulating the news is literally the opposite of freedom of the press.
I'm not advocating for the government to regulate the news. What I'm advocating for is for establishing certain standards that media outlets must adhere to in order to operate. This could ideally be done via an international body with independent oversight, and not just by a single government. The financial incentive must also be removed, and news outlets should operate as non-profit public services rather than corporations.
If done correctly, this could ensure transparency and integrity in news reporting, and bring ethics back into journalism.
> So the government will revoke freedom of the press and license journalists? Just dont do that in my country, thanks.
Freedom of the press doesn't mean that everyone should have an equal voice in reporting facts about the world. You really think that a social media influencer can be relied on to report facts more than a news agency with actual journalists? That's delusional.
The reason licenses for journalists are a good idea is the same reason why we require one for doctors, civil engineers, and other professions where human lives are at stake. Information is one of the most important factors in the wellbeing of a modern society. By ensuring that only individuals who study the craft and pledge to abide to certain ethical and integrity standards can practice journalism, we could establish trustworthy news sources, and regain public trust in news agencies. This would make whatever nonsense is spewed on social media irrelevant.
> You want the government to license journalists. You want to make the government the arbiter of truth.
You are intentionally misinterpreting what I say, so I'll refrain from replying again. What I said was that if only facts are reported there wouldn't need to be an arbitrer of truth, because the facts could be easily verified. If multiple independent and trustworthy sources report the same story with the same facts, then it must be true. The government nor anyone else couldn't have a say in the matter.
What is fascinating is that you're unable to see that we want the same things, since you are blinded by social media, and conditioned to see those who challenge your thinking as the enemy.
This exchange is a good example of the damage these technologies are doing to civil discourse.
He is a pretty important guy who does a lot of stuff all of the time that causes ripples throughout the entire world! I don’t read much about him beyond the headlines since I feel the same way about everything he does, but I understand why it fills up so much space.
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'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).
The Kagi I know would never have ads, much less charge to remove them. I'm pretty confident that this service will be another perk of the main Kagi subscription.
I love when projects add rss feeds like this. The feed articles look great and are individual items per story not one big list as one article which I appreciate.
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 announcement talks a big talk of trying to avoid echo-chambers, but the sources it quotes seem to be exclusively on the center-right (i.e. liberal) to far-right spectrum.
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.
This seems like a perfect example of the weirdness of our overton window. Is the the guardian out here campaigning for socialism and democracy and labor right and gender equality and such?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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].
[0]: https://ioc.exchange/@troed/113311981054448887
[1]: https://chaos.social/@scy/111704636274463611
That "politics and tech" thread made me trust Kagi more, not less.
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
Didn't know that. Kagi has been added to never touch pile.
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.
> 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.
Yandex is connected to Russia's government similarly to how Google/Microsoft/Amazon/etc are connected to US's government, and perhaps Israel's government. Should he stop dealing with those companies too?
There is no such thing as being apolitical. "Just focusing on the product" is implicitly supporting the status quo.
Hope you don't use any Google/Amazon products or any product that uses Google/Amazon products then.
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...
> 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
> 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.
I said this before in another comment a while ago, but we have echo chambers in real life: they're called friends.
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.
There are echo chambers on both ends of the political spectrum (and for various subcultures) but it’s obvious they are real if you are in the centre and find yourself politically homeless between two progressively extreme groups who are doing the same shit with different flavours.
Tell me more about how there are two "progressively extreme groups" but also "doing the same shit".
How do you get more centrist and status quo than freaking joe biden, hillary clinton and kamala harris? Name one "extreme" position they held.
Extreme in their lack of interest or tolerance of opposing viewpoints that drowns out meaningful conversation.
The kind of thing that allowed Biden to get so far into the re-election cycle, etc. My favorite recent example is one ive heard from numerous people in real life, is suggesting that the main reason Kamala lost was because she was a woman. Or confusion at all the Texas border counties flipping to Trump. Dems dropped the ball in so many obvious ways and its deeply frustrating that its still difficult to have serious conversations about it. The reality is many of my left leaning friends are still deep in echo chambers they can barely see; its quite different from my right leaning friends who feel a bit closer to delusional on a few particular issues (ie consistently discard and avoid incorporating relatively mundane facts such as low murder rates vs "this is the most dangerous time ever for a child to be outside").
> Extreme in their lack of interest or tolerance of opposing viewpoints that drowns out meaningful conversation.
Again, this is.. biden or kamala or clinton? Are the people in power in this political power advocating for extreme positions or acting intolerantly?
Is it intolerant to refuse to consider the idea of deporting 65 million american citizens of latino descent? What is the correct response for this in your world?
As for Dems and balldropping, this is an extremely complicated subject that is way too broad and deep for this little text box, but before any discussion took place, I'd have to advance the argument that, given the behaviour of the various major news organisations during the last decade or so, I'd have to ask, were people voting based on what democrats actually did, or what they were told they did?
> Again, this is.. biden or kamala or clinton?
The state of the left in general, which is effectively what led to Kamala (a bad candidate) leading the Democratic Party instead of someone that had a more legitimate chance of winning. The example I provided was the (otherwise smart) people I know saying "We just can't have a woman candidate" as though _that_ were the reason she lost. It's difficult to have that conversation - they look at you like a complete jerk when you suggest... no that's not the reason she lost. Which is what OP was getting at.
> Is it intolerant to refuse to consider the idea of deporting 65 million american citizens of latino descent? What is the correct response for this in your world?
What is the intent of this exactly? This isn't the issue swing voters I know of reference in thinking Biden / D's were bad on immigration. They would refer to the surge in (illegal) immigration.
> I'd have to ask, were people voting based on what democrats actually did, or what they were told they did?
One of (or the?) Kamala's first network appearance involved her opening with responding to "What would you do different" with "Nothing in particular... and I was involved in a lot of the important decisions". It is difficult to even imagine what would lead to her saying such a thing if not an echo chamber but, certainly that kind of thing impacted a lot of swing voters. 2020-2024 was a very bad time for a lot of people. You need to tackle that head on.
> if you are in the centre and find yourself politically homeless
This is also an echo chamber
every downvote is proving my point :)
> when people start talking about "echo chambers" it's usually because they are upset that I won't listen
Probably not "upset", per se. Most likely frustrated that you bother weighing in on topics for which you maintain a deliberately narrow view.
> 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.
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.
You say this like you think you're making some kind of clever point.
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.
Exactly, I'm with you. People who claim to "advocate for moderation" or for "depolarization" are always enemy agents or AI bots who get paid a salary from the enemy to try to weaken us. We must stand firm in our psychological self defence, and only listen to verified and trusted sources and people. We have to diligently prune our friend groups and family from those who have been infected with wrongthink and started working for the enemy. They get together when we think they're at the dentist to plot against us, it could even be your own spouse!
The point I'm making, which you are either unable or unwilling to grasp, is that being moderate is not the same thing as being correct. Sometimes the right position is an extreme one. Fighting hitler is a pretty easy example.
There's a particularly annoying form of cowardice that involves refusing to take a position and then pretending this is some kind of moral high ground.
Jesus Christ, the sarcasm is thick. You even used the word "wrongthink".
It's not a conspiracy or anything like you're describing, it's that moderate politics is often just... wrong. Believe it or not, there's sometimes a right answer, and a wrong answer. And if you go "in the middle" you end up being wrong.
I mean, take a small gander a history. There's usually a right answer... and a wrong one. Typically, in the moment, the people don't know that. So some construct middle-ground that they believe seems reasonable. Then, we look back on it, and say "what the fuck were you thinking". And that's how we end up with bullshit like the 3/5ths compromise. Seriously, what the fuck was that?
Point being, simply being moderate or depolarized doesn't save you. Consider that, in some countries right now, moderate positions are pro-genocide. Because that's how far gone the politics in said country are.
I don't think anyone thought the 3/5s compromise was morally correct, people either didn't care or were willing to live with it in pursuit of another goal.
Also, as you said: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation there's a name for it!
> I don't think anyone thought the 3/5s compromise was morally correct
I disagree, they absolutely thought it was morally correct because morals progress throughout history.
What I think people miss is that slavers were evil people doing evil things. No, they were normal people doing normal things. And that's much more scary.
> 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.
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.
Don't worry, the first link I clicked, by chance, was this super well-balanced article: https://www.dailysignal.com/2025/07/09/big-beautiful-test-of...
/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.
Kagi founder here. This is prematurely shared and not ready for prime time yet. Official launch with mobile apps will happen soon. Thanks!
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
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.
Looks like your option has a much smaller set of topics. Science, Technology, Economics and Regional news are largely absent
Yes the focus is largely on international news.
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?
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).
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!
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!
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)
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.
I'm with you on that one. An option to exclude certain words/topics/individuals would be great.
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
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
As another European, I second this. I avoid Trump "news" like a plague. This was 50% Trump; 8 out of 10 was US.
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)
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 :)
Will you have an RSS feed that can be integrated into Tapestry (mobile app by Iconfactory)?
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.
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...
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.
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
Having to use Google for translation services sucks, and I use the Assistant everyday. I hope Kagi keeps building more stuff with my money.
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)
Who offers a better search engine?
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
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.
You forgot browser and email. Have some faith, young padavan.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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).
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!
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.
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.
I made something quite similar, and was just using <details> tag instead with grey coloring on open (that was persisted to localstorage).
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)?
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.
If you could mash this together with this: https://www.newsminimalist.com/ - that would be great.
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.
Founder here, thanks for the shout out!
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.
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.
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.
Perhaps I don't understand it correctly, but doesn't journalism mean examining a topic from different perspectives based on evidence?
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?.
That's great. As a long time kagi subscription (with free t-shirt because I forgot to order) I think this needs some polishing
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.
>The reality emerges from the collision of different viewpoints and perspectives - that's how we separate signal from noise.
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.
> Kite reads public RSS feeds of thousands of (community-curated) world-wide news sources and distills them into one perfect daily briefing
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.
/r/worldnews is not a balanced view and is clearly extremely left-leaning. I imagine Kagi thrives to portray a more balanced view.
In my experience /r/worldnews is extremely right-leaning. The power of echo chambers, huh?
Show me one article that's on the front page of r/worldnews that is right leaning.
https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/1lvzd7k/north_ko...
Anti Kim Jong-un, a dictator, article is right leaning?
That's just how the left works today. Anything remotely aligns with the US's interest (criticizing NK, China, etc) is right leaning.
Why do you think that is?
I really love this.
I also just started reading Kagi's changelog. I'm glad I subscribe, these folks rock!
I’ve also been experimenting with a curated webdev related newsfeed based on HN submissions: lessnews.dev The goal is not to keep users on the site. If some dev visit the site once in a while, and finds a link useful, that’s it.
I like this a lot. A suggestion, I think it would be good to have a 'latest update' date on the articles, indicating the latest update of any source used. I understand this could be difficult but it would be nice.
When they first got mentioned, I started aggregating their links. Just now did a quick analysis to look if they've changed something. At the beginning Kite contained a lot of rt.com (Russian propaganda) and a few other discutable sources. rt.com has not surfaced since May 22, which is good. Hope they'll reconsider Kagi's Yandex integration as well.
UX is nice enough but suffers from same curation (center-right leaning, tech industry-directed) that makes anything like this fundamentally pointless in the long term. Designed to keep readers within the acceptable window of mainstream media that manufactures consent for war, genocide, income inequality, and other suffering at home and abroad. For example: this site taught me that there is only one (unnamed) sticking point on the Gaza ceasefire agreement! Gee, I bet it’s really going to happen this time. Also to offer an Israel section at all, let alone without a corresponding Palestine section, is dubious.
That is indeed a problem and an unsolvable one. All major news sources are in the business of manufacturing consent. They're not trying to manufacture the exact same consent, but mash them together... you get a general direction, not unlike the ones we see at cattle ranches.
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.
tl;dr: It sounds like we agree that the UX is good but the aggregation is bad.
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”.
I made a similar project where all news is ranked by significance on a scale from 0 to 10.
Because the significance is determined by an LLM, it surfaces many stories that are usually missed by major media.
https://www.newsminimalist.com/
I've been using something called BoringReport https://www.boringreport.org/app
For news consumption. I'm not the author. But saw it here on HN dome time ago, and found it pretty good.
Great to see innovation in how we digest news. I’m a big fan of:
[1] https://www.mosaique.info
Thanks for the shoutout. I appreciate it!
"World" seems to be much like "US" from my southern European point of view
There’s an iOS app doing something pretty similar:
https://pidgeon.news/
I’d call this performative news consumption. Information overload is mainly a result of legitimate complexities in the world. It took only a little while to find in today’s item about Hamas a timeline describing October 7th as “the beginning of the current conflict”. A very neat and comfortable summarisation, that also happens to be vehemently rejected by many people. It’s very silly.
This looks great!
Overly AI processed stories from suspect sources (BoingBoing is a source for tech business news vs CNBC, NYT, Reuters etc?) and days old stories (Grok antisemitic posts) ranking high, Prime Day sales as 'news'. Not good first impression. Moving on.
If this is not meant to be an echo chamber, why is "Bay" one of the default categories? Most people don't live in the SF Bay Area. Most people who don't, don't even know what "Bay" would mean. I only know because I spend enough time in tech circles to 'get it'.
This currently has an extremely serious hallucination (aka lying) problem, and I am begging people to not use AI-written "news" services. AI aggregation of links to real stories is maybe ok, but you cannot trust anything that claims to be "summarizing" sources while actually just making things up.
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.
I appreciate your attempts to keep this nonsense in check.
>an endless stream of clickbait that destroys our ability to think deeply and clearly.
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!
>News never changed. It was always exactly like this.
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.
>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.
> News never changed. It was always exactly like this.
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.
>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.
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.
> That's how freedom of the press works correct. If you dont have moral and integrity, good luck getting an audience.
In what world do you think this is true?
> It's plausible that pre-1987 that journalism was better but I very much doubt it.
Thankfully, you can look up archive footage and print media to confirm this. Or talk to people who lived it.
> There's tons of Vietnam war era journalism that was terribly bad.
I didn't say all of it was good. I said that that the line between fact and opinion was clearer. I'm not that old, but I remember when newspapers had an editorial section. This was a single-page essay about popular topics written by senior editors that was clearly labeled as an opinion piece. This meant that the rest of the paper was not an opinion, and contained purely facts.
After media companies became for-profit organizations, the editorial didn't make sense, since they could fill the entire edition with opinions. And, wouldn't you know it, if they reported more of a certain type of event and gave it a specific spin, they would get more eyeballs, and more profit from advertisers. Outrage media and spin doctors were born.
> 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.
You have a twisted perspective that governments, and somehow by association journalists, are the only ones with an agenda, and can't be trusted.
While that might be the case, what makes you trust a random social media influencer more? Influencers are even more susceptible to being corrupted by whoever's sponsoring them. At least with propaganda from governments and traditional media you know what their agendas are. I know what to expect from Fox News and CNN. It's practically impossible to know the type of agenda of a million different voices all shouting into the void.
> That's how freedom of the press works correct. If you dont have moral and integrity, good luck getting an audience.
Wow. Are you new to the internet? That statement is blatantly false if you check any social media site.
> The government regulating the news is literally the opposite of freedom of the press.
I'm not advocating for the government to regulate the news. What I'm advocating for is for establishing certain standards that media outlets must adhere to in order to operate. This could ideally be done via an international body with independent oversight, and not just by a single government. The financial incentive must also be removed, and news outlets should operate as non-profit public services rather than corporations.
If done correctly, this could ensure transparency and integrity in news reporting, and bring ethics back into journalism.
> So the government will revoke freedom of the press and license journalists? Just dont do that in my country, thanks.
Freedom of the press doesn't mean that everyone should have an equal voice in reporting facts about the world. You really think that a social media influencer can be relied on to report facts more than a news agency with actual journalists? That's delusional.
The reason licenses for journalists are a good idea is the same reason why we require one for doctors, civil engineers, and other professions where human lives are at stake. Information is one of the most important factors in the wellbeing of a modern society. By ensuring that only individuals who study the craft and pledge to abide to certain ethical and integrity standards can practice journalism, we could establish trustworthy news sources, and regain public trust in news agencies. This would make whatever nonsense is spewed on social media irrelevant.
> You want the government to license journalists. You want to make the government the arbiter of truth.
You are intentionally misinterpreting what I say, so I'll refrain from replying again. What I said was that if only facts are reported there wouldn't need to be an arbitrer of truth, because the facts could be easily verified. If multiple independent and trustworthy sources report the same story with the same facts, then it must be true. The government nor anyone else couldn't have a say in the matter.
>I'll refrain from replying again.
I bet, you're straight up calling for government state propaganda and the end of freedom of the press. You're literally my enemy.
What is fascinating is that you're unable to see that we want the same things, since you are blinded by social media, and conditioned to see those who challenge your thinking as the enemy.
This exchange is a good example of the damage these technologies are doing to civil discourse.
Farewell.
I get 5 out of 10 news about Trump! Is there really nothing else happening in the world?
He is a pretty important guy who does a lot of stuff all of the time that causes ripples throughout the entire world! I don’t read much about him beyond the headlines since I feel the same way about everything he does, but I understand why it fills up so much space.
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.
"World doesn't live in echo chambers.", yet 1/2 of the articles are about Trump.
I appreciate this is likely coincidence, but my my news sources are far more varied.
I love how there are no ads on the page and it is all for free, no paywalls, private, to the point, no sponsors, just the news.
Can you add RSS feeds as well?
More news websites need to take a leaf out of Kagi.
Edit: The RSS feed is here:
https://kite.kagi.com/world.xml
> and it is all for free,
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).
The Kagi I know would never have ads, much less charge to remove them. I'm pretty confident that this service will be another perk of the main Kagi subscription.
Kagi doesn't have ads because people pay for it. Google Search has ads because it's a free service.
https://kagi.com/pricing
> Kagi has no ads and is fully funded by its users.
None of the 4 plans say anything to the contrary either.
The point is that Kagi would not have ads.
Yes it charges for any use - but not to remove ads.
I literally said "Kagi subscription" in my post.
I love when projects add rss feeds like this. The feed articles look great and are individual items per story not one big list as one article which I appreciate.
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 announcement talks a big talk of trying to avoid echo-chambers, but the sources it quotes seem to be exclusively on the center-right (i.e. liberal) to far-right spectrum.
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.
> No Jacobin, No Novara Media, No WSWS.
Thanks for the idea.
If you mean it - hvala ti brate, from a fellow Jugosloven ;)
I love the search product - thank you for keeping the internet usable!
I see the Guardian - which is considered left wing in the UK - so I would think would be in the US as well.
It’s center-right. Even something as boring as Democracy Now would be a major improvement for this list.
This seems like a perfect example of the weirdness of our overton window. Is the the guardian out here campaigning for socialism and democracy and labor right and gender equality and such?
Yes it definitely supports those things.
It will give platforms to those campaigning for those things.
It is a newspaper so its job is to report but not necessarily campaign.
But look at the subheadings on the Opion page to see what opinons it pushes.
citation needed