Pirate Party Founder Rick Falkvinge Launches News Service 66
New submitter lillgud writes: Rick Falkvinge, founder of the first Pirate Party, has unveiled a news service to compete against "oldmedia." The news stories will be three sentences in length, and distributed within shareable images. Falkvinge says this obviates certain parts of the industry — for example, there will be no need for clickbait headlines, because there's nothing to click on. The business model is based around advertising, but those ads will simply be a watermark on the image. Thus, no worries about adblock, and no concerns about ad networks collecting information from users. The service is targeted to be operational in Q3. Each writer will be paid in accordance to a revenue sharing model, and Falkvinge's goal is for each part-time writer to receive €125/month in exchange for four stories (12 sentences).
Independent News Wins!! (Score:1)
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This news site is hypocritical. One the one hand they encourage pirating IP of other companies [falkvinge.net], and on the other hand they charge advertising fees for their own IP (news articles). Pirate activists give activists a bad name.
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"The business model is based around advertising, but those ads will simply be a watermark on the image."
And there is no simple way to automatically remove watermarks from images, as far as I know.
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I agree that its nice to see another option becoming available, as it is so alarmingly clear that the existing sources of news are highly controlled, bias, and frequently inaccurate. And especially at the community level we need to enable new processes for news to be gathered and made available because everything begins at the community level.
If anyone out there has the good fortune to have access to one of the newer generation of online, local niche news reporting for their community, and the often active
Thanks, I'll pass (Score:3)
A news service brought to you by politically motivated "writers" with a political agenda and served via images with included ads? Thanks, I definitely don't need this kind of "news".
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because the "other" news you have been reading are not illegitimate children of political agendas and advertising...
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I'm concerned too about the "politically motivated" part.
For instance, I agree that there is a problem with excessive use of force by police in America. Reddit, however, has a massive boner for any kind of story that depicts police as bloodthirsty maniacs. So you'll see a front page story with a headline like "Man Shot 47 Times by Police Just For Asking For Directions." And you open it up and find out the guy was raging on PCP, firing at cops yelling "Which way to hell pigs?! 'Cause that's where I'm sending
Re:Thanks, I'll pass (Score:4, Insightful)
When you have a political party that advocates something approaching pure freedom, then their political affiliation is no longer destructive. Freedom is good. Any thing which promotes freedom is a virtue, not a vice.
Re:Thanks, I'll pass (Score:4, Insightful)
When you have a political party that advocates something approaching pure freedom, then their political affiliation is no longer destructive
Just because someone's political orientation agrees with yours, and is on the good side, doesn't in any way stop their political affiliation from being destructive. It is pretty easy for people to unknowingly sabotage their own side, because they go too far. As with what the GP was talking about and many other examples, if you misrepresent reality in the name of pushing an agenda, or even introduce strong bias, you risk hurting your own cause when others call you out for your mistakes.
A good cause doesn't need more preaching to the choir that just polarizes everyone and kills any spread of an idea to new people.
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There is literally no such thing as "too far" when it comes to the freedom of the people. If you disagree, then you are a bad person. Sorry
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"It is pretty easy for people to unknowingly sabotage their own side, because they go too far." There is literally no such thing as "too far" when it comes to the freedom of the people. If you disagree, then you are a bad person. Sorry :(
Anything involving advertising is not free.
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So in your opinion we should abolish jails alltogether then? Because jails hinders the freedom of some individuals though not all of them.
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You miss the point.
Complete, total freedom means everyone always have freedom to do whatever they want e.g. anarchy. So yes, you can go too far on the freedom front. Freedom in moderation is great, too much or too little will lead to bad things though.
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I am reminded of the people who think that freedom of speech means freedom from the consequences of speech. Such positions are asinine.
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No, the incentive is that when they leave the geographical region where their cut-rate social insurance will cover them, they can be murdered and cannibalized for their organs and meat without recourse. Continued life is the strongest of all incentives.
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Re:Thanks, I'll pass (Score:5, Insightful)
That's incredibly naive.
Pretty much everybody likes "freedom." But everybody has a different idea of what "freedom" means. A conservative businessman might argue environmental regulations impinge on his freedom to dump soot from his factory into the air. Hippies downwind might argue allowing the businessman to dump soot into the air is impinging on their right to breathe.
The Communist Party of the USSR defined "freedom" as "absence of opposition to world socialism." Some Muslim clerics believe freedom (or peace, at least) is found in "submission to the will of Allah."
I do not want a news service that promotes "freedom." I want a news service that provides facts, and promotes nothing.
And claiming to be unbiased, when in fact presenting a bias sabotages the arguments. Liberals have such a distrust of Fox News that Fox could say "the sky is blue" and liberals will question their accuracy and motives. Truth, reported from a news agency founded by somebody who founded a political party (that is seen by many as radical, and these very people we're trying to convince to change their minds) will be seen as suspect, and rejected.
There's a cognitive bias for this. I can't remember the name of it, perhaps one of you can, wherein truthful arguments presented by someone you don't like reinforces your adherence to your own false beliefs.
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Yo, I disagree. Most people, rather than supporting the freedom of others, want other people to be forced to agree with their own views. But that isn't freedom.
Words have meaning. Those who attempt to take away the meaning of words should be exposed to the full force of an outraged society. They attempt to win arguments through redefinition, often to double meaning, ie Orwellian doublethink. This is bad.
Both liberals and conservatives are rubes, both ha
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Which is why I put "freedom" in quotes. Because people like their own "freedom," however they choose to define it.
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The reason for your wariness is that the vast majority of other political parties advocate for something other than freedom. When you have a political party that advocates something approaching pure freedom, then their political affiliation is no longer destructive. Freedom is good. Any thing which promotes freedom is a virtue, not a vice.
This is simply bollocks. You are perfectly "free" to write some white supremacist news involving a made up story about people with brown skin being sub-human (or whatever). That doesn't make it right.
Re:Thanks, I'll pass (Score:4, Informative)
I support the Pirate Party, but I'm wary of any "news service" run specifically by any political party.
Thank you for your support, it's much appreciated. However, Falkvinge's news service isn't in any way affiliated with the Swedish Pirate Party (or any other Pirate Party as far as I know). Interests and viewpoints might of course overlap regardless.
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It's just enough to alert people to the fact that something is happening, allowing them to go dig up details themselves.
Without any link to in-depth stories or sources, it is not going to be used by those who want more information than what amounts to a tweet.
This is for Generation ADHD.
I'm just surprised they won't drop the text altogether and use a 5 second video snippet.
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> Three sentences is
> Just enough information
> For stupid people
A dumb, Haiku-loving person, reading an article on Slashdot, which used to stand for 'News for Nerds', encounters an article about a novel news service. The blurb is using terms which the reader might be unfamiliar with, such as 'sentence', and mistakes it with 'row'; he also fails to take into account the possibility for complex and/or compound sentences. Having demonstrated his lack of grasp on the matter publicly - with the foresigh
Good initiative (Score:2, Interesting)
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I like this guy. Instead of bitching about adblock, he tries to adapt to it. More people should be willing to adapt to changing realities rather than crying to legislators so they can rig the game for them.
I suppose if you're a libertarian, then any article is just another excuse to blame the government.
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Advertisers (Score:2)
This will depend on advertisers being on board. Assuming they are (which is not guaranteed, since you can't click their ad to visit their site) at a reasonable CPM this looks doable. I like the model.
I am amused at the idea of news-via-image-macro (aka, meme pic).
Limited text length sucks (Score:2)
Twitter, this news service.. Painful to read. For crying out loud, people need enough text to complete their thoughts.
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3 sentences? (Score:2)
I'm all for being brief and getting directly to the point, but either a lot of details are going to be left out of an "article" or will be a overly complex run-on sentence. I don't want to have to read 18 different images (with accompanying ads) just to get the full story of something more complex than what can be said in a slightly more than a single tweet.
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And sources? (Score:1)
Three Sentences? (Score:3)
So their news stories will be brief snippets (no linking to sources or examining issues in depth). In addition, they will be posted as images so you can't copy snippets easily (not without posting the entire image). Three sentences is fine for a comment, but news stories often require more in-depth coverage than three sentences will allow.
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In other words, it's perfect for the attention span and depth of engagement of the 'net generation' Falkvinge wishes to reach out to. If it can't be summed up in an image meme/slogan - they aren't interested.
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In other words, it's perfect for the attention span and depth of engagement of the 'net generation' Falkvinge wishes to reach out to. If it can't be summed up in an image meme/slogan - they aren't interested.
I think the correct term nowadays is "millenial" which has the twin advantages of sounding cool and making no sense, thereby appealing to millenials.
News is only for non-blind people? (Score:2)
I tried reading the article, but either it's blocked, or the site's being overwhelmed right now. (I apologize, but I actually try to confirm things before I rant about them ... but I can't, so I'm going to instead take the normal slashdot approach).
If the proposal is what I think it is, it's no different than people passing around images filled with text to get past the twitter character limit.
People in the accessibility community realized the problem a year ago [mosen.org], but it wasn't until last week that I saw ot [buzzfeed.com]
But it's being written by Nathaniel Hawthorne (Score:2)
The news stories will be three sentences in length...
But each sentence will be 200 words long, with plenty of commas and semi-colons.