Just launched - maagnit.com
After 3 months in development, I just launched maagnit.com and would love to get your feedback / bug reports!
maagnit is basically YouTube for News. It is setup to surface the latest news and politics videos from both the Left and Right leaning media all on one page, as well as from both Mainstream and Independent media / content creators.
I use it myself to help me get a balanced view of the news. I'm hoping it will help others get a balanced view, by watching news from both the left and right, to get a 360-degree view.
I would love to receive any feedback or bug reports, I am sure there are a few layout/ui bugs that you probably see on your browser that I do not. That would be great to mention here or at support at maagnit.com
Excited to receive any feedback, good or bad, or feature suggestions etc!
Will be visiting IH regularly, now that I am launched, looking forward to joining your community!
--Daniel
Hi Daniel. Welcome to IndieHackers.
You did a lot of work and this list may include things you just didn't consider before: https://cloud-access.online/reports/7kkgaaQ2QzCURU1Iy9KrfS7siDGQmCk1/maagnit.com/2020-01-03/Site Audit (Details).html
I'm sure you'll find a way to automate the process.
Hey Daniel,
This looks really nice.
I run https://HackThePress.org - at our events we've had people build similar tools. Unfortunately we find there are a couple of issues:
I'd love to chat more about what you've built, and how you would mitigate these issues.
Perhaps we could chat over email?
joe@hackthepress.org
Great idea! Always had a very similar idea in the back of my mind, but I never executed on it.
Personally, never been a huge news video guy, but have you thought about integrating written news articles too? Also, what source do you use or how do you determine the right or left leaning status of videos and their respective media companies? What I think would be an awesome feature would be to implement some algorithm that could sort by trending issue and reveal both articles/videos from both sides that relate to that issue!
Hi! Thanks for your comment and for visiting the site! Yes, I think video vs text appeals to different people, and at different times. A lot of the time I am not able to play a video on my phone (people around me etc, no earbuds) and in that case text will be super important. I do have plans, and some ideas on how to integrate text, definitely. I actually think that will be a little bit easier than video, and there are a bunch of other Text News aggregators, so I've held off on that for now, but I definitely see it in the short-term future!
For determining Left or Right status, there are a couple online resources that I use. Some are just blog articles from 2018, 2019 that listed all the Left News sources, another one for Right. Then whenever I see a report on media bias, I give it a skim to see if it includes any of my sources and then I adjust if needed.. Well that's the plan anyway, since it's still early days, I haven't had to adjust yet :)
One of my projects in 2020 is to get big into Machine Learning and so I definitely plan to be using NLP and other ML techniques to help identify what is trending and to assign it a left/right status. maagnit.com is actually running some ML (a neural net, really) already to help tag/classify headlines. It's a lot of fun and I plan to build on this in January+February.
Thanks again for your comment and interest!
I see! One other idea that could benefit more avid email individuals, like me, is a weekly subscription that could email the top 5, for example, ongoing issues what both sides are saying about it. Just an idea! Great project though and I wish you the best with it!
Just kinda skimmed through for a minute but seems like a really cool idea. Navigation seems simple. Not sure if this is something you can answer but are the videos pulled from an API and updated automatically to keep the feed up to date? Noob question.
Hey hey, thanks a lot for checking out the site and your comment above! Yes, I'm just using Google/Youtube's free public API :) You can see it here https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3 It's nice! Thanks again!