In 1995 I co-built CRAYON (CReAte Your Own Newspaper) - the first personalized news service on the web. 650k people made papers. The Perl CGI site ran, barely, for 31 years. I've now rebuilt it: stories ranked by independent-source count instead of an editor or engagement algorithm, every side of every story on one page. Your 1996 password still works, and every subscriber can open their original paper as a time capsule - dead sources marked "lost to time."
Comments
drrajvanshi•2h ago
Ranking by count of independent sources is a nice answer to engagement ranking. How do you decide two outlets are actually independent, though? A lot of "different" stories are the same wire copy lightly rewritten, so I'm curious how you dedupe that.
drrajvanshi•2h ago