Why I’m Uninstalling a Great Mobile App from Yahoo!
Yahoo! News Digest mobile app is a gem. The experience is awesome. The news digest gets published twice a day at 08:00 AM and 06:00 PM. Simply consume the news as a healthy nine/ten/eleven nibbles. “Did you know?” at the end of each digest is always a good read. The subtle dots animations and parallax transitions are awesome.
But recently, with a heavy heart, I uninstalled this wonderful app.
Why, you ask?
You should avoid exposure to too much news of the depressing type. Show me someone who you think is always in a good mood and I’ll show you a person who (probably) avoids overexposure to sad forms of entertainment.
- Scott Adams
I hate to start my morning by reading negative news. I always felt that Yahoo! News Digest is trying to say that we are living in a world which is really a bad place. Probably they are true. But, we are all keeping faith in humanity, right?
An 'Unscientific' Study!
To prove that my concern is right, I came up with this ‘highly unscientific’ way of recording the number of positive and negative news in each digest. I ran this ‘unscientific study’ for an entire week.
Here are the statistics of Yahoo! News Digest?—?International Edition. First, let us look at the Morning Digest of 8:00AM.
Evening Digest of 6:00PM is always better as the number of positive news is more. See the graph below.
Other interesting facts:
- Evening digests have more news stories (mostly 10 or 11) than the morning edition (mostly 9).
- Positive news generally appear towards the second half of the digest!
See the following heat map where the green squares denote positive news. The numbers from 1 to 11, on top, shows the order of news stories in a digest.
Let me clarify that the classification of a news item to be positive or negative is based on my personal views?—?this may not be true for you and most of you may not agree with me. Still, this exercise was fun.
Moral of the Story
Good bye, Yahoo! News Digest... Welcome, Reverb News and Zite!
Have you felt that news in various channels like internet, television, newspapers… is always cynical? Do you agree with my ‘unscientific study’ on how Yahoo! News Digest? Do you have any other suggestions for a good news digest app?
This story is adapted and abridged from the one at Medium.com.
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9 年Ha! Thank you for decoding the "top story" formula, Srinivasan Rajagopal. In Yahoo! News Digest app, we cannot choose the news categories. But Reverb and Zite offer the function. Also, we cannot rate a news article in Yahoo! Digest. Reverb learns our preference by estimating the time we spent on each article. In Zite, we can like or dislike an item. Thus, if I want, I can tweak the feeds to positive news in Reverb and Zite; not in Yahoo! Digest.
Director - Digital Marketing at Tata Consultancy Services
9 年Hi Anas K A , as always, a very interesting & thought provoking observation. My two pennies' worth: The polyanna principle - It states that humans tend to use more positive language in communication. When NY Times did a sentiment analysis of their content, they came up with a finding that most of the language used is positive. But, It is hidden in the local news sections. Front page is typically negative news - the big stories of the day would be about stock market crashes, scandals and murders. has mostly "top stories" in the app. Hence, expect a negative skew. Also, what is the benchmark? If your premise is that Yahoo provides only negative news, are you sure that other apps which have a similar (That is the operative word) algorithm provide more positive content? If you choose "motivational" or "good news" as a topic on Flipboard, obviously it is going to give you a lot more positive content everyday.