What you're looking at is kind of like a backend - consider it the "talk" page for Wikipedia.

It's a little bit chaotic this early in the morning, but our algorithm pulls in the "breaking" stuff on the left, and the most upvoted stuff flows to the top of the "popular" page. Grasswire users fact-check stuff for accuracy, and comment on whether or not/why it's important. The site is mostly for news junkies. It's a little bit hectic right now because a bunch of people from HN are just upvoting random stuff to screw everything up, and it will take the power users a minute to sort through it.

The result is at the end of the day, the best stuff curated and fact-checked by a couple thousand people, and we send that out to the everyday person in an email they can digest in 30 seconds. We're adding a short, editable description to each news item to give some background, and allowing anyone to submit external stuff, so it's still a work in progress, but that's the gist of it.

I really like this. I too am sick of seeing stuff promoted in everyday media which is clearly fabricated.

Admission. I think I up-voted some comments by accident. It's not obvious what that large up arrow does (now that I say it out-loud I think it's probably pretty obvious!) and there's no way to undo the operation. Sorry.

Are there plans to add a frontend to it?

Well once I push these code changes in the next few minutes you should be able to click on the upvote again to remove it. For now, don't worry about it :)

We see the "frontend" as a daily email that goes out or an app with a daily push notification that says "Hey, here you go, the best news of the day in 30 seconds." So the hours of work that the people are putting in on the back-end really just reduces the amount of time for the end user. We could probably hire five people to do that, but it's important to us that it's democratic and open.

That all makes sense. In terms of a frontend I was thinking of a read only type system. At lunch time I come to HN to entertain myself. Occasionally I jump over to bbc news (which is pretty dire) or aljazeera. It would be great to have a page I could drop into to get the digest.

Very interesting concept. I signed up; we'll see where it goes.

One thing to note, though - on the left I'm seeing a number of duplicated entries, with the duplicates immediately after the original. I'm using Firefox, if that matters.

The site looks slick, but it doesn't have some features I'd expect and want from a news aggregation site. I can't find any way to search for news about specific topics, for example.

Ya, it's still an infant. We're adding tagging, but it will be a couple of weeks