How it works

dissemin8ed is a real-time news aggregator. It pulls from hundreds of RSS feeds, clusters duplicate stories, scores them by signal strength, and surfaces what matters — without an algorithm designed to maximise outrage.

Reading a card

Each card is one story cluster — the same event reported by multiple sources, grouped together so you see the full picture rather than the same article repeated.

• Thumbnail — lead image from the first source to publish.
• Coloured dot — political bias of the lead source (see Bias below).
• Source count — when multiple sources cover the story, a N sources ▼ button expands to show them all. Alongside it, a compact 2L 4C 3R spectrum distribution shows how many sources from each side covered it. The source marked 1st was earliest to report. When only one source exists, the outlet name and its bias dot appear directly.
• X ago — how long since the article was published. Hover for the exact timestamp.
• ~Nm read — estimated reading time based on word count.
• Score badge — ▲ Active (top 25%), ↑ Rising (top 40%), ↓ Cooling (was rising, now fading). No badge = normal.
• 🔒 Paywall badge — this source may require a subscription. If free alternatives cover the same story, a ✓ N free count appears.
• ★ Star — save to your Starred list (see Personalisation).
• ✕ Dismiss — hide this card from your feed (see Personalisation).
• AI summary — an italicised one-liner generated by AI. Only shown when available.
• Share buttons — X, LinkedIn, Reddit, copy link. Appear on hover.
• 🌐 Translate — appears on non-English articles. Fetches an AI translation (10/hour per IP).

Source bias ratings

Every source is rated on a five-point scale based on AllSides and MBFC ratings. These reflect editorial perspective, not accuracy.

Sources not in the bias database show no dot. The ⚖ Cross filter shows only stories covered by sources from both sides of the spectrum.

Topics

Topics are tags attached to each article, powering the topic pills at the top of the feed.

How topics are assigned

1. Keyword matching — each article title and summary is checked against curated phrase patterns per topic. Multiple topics can match.
2. AI fallback — articles matching zero keywords are sent to GPT-4o mini, which picks 1–3 topics from the same list.

All topics

The count badge on each pill shows how many stories carry that tag right now.

Trending phrases

Trending pills show statistically significant coverage spikes — phrases appearing at 3× their baseline rate in the current 6-hour window. They signal accelerating newsroom attention, not social virality. Only 2–3 word phrases (bigrams and trigrams) can trend; single words never appear.

The algorithm

• Window: English articles published in the last 6 hours.
• Baseline: the previous 7 days split into 6-hour buckets (28 windows), averaged.
• Spike threshold: a phrase must be at least 3× its baseline average to qualify.
• Minimum volume: at least 4 articles must mention the phrase in the current window.
• Deduplication: overlapping phrases are collapsed to the most specific one.

Sort order & scoring

Use the sort buttons in the filter bar to switch modes:

▲ Ranked 🕐 Newest

▲ Ranked (default)

Cards are ordered by a composite signal score recalculated on every page load:

• Freshness — exponential decay with a 24-hour half-life.
• Source count — more outlets covering the same event signals higher importance.
• Cross-spectrum coverage — stories covered by both Left and Right sources rank higher.
• Paywall penalty — fully-paywalled stories score slightly lower.
• For You boost — once you’ve clicked 5+ articles, topics and sources you prefer rise in your feed (stored locally, never sent to the server).

🕐 Newest

Cards are ordered by when the story first appeared on dissemin8ed — i.e. when the earliest article in that cluster was discovered. This is the arrival time into the system, not the article’s own publication timestamp (which is set by the publisher and can be back-dated or future-dated). Use this mode to browse the latest incoming stories rather than whichever ones have accumulated the most signal.

Filters & controls

Topic pills

Click any topic pill to filter the feed. All resets to the full feed. The country pill shows geo-detected local news.

Trending pills

The row above the topic pills shows phrases with accelerating coverage in the last 6 hours — each prefixed with a ↑ arrow indicating a rising coverage rate. Clicking one searches all stories mentioning that phrase.

Bias filter

All ● Left ● Lean L ● Center ● Lean R ● Right ⚖ Cross — filter cards by the lead source’s political leaning.

Status

All Unread Read — a read mark is added when you click through to an article. Stored locally.

Language

A language dropdown appears when sources in multiple languages are active. All langs is the default.

Paywall toggle — 🔒 / 🔓

🔓 (default) — paywalled stories are shown dimmed with a 🔒 badge. Click to switch to 🔒 which hides paywalled articles entirely.

Personalisation — Stars & Dismiss

Everything is stored in your browser’s localStorage. Nothing is sent to the server.

★ Stars (Favourites)

• Click ★ on any card to star it. Starred cards float to the top of your feed.
• A ★ N pill appears in the topic bar. Click it to show starred items only.
• Stars persist until you remove them.

✕ Dismiss

• Click ✕ on a card to hide it from your feed immediately.
• Dismissed stories are remembered for 7 days then forgotten automatically.
• A ↻ N hidden pill appears when you have dismissed stories. Click it to open the Hidden Stories panel.
• The panel shows each dismissed story with its thumbnail. Check boxes and click Restore selected to bring them back without a page reload.

For You

• After clicking through to at least 5 articles, a ✦ For You pill appears.
• Selecting it re-ranks the feed by topics and sources you’ve engaged with.
• Preference data lives only in your browser.

View & text size

Layout

⊞ Auto — fills available width (default)   ▦ 2-column fixed   ▬ Single column

Text size

A− decrease   A+ increase — four steps from small to extra-large. Resizes titles, summaries, and AI summaries. Your choice is remembered.

Search

The 🔍 icon in the header opens full-text search across all article titles and summaries in the database. Results are ranked by recency. The paywall toggle applies to search results too.