Split Belgium feed into fr and nl

[mart-e]

We speek french and dutch in Belgium (and German but there is no german feed in the list). It is odd to have a list mixing two languages, it will work only for bilingual people.

Should I change the display name?
Will this cause an issue for users that have already configured their feed?

Also remove belgianaffairs.be that was added at aa5d5ff but that does not seem like a valid website (anymore?).

[mart-e]

Hmm now that I am testing a bit more, maybe we expect people to use the translate feature if they don’t speak the language?

[Natha]

Big +1 on that. Also, I would remove Sudinfo.be. It's more of a tabloid than anything else, with lots of bad reputation in the French community (fake news, sensationalism, etc.). Same thing for 7sur7.be and DHNet.be.

[giorgiobrullo]

Hey, I feel like it would indeed be better to keep them together. Translations are available in the other language as pointed out, what we can do is create two additional feeds with the regions being split if you'd like to read more local news.

[Natha]

Belgium being Belgium, it would be better to split the feeds. As a matter of fact, our country is so complex that the best thing to do would be the following: Belgium (NL), Belgium (FR), Brussels/Belgium (all languages/Brussels). We even have a German speaking region, but the news are mostly shared in French over there. So I don't think it's worth adding a fourth feed to something that is already complex by design.

[mart-e]

I don’t mind having news from other newspaper (on the contrary), but the issue is that all my new posts are in Dutch (that I don’t speak), even if there is a source in French.

[giorgiobrullo]

We're gonna improve our settings for the content language, so you can just pick the language(s) you actually speak, and see only those. Right now if you go in settings, what's the content language? If you set it to French, you should see all news in French, including other categories.

As a matter of fact, our country is so complex that the best thing to do would be the following: Belgium (NL), Belgium (FR), Brussels/Belgium (all languages/Brussels).

Can definitely do this if there are enough (at least 25) sources for both the FR and NL part. If we split them like this, they wouldn't generate enough stories.

[mart-e]

Right now if you go in settings, what's the content language? If you set it to French, you should see all news in French, including other categories.

Indeed, it was set to Source to avoid machine translation but actually, it’s not really the translation of the content but the target language of the AI summary?

It’s not really clear why Dutch is chosen here for instance. The four source articles are all in French.

[Natha]

It is a (very) common issue for websites and apps to default to Dutch in Belgium. Which ain't great, as half of the population does speak French. @giorgiobrullo I do agree with your idea of being able to choose which language the user does speak, so that it doesn't automatically translate articles in said languages and better filter the newsfeed.

When it comes to the feed split, I think it's gonna be hard to find 25 media for each languages. I can think it through a bit longer, but reaching that thresholds means involving a bunch of non-desirable news websites. Which is something that I definitely don't want to see happening in Kagi News.

[Natha]

And yeah, as @mart-e pointed out, some French articles are translated in Dutch. Which doesn't make a lot of sense.
By default, both Dutch and French articles shouldn't be translated for people choosing the Belgium list. Except if the user doesn't speaker either of said languages. (e.g. a French Belgian who doesn't speak Dutch but does speak English could benefit from the auto translate feature of Kagi News).

[giorgiobrullo]

Generally we try to have the entire category in a single source language, we could make an exception here - the problem is what language should be used when mixed NL and FR articles are used? If we don't manually set one, it's just gonna be left to luck.

Once we update the content language settings, someone from the FR part is gonna see everything in french, someone in the NL part is gonna see everything in Dutch. Would that work? Open to other solutions of course.

[Natha]

Hey, looks like I forgot to answer that thread.
Yes, that would work, with one subtlety: Brussels should be in English by default.
So that everybody's happy and anyone in the city can choose whichever default language they'd like to use.

How does that sound? Would that be feasible without causing privacy troubles (as Kagi News would have to ask at least once to have access to the user's location)?