
'Good news day' decimates website's readership - csandreasen
http://m.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-30318261
======
ChuckMcM
This result (fewer readers for 'good news') isn't particularly surprising.
People read the news to find things they need to take action on, things that
interrupt their normal life flow and tell them what to do. I read a paper that
called it the Utopia Paradox[1] which described the situation where all needs
are met, people cease to pursue ideas. I would find when starting a new job
and leaving behind an email inbox full of demands on my time that the sheer
choice of things to do is initially overwhelming.

So when you stop giving people things to worry about, and I think they use it
as a crutch to organize their day, they are at a loss. Too often news is "Its
going to rain" therefore I need to have my raincoat tomorrow, "Idiots are
going to win the election", therefore I need to vote, "Kids are getting
kidnapped", therefore I need to protect my kids. But when the news is, "All
the trains are on time!" what help does that give you in planning your life?
None. And in fact you have now "wasted" time on reading an article that hasn't
helped you figure out anything you need to prepare for or worry about, so that
are only so many more minutes left in the day to prepare.

It's a very strange cycle. You can play it the other way though, you can both
report good news _and_ give planning data, like "The trains are all on time
and cars are less reliable than they were, consider changing your plan to use
the train tomorrow." That is the sort of positive news I'd prefer we got,
"Here is what is going on and here is some action you can take to help it
continue and/or mitigate it."

[1] I suspect there are several alternate uses of this name though.

~~~
Joeri
I can't recall a single time, ever, that the news gave me actionable
information that I didn't already get from other sources. Basically, when you
subtract all the feel-good stories and all the scare stories, what is left is
the weather, information that affects my commute and extraordinary events. The
weather i get from looking out the window in the morning. If something affects
my commute i have to try to make it anyway, so knowing ahead of time just
gives me more stress. And extraordinary events will be told to me in other
ways.

Taking your examples: (1) nobody should need to tell you to protect your kids,
(2) you should always vote, (3) you can see whether you need a raincoat in the
morning.

Basically, the actionable content of the news is exactly zero. When i watch
it, i don't expect to take action, i expect to be informed about the zeitgeist
so i can gossip along with everybody else. We like to gossip about bad things
more than good things, so if the news tells us only good things, it's not
giving us what we want.

~~~
SeanDav
Not sure how you are going to find out the tornado weather in Chicago by
looking out your window in New York, prior to flying out. Or how you are going
to find out about a major traffic blockage on your commute route by looking at
the traffic in your street.

Or even more extreme, how your are going to ask your nurse daughter to take
extra precautions because there is a serial rapist of nurses in your city,
without listening to any news.

Almost by definition, news is something out of the ordinary. I would suspect
that news plays a far bigger role in your life than you seem to want to admit.

------
lettergram
Their readership might not enjoy 'good news', if you build up readers who
enjoy a negative story, then putting 'good news' may put people off.

For example, I actually come to HN because in general there are 'happier' or
at least less depressing stories on HN than negative. If all of the sudden
this changed, I probably would visit it significantly less.

Plus, I would like to point out that Russian's (or any society for that
matter), may have react different to happy stories.

~~~
Xcelerate
> For example, I actually come to HN because in general there are 'happier' or
> at least less depressing stories on HN than negative. If all of the sudden
> this changed, I probably would visit it significantly less.

Same here. I actively avoid reading the local and world news. I didn't even
know about the Ferguson case until starting talking to me about it. I assume
that if there's something really important happening in the world that I need
to know about, I'll either see it on Facebook or hear about it from a family
member.

I love interesting articles about math, science, technology, music, and other
thought-provoking ideas though. That's why I visit HN.

~~~
tempestn
Besides, if there _is_ something really important going on, it will show up on
HN too. We just filter out all the day to day negative noise that fills the
mainstream news.

------
api
There's a whole industry on the net of pimping "fear porn." Sometimes the
fears are even complete fiction, like Fukushima causing a cancer epidemic on
the US West Coast. These sites are click farms, and some of them make a lot of
money by doing nothing more than aggregating and reprinting blog articles with
a fear or outrage slant. They generate massive traffic in spite of their
horrible quality.

"If it bleeds it leads" is a saying because it absolutely works. There seems
to be a huge attention bias toward negative information.

~~~
zaroth
Wait, I know that site... Oh yeah, drudge.

~~~
api
Drudge is one, but there are thousands.

------
ary
They certainly biased their own readership by announcing the editorial agenda
ahead of time. It would have been far more interesting to do this unannounced
and then inspect the results. Given how nearly universally conditioned the
general population is towards "negative" news people probably just took this
to mean no "real" news would be published that day.

------
ritchiea
It is also possible that by emphasizing negative news they have built an
audience that is seeking negative news and it may be an entirely different
audience who wants to read the positive stuff. Spend one day on positive news,
they lose their core audience without having a chance to reach people who are
truly interested in positive news.

------
whatshisface
Nobody ever rubbernecks an open road.

Is it possible that the world we live in is so nice that almost all of the
out-of-the-ordinary things that happen are bad things? People still cheer on
news like the Philae landing, but highway overpasses being completed on time
is the very incarnation of met expectations.

~~~
jobposter1234
People don't rubberneck an open road because there's nothing human happening
there. People certainly rubberneck when wedding processionals go past. Parades
are another example.

------
xg15
I think this is less some grand psychological revelation about the human race
and more a simple failure of the newspaper. Those weren't good news, those
simply weren't news at all.

I don't know the original articles, but if the headlines in the BBC story are
in any kind representative, then I have my doubts that the failure of the
whole operation was really because people only want to read bad news.

For a basic definition of "news item", I would require that it tells me
something I don't already know - or at least don't assume is the norm. Stuff
like "you can use the public road system to commute to work today" or
"municipal construction project is still on time as of today" does not fit
that definition. (Okay, maybe the last one kinda does)

I think in general it is possible to make "sellable" headlines from good news
as long as they are in some way actually relevant for the reader: Everyone
would like to be informed about some new tax laws that allow them to save
money. The HN frontpage itself also frequently contains new, positive
developments from tech or science the top ranks.

------
andyjdavis
Something that popped into my head while reading this.

I am curious if the result would be different in a country other than Russia.
In particular any country that doesn't have a recent history of heavy handed
censorship and oppression.

>"No disruption on the roads despite snow,"

>an underpass would be built in time for Victory Day.

These seem eerily like the kind of headlines you would get in an environment
where newspapers are forbidden from commenting on negative events. I wonder
whether Russia's recent history makes people more averse to this kind of
reporting than might be the case elsewhere.

------
curiousgeorgio
It's kind of ironic actually - they follow up a day of purely good news with
perhaps the most depressing news of all: human beings are hardwired for
negativity :)

------
Semiapies
A lot of conclusions being made based on one Russian website's experience for
one day.

------
wordsmeanthings
| it lost two-thirds of its readers

The headline writer ought to look up the definition of decimate.

~~~
umanwizard
this is the worst type of pedantry. Wrong or right, you're being obnoxious.

~~~
user24
and brings nothing to the debate but distraction. Who cares if it was 1/10th
or 6/10ths, the point remains the same. In fact if anything the headline
_understates_ the point by using decimate.

