Not sure I'd agree with that. I'm no fan of crime documentaries or political coverage, but it seems almost guaranteed that there are better sources for those things online, at least if you know where to look and how to vet whether someone's an expert.
It's just easier for people here to tell they're not experts at tech because people here are more knowledgeable about tech than they are politics or crime.
(There's also a rule/phrase for that, but I can't remember the name).
> there are better sources for those things online, at least if you know where to look and how to vet whether someone's an expert
What if someone did that for you, as a full-time professional job, and did it both online and offline? What if they actually spoke directly to the participants, from senators to the bus driver in the crash to the head of safety at the regulatory agency; and what if they interviewed leading experts and engineers; and read the court filings, etc. What if they made it their life's work to become expert in that kind of research?
That might be worth a few bucks a day. And it would be far more valuable than idle commentary from bloggers and commenters.
Might be, but then again, it's a rare thing. And the "idle commentary from bloggers and commenters" has the benefits that for any topic, you can find bloggers/commenters who are both subject matter experts, and have no incentive to misrepresent the story.
> bloggers/commenters who ... have no incentive to misrepresent the story
Isn't that a exceptionally idealistic given what we know about misinformation on the Internet? While we can debate the motivations, the Internet is a cesspool of misrepresentation. Just look at HN comments; they are among the highest quality available, but still it abounds.
> bloggers/commenters who are ... subject matter experts
> Isn't that a exceptionally idealistic given what we know about misinformation on the Internet? While we can debate the motivations, the Internet is a cesspool of misrepresentation.
I suppose the idea I'm trying to communicate can be also expressed as navigating towards localized pockets of lower misrepresentations levels in the cesspool of Internet. I'm arguing that regular news outlets have high concentration of misrepresentation, and quite frequently are the source of it.
Or: I'm not saying that if you pop on to a random subreddit you'll immediately find gold-standard, unbiased people. But I am saying that for any given domain, if you find a niche community and browse it for a bit, you'll get, on average, much better information than you'll get from reading news articles on the same topics.
Another extra feature of niche communities like various specialized subreddits, or HN, is that the experts, the pretend-experts and the wannabe-experts will engage in a discussion. This does not only help filter out obvious bullshit, but also provides extra information and can tell you when a problem is so complex it can't be accurately summarized in a headline or a short article.
That's useful to think about; I see it as a massive increase in communication channels making specialized information more available.
However, I still think it greatly underestimates the prevalence of misinformation in specialized communities (e.g., I have never found a valuable subreddit), and greatly overestimates human ability to know when they are being mislead. And the latter is far more difficult when trying to understand, as a non-expert outsider, experts in conversation about their domain. I fear what someone outside IT would walk away from HN thinking about some things. Even I have a hard time identifying the BS sometimes.
Subreddits are the answer to the philosophical question: 'Do two people who don't know what they're talking about know more or less than one person who doesn't know what they're talking about?'
> I'm no fan of crime documentaries or political coverage, but it seems almost guaranteed that there are better sources for those things online [1], at least if you know where to look and how to vet whether someone's an expert [2].
[1] Not sure about that — those "better sources online" tend to be the very journalists whom we're discussing, working for local media outlets.
[2] Assumes facts not in evidence — vetting of someone else's expertise is a non-trivial challenge, one that most of us neither want to do nor have the time to spend doing it.
[1] - better sources on-line are usually first-hand reports and the opinions of the "protagonists" of a new story.
[2] - well, a lot of people don't want to spend time vetting their sources, but this should prompt them to assign very low confidence to the things they read; of course, they frequently don't, which is why they need to be reminded that when they repeat what they read, they're most likely repeating bullshit.
It's just easier for people here to tell they're not experts at tech because people here are more knowledgeable about tech than they are politics or crime.
(There's also a rule/phrase for that, but I can't remember the name).