Former newspaper city editor here. With few exceptions, positive stories -- although readers clamored for them in surveys -- never drove newsrack sales the way negative stories did. That's why we had a whole section for feel-good features but they didn't usually get prime front-page real estate.
In the age of infinite content, headlines have become a sort of drama arms race. But the basic dynamic of what works and what doesn't for drawing in readers hasn't changed.
1. To let you know about local or world events that could affect you and those close to you.
2. To let you know about world events that affect others far away, in order to judge the effectiveness of political decisions and the necessity of future political decisions.
3. As a form of entertainment derived from the ongoing story of world history (or celebrity gossip, or whatever else).
---
#1 is the reason that news feels important enough that tuning it out completely feels irresponsible, but it's a very small component of most news.
#2 is perhaps necessary for democracy to work, but it's so easy to manipulate, and the incentive to manipulate it is so high, that it's questionable whether this type of news has ever existed without being more manipulation than fact---and this has been true since long before the internet.
#3 is the real reason most people (myself included) read news, even when they convince themselves it's #1 or #2. And it becomes unhealthy because, as long as you're convinced you need to care deeply about what you're reading because it's actually #1 or #2, it will inspire constant anxiety.
I would be interested to see a type of (perhaps government-funded) news service whose sole purpose is to publish only news that fits into category #1: if it is not reasonably likely to affect the average reader in an actionable way in the next 6 months, then it can't be published in this outlet.
Citizens that are active and care, is what's necessary for democracy to work, that is, citizens which actively monitor, and participate in, political developments. Mere "informed voters" just voting once every 4-5 years do not really make democracy, even if we were to be generous and assume that the elections-very-X-years model and the existing representation hierarchies system are adequate.
Beyond that, for real democracy to work, the number one source of information of citizens should be real life experience with other citizens that they're actively learning from (their issues, grievances, etc with laws, political decisions, officials, etc) and collaborate with. Not the media.
In other words, voter who 99.9% of the time tend to their private affairs alone, can't make democracy work.
> the number one source of information of citizens should be real life experience with other citizens that they're actively learning from (their issues, grievances, etc with laws, political decisions, officials, etc) and collaborate with. Not the media.
How can the real life experiences of people I know possibly inform me about Ukraine, Chinese foreign policy, the SVB bailout, pandemic issues, etc. etc. etc.?
Democracy begins at home. If there's no active citizenry with real-world knowledge from discussion, colloboration, and participation in domestic issues, then there's just individuals being governed like cattle, and they being informed on whatever foreign issue doesn't matter: they'll just be listening to whatever those in power will be doing, like they do in domestic issues.
Also notice how I said "the number one source of information" and not "the sole source of information".
And it's not just about "people you know". When far more citizens were far more politically active, e.g. in the sixties and seventies for example, you could learn about developments in any part of the US, and actual perspectives and experiences of people involved, be it workers, blacks, gays, student, veterans, and so on - without reading an establishment print media once.
People and citizens movements were networked and exchanging experiences and perspectives, and they didn't even have internet, they had to do it by mouth, snail mail, real world gatherings, indie press, and so on.
1. I think serious news media (not just any news media) is more reliable than 'people you know'. People you know, now manifested in social media, is the vector for the virulant phenomenon of disinformation and misinformation.
> When far more citizens were far more politically active, e.g. in the sixties and seventies for example, you could learn about developments in any part of the US, and actual perspectives and experiences of people involved, be it workers, blacks, gays, student, veterans, and so on - without reading an establishment print media once.
Could you give some examples or evidence of that? Did you experience it yourself? I'm not saying people had no information then, but I think they have far more now via the Internet (information including disinfo and misinfo).
In what way are you allowed to change state level policy on those issues? Should you (and by extension, everyone in your democratic society) be allowed to do so?
> In what way are you allowed to change state level policy on those issues?
State level policy depends on public support or opposition. For example, re Ukraine, US policymakers and others - from Fox News to the Russians to internationalists and many others - are carefully monitoring public opinion and trying to shape it.
They are investing a lot of time and resources in that. Why are they doing it if public opinion doesn't matter?
>State level policy depends on public support or opposition.
Arguable - I'd say even unlikely in most real world situations. The US has recently had a wildly unpopular president who showed remarkable indifference to said public opposition. And relying on the media to gauge public support, or inform the populace in objective terms about the actions of their representatives, is inadvisable. It is not difficult to find instances of the same media organizations arguing both in favor and against public policies depending on the elected official enacting them[0][1]. In that regard, mainstream media seems more akin to a tool of propaganda, shaping opinion and manufacturing consent after the fact, than a useful organ of democratic governance.
The issue is that the control the population realistically has over their representatives in a democratic republic like every (?) modern democracy is by necessity of the size of said governments extremely limited. You can't have a referendum on every issue, so for the most part all the public gets to decide is if someone did a good job over the last X years. I recommend reading Democracy for Realists for a more in-depth look, but suffice to say that that level of interaction is far too coarse to guide public policy on immediate, subtle, and complex issues like Ukraine, COVID, or Chinese foreign policy. If something is not a core issue (i.e. something that the parties have split and staked their identities on, like women's rights, access to guns, immigration, etc) or is so universally desirable that everyone just wants more of it (i.e. visible short-term economic growth - note that long-term economic growth is generally not rewarded by the electorate), policymakers have essentially no incentive to actually care, because their voters won't care enough about those issues when it matters to sway their vote one way or another.
To your last question; the public's opinion of a decision doesn't influence whether a policymaker will make the decision. The point of the media is not to inform the public on what their representatives are doing, it is to shape the narrative of politics in the country. The actual decisions, the policy positions, are for the most part incidental to that. The causal arrow goes the other way. See also: [2][3][4]
> 1. To let you know about local or world events that could affect you and those close to you.
> 2. To let you know about world events that affect others far away, in order to judge the effectiveness of political decisions and the necessity of future political decisions.
> 3. As a form of entertainment derived from the ongoing story of world history (or celebrity gossip, or whatever else).
The stories people classify as "positive" are exclusively category 3. Crime stories are entertainment, charity porn (especially about children doing charity work), stories about sick people and animals that got well again, all entertainment. Sports. Stories about soldiers and cops that are framed as inspiring and patriotic. None of it is news, it's messaging.
It only makes sense. News that affects people is mostly news of problems, or more accurately, actionable news. "Ongoing Processes Maintaining Themselves As Planned" isn't news that affects you unless it's a followup on "Potential Problem Found In Ongoing Process." The other actionable news is "Event Occurring That You May Wish To Take Part In," and the "news" doesn't care about those unless the "event" writes a check.
I only recently discovered PBS news. I thought it was great to have #1, #2 without much entertainment. Realistically I stopped watching after a few weeks as it was kinda boring. There needs to be some #3 in any offering.
I suggest the opposite. I'd like a proof that there is no government involvement.
Believe it or not, I think the closest to this is ideal is 4chan /pol/. It's not backed by any major corporation (unlike HN which is backed by Y Combinator), it's not partly owned by Tencent/China (unlike Reddit), and so on. There's no algorithm, there's no karma, there's no blue badge, it barely scrapes by using shady NSFW ads. That's the closest to the libertarian anarchy ideal we had in 90s.
There's of course alphabet agencies mining data and pushing narratives, but that's fine.
I don't see how an unmoderated, anarchic space like 4chan is close to what I described; the entire point of what I had in mind is a very specific kind of moderation: stories are only published if (a) they're reasonably likely to materially affect some significant portion of readers sometime in the next 6 months, and (b) there's something they can do about it or in response to it.
For example, if the readership of this news service was entirely US-based, then it would only publish a single article on the Ukraine war---when it started---and then might only ever mention it again if it has a direct practical effect on US residents, like travel restrictions.
> (a) they're reasonably likely to materially affect some significant portion of readers sometime in the next 6 months, and (b) there's something they can do about it or in response to it.
That's the entire point. Who are you to decide that? How can you quantify 'likelyhood to be materially affected'? How can you empirically determine if 'someone can do something about X'?
Your opinion is worth the same as the next guy's. Anarchy and no moderation whatsoever, in this context, is always better no matter how you try to rationalize it. The only problem is that it makes is harder to tell the signal from the noise (noise being fake stuff, tangential topics, hearsay, bullshit, etc.). But the opposite is much much worse.
I get the sense that you think I'm saying more here than I actually am. I'm not proposing that this is the only kind of news that should exist, only that it would be nice if it existed for the kind of people that want to read (only) this kind of news.
And I'm generally in agreement that most attempts to quantify 'truth' in media are hopelessly dependent on personal bias---but this mostly shows up in category #2 in my list. In things where you'd never know the difference if it were true or not, because it would never affect you either way.
The reason I thought a news service like this would work better as a government service than a private entity is because a government news service's commitment to the principles I listed could be defined by enforceable laws. "Likely to materially affect people" is something that you could reasonably argue about in a courtroom, just as much as other fuzzily-defined legal concepts like libel or false advertising.
I'm imagining a news agency whose legal responsibilities were defined in such a way that it could be sued if one of the following happened:
1. It reports something that no reasonable person would believe meets the criteria.
2. Readers experience some kind of material harm that could have been avoided if they had read news reported in another outlet but not this one. And this harm is not the result of the reader being in some very small minority of readers (say, <1%), because after a certain point this will always be true for things that affect a very small number of people.
> …a government news service's commitment to the principles I listed could be defined by enforceable laws.
The problem is whoever controls the government and controls the news is also the one enforcing the laws.
You want to see suppression of “fake news”, aka anything that makes the ruling party look bad, then look no further than government run media services.
I think they thought long and hard before they add freedom of the press to the bill of rights.
NPR does a half-assed good job of providing unbiased news (they unironically claim that title) as long as it isn’t some hot button issue like Roe v Wade. In those cases they go into full on partisan politics propaganda machine mode. My absolute favorite, as I enjoy the absurd, was trotting out some kids who grew up in foster care with the implication that they would have been better off if their mother had had an abortion. Just an example, not a statement of purpose.
Summed up NPR pretty well. I listen to NPR, but sometimes it gets a bit much on the partisan stuff. However, they are still my choice for anything news related. I noticed a big change in them around the 2016 election when they shut down their comment section.
Since you brought up that abortion segment, here is another from last November when they ran audio of an actual abortion. Beware - it's brutal:
The executive branch is in charge of enforcing the laws and is also traditionally the leader of the party.
Congress can pass all the laws it wants but they have no power to ensure they are being acted upon. And sometimes have no power to stop them from being violated like the whole Trail of Tears thing where a sitting president blatantly violated the law with no repercussions.
I understand what you're saying, and it would definitely make for an interesting experiment. If every news piece meets that criteria, it would be a very specific subset of news, but valuable nonetheless.
> Anarchy and no moderation whatsoever, in this context, is always better [...] the opposite is much much worse.
Why do you think this? What is your basis for this claim? Note specifically that in unmoderated channels, governments already do participate with propaganda, so your claim that the only problem is distinguishing signal from noise is false by your own stated standards.
Agenda in reporting is a problem, there is no question, but I don’t buy for a second that anarchy is “always” better or even often better. I would agree that there are times when it helps, but I think it’s closer to few and far between, and that the noise and chaos in the mean time is detrimental and damaging to someone’s ability to see truth when it does come through. To use the example from this thread, 4chan is usually demonstrably and objectively worse than any mainstream news at sharing important, relevant, and true information.
> 4chan is usually demonstrably and objectively worse than any mainstream news at sharing important, relevant, and true information.
Are you talking about trivial news reporting ("this thing happened today")? If so, yes.
If you're talking about important questions in society, no. I mean, if you want full-on propaganda you can read the New York Times or The Atlantic, or Washington Post, etc. Aside from tangible reporting, your probability of finding truth about important questions in society is extremely low, while they tout it to be really high -- extremely disingenuous. And yes, in all of these places the Opinion section has adquired so much relevance that they are no longer newspapers in the traditional sense.
On the other hand, if you want actual truth, you'll have to read through tons of bullshit, slurs, memes, jokes, fake news, fake tweets, CIA narratives, Mossad/JIDF narratives, but it will be there... buried somewhere deep in a 4chan thread. The great thing about this is that there's no pretense, it's: come at your own risk, use common sense, take everything with a grain of salt, "everything said here is satire".
> Note specifically that in unmoderated channels, governments already do participate with propaganda
That's definitely true, there's even specific slurs for those pushing propaganda. But that's the beauty of it, there could be conflicting narratives being pushed at once, and there's no way to tell whether someone believes it or is just shilling. At the end of the day, it's just an anonymous comment and you can only determine it's value based on the content of the post. You can't even safely tell if it's a human or a bot nowadays.
I have no doubt in my mind that the free flow of information is always better. Now, you can argue about the practicity of this, and you'd be right. The thing is, this is a symptom of the state of affairs. Think about it, there are 8 billion people walking on Earth, a great proportion of which have a computer with an internet connection and a high quality camera in their pockets. That means that this year will be the most commented on, most recorded in human history by far. On top of that, there are governments around the world spending billions of US dollars in propaganda. It's no wonder 'truth' is obfuscated and almost impossible to come by.
I appreciate the response, but yeah I just don’t buy that 4chan is better on any axis ever, especially for important world news. I see and acknowledge that you lack trust in mainstream news and your government, and there’s probably a longer story there, but I think it’s objectively false to claim you’ll find more truth on 4chan than mainstream news. It might be fair to say that certain subjects will be discussed that you wouldn’t see on TV, then again there’s almost no way to tell, and the stuff on 4chan is is rarely if ever made by people with any qualifications or expertise in the subject.
This twisted argument seems to be claiming that 4chan is more trustworthy because it’s less trustworthy. But you’re demonstrating a double standard. If you can excuse and overlook the unending ocean of fake news and propaganda and bullshit on 4chan, then it’s only fair and consistent to do the same for mainstream news, where it’s also true that not everything is propaganda. You’re whole complaint boils down to you writhing against the “pretense”, but why does that matter, exactly? You either care about the truth or not, so the reputation shouldn’t be a factor for you, especially if you seek information from disreputable sources.
That's a fair argument, and I can't dispute it. Thinking about this made me reflect a different way to put it. It shouldn't be one vs. the other, but rather, 4chan (and similar forums) are a meta reading of the news and train you to see blind spots or what's not being reported, listen to arguments from both sides of the aisle, and sprinkles a healthy dose of skepticism. After all, most of the discussion revolves around an extract from a maintream newspaper article or mainstream personality, so you're exposed to the "mainstream viewpoint" no matter what.
So the bottomline of what I'm trying to say would be: if you exclusively consume mainstream news, you're probably more vulnerable to adhere to a narrow viewpoint, and maybe not even know there are people who disagree.
Similar to how HN operates when discussing a blog post, especially clickbaity posts -- when reading the comments you may see that there's more to the story or that the author is wrong about something. Sometimes that has helped me get a more nuanced perspective on a specific topic.
FWIW I upvoted earlier but wanted to add that I agree with this completely, and got surprised by your kindness and acceptance and self-reflection, enough that I feel sheepish about my tone above.
Isn’t the pretence important? If I talk to a bunch of people at the pub I’m likely to get various answers, increase the size of the pub and I’ll get to hear all kinds of different stuff and since it’s just people at a pub I can take it or leave it at my will. But when there’s perceived authority involved, a trusted newspaper, maybe a uni lecturer, that kind of thing, then it’s easy to be frustrated that you still have to treat them like people from a pub because they’ve spent considerable effort having me believe they’re better than that. Maybe it’s the difference in expectations between brainstorming and a final review, or a professional and an amateur.
Perceived authority of the source is important to the question of how many people trust & believe some information, yes, you’re right.
This is why “Q” claimed to be a high-level government official, for example, to attempt to establish authority. Pretense, or just experience or expertise or authority, is always there even with the stuff on 4chan.
The authority of a source is a shortcut for evaluating the truth of a source’s information. I think this is what @t12hrow meant by the question of practicality. It takes a long time to verify information on it’s merits alone.
But of course, that misses the nuance. Lots of US-based readers come from Ukraine, have friends or family in Ukraine, or friends or family in Russia or another neighbouring country. Of course, that might be fine if your media hypothetical outlet is just one of many. But then people will probably just still end up the ones with categories #2 and #3 regardless.
4chan is a sick community where mental illness is coveted. You are correct about the 90s and finding true niche communities you could hang with, sharing ideas and ideology like the BBS days. Today is very different and the amount of brain washing put forth by anti-America bots and propaganda/make a buck machines is ridiculous.
The reality these places are pushing, including HN, is out of touch with society. Even the European stuff is so out of touch I get crazy looks and responses when I’ve asked people (Europeans) about them.
I wouldn't describe 4chan as karmaless. While the site bemoans the idea of upvotes (updoots), they'll also be the first to tell you how much they crave replies (which they call "you"s). We can see how much this affects the forum, with many people posting content, not because they think it is the best thing to post, but because they think it will get a reaction.
Yes, I've thought about that. In my opinion, the difference is that "you(s)" often reward controversial/contrarian takes. 4chan is already contrarian so what I mean here is going the opposite way. That is, you can go and post something that's completely against the culture of the forum and you'll get plenty of reactions. Even if it's just insults or slurs.
In a funny way, this incentivises swiming against the current, so there's never a consensus.
Karma on the other hand only creates a chilling effect, beacuse you're either banned or shadowbanned or somehow silenced. Take HN for example, if you post something controversial here not only it doesn't get more visibility, but it's grey-ed out and thrown to the bottom.
Some qualification: It's small enough that each board has a global chrono view of posts, same with replies on posts. You can reply back and forth and still understand what's going on despite the other noise.
Given that there’s basically no way to interact besides posting or replying, I’m willing to bet most of that traffic is just lurkers. And another large chunk of that traffic probably congregates on boards like /a/ and /g/.
Some boards are incredibly slow given the popularity of the site as a whole, threads on boards like /n/ can stay up for weeks with barely any replies.
For a long time, Al Jazeera was great on anything that didn't directly impact Qatari domestic politics.
PBS is pretty fantastic overall and serves a lot of niches that aren't served by commercialized media and really shouldn't be.
Like yes if you set out to make a state-sponsored propaganda agency then that's what you get (see: Voice of America, etc), but state sponsorship of media doesn't inherently corrupt. If anything it's the opposite and really the accusations of bias end up being a way to try and control coverage that you find inconvenient and force faux-centrism (see: NPR).
PBS is essentially corporate media, getting ~15% of its budget from government. NPR is even less at ~2%.
Corporate vs. public ownership matters a lot less than institutional standards and the org's cultural commitment to a rigorous journalistic mission. BBC has a relatively strong commitment; NPR (my favorite whipping boy for bad journalism packaged as Thinky Stuff) does not.
That's a pretty facile analysis. PBS and NPR both have affiliate models where the dozens of local public radio and tv operate independently and are funded separately utilizing the affiliate network to buy and sell content. They are mostly funded by membership, by government indirectly via CPB grants, and sponsorship.
You're right about the affiliate model. But most NPR stations in all but the largest markets predominantly run nationally syndicated content. Creating and syndicating that content is the NPR mothership's largest cost center, averaging 58% of operating expenses FY18-FY22.
Corporate sponsorships are, at an average 39% during the same period, the largest source of funding. Contributions (what we'd call donations) are 12%.
Put another way: Local donors may (or may not -- I don't know) form the backbone of funding individual stations. But corporate sponsorships fund most of the content that appears on most of the stations, and also funds its distribution.
Are you implying PBS does not have a commitment to a "rigorous journalistic mission"? It seems quite disingenuous to lump PBS and NPR as "corporate media" in the same light as corporate media entities like Fox News, CNN, et al.
Since we are speaking of reasonable people, most reasonable people would define "corporate media" as for-profit entities either privately owned or with shareholders and which rely primarily on advertising to turn a profit. Nothing in that definition defines PBS or NPR as "essentially corporate media". What you are probably angling at is corporate underwriting -- in which case I can only direct you to read their statements of editorial standards and independence found on their websites. Now I suppose you will have to take their word here...but if not, then it's just an endless rabbit-hole of debate.
Now I won't say PBS or NPR are above criticism -- and as the kids say, "there's a lot to unpack here", but let's be honest, is NPR's journalism really low-quality? Or is it more likely you have a bit of grievance with NPR because you feel they do not favor your own particular political bias? Since we are internet strangers and have little context to go on, I can only assume the latter is the most likely.
I don't know how others do it, but my main tools are:
* Reading rather than watching/listening.
* Going out of my way to consume content from authors/publications whose worldview I disagree with. Ditto for non-U.S. sources.
* Filter based on seriousness rather than passion. The whole information ecosystem is full of people and institutions ready to be passionate about almost any topic; the number willing to be serious is a lot smaller. This, more than any other filter, will improve your news-consuming experience.
* Read what the journalists are reading to get their story ideas. That means niche-y Substacks, newsletters and industry websites.
Investigative journalism: There are some nonprofits doing an very good job, like ProPublica. But too often, those newsrooms are political/cultural monocultures. To use the ProPublica example, you're much, much more likely to see stories about evil billionaires and how government should have done something(tm), than investigations about how, say, government is holding people back.
Some of this stems from hiring trends in journalism, which have skewed more and more to hiring coastal, degree-holding (relative) elites compared to the more blue-collar newsrooms of the past. Hire for monoculture, get monoculture results.
But the other part is funding diversity -- left-leaning donors have embraced nonprofit journalism in a way right-leaning donors have not.
When the right gives to journalistic efforts it tends to take the form of local investigation (and there are some GREAT reporters doing local-market work with that model), open-the-books efforts aimed at government transparency or, these days, own-the-libs clickbait. This reflects the growing delta between how much the right and left trust the press in the U.S.
Realize that while they might make it more likely for some, this is not the default. You should not feel anxious just consuming regular news. If you do you should probably talk to a doctor as this seems like an unhealthy thing.
I used to work at a food/recipe publication and had a similar experience -- users constantly complained that they wanted more healthy recipes, but those types of recipes always performed poorly. Meatloaf and other comfort foods dominated traffic.
This has been a good opening for niche creators on Youtube and such -- i.e., there are plenty of people out there interested in vegan, oil-free recipes, and that audience can go to a specialist on Youtube and the creator can be successful covering only that one niche. But in aggregate it's not going to outperform food that provides more dopamine, so the major food publications have to deprioritize it.
I suppose that depends on the meat you use and how else it's prepared.
Use a high fat ground beef and bread crumbs that'll soak up that fat, and I'm sure many would consider that unhealthy.
Use lean meat and something else as filler (oatmeal is common when trying to fill out meat) and it would be less unhealthy, but far more prone to error, resulting in perhaps a tasteless brick.
Never read on meatloaf, but I'm sure a publication would go the "easier but fattier" route.
I wouldn't call it unhealthy, unless you're of the mindset that red meat is inherently unhealthy. It does retain most of the fat from the ground beef which would cook out of normal burgers or hamburger steak. But it's also more filling than either of those due the fat and the inclusion of bread crumbs or oatmeal as filler.
The comment before mine set the binary condition. I'm not writing a dissertation here.
> A moderate amount, especially lean, is considered a net health positive by the vast majority of the relevant professionals.
I don't think that's true, but how do you define "net health positive". My understanding is that you are better off without it, but a little won't kill you.
What got me to break out of this habit is realizing that the vast majority of what news sites/tv report on isn't remotely actionable or relevant for the average viewer.
It's basically something that scratches the itch of human curiosity, but with manipulative and lowest common denominator garbage.
We'd all be better off if we scratched that curiosity itch by reading about things we're interested in, rather than current events.
I've moved towards this too, for better or worse. Between 18-25, I was very passionate about national politics and macroeconomics and consumed by following political news and fiery debates, as many young people are. As my adult responsibilities grew, I realized that the national political stuff was either irrelevant to my day-to-day life experience and / or not something that I could affect much (not actionable, as you said), and the return-on-investment of my time and attention on more immediate things was much higher. In my 30s now, I almost exclusively read and listen to things closely related to my own work and family finances and health. I guess there's a downside of political disengagement for society, though. Old people seem to become more engaged again when they have more free time, but maybe we end up with this donut hole of representation among people who are in the middle of working full-time and raising kids.
Do these fiery debates help? I say as someone who also was like this in my late teens.
I do local advocacy for transit and civic planning related purposes in a US city. A lot of the "work" is really boring, just going to long public meetings and listening to SMEs drone about very specific issues. But that's where the sausage gets made. Our local transportation department is very receptive to the public's urban concerns and is doing a lot of great work. But they're blocked right now. Not just because their funding is uncertain or due to cranky old neighbors, but mostly because they have staff shortages as Baby Boomers retire. There's nothing we activists can do about this, we can't campaign for a measure or bill that puts butts into seats.
If you go to Youtube or online North American urbanist forums though, folks aren't interested in these local issues at all. A lot of it is raving and ranting about how the US puts cars first and hates its people. This is fun to get emotional about (and believe me I've had enough close run-ins with cars as a pedestrian or cyclist to feel the rage) but doesn't actually materially affect our local urban conditions. But it's a lot less fun to talk about budget appropriation and staffing politics and much more fun to get angry at the GM Streetcar Conspiracy, so nobody does.
I'm not saying these topics aren't important; if you're new to the issue it's important to understand why North American built environments are the way they are. But what's more important is working to change the reality around you, not getting wrapped up in online debates.
There's a reddit post that pointed out how much of an outlier your personality has to be to be someone that actively posts online. These online discussions are almost never worth the effort and don't really represent average people.
Yup. Doing actual policy work negates a person's interest in infotainment (keyfabe).
Similarly, working on campaigns reveals that most political commentary isn't even wrong, so not even worth debating.
PS-
> about how the US puts cars first
And the flip side: How anything less than full throated praise for and life long devotion to cars, such as asking for safety improvements like sidewalks and bike paths, is part of a grand anti car conspiracy. Sure. There's 1.4b cars in the world, and growing. And me peddling to work 3 days a week is an existential threat to the world order.
Most daily-or-faster reporting is so shallow that consuming the information may, at times, be a net-negative to your understanding of whatever issue they're reporting about.
Sure, but there's no deep secrets. Take away the partisan criticisms and smarter-than-though HN commentary, and there are few surprises (unless you go deep into news coverage). Newspapers are generally best - much more scale and room than TV or other options, and the most well-regarded have reputations for good reasons. (The trick is to ingnore the opinion pages, which are often no better than long HN comments.)
* NY Times: Attacked from all sides by those in power, and for a good reason.
* Washington Post: Smaller, and if I had to say, maybe not quite up to the NY Times
* Financial Times: Expensive, but on par IMHO with the other two.
* The Guardian can be excellent, but signal-to-noise (consequential-to-not) ratio isn't as strong as the others, IMHO.
* The Economist: Free-market ideologues, but if you have to read one thing, they are most efficient. Not really journalism (they don't go out and dig up information, nor report their factual basis transparently with quotes, etc.; but short, efficient, sophisticated, very wide-ranging analysital pieces.
* Poltico: I'm not sure what I think of them; I don't trust their ownership entirely [0], but they are seriously competing with the others, at least in national/international political news.
The Wall Street Journal seems serious, but it's run by Rupert Murdoch. If people trusted the WSJ before, I don't know how they do now after the Dominion case revealed Murdoch openly manipulating reporting to favor Trump and others.
----
Another good options is curated news summaries. I'd look up Just Security's, for example. Politico also has some newsletters like NatSec Daily. Memeorandum can be great, if you skip over the less important stories.
[0] Look up the NY Times reporting on Axel Springer's owner (Axel Springer bought Politico recently).
If the news is inherently skewed towards negativity then maybe it's not as valuable as we assume it is.
This isn't an argument against the free press or anything. As bad as bias and fearmongering in news is, adding government oversight would make it way worse. It's just a thought experiment.
To elaborate, if news is inherently skewed towards negativity (and I'm just taking that at face value), then maybe it shouldn't be revered as much as it is (by my estimation). I think people tend to think that news is sacred - more is better and it should face no challenges to its existence. But I also think we find ourselves in a predicament that we don't associate with times where news consisted of a daily paper and perhaps the radio. I'm not sure those times were any less prone to bias an negativity. The bigger difference is there was just a lot less news. Maybe the world would be better off with less news.
I'm not really sure what sort of attitude change or direction this would dictate. Like I said, it would be terrible for the government to limit news, and this negativity exists because there is strong demand for it. I guess I think people just shouldn't watch the news much, with some exception. I mean if you look at cable for example, it's virtually all garbage.
There's a whole category of widely believed and oft repeated historical myths that originated from journalists trying to sell newspapers, writing articles that were later cited as "contemporary accounts" once the truth had faded from living memory.
A few examples; the Titanic was never called unsinkable until after it sank, no one committed suicide on Black Friday as a result of the stock market crash, and there was no public panic caused by the original War of the Worlds radio broadcast. All of these things were reported by the media at the time.
Think of the stories you see day to day and imagine in 100 years if these are the go-to source for information about our time how skewed a picture you would have of how things actually were.
> A few examples; the Titanic was never called unsinkable until after it sank, no one committed suicide on Black Friday as a result of the stock market crash, and there was no public panic caused by the original War of the Worlds radio broadcast. All of these things were reported by the media at the time.
Why should I believe you, a random person on the Internet?
That's interesting. I'm not sure what you point is. I think it reinforces my point that news in the past wasn't necessarily more informative. I'm not really sure though.
That it has never lived up to being the bastion of truth and democracy it's sometimes made out to be, it has always been about getting eyeballs and selling ads.
These examples are more "sensational" than negative, but it is essentially the same idea.
>it has always been about getting eyeballs and selling ads.
And setting the record straight, where "straight" is whatever the powers-that-be want.
We even have an age old saying for this: History is written by the victors.
Historical records, and by extension journalism, have never been concerned about recording the facts. They have always been concerned only about defining the narratives and truths for the powers of the time.
> The bigger difference is there was just a lot less news. Maybe the world would be better off with less news.
I think you’re close. There was a lot less repetition of news. Now the need to fill endless hours with content means stories are repeated ad nauseam. Keep in mind that repetition is known and used as a torture technique. “Repetition is an important neural linguistic programming interrogation tactic to influence the target mind” [0].
Its valuable to us because of how our brains work. Learning a piece of info that is bad actually adjust our internal networks more effectively than learning what is good.
It works for ML too. If Tesla had a set of training data that was inversed, ie the vast majority of cars were involved in a crash, it would have a fully working level 5 autonomous autopilot 2 years ago.
Its much more efficient to have the knowledge of statistically improbable but bad actions to avoid, rather to have a set of good actions where you don't know where the boundaries are.
That’s an interesting take. I’m not sure I fully agree. Lots of things are scary. But not everything that is scary is worth constantly defending against. When the news oversamples or misrepresents then people will orient themselves towards a worse world that doesn’t exist. It leads to unjustified resentment and animosity.
Its not about defense, its about information efficiency. Bad events are rarer, and knowledge about them is more valuable than good events.
Lets say that you had to walk through a minefield with a set number of mines. You could pay me $10 for a piece of information. I can either tell you a spot with a mine, or a spot without one. How do you spend your money?
I'm not sure what you mean by this. In particular what "knowledge of the news" is.
What I'm getting at is that the premise that news is mostly negative seems to pretty clearly dictate that we would be better off without most news. Yet this seems to contradict a pretty wildly held belief that getting rid of news is troubling.
I think what they mean is that, someone knowing what is happening in the world, and being able to discuss those things, could be seen as them being part of a certain level/caste in society. Being able to discuss issues, being seen as intelligent and knowledgeable.
Ie, you will be looked down on in some circles if you are not aware of what is going on. Knowing what someone else doesn't know is a way of being better than them. Or signalling that you are better than them.
It's not usually as overt as this, but it's there.
I will admit that while reading the news I have on occasion consciously committed certain details about recent events to memory knowing I had an upcoming social gathering specifically for this purpose.
It makes sense at a surface level, if you ignore negative information it could potentially lead to negative outcomes for yourself.
If you ignore positive news, what's the worst that could happen if you're caught unawares? Something positive or at least personally benign?
I this this is a fair point. I would argue, though, that 99% of the negative news (or most news, for that matter) will have zero effect on 99% of the population (e.g. focusing on individual crimes vs. aggregate crimes or a systemic crime problem).
In an ideal world, news outlets aren't pushing news that is shocking for the sake of being shocking (and therefore, increasing viewership/readership), but pushing news that is actually relevant to a good percentage of their viewers.
Sure, report things like severe weather forecasts, boil water advisories, etc.
But I don't need to know about every crime, or every scandal in Hollywood, etc. -- and this is most of the negative information that's covered. Not the things that are genuinely relevant to most of us.
News of a bad thing happening to someone far away does not really impact survival as well.
The point was not about providing a good counter-example. I wanted to show that when one hand-waves away a behavoiur to an abstract selection criteria, one can easily come up with criteria that contradicts that notion.
I watched a farewell video of a very far right person dying of Covid. He didn't get vaccinated but I don't know if it was because he was anti-vax, didn't think Covid was real or didn't get a chance as this was early in the pandemic. It was a recording made from a hospital bed and uploaded to Facebook. As he was saying his goodbyes he said something like "...and tell Brandon (son) I love him, not to trust anyone, and no one will ever help you in life"
I realized that certain people indoctrinate their children, and this is the correct usage of the word, with a negative outlook on life. They ignore the altruistic nature of humanity for a distance based trust system. Assuming the son takes this message to heart he'll likely experience more problems because of his mistrust and when he examines his situation in life confirmation bias will prevent any self reflection. I don't understand why you reduce us to "scared and vigilant" and I wonder if that is a self fulfilling state.
hah, the person below you did a nice imitation. They forgot "Assuming the daughter" not son.
But more seriously, the reason people indoctrinate isn't because they want them to be negative, but to realize that being pessimistic is actually going to be a more reliable way to have a plan for life when no one is able to help.
For example, if your car breaks down and your cell phone battery is around 30%- you have time to make a few phone calls, but instead of wondering if your friend can pick you up (assuming he has a cheap pickup truck that can tow), you rationalize- he might be sleeping, working, unwilling to answer the phone. You have three phone calls to make, so you decide you'll compare the rates of the two nearest towing companies.
Which do you call? You have money and time to spend, but you don't want to be stranded for a very long time, even assuming you were able to pull your car over to the side of the curb. Being pessimistic is just being prepared, and similarly, you want to try to save for a rainy day.
> the reason people indoctrinate isn't because they want them to be negative, but to realize that being pessimistic is actually going to be a more reliable way to have a plan for life when no one is able to help
I take it you are a conservative. This is a perennial city people (liberal) versus rural folk (conservative) discussion that will never have a resolution.
Liberals generally don’t believe in the idea that "no one is able to help" because they live in larger urban populations that see the government as beneficial.
Conservatives tended to live in more rural areas where there weren’t as many people to help them, and they couldn’t depend on the government.
Urban living is more anonymous and alienating than rural living.
There are too many people in a city to form relationships with everyone, you don't know 99.9% of the people you see in daily life because there are so many moving around. On the other hand in a small village, most times you see another person it's a repeated interaction and you have met that person before.
So the rural conservative view and values on social interaction is more based on repeated interactions with people you already know, whereas the urban liberal has values and prefers systems that work well with anonymous people; the government needs to step in to help people in need (because their neighbours won't).
In my experience, neither urban or rural communities are impersonal.
Suburbs, however, are dystopian soul destroying hellscapes. Simultaneously parasites feeding off of the prosperous urban areas while desecrating previously productive lands.
Urban and rural peoples are natural allies, kept apart by pro suburbanite propaganda. The American Dream™ was presented as McMansions, endless pavement, strip malls, and 2 SUVs in every garage.
I have lived in suburban, urban, and rural environments. I think the issue is more about whether globalization has changed all that. During the pandemic lockdown, many people were working from home, and some realized that paying for rent in NYC or SF wasn't worth it, if they couldn't go out and enjoy it, so it makes a lot more sense to work from home in a rural area if I am an IT person. That said, I don't think political viewpoints has anything to do with trust- when I was in the city, I didn't think "liberal" or "conservative" neighbors were more likely to be trusted. The point is that if one is raised believing there will always be a helping hand, it is better to not expect much, even if there is nothing wrong in asking for more help than supposedly more "individualistic" areas, which, in many cases isn't exactly reflected in rural vs. urban environments (e.g. cattle grazing was exploited by libertarians as cheap land leasing)
> The point is that if one is raised believing there will always be a helping hand, it is better to not expect much, even if there is nothing wrong in asking for more help than supposedly more "individualistic" areas
I don’t disagree with anything here, except there is a correlation between the amount of trust liberals and conservatives give to people in their community, and one user up above directly addressed how small towns generate trust between people they personally know. The only thing I would disagree with here is the notion that some people believe there is a helping hand to be had; I think this is more of a political myth. What I was originally getting at is that liberals believe government can and does help people, while conservatives, at least in the US, promote the idea that government should be hands off.
I don't disagree either, and maybe I worded it to indicate otherwise. While I think there is a difference between the notion that a helping hand exists or not and whether a person is entitled to advocate for government assistance, the two are typically correlated because liberals believe in a legal mechanism (voting) for seeing that type of assistance through a machine, the Democratic Machine (Tammany Hall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoils_system) (I wouldn't even call many government services assistance, but programs that accomplish basic services, like National Parks management, etc).
I also think the GOP relies more on the patronage system now,
I think that best captures the divide, more so than specific political issues, although that does overlap alot- for example, the perception of crime and immigration, while not correlated, get grouped as a platform issue on the right, whereas the Democratic platform does not consider those issues in the same light.
There is another anthropological term for fear, that I can't remember but read a few days ago- I think it was a Dutch anthropologist who coined a term in the 70s and also developed a computer architecture.
Is missing out on something positive bad? Don't positive stories contribute to a positive outlook on life? Therefore missing these stories could be a negative?
Do you think this is just how we're wired? What is so extremely disappointing to me is that, across many objective measures, many things seem to be improving, yet the perception most people have of reality is the complete opposite, thanks to this perverse incentive.
> many things seem to be improving, yet the perception most people have of reality is the complete opposite
Online news (as well as cable news) in particular has taken to farming any kinds of changes to society as moral decay. Airing or printing only outrage is a business model unto its own. See: Huffpost, Breitbart for examples.
I think the way the news is reported says more about us than it does about the organizations that do the reporting. If we didn't want all the negativity, we would reject it, and they'd stop reporting it. But that doesn't happen. So, essentially, we want all the negativity - yes, it's how we're wired. We just don't want to accept it.
Most people don't read online news. Online news is a subculture at this point and they're not interested in happy stories so happy stories are not produced.
Politicians are also pushing the notion that things are getting worse for support and those politicians are supported by news networks who may skew coverage.
I'd argue that people's impression of the world is going to be driven largely by their own perspective, not media. Borrowing a quote [1] from Stephen Pinker, probably the most visible advocate for 'things are getting better' :
"... the United States is an outlier among rich Western democracies, with a stagnation in happiness and higher rates of homicide, incarceration, abortion, sexually transmitted disease, child mortality, obesity, educational mediocrity and premature death.... "
Many of these issues are ones people are going to be aware of, and that is going to impact, them on a day to day basis. And that's going to inform their decisions much more than whatever the news is saying. And that was written back in 2018 which absolutely feels like the "good ole days" compared to now a days!
Spectacles drive the news. It's easier to frame a negative issue as a spectacle than a positive. Say you have a local festival. That's supposed to happen. There's no news there except for the time and date the festival is open, and any new or interesting things can be found by going there. Car drives into a festival and runs over some people? Wow, unexpected. Might wanna read about that and get the details.
But if your local high school football team wins a state title? You'll sell that paper out. Local refinery explodes? Likewise.
And thus, because profit motive drives literally everything (because it's impossible to forestall a takeover if you're broke) then all news-media trend toward maximum tolerable negativity.
That is, there is a saddlepoint for how much negativity viewers desire.
While I don't personally know what the threshold for psychological damage from exposure to this kind of media is, I would guess it's lower than the average exposure level is now.
sometime around the 2016 US Presidential elections, when outragebait headlines had arguably achieved a local maximum, I will now never forget how I overcame headline rage forever.
I saw some headline about how students at some school, Berkeley I believe, had joined arms and surrounded the front entrance to the school, and would only allow non-white students to go through, forcing white students to go around and enter the back way, or something to that effect. I felt the all-too-familiar-at-that-point boiling rage enter my mind—this was an outrage! a clumsy attempt at making a political statement about racism, enacted through an act of mass racism. did these idiots not understand that they're not making things better for anyone, that their actions served only to divide rather than unite?! how could they not see this, it was so obvious?!? I could feel my blood start to boil: rrrrRRRRRAAAAUUUUUGHH—
suddenly, I had this moment of clarity out of nowhere, as though from God Himself: I was fully aware, somewhere in the back of my mind, that the whole point of this stunt was to cause outrage locally, and the whole point of the article about it was to spread the outrage globally, even though the article reporting on the event was politically opposed to the actions the students had taken. yet, in the end, their goal was the same: to cause outrage!
woah. "both sides" here want to cause me to be outraged, and here my dumb ass was, just letting it happen. why should I oblige either party? was I really so simple and manipulable that just seeing some words and photos on a screen about something dumb and wholly irrelevant to my own personal daily life could work me up this much? what the hell was wrong with me? why did I let myself fall for this bullshit?
since that day, I have never once felt that familiar blood-boiling rage as the result of reading a headline or news article again. I can't really explain it but something just clicked in my head that day, giving me insight into just how emotionally manipulative pretty much all "news" so obviously is, and how, once I was made consciously aware of this phenomenon, it was really on me to consent to this blatant emotional manipulation—which, I then realized, I had totally been doing for years at that point!
I had nearly forgotten about this having ever happened until recently a very close friend saw a news article about something that had happened over a decade ago, politically framed such that it was relevant to contemporary politics, and it significantly emotionally affected him in a way that reminded me all too much about my past self. I talked him through this story and showed him how much better off I was today now that I choose to refuse to let news headlines and even stories massively emotionally affect me. it took awhile to talk him down from his irrationally outraged state but in the end he calmed down, heard what I had to say, and thanked me profusely for the perspective I gave him, as, much like the story that outraged me years ago, this too had caught him completely off-guard such that before he knew it he was an emotional mess, all because of something he read on the Internet, about something that had happened over a decade prior.
Yeah, I actually get more annoyed when "my own" political side does this. They take the worst possible example of the other side and make outragous article about them. Yet I know most people on the other side are actually good people, with good intentions, we just disagree on a few points.
Yet all I ever see in the media are ridiculous parodies of the other side. I've basically stopped almost all politics reading at this point. It's no better than gossip columns, and big brother level entertainment, it's just packaged for people who think they're more intelligent than those who watch big brother.
I have less of a side as I age. The opposing side would probably have a convert if they weren’t dominated by raving lunatics obsessed with offensive garbage.
I have a feeling a lot of people across the political spectrum feel the same. Some day one of the parties is going to find not pandering to the emotional appeals of their brand of extremists is actually a huge political gain. I hope for that day, but not much.
> The opposing side would probably have a convert if they weren’t dominated by raving lunatics obsessed with offensive garbage.
It's telling that I literally can't tell which side you're referring to, as both sides seem dominated by raving lunatics obsessed with offensive garbage. I guess amplifying that garbage is exactly what sells, which is why reporting of each side focuses on that.
I guess it comes down to caring more about engaging your base than it is appealing to a broader audience. Which is unfortunate.
> Yet I know most people on the other side are actually good people, with good intentions, we just disagree on a few points.
I think this is the attitude most people have if they stop consuming so much news. And I think it dissolves a huge amount of animosity we see between different groups in western society atm.
"dependent origination" is a name for that chain from a thought all the way via emotions and physiological reaction (blood boiling) to new thoughts and so on.
catching oneself in that circular road and taking another turn off that wheel, that aha!, that enlightening moment is what some people invest heavily into, time, energy even money.
and you have it just like so, ten years ago, from that news article on racists blaming anti-racists for a racist anti-racism gig...
Had similar experience watching TV ads. It started with a beauty ad which was plainly targeting viewers’ body image insecurities. Was very jarring to recognize how dark and manipulative the glossy, “upbeat” ad truly was.
Then recognized same pattern in every TV ad afterwards, almost all target some sort of insecurity or feeling of lack.
I was surfing market analyses one day, and stumbled on this: in the US, the largest personal care product category was shampoo, but in India, it was skin lightening products. And then I found a multinational doing shampoo to be beautiful ads in the US, was doing whiter is better ad campaigns in India. Which long-term gave the former a rather different taste.
> and how, once I was made consciously aware of this phenomenon, it was really on me to consent to this blatant emotional manipulation—which, I then realized, I had totally been doing for years at that point!
This is in no way an attack on you, but your post shows exactly the problem. You first wrote
> With few exceptions, positive stories
and then you wrote
> a whole section for feel-good features
"Positive news" is more or less orthogonal to "feel-good features". When I moved to my current job, I had the option of watching Kansas City news or Topeka news. The KC news stations took the route you're suggesting. Everything was negative and intended to shock/alarm ("Joe Smith was murdered and then the police were involved in a car chase to catch the murderer. When they shot out his tires, he took his own life.") The Topeka stations did mostly positive news, with some negative mixed in. As any sane person would do, it didn't take long for me to go with only the Topeka news. It was nice to know what was going on in the area, to see a review of a local restaurant, or to hear about the debate on a change in the sales tax. I don't watch the news to see someone's good luck.
I've noticed some programming and sources have sort of jammed feel-good pieces in some weird attempt to counter balance things. People dying on Ukraine, banks defaulting, Little Timmy in nowhere USA is taking steps to setup his lemonade stand and donate to the local food shelter to make a difference.
Don't get me wrong, I think efforts like Little Timmy's are great and in the scope of their lives is probably significant. It doesn't however hit the level of magnitude/significance and scope of their negative counter parts. It's only in local news sources that I tend to see a better balance of things that truly effect, are relevant to me, and aren't full of doom and gloom.
Also there are often "feel good" stories that are really quite negative in disguise. "Little Timmy started a GoFundMe to pay off his school lunch debt, and all his friends donated!" and other dystopian "seems nice but is actually horrifying" content.
I feel like you could break up negative stories into a lot of batches. Would you say the type of negative stories have changed? Maybe towards more outrage or drama stories instead of fear-based stories?
Do you think it's always been the case ? I have a strange belief that people before the 60s, through harsher lives, were a lot more resilient and thus less interested by petty news cycles.
I highly recommend reading old press clippings from your area. Reading headlines from 100 years ago personally made me feel as though not much has changed.
Has anyone tried a serious meta-approach: introducing the public to the notion and methods of contemplating the nature and consequences of the abstract phenomenon itself?
About a year ago, I stopped consuming news cold turkey (save technology and movie news [the former work-necessary and the latter a personal vice]). I took the extra step of banning Twitter and Memeorandum at the router level, so that I couldn't revert easily.
I didn't read a single political news story in the ensuing six months. Some of the happiest months of my life. These days I will read the section headlines on Memeorandum if I'm out and about, every week or so. I have found that I no longer have any interest at all in the contents of the stories. Most seem so petty.
I don't honestly give a f*ck if someone on either side of the aisle is caught doing something immoral, because there has been zero consequences during my 50 years of life. The vast majority of power players (politicians, businesspeople and celebrities) get off scott free, so I've just opted out of caring.
One of the most common bit of wisdom I've heard from older folks is to ignore the news. Don't read the newspaper, don't watch TV news, don't listen to radio news, etc.; they all say nothing in them is worth our time.
It's among the most useful piece of advice I've ever had.
100% Agree. It's an entire article written about a celebrity or politician's tweet reacting to another celebrity or politician. It's an entire article that talks about some filler setting up the background, the actual embedded tweet, a paragraph or two quoting that tweet with filler in it, then perhaps a second reaction tweet or a bunch of tweets that random people responded with either positive/negative or both depending on what the author is trying to achieve or influence.
I think you are drawing an arbitrary line to defend an industry that doesnt deserve it at all.
In my book, even the supposedly important news are pure poison for the individual, and at the end of the day, unimportant as well.
People that need to push a new or current narrative will likely disagree, but that is predictable. They dont want their hate-channel to be closed down.
I’ve observed that so much of the news is published before the facts are even out. In a race to be first, they present half a story that hasn’t been verified yet. So you are left to either be outraged preemptively or just ignore the story entirely as it’s currently useless.
Could you give some recent examples, especially from news organizations with leading reptuations (NY Times, Washington Post, etc.)?
To a degree, that's what journalists should do: They are not writing a history book. They can't wait until all the facts are out or we'd never know if someone was arrested or accused until the trial was over.
reptuations, that was a freudian slip, right? Reputation is obviously in the eye of the beholder... What is one persons reputable source, is a money making machine without conscience for others.
People can fabricate whatever they want. They can call a leading newspaper a child kidnapping ring. But reputation refers to something else - there is truth and people do tend strongly toward it; people make functional (not optimal) decisions as a group - that's how democratic self-governent has worked far, far better than any other form of government.
It's philosophical theory that human judgment could be just completely arbitrary and that all these arbitrary opinions have equal weight. But it's cheap theory - not good enough for the first day of philosophy class - and transparently wrong, and has nothing to do with reality. We (you included) make imperfect but not random judgments all day every day, using many skills and inputs.
I ment "you likely typoed that word because you unconsciously dont believe in what you said", which is, stretching the coloquial meaning a bit, a "freudian slip".
But reading your text, it is probably useless to talk to you about humorous viewpoints...
Yeah, they use words like “allegedly” or “according to unnamed sources” to free themselves from liability in the event when what they report turns out to be inaccurate. In that case might as well not report the news then if they’re not sure.
Over the course of the last 3 years I found myself clicking on less and less HN stories. This place definitely feels like it lost the inventor spirit and the clever "how to" articles. A lot of stuff is either political or has very close political outcomes, and the rest is blind hype (ChatGPT won't revolutionize almost anything, and I'll stand by my words, bookmark this comment and show it to me in 5 years, I dare you). Let's not forget the yet-another-500-comments thread arguing pointlessly about whether startups are a good format or not. Or office vs. remote. And several others (but they are not many and it does feel like a tool a la ChatGPT could have generated them).
Today I've gotten much bigger value for my time when reading about various CLI tools that process and ingest / export data (recent thread about `miller`) than all of the above, combined.
HN, I feel, became more popular, and that has hurt its quality. So yes, I started reducing my consumption of it as well. I treat it like all other news sites 99% of the time, and I am right to do so at least 90% of them. I barely find 2-3 good articles per week these days.
Soon I might start checking HN biweekly because the value proposition is just not there.
>ChatGPT won't revolutionize almost anything, and I'll stand by my words, bookmark this comment and show it to me in 5 years, I dare you
1. I'll actually take you up on this, because I'm interested to re-visit the discourse around launch, 5 years from now :)
2. I do agree it's overhyped to a degree. I think it will revolutionize _some_ things but it could turn out like VR. I do use it every day and I don't see a reason not to... I guess we'll see what the future holds!
My problem with the hyped up stuff, ChatGPT in particular, is that AI actually does not exist.
The practitioners of the area of course have a vested interest to argue until the end of days that ACTUALLY AI does equal ML/DL and stuff but I am like "I see no Skynet so get off my back, we have no AI and that's that". :D
But, I guess in 5 years we could argue whether certain progresses are indeed attributed to ChatGPT or is it something else entirely!
If you don't know how your program works, in the sense that you don't know how it arrived at the answer it gave you, IMHO that's as good a reason as any to call it "AI."
The days of understanding our own code are rapidly coming to an end. As developers, we now have the same problem that the mathematical community has had to deal with for some time, as proofs become complex enough to demand large chunks of peoples' careers to comprehend and evaluate.
Prompts may or may not be the next revolution in the graphic arts, but they will be the next revolution in programming languages. I've seen more than enough to conclude that.
> The days of understanding our own code are rapidly coming to an end.
That's one possible development of events, yes. The other one is inventing DSLs on top of popular languages so we're spared tons of boilerplate; but then we'll need experts on the actual underlying languages (say C++, Rust, Lua, Erlang or anything with a good VM and/or statically strongly typed and compiled to native code) when sh1t hits the fan, which... actually can work just fine.
This is why I prefer the term "weak AI". Weak AI is specifically trained to solve tasks whereas strong AI can teach itself to solve new tasks.
Whether humans are able to create strong AI is a philosophical question: While some argue that's not possible (can we be Gods?), others argue that this is the next logical evolutionary step.
Let's see if we can at least mimic strong AI when we let LLMs connect to external systems (internet, money, more energy, etc) and specifically allow themselves to fine-tune or train new NNs in general.
Well comments like yours are the ones truly deserving discussion on the topic, just so you know my opinion. <3
> This is why I prefer the term "weak AI". Weak AI is specifically trained to solve tasks whereas strong AI can teach itself to solve new tasks.
Yes, we can call it a spectrum, though I'd think it's more like a multi-dimensional space. Wouldn't contest your definition though, it's as valid as all the others really.
And yeah I agree/think that the ultimate general AI is the one that can teach itself new tasks, utilize past experience even if the patterns don't match perfectly, and have some sort of sentience. And let's not forget that it must have actual goals and motivation (otherwise it'll just conclude that the best course of action is to not expend any effort and just put itself in an infinite idle loop).
> Whether humans are able to create strong AI is a philosophical question: While some argue that's not possible (can we be Gods?), others argue that this is the next logical evolutionary step.
IMO people romanticize these topics too much. The true AI will be "born" as a hyper-optimizing recursive machine (and collection of algorithms) and it will eventually get limited by the physical reality it inhabits so it'll self-balance quite fine. It's strange how much spiritual value people put into these things, though I somewhat understand; that'll be the second truly intelligent and sentient "life form" that we will know beside ourselves so some metaphysical hand-waving seems unavoidable and maybe even desirable (in terms of moral correction mechanism, maybe).
> Let's see if we can at least mimic strong AI when we let LLMs connect to external systems (internet, money, more energy, etc) and specifically allow themselves to fine-tune or train new NNs in general.
I have no doubt we'll eventually get there but my feeling is that the current "AI" area is in a local maxima and it won't crawl out of it easily.
Depends how loosely we interpret this. Do we mean online AI language models which are part of a continuous lineage tracing back to the present chatGPT will not have revolutionized anything, or do we mean that OpenAI and their product line known as chatGPT in particular will not have revolutionized anything? Let's disambiguate now so no one says we are equivocating in 5 years. I'm understanding it to mean the former.
I mean the latter. Science progresses with big steps every now and then so it would be crazy for me to claim "AI will never exist". It's clear that eventually we'll get there.
It's a fact that somebody somewhere thought of making better bearings for their horse-pulled carriages centuries ago. That person does not get credit for modern cars' suspension systems however.
Yup. I ignore 99% of the threads that come by here, and I wish I could do that without bothering to read the clickbaity (and generally sensationally false) headlines.
Not as much in my opinion. True, there are spikes of negative and cynical HN threads, but it's not nearly as consistently sustained as general news media.
Going too far in the other direction can be pretty annoying, too, though.
I'm autistic and vehemently ignore and reject most pieces of news, especially political, and that causes tons of terrible things to happen whenever some sort of spoiler gets out and I happen to see it.
It's like I'm proud of my great ignorance and having that threatened with mere knowledge sends me into a panic of some sort.
It's not just news. If I say "I don't know what that is lol" to someone, 9 times out of 10 their default response to tell me what it is (if it is some cultural/media thing) is the complete opposite of what I want, which is usually just for the other person to move on without telling.
Knowing things can't be undone, so I strive not to know most things, apparently.
> Reply with a response that will get the response you want.
This is something that I understand, but unfortunately can't really perform for some reason. I always have to be... "honest", for lack of a better word. I will always say something that makes things worse for me because it's... just how I feel.
I used to be a pathological liar, and from a young age I had this one friend who was a living lie detector, and they trained it out of me so hard that I now obsessively tell the truth in all situations even when it would be detrimental. ;-;
...Maybe I didn't do a good enough job of trying to avoid that implication, but the point is not "I don't lie anymore" (implying "that would be a lie"), but rather "I now obsessively tell the truth in all situations even when it would be detrimental" (meaning "that would be omitting things I Absolutely Must Say").
In other words, even if I know just saying "ok" would probably work, I feel the need to somehow "brag" or otherwise disclose my proud ignorance, even if that only results in the literal opposite of what I want.
I went the other way, expanding the news I read to include more international stuff. Really makes me see the partisan stuff in the US as silly, so I don't get heated about it, just lazily keep up with what's happening. International propaganda is easier to spot cause I'm not living in it, which helps me identify it more at home. Anything I consider real news is still too far away to really upset me but important enough that I want to do something about it in a cool-headed way.
And if I weren't doing that, I'd go no-news. That's fine too.
> Really makes me see the partisan stuff in the US as silly, so I don't get heated about it,
Some of the partisan issues are not silly if you are affected by it. To pick a left issue, if you are gay and would like to marry your partner and get the benefits of such legal recognition, the differences are very consequential. To pick a right issue, if you think that Democrats are voting illegally by the millions, then addressing such threats to Democracy is incredibly important.
There are many other issues where there is a real difference. As an affluent, well educated, older white guy with job security, I'm well insulated from many of the issues. But I have empathy for the people who can't be so aloof; to say "both sides are equally bad" across the board is lazy enlightened centrism.
I don't think they're equally bad, only equally silly. They use the same scare tactics every time, and it helps to look past that. Yes I care about the issues.
But how I vote is different: just straight down for whatever is the minority party in my state. Only battleground states get the pandering, and I'll stop doing this if I ever live in a battleground state or they change how voting works. State propositions are a separate thing.
Same but I just don't vote at all, unless there are any strong trustworthy pro-worker candidates which basically doesn't happen. I will also show up to vote against anti-worker ballot measures, which are more frequent.
You'll end up with a many more anti-worker activity if you don't vote. And you will be ignored.
And who will make decisions for you? Who will take on your responsibilities? What other authority is there? When we are children, we can be irresponsibile and our parents ultimately see to them. As adults, there's nobody else; it's just us.
One vote doesn't matter, in fact you get negative value out of it cause it takes time and exposes some of your private info to the public. I vote despite that, only cause I want to. There isn't a logical explanation for it.
C'mon, we can think deeper than that. One soldier doesn't matter; are militaries useless? One software developer can't do much on a sizeable project; should we abandon all software? All open source? One journalist, one HN comment, etc. etc. When can one person accomplish much by themselves?
You're right, one person alone doesn't accomplish much, yet somehow humanity has accomplished incredible things. We are social creatures, we naturally work together to build and do amazing things. Please join us! The sky is the limit, and not even that since 1961.
I would go one step further: There is no left wing to speak of in the United States, and if there were then it would only vote for its own democratically disciplined candidates.
I only read biz/economic news religiously, like stock market crashes, bank failures, layoffs, etc…because they are more likely to affect me and I can act on that news. Business news also seems to have less bias, since they are judged on their ability to help their consumers make and retain money, rather than just cater to their cognitive biases.
I think it's a bit extreme. I have developed some heurisitics, which so far are (living in Australia):
* news.com.au = clickbait
* government funded ones = abc, sbs are free and ok
* 9 news, 7 news = negative
* google news = aggregator of mostly negative news
* AFR, Sydney Morning Herald, .. few others = ok
My experience with twitter has been the following:
* I look at some content I subscribed for (humor, or tech related)
* Then it feeds suggestions which spiral downwards into negativity (sometimes extreme - like videos of people getting shot). Soon, I resent twitter and the platform.
Experience with youtube: meh, but not as bad as Twitter as described above
Experience with Quora: better and interesting
Facebook: I avoid
TikTok (my wife's): interesting content - but happy to view via my wife's mobile, since it naturally limits my consumption
I would say both ABC and SMH often lead with clickbait as well. I sometimes check the headlines and it is almost always a waste of time and emotional energy.
The top article on abc at the moment is clickbaity and niche, although, I give credit to it actually being of relevance to some people.
I would swap a lot of these out for primary sources. 'News' sites are just middle-men for a 9:1 blend of unimportant trash and important information. Occasionally they can alert you of something important you need to know about, but once I learn of such topics, I examine primary source(s) and context; very rarely do I get info from the 'news' article itself; it's usually designed to titillate or outrage.
The most interesting news website for down under is theconversation. The quality is much much higher than any other general news website I have ever read.
I did about the same thing at about the same time. I’ve spent much more time creating - music, software, retro computing. Much happier, but there is one corner of my brain that feels a bit like I had to give up on humanity to get here and that sucks.
Entirely understandable. But taken too far, it is sort of like a person being raped coming to terms with the abuse and actually learning to like it. News can be addictive, so its important to keep it in check. But too much ignorance makes you an unwitting slave.
I like to watch my favorite local news station. They have a lot of minor stories that never make the National media. Although there are local issues like murders, thefts, and controversial topics. It’s still a huge downgrade from the rage inducing large outlets.
edit:
To add more color: "local news" is increasingly not local anymore. The video I linked to is a collection of "local" stations that are owned by Sinclair reading from the same script rather literally.
I expect youre being downvoted for the same reasons I felt the need to reply. I'm skeptical that any "local" news station is able to give you useful content without also pushing strong partisian agendas.
What station is it? Asking with an open heart and mind. I would love it if such a thing exists in this day and age.
Local news tends to be way more actionable. City council meetings are attended by like... Thirty people? Max? I've shown up to ones where there are more people on the council than in the gallery. It's very easy to get your voice heard if you're in a crowd the size of a small classroom. And the impact is direct! They were going to accept the suburb negotiation for allocation of service renumeration based on assessed value rather than service quantity consumed! I voiced my opposition, as did several others; the motion was eventually decided against.
But if you're not reading your local paper, you might not even have known. Of course all three of mine are INCREDIBLY partisan, which is great because they're partisan in different ways :)
Hesitant to give out my location but I guess if you combed my comment history someone could find out.
I like WSB-TV and the early morning broadcast only. Lots of local news less the 5 o’clock prime time breaking news type stuff. Perhaps the key is picking the right time of day.
I also pay for PBS/GPB but I am someone who can filter out partisan topics and welcome both liberal and conservative discussions. At the end of the day I make my own conclusions and I’m not afraid to break party lines.
I’ve found that one needs to decide if they are going to get involved, or if there is a line that can be crossed that they are willing to get involved.
If not, ignore all news. If the line is crossed or going to be crossed soon. Then get involved.
I guess it's one of those game theory things. Individually each of us can improve our lives by "defecting" and ignoring the news. But if we all "cooperate" by consuming a lot of news then we have better odds of voting in ways that actually improve the world. An interesting moral dilemma: is it right to become a low-information voter in order to be happier?
(I am not judging your choices. I honestly don't know the correct answer.)
An alternative is to find someone whose thought process you trust who does consume a lot of news and treat them as a human filter. Not too much different than how we use experts in other domains.
Who is going to make decisions and hold power in our society, if not you and me? We have responsibilities for it; if it's malfunctioning, that is on us. Who will take care of these responsibilities for you?
Expecting someone else to do it is playing a victim and a child - it is us, there's nobody else; there are no parents or authorities to take care of us while we act out. People following your path are why nothing happens. People who act are the reason many do face consequences.
Look at the world that was built for you - the freedom, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, the technology, health care, roads, schools, etc. They were built by the prior generations, not by people who quit under stress. What are you building?
The best tactic of the people with power is to get people like you to give up yours, because the public has the ultimate power. Why do you think people in power invest so much in persuasion, disinformation, etc.? If you were powerless, it wouldn't matter.
If you claim news is useless, what are you doing on HN that is so useful? (And see the headlines from Memeorandum, below.)
> there has been zero consequences during my 50 years of life
That's a falsehood, and if more need to face consequences, that is up to you and me.
> Memeorandum
Here are the current headlines. Many have great impact on the future of our country, on the freedom and financial security of hundreds of millions. You don't care about anyone else, including yourself? That's not a persuasive argument.
* Trump attorney ordered to testify before grand jury investigating former president
* Law enforcement agencies are prepping for a possible Trump indictment as early as next week
* ‘The Wire’ Star Lance Reddick Dead at 60
* Wyoming Becomes First State to Outlaw Abortion Pills
* My Struggle Session at Stanford Law School
* Two gifts to Trump family from foreign nations are missing, report says
* ICC issues arrest warrant for Putin over war crimes in Ukraine
* House GOP ignored Capitol Police requests to review public Jan. 6 footage, lawyer says
* Michigan Is Becoming The Anti-Florida On LGBTQ Rights ― And A Lot More
* Biden jokes he's ‘really not Irish’ because he's sober, doesn't have relatives ‘in jail’
* America Has Decided It Went Overboard on Covid-19
* Biden asks Congress to impose tougher penalties on executives of failed banks
* Just Because ChatBots Can't Think Doesn't Mean They Can't Lie
* Derek Chauvin, ex-officer convicted of killing George Floyd, pleads guilty to federal tax evasion
* As crucial legal test for Antifa ideology heads to trial, right-wing media also scrutinized
> Two gifts to Trump family from foreign nations are missing, report says
> Michigan Is Becoming The Anti-Florida On LGBTQ Rights ― And A Lot More
> Biden jokes he's ‘really not Irish’ because he's sober, doesn't have relatives ‘in jail’
> Just Because ChatBots Can't Think Doesn't Mean They Can't Lie
> Derek Chauvin, ex-officer convicted of killing George Floyd, pleads guilty to federal tax evasion
> As crucial legal test for Antifa ideology heads to trial, right-wing media also scrutinized
I live on the west coast and the above items you mentioned are pure sensationalism and have absolutely nothing to do with me, my state, or my local community. They add absolutely no value, informational or otherwise, to my life. They do not help me make more informed choices for me and my family or better my life in any discernible way.
You want to care about all that fluff and noise? Good for you. Just don't go around pretending to be a better person for that, or denigrating others who don't fall for that crap. People like you are part of the problem, not the solution.
Sure, there are some things that won't apply to you, but there are many that do. Also, why limit the scope of importance to state and local - it seems arbitrary. Things all over the world affect you. Look at climate change, as an easy example. (Also, the Antifa trial is in San Diego.)
> pure sensationalism
Political censorship in elite law schools, corruption by your President, AI dangers, justice, political oppression. Those things can certainly affect you and do, and will. The freedom of future Americans and people around the world depends on you - there's nobody else to do it for you. We're on our own. Let's get to work!
While you fight for this narrative, you surrender your power to others who are determing the course of your life. You are doing just want they want.
That's not the thrust of the study. Per the article, "Here we analyse the effect of negative words on news consumption...
Where it is reported a reason for consumption "...negative information automatically activating threat responses and leading one to deduce that ...motivations may make ‘fear’ and ‘anger’ more influential...
Wtf. It’s easy to say that now after covid variants have become decreasingly virulent as they became increasingly transmissible, but it was absolutely not mostly harmless. The human species won the lotto with how it evolved, but just spin that to play to our political leanings. I’ll take the downvotes for saying this, but with all respect, please just duck off back to “doing your own research” in whatever echo chamber you prefer.
We won the Lotto? Over 6.8 million people, including over 1 million Americans died. Many more suffer from long-term damage. The economic cost was astronomical.
Sorry, yeah, we’re in agreement here, my comment was poorly worded — I meant the death rate and global economic damage would have been beyond catastrophic had it become more virulent as it became more transmissible. Yes, it was bad, really bad (my healthy 40y/o friend was on death bed at start), and to hear someone say it’s “not that bad” or “no worse than a bad cold” is beyond the pale. I think my lotto comment was more in line of, “do you know how fucked we would be had it become more virulent while you all played along with games of politicizing masks and vaccines?” Sigh.
In the US alone it is > 1 million Covid deaths by now.
When anybody says millions of deaths is "mostly harmless", while the vaccine that helps fight those deaths is "extremely dangerous", I believe they have a political agenda.
Whereas healthcare professionals who give us the statistics and vaccines do not have a political agenda. They have a healthcare agenda.
So it's really not like "both sides are bad". Whoever pushes unproven facts is working for the bad side.
Maybe it is because happy people do not consume the news? Happy people tend to have full lives and are therefore too busy to waste time ingesting news about events that are not going to personally affect them. Whereas, I can only speak for myself, but when I am down (like right now), I spend lots of time doing nothing but browsing news aggregator websites and leaving comments like this one.
And of course, negative news would resonate more with a person who is in a bad mood.
Some people are hoping for a catastrophe that will render all their personal problems irrelevant, be it World War III, environmental disasters or societal collapse. Like a snow day for your whole life.
That's kinda how the pandemic felt to a degree. A happier than average time in my personal life, despite (or perhaps due in part to?!) all the carnage and pandemonium throughout the world. Feels wrong to say, but I will look back on my experience of the pandemic fondly.
Agree, the pandemic didn't hit the way I expected and I've heard many with similar experiences. This type of response (generally speaking, not necessarily you) may for some be driven by hypervigilance, as one of the ways it manifests is a level of calm in emergencies when others are freaking out. Rather paradoxical on the surface, but has to do with adaptation to certain stress levels and threat/friend response. The pandemic made a lot of friends into threats, if you were trying to avoid covid. Safety came from a greater level of suspicion and alertness to surroundings; an unhealthy response in everyday life but rather suitable for a pandemic. Another example is soldiers who come back from war can feel really out of place in civilian life, but in wartime can feel like they're 'home'.
Yeah that is consistent with my experience for sure. Probably true for lots of others too. I'm pretty neurotic about dumb shit on a day-to-day basis, but the few times something actually extremely serious has gone wrong in/around my life, it's rarely felt particularly scary or panic-inducing -- maybe even less so than the usual "oh my god I probably left the stove on and the building will burn to the ground and it'll be all my fault!"
This is a pretty common behavior for folks with anxiety related disorders, obviously closely tied with neurotic behavior. For me, there's nothing like the clarity of an all-out disaster to focus and sober me up.
Very interesting point. The other type is people who think they'll be on top after a society-breaking external event. It's a very bitter and passive attitude. Something to hold on to for the ones who don't have the power to do things themselves. I guess News just mirror that attitude. In a less dramatic way negative News distract you from your own problems for a while.
Of course everyone loses to an extent in a collapse but power is relative. And short of a meteor collapses are usually partial (e.g. the roman empire fell but the church remained and consolidated power).
You can only paint with a broad brush but it's not exactly hard to pick out groups that will be net recipients of relative power and wealth in various collapse scenarios.
If the financial system collapses people who own capital in whole (e.g. some tradesman with his van full of tools) and people who own "promises" of things (the contents of your 401k, bank account, etc) lose. If high level government collapses people who are associated with alternate sources of organization and administration (local government, the church) win. If local government collapses people who depended a lot on those services lose and people who already went without win.
Remember, money and political capital are convertible to each other to an extent so that complicates things as well.
So it's perfectly rational for people to root for the kind of specific tumultuous change that would benefit them.
In my experience, it's not those that are likely to be better off after a catastrophe who are looking for it. They are already pretty well off, they have a lot to lose in chaos.
Those who don't have a lot to lose are more interested in a chaotic phase that rolls the dice and will quickly reshuffle the social order. The rich are moving into gated communities, they're not looking forward to living in a mad max world -- they're trying to keep that world out.
In fairness, there's no such thing as a mad max world. At least not one without the rich. A mad max world is predicated on companies like Halliburton continuing to keep the fossil fuel deliveries coming. Which, in turn, is predicated on keeping refineries maintained and running. Keeping pipelines secure. And keeping roads repaired. All of which imply a very large number of wealthy people. (Assuming even state or regional scale energy logistics.)
To get mad max, we have to have alternative energy production and storage be cheap enough for broke people to afford. Even then, they'd need to be able to afford enough of that energy that they can spend huge amounts of it riding around looking for other people to steal from rather than spending the energy on farming and heating their homes. Raiding might work for post apocalyptic populations in Florida or South Carolina. I imagine the climate might be conducive to that sort of thing. But in a world with no energy deliveries, spending what little energy you have so frivolously would quickly doom you and your family if you live in Minnesota, Illinois, or Wisconsin for instance.
> Very interesting point. The other type is people who think they'll be on top after a society-breaking external event
Wait until you see those who want to create a nuclear war somewhere to make an apocalypse happen so that Jesus of Nazareth can come back. Then there are also ones who believe that the nuclear apocalypse must be global for Jesus to return. Have your next shock when you discover that these people actually have politicians among them. Then another one when you discover that the last US Sect. of State himself publicly admitted to be one of those...
Is is a snow day from their life or is it that their life hasn't or isn't going the way they expected but they perceive everyone else to be living fulfilling lives... and they would like to see that end?
We had that. It was called Covid. Two years later we are still dealing with the first phase of the completely predictable results rolling lock downs caused. In another 5 we will start dealing with the unpredictable ones.
Here's hoping that we're wise enough to not let reddit admits dictate world health policy again.
It works the other way, too. You're happier when you don't consume the news. That is also scientifically proven, although I have no linkage to support that claim.
It is a valid question, but anecdotally, I am a happy camper, who typically does not really worry too much, but events over the past few years forced to cut down on checking news, because the more I understand it, the more depressed I get over state of affairs I have zero control over. This weird level of inability to make any kind of difference puts a damper on things.
I set acceptable times for when I review stuff and even then I try hard to curate it as much as possible to avoid mindless scrolling. It is not easy and you get psychological jitters ( and you try to channel it some other ways ) and you can feel your hard trying to reach for that mouse.
But overall the results were/are worth it. Sure, we are facing eventual extinction of human race, but one could argue that has been the case for several decades now so I sleep much better.
Trolls troll because they enjoy the stimulus that it provides. Perhaps there is some overlap with that and posting negative news? Prison Experiment meets Social Media (which weaponizes and amplifies).
Happy person speaking. I subscribe to the physical edition of several (paid) local news publications, mostly to keep tabs on local events, new businesses opening, and stuff that requires political engagement (votes, borough and city meetings, etc.) It makes me feel more connected to my community, and I never run out of fun stuff to do :)
I don't bother with online news; most of it is irrelevant to me. If a national story has some bearing on my life, it'll usually end up in the local Sunday paper anyway.
I suspect this isn’t the case. Even when I’m in a great mood, I find myself drawn more to negative headlines. I wonder if it’s related to our odd loss aversion behavior[0].
Or consume different news. Ad-driven news is vastly more crisis-impending than subscription-driven news, which tends to be more contemplative as well as zoom out and explore regions and issues that aren't in spotlight. (I read the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Economist, Information, Monde Diplomatique and Paris Review, in addition to a number of stacks.)
I can definitely recognise similar patterns in my own behaviour and how they relate to mood. Infamy is very effective at rallying what is essentially an ad-hoc community, and so is viscerally attractive when I feel lonely or have feelings adjacent thereof. But the company I find in misery ends up being especially unproductive and unconstructive and hostile to calls to action that are collaborative, or can't guarantee immediate ROI. And so, the payoff I need to feel better, collaborative edification and mutual restoration of hope, doesn't happen, and so I can find myself having spent hours hopping from outrage to outrage, getting progressively worse until exhaustion demands a rest that (hopefully) provides the respite and reset required to pursue a more productive alternative.
Back in the late `70s early `80s I lived in Los Angeles and I'd grab some fast food after work and go home and sit down and watch the "News". There was only one channel we could get using an antenna. They had 3 half hour news programs back to back. They started out with local news, then National news, then World news.
Basically they scraped up every bit of "Bad News" they could find. Murders, robberies, car wrecks and natural disasters. After a few months of that I noticed I was getting depressed after consuming all that. I'd wake up feeling fine, go to work and get done and still feeling fine. But after that hour and a half I felt like life sucked.
So I quit watching it and the depression went with it. Since then I've made a point monitor the news and learned to keep that in perspective with what's going on close to me.
BTW, that News station was one of the very 1st to be bought up by "FOX". Since then they pivoted from focusing on tragedy to political outrage, but the effect on ones view of life is obviously very much connected to the "news" they consume, and a great many are attracted to gloom and doom and outrage.
I have an auth who was a producer for a news network in the US back in the 90s. She said she someone came to who one day with a story and before they could even finish their sentence, she went "how many people died?" and saying that out loud made it click how depressing her job was. She quit shortly after and moved to the Scottish countryside and still says it's the best decision she's ever made.
I follow the Community Impact paper for my city. It's a Texas firm that has specialized papers for each area of each major city. It's filled with very informative mostly positive community developments -- oriented around new establishments, expansions, road improvements, city parks/rec proposals, and events.
We've got huge quantities of multilingual news data with social metrics (e.g. newsapi.ai), classification models, research APIs for Twitter.
But Nature's running Upworthy and dictionary-based classification? It's almost low-N by today's standards. This is the sort of paper that could have been written a couple of decades ago.
There was no need to reach for more sophisticated tools; these were sufficient to give them the results they wanted.
I suspect you wanted research where people look at the world and discover what it means. This is the other kind, where people decide what they want the world to look like, then paint their data to reflect that.
Ever since I started my news diet I feel better overall and less stressed. Sure you can claim being apathetic/ignorant towards global current events makes me a bad person, but I do not care. To me, no human is designed to handle as much information input as we experience today.
Maybe I'll become informed again when news becomes more balanced, but I am waiting.
A tale that predates the "yellow journalism" movement. One of my favorite anecdotes about Ben Franklin (via the Isaacson biography) was his tendency to deliberately gin up stories or controversy in his publications, using fake letters to the editor and other tricks. This was in the mid 1700s.
TV news has the same problem. After the Eagles broke up, drummer Don Henley nailed it with one of his first solo hits, Dirty Laundry:
I make my livin' off the evenin' news
Just give me somethin', somethin' I can use
People love it when you lose
They love dirty laundry
Well, I coulda' been an actor, but I wound up here
I just have to look good, I don't have to be clear
A questionable headline- does it frame and try to link negativity with news, or choose this proposition because it's more likely to get clicks?
If I had unlimited cash and I was the editor, my front pages would be tongue-in-cheek nods to negative stories, like "CRIME ON PAGE 15" so they'd have to flip through a meadow of full page color ads of sakura trees, the textual equivalent of green noise.
Archive.org has a pleasant viewing experience if you flip through many of the fully-scanned magazines, simply because there are no digital popups- at least the ads on the pages are inert and unable to cause a virus.
Regardless of new worthiness it's logical to focus more on negative things.
Negatives are problems to be solved, if enough people care maybe they will be solved too. Whereas positives don't need solving (though can still be good to think about to avoid throwing out the baby with the bathwater when addressing a negative.
Of course not all negatives can be solved themselves. If it's "X was killed due to Y" then of course X is dead so nothing more can be done for X but maybe we can prevent issue Y killing someone else Z in the future.
It's in the human nature. People are more worried about what can affect them in a negative way than are they content about good things. Maybe it's the survival instinct that triggers with bad news, maybe people consider the good news to be normal.
I try to click less on negative stories and more on positive stories. Negative things can make me angry or sad and I dislike being angry or sad. Also I find many negative news to be tiresome.
> I try to click less on negative stories and more on positive stories.
An alternative approach is to consume news from multiple countries (including your own). It's so interesting to see how all the fnords are different and just how conditioned you were to consume the one kind of media designed for your country.
This is approaching the status of truism to anyone who has worked in journalism.
It’s not just the macabre dopamine rush of car crashes and natural disasters. Critiques involving total and complete destruction of the restaurant/play/movie/album — like this classic takedown of Guy Fieri’s monstrosity of a Times Square restaurant https://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/14/dining/reviews/restaurant... —always draw the most eyeballs.
And it's not just news a lot of other media is producing negative or outright toxic content, and it's super hard to break out because drama and gossip are captivating, because satire can be fun even if disperse in a negative sea and because there is quite some selection bias from our own frustration in selecting the content that relates to us.
Let's not forget we went trough four "once in a lifetime disaster" by now. Or more depending how you count.
Today I make a conscious effort to check a channel content before consuming any drama in it. If the channel is 100% drama I pass, regardless of how captivating the original link was,to try and break out of the algorithm.
I stopped reading news a year ago for this reason, having left social networks for much longer. Of course I still have some exposure through HN, but overall I'm happier and don't miss them one bit.
Engagement is engagement. Ryan Holiday wrote about this years ago. He’s not an academic but has a solid grasp on the practical aspect of how to exploit this tactic.
I went for a jog at my condo's gym the other day and the news was on. During my 30m session I learned about 3 violent crimes around the city. 2 car collisions. And a bunch of political turmoil etc.
I thought to myself: Why do I need to know person-x was one in 3 million to get killed? Why is this compelling? Is there a risk to me?
Was such an overtly negative feeling to watch that. Turned it off half way through the run.
Actually, it's much more specific than that: outrage.
Novelty makes it more viral.
Propinquity also increases the response (similarity between reader and subject).
In terms of manufacturing consent/sentiment, people who watch more local news tend to drift their views of police and authorities to more favorably. And everyone should know what the effect is of Fox News on its viewers.
About 20 years ago, I would read many newspapers every day. (I care a lot about society, and, therefore, journalism.) I learned a lot about both.
At some point, I had to take a break, because awareness of so many problems was overwhelming, and also there were diminishing returns (most problems are ongoing or recurring).
Years later, I found myself following local news for the locale where I was living (and where I had some large complaints about that locale). Eventually, I realized that, unlike before, I was subconsciously looking for and drawn to stories that reinforced my dislike for that locale. Reading was like ranting. This seemed very unhealthy, so I stopped.
One idea for LLMs would be to give me weekly or monthly updates on the news, or catch me up after some arbitrary break period. Maybe a more flexible NYT Week In Review.
News are not news anymore. They are fake headlines just fishing for one more click.
Real News should be government driven. News and not click headlines. And it is in finland and GB, atleast one alternative among the market ones.
Don't know about the GB one but in finland the YLE has crazy overgrown budget that just grows and grows, too many people working with too much time and the result is that it's not anymore "government basic information agency for every citizen" but a hundreds of ppl with no real work, but just to make gay, lesbian and lqbqt content on the headlines and everywhere. The amount of unbiblical sickness of sex-related vomiting is just so much that it must be the end of times..
It's always obvious in the Google news aggregation where the top article group is saying one thing and the Faux News headline is spinning the completely opposite direction no matter how tenuous the position is so long as it's owning the libs.
Maybe Google News is just great at serving you articles that aligns with your viewpoint? If people don't find biased articles at least weekly in their favorite newspaper, then I'd argue that they aren't critical enough.
I never click on them. Nothing in their profiling would make me a target for that company's propaganda. Ten years ago FN never showed up their news aggregation. Then there were complaints about bias so their algorithm was tweaked to be more "fair and balanced".
The paper doesn't seem to introduce any novel understanding of the topic, just reinforce what we already assumed - maybe I'm missing something.
I'd be more interested in a study of "persecution" news, the us-vs-them narrative that has become much more common in the last 20-30 years and which I think drives a lot of the so-called polarity of political dialogue.
Also it would be interesting to see effects in decentralized publishing, e.g. youtube/tiktok & independent journalism, since those are so much more prevalent and integral to the broader media narrative now.
This is bad. It is a negative feedback loop that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of negativity. We see it happening already with mass media being responsible for stoking tensions between superpowers in order to “be first” in reporting something (even if they have to redact it later), or in order to obtain click revenue. We need to stop the tabloidification of the 24/7 negative news machines everyone is holding in their hands right now.
I think it's because people care about fixing broken things in the world. There's no mystery here. We want to know what's broken in order to discuss and debate solutions.
If there's perception of injustice or bad practice in the community, then yes people will click the negativity. Apart from that there's the "popcorn" consumption, where negative things are more entertaining.
Negativity (anger, fear, anxiety, etc...) has a way of getting you to cling onto it in an incredibly insidious way. It's hard because usually you don't notice it until you've already started spreading it to others.
Let that shit go immediately, once you become aware. And if at all possible, spend time working to develop mindfulness (a meditation/introspection practice is very helpful).
The study isn't about news but rather clickbait shitposting on Upworthy. I don't refute the claim, partly because positive news are rarely extraordinary, but the paper isn't about news. It does however show that an incorrect headline can go a long way when trying to get attention on social media as long as the claim aligns with the voters.
The headline of the article is a concept that most of us are familiar with, but what I think is the novel part is how they quantified it. If you are not planning on reading all 8000+ words, scroll to the results section and look at table 2 for all the headline variations and click through rates.
I like to see both points of views between Democrats and Republicans. I made a little website with a side-by-side of the top posts for each party from reddit.
this is a bad headline. Drives is a causal word, which is not established. Indeed, a much more reasonable hypothesis is that both negative headlines and consumption are caused by high information events, which are more likely to be negative.
TFA discusses how randomized controlled trials were used to obtain their conclusions which do actually discuss causation. You're free to disagree with the study but you are incorrect in calling the article out as having a causation fallacy.
Define news. Is it the local gossip section or large social shifts or trends? Is the release of GPT-4 news? Was covid news? Any sufficiently important event will eventually knock on your door, so it's not like you can stick your head on the sand completely.
Ultimately, news is indistinguishable from information, and information is valuable if you're able to tell the signal from the noise, extract the meaning, and find the balance between getting the most value and not wasting time. You can use that information to make decisions over your own life: should I invest in X? Should I work in Y? Should I move to Z?
For example, amid the tech layoffs and the rise of AI tools to write code, I think one should reconsider starting a career path in software engineering
That is, unless you're completely self sufficient and living off the grid, in which case you don't need any of it.
Wish people could turn back time, and get back the time spent reading news/politics articles. Such a waste of time. Nothing ever happens. And if WWIII happens, nothing you can do about it reading articles.
I read far too much news/politics articles and I'd like to read more books instead. How do I go about doing this? The novelty of news and perhaps the uncertainty of rewards (slot machine syndrome) makes it appealing.
I only read the Wall Street journal which I feel gives fairly balanced and non click bait content. If it’s not big enough to warrant being on the WSJ, do I even wanna read it?
correct - the SVB collapse was pretty bad on its own, but it provided the perfect opportunity to jump on the blame train and spin a bunch of negative narratives.
News(events) = boring but useful
News(events + narratives) = juicy and less useful
I think the situation is a bit more complex than this; or at least that it can be.
The thing driving consumption is engagement. So what can news provide that drives engagement?
Incomplete narrative.
Conflict is probably the most familiar place to find an incomplete narrative. The easiest way to present conflict is from a negative perspective. A problem that is missing a solution is very easy to engage with.
Mystery is another. What really happened? What will happen next? Speculate!
These are broadly considered "lazy journalism", and for good reason. Controversial narratives are trivial to construct, even when the controversy itself is fake. Mystery is either an incomplete story or speculative fiction.
---
The best works of journalism present a complete story, but that doesn't leave much to engage with. It might be interesting. It might be complicated. It might be important. Is that enough? Sometimes.
Stories that good don't get written every day. If they did, they would become relatively mundane. The news does get published every day. What can we do except to fill the days in between with conflict and mystery?
What kinds of engagement are actually positive? Can they compete?
---
I visit hacker news because it is thriving with examples of positive engagement.
New tools, educational exposition, open questions, historical exploration, etc. Many of the posts here aren't news per se, but they are better than vain controversy.
I think that news organizations should diversify their content and presentation formats. Find more alternatives to "new" than opinion and speculation. Present opportunities for objectivity instead of neatly wrapped conclusions.
This is just one form of “information ochlocracy” in all forms of media. Ochlocracy is the evil cousin of democracy - basically mob rule.
Because the business model of media (old or new) requires a large audience, the least common denominator inexorably pushes content towards the basest human emotions and targets the least educated (as they are the vast majority of people).
This is how we end up with the History channel focusing on Nazis and Ancient Aliens and Bravo transforming from a channel focused on the arts such as Opera, to broadcasting Real Housewives non stop.
In terms of social media, it’s the same incentives. Those that post or share the most inflammatory content get more reactions and engagement. Even cat pics produce the same level of emotion, except on the opposite end of the spectrum.
What’s not rewarded is intelligent discourse. See also “eternal September”.
A nice new trend is the small newsletter subscription model, where those that most appreciate in-depth, detailed thought are able to support it directly. But this model is simply a boutique solution, and it won’t result in another Time Warner.
survival. If you miss hearing about a peace negotiation you're going to be pleasantly surprised, if you miss hearing about a conflict breaking out, your house might be a pile of rubble with you in it. The obsession with avoiding 'negativity' these days is childish. It's rational to focus on threats. The cost of missing one is, in the most extreme case, death. The cost of missing something positive is most of the time, nothing.
wow, strange but revealing comments here on the ideas of what constitutes news in the usa - i read the guardian (uk) every day, and i simply don't recognise many of these issues.
Checking out The Guardian's current UK page headlines: public sector strikes, controversy around media involved in a Rwanda visit, putin war crimes arrest warrant, actor dies, actor has blood cancer, labour party racism claims, SNP head of communications resigns due to failures, female footballers criticise another article, london bridge terrorist attack memorial, supermarkets fined after death of employee, something about the conservatives party upset someone wasn't prosecuted.
Followed by a row for the Ukraine invasion followed by a spotlight section containing: "the poison umbrella" on cold war killings, some babble about hugh grant and complaining about the Oscars, a somewhat not negative story about childcare funding?
~20 completely negative and/or garbage babbling stories on the page before one somewhat decent one sounds exactly the same to me.
Question: Which of these two stories will get more clicks for an advertiser? Click-bait pays the bills for our news. NYT is an obvious example. Their stories? How much home can a million buy in Portland. Which $600,000 apartment would you choose in Brooklyn.
Negativity is certainly a factor in click-bait but lets pin the tail on the donkey: targeted advertising as a business model.
Just as I have been saying, we need an alternative to the capitalist profit-driven media organizations. Outrage drives “engagement”, for both social networks and for publishers.
All of the profit-driven outleys are subject to market pressures. Even NYTimes which won more Pulitzer prizes than anyone admits to A/B testing headlines for clickbait. Let alone FOX News or YouTubers with “X does Y, immediately regregts it” and “Foo DESTROYS {group we hate}”
The profit motive and private ownership of the social networks and publications inevitably drives people into echo chambers and creates tribalism. Because the market selects for that over anything else. It’s not an accident that Twitter is so toxic, for instance.
Worse than just negativity, the media outlets selectively report on events in order to support their country’s narrative, often due to their government’s pressure. This can lead to wars and misunderstandings between huge populations, leading to violence.
The news on Twitter isn't really for-profit, more like for glory or popularity in many cases. I'm fully convinced now that the issue is the one-to-many distribution. When news only travels from friend to friend like the old days, it tends to be more positive and less devious, and there are studies behind this. You don't make friends sending them fake ragebait, but it certainly works on Twitter.
I'd have to see your app in action to know what it really does, but it does sound like the same kind of distribution as Twitter.
[Verse 1]
I make my livin' off the evenin' news
Just give me somethin', somethin' I can use
People love it when you lose
They love dirty laundry
[Verse 2]
Well, I coulda' been an actor, but I wound up here
I just have to look good, I don't have to be clear
Come and whisper in my ear
Give us dirty laundry
[Chorus]
Kick 'em when they're up
Kick 'em when they're down
Kick 'em when they're up
Kick 'em when they're down
Kick 'em when they're up
Kick 'em when they're down
Kick 'em when they're up
Kick 'em all around
[Verse 3]
We got the bubble-headed bleached-blonde, comes on at five
She can tell you 'bout the plane crash with a gleam in her eye
It's interesting when people die
Give us dirty laundry
[Verse 4]
Can we film the operation? Is the head dead yet?
You know, the boys in the newsroom got a running bet
Get the widow on the set!
We need dirty laundry
[Verse 5]
You don't really need to find out what's goin' on
You don't really wanna know just how far it's gone
Just leave well enough alone
Eat your dirty laundry
[Chorus]
Kick 'em when they're up
Kick 'em when they're down
Kick 'em when they're up
Kick 'em when they're down
Kick 'em when they're up
Kick 'em when they're down
Kick 'em when they're stiff
Kick 'em all around
[Post-Chorus]
(Kick 'em when they're up
Kick 'em when they're down
Kick 'em when they're up
Kick 'em when they're down
Kick 'em when they're up
Kick 'em when they're down
Kick 'em when they're stiff
Kick 'em all around)
[Verse 6]
Dirty little secrets, dirty little lies
We got our dirty little fingers in everybody's pie
We love to cut you down to size
We love dirty laundry
[Verse 7]
We can do "The Innuendo", we can dance and sing
When it's said and done, we haven't told you a thing
We all know that crap is king
Give us dirty laundry!
[Outro]
(Kick 'em when they're up
Kick 'em when they're down
Kick 'em when they're up
Kick 'em when they're down
Kick 'em when they're up
Kick 'em when they're down
Kick 'em when they're up
Kick 'em when they're down
Kick 'em when they're up
Kick 'em when they're down
Kick 'em when they're up
Kick 'em when they're down
Kick 'em when they're up
Kick 'em when they're down
Kick 'em when they're up
Kick 'em when they're down
Kick 'em when they're up
Kick 'em when they're down
Kick 'em when they're up
Kick 'em when they're down
When they're up, when they're up
Kick 'em when they're down
Kick 'em when they're up
Kick 'em when they're down
Kick 'em when they're up
Kick 'em when they're down
Kick 'em when they're up
Kick 'em when they're down
Kick 'em when they're up
Kick 'em when they're down)
In the age of infinite content, headlines have become a sort of drama arms race. But the basic dynamic of what works and what doesn't for drawing in readers hasn't changed.