This is exactly the same conclusion I came to at the end of the day yesterday.
I realized I probably "wasted" three hours following the story. Because at the end of the day, I gained nothing I couldn't have gotten in reading an article at 11pm for five minutes.
I swear, it's like a drug. It's exciting at the time, but afterwards you think, well, that was a stupid waste of my time.
It's the same phenomenon that gets people to think that working long hours, or working in "open plan" offices for that matter, is super productive.
You watch TV for a bunch of hours and there's a constant hum of energy which is mostly just regurgitating the same information over and over again in different ways but there is a little kernel of new information coming out in dribs and drabs. And at the end of X hours it feels like those hours were spent productively because you have been exposed to new information along the way. Typically though you'd be better off just reading a summary later.
In an office environment when you work, say, 12 hours a day you'll find that you do productive work all throughout that period, even in the parts after "normal" hours. And that suckers you into thinking that the whole stretch was valuable, even though typically there are lots of periods of downtime and reduced productivity in those 12 hours and usually you'd be better off just working 8 hours or less and having better time management. Similarly, when you happen to overhear co-workers talking about something important and you go join the discussion and it turns out to be very fruitful you have that same post hoc rationalization that how things happened is the best and/or only possible way for productive work to happen.
I've been against open plan office environments since long before it became cool. There are some things that I just don't need to see and hear. It could be anything from a coworker blowing their nose, a conversation, or body language. It's distracting. If a company won't give a programmer a proper office with a door, it tells you a lot about the company, and what it tells me isn't good for productivity.
In that case it would appear to be unavoidable. However, when comparing the costs between offices I think it is important to take lost productivity in to account.
When looking at $cost_of_office_with_private_space versus $cost_of_open_plan_office it might make sense to go for the open plan office.
But $cost_of_office_with_private_space versus ($cost_of_open_plan_office + $productivity_cost) might lead to a different conclusion.
So how do you measure $productivity_cost accurately? Do you account for cases like where employee A, B and C come in the shared office with a new kind of idea going to rocket your business revenues to sky level?
I've got no problem with "ramen profitable" startups doing it out of necessity— after all, there's a lot of non-optimal things new companies do. What I object to are companies that are flush with cash, profitable— maybe they've even IPO'd— and can afford to foster a productive work environment, but believe open floor plans are the way to go because Facebook does it.
> Because at the end of the day, I gained nothing I couldn't have gotten in reading an article at 11pm for five minutes.
That's not strictly true. If all you do is watch "real news" on TV all day, perhaps, because they just regurgitate the same information over and over.
I was able to feel more involved with what was actually happening. To feel more connected with people who were affected by the bombings. To see what went on, and to empathize with people. Rather than consume the same 5 pictures shown on the news over and over, there were hundreds, thousands of pictures to look at, lots of people telling their stories, people posting pictures from their days that let me be immersed in their experiences, etc. I also got to witness the heroic acts of everyone in the vicinity, those injured themselves, who overcame their instinct to run and saved lives. The death toll would've easily climbed to 10 if these people hadn't immediately acted selflessly -- stories not widely talked about in the news. I'm astonished at how incredible some of these people are.
The end result is that I feel connected to my Boston brethren, and feel deeply empathetic with those who have a loss, and want to help.
You don't get that sense of community out of a 5 minute story after everything is said and done. So my time doesn't feel wasted at all. I'm a human, not an information processing robot.
However, yesterday a couple million people really needed to know what was going on immediately. For those of us who live in and around Boston, it's a really small town (that punches wayyy above its weight). It seems like everybody I know in Boston was nearby to some part of the craziness. Those who weren't had a loved one nearby.
Everyone in Boston can say something like, "my friend crossed the finish line a half hour before the blasts," "my girlfriend worked right by the finish line," "I walked through Kendall a half hour before the MIT cop was shot," "my neighbor went to the hospital with a somewhat serious wound."
Given the proximately, we simply needed to know where stuff was happening immediately. People will point to the journalistic errors and say we were dangerously misled at times. But that is the risk of all information that pops up on the internet. Everyone living in the internet age has learned to attach probabilities to everthing we read. I give CNN breaking news 60% probability of getting it right. I give @YourAnonNews 30% probability of getting it right. Although Twitter reports are often wrong, the right story is usually in there, and thoughtful people are always questioning the right facts.
I just want to come back to where I started. You're right that breaking news is broken. But yesterday, the chatter on Twitter alerted us of risks hours ahead of sound/verifiable reporting. Although many of those reports were quickly rescinded, I believe many Bostonians made prudent, timely choices as a result.
I guess my point is that news has different purposes for different audiences. For at least one audence yesterday, I thought the information coming over good accounts on Twitter was a blessing.
> However, yesterday a couple million people really needed to know what was going on immediately.
Reminds me of energy drinks.
Energy drinks make sense for some athletes, in some situations. But mostly, they're purchased by people who have been conditioned, in some way and to some extent or another, to think they need an energy drink.
Hmm... perhaps that's a productive definition of "journalism." ... But I guess I don't understand your point.
If you're saying that meaningful information can't be conveyed in 142 characters then I think you'd be dismissing the majority of spoken conversations, chat, sms, etc. A good example to the contrary: https://twitter.com/Boston_Police
If diluted quality and deluge quantity--firehouse, ahem--is what this thread is about, those are the points I speak to.
Trivial information can be shared in 142 characters. Sure, T is used by some as an aggregator/reader/chat tool, but then what are we doing talking tech here at HN instead of on T? The format and structure just isn't optimal for these functions. It's breadth and no depth with that format and structure.
I never said gossip is of zero value, but I did say 142 characters will never be journalism. The legacy media structure is precisely why the world is in such a bad spot today. That you jest about journalism is just an example of the systemic problem in society writ large. What you should be complaining about is quality, not the function itself.
> That you jest about journalism is just an example of the systemic problem in society writ large...
The last thing I wanted was to jest about journalism. I'm an avid reader of long accounts of events. My point in putting "journalism" in quotes was that you seemed to be offering a definition to a specific term as opposed to discussing the capacity to convey information through various media.
I didn't want to argue semantics -- I wanted to discuss the capacity of Twitter to convey information quickly.
> What you should be complaining about is quality, not the function itself.
142 characters is a headline. Often it includes a link to a supporting article and discussion. Sometimes your non-journalism is arranged on a page in a list. Sometimes with sorted and scored with points assigned by the site's users, sometimes not.
This is a bizarre comment to read on a news aggregation and discussion site.
PS Sometimes I wish there were a news service that would identify news headlines by their degree of importance.
Rank 1 headlines would be SMS-ed to me immediately. Rank 2 would be e-mailed immediately. Rank 3 would be collated by e-mail daily. I could choose specific categories of interest (technology, US politics) to add to the daily e-mail of lower ranks (4, 5, etc.)
That way, I'd always know I wasn't missing anything important, but not wasting my time either. Happily, there would be whole days where nothing of importance happened, and I'd have nothing to read!
When your job is to get people to pay attention to you, why would categorize anything as less than the most important? Crowd-sourcing the importance might be better, but that brings us right back to a HN/reddit solution.
In practice, attention is credibility. You can look at this as a cultural problem[1], a psychological finding[2], a propaganda tool[3], a business model[4], etc.
I guess credibility is a poor word choice. I meant something more like trustworthiness (which might tend to build credibility with a certain demographic...).
As the other guy mentioned, devolving into 4chan, tumblr and reddit are what happens when there is no individual cost--disincentive, not necessarily financial--to polluting the public information pool. The first layer of defense is a scarce publishing profile, the second is scarce publishing frequency and third is individual accountability.
There are very few scenarios where a person can be physically threatened by the nature of their information. In those rare situations, anonymity doesn't protect the individual because the information is likely only privilege to a small group.
To identify content of public importance, you would need to identify which people the information is important to geographically and then determine the demand via market forces and then determine the trustworthiness of the content by evaluating the individual sharing the information.
You end up with a trust structure tied to publishing capability on a geospatial information system.
I saw a suggestion on Reddit where with each million users, the headlines get even more distorted, that there be a karma penalty for distorting the headline. I think that could work if it was on a per subreddit basis.
Reddit can manage the volume if they get rid of the legacy media content. I don't see that happening with Conde Nast running the show though. Subreddits aren't as diluted by corporate content as /politics or /worldnews are, but reddit is kinda like the yahoo of news: lots of categories and that doesn't scale so well as we all know now.
Between corporate content, categories and so many human moderators it is going to be a battle as a viable business. My ad testing also showed a non-trivial percentage of their audience and traffic is <14 y/o.
It absolutely is a drug. There has to be some study showing what chemicals are released in our brain when we see little tidbits of new information flowing. Look at the biggest new websites - facebook, twitter, reddit - they're all the same thing. Tiny interesting tidbits constantly streaming. There's something addicting about it.
You could say the same thing about watching sports. Why watch the game when you can't change the outcome, the highlights are on repeat on ESPN, and the final score is the only thing that really matters?
I realized I probably "wasted" three hours following the story. Because at the end of the day, I gained nothing I couldn't have gotten in reading an article at 11pm for five minutes.
I swear, it's like a drug. It's exciting at the time, but afterwards you think, well, that was a stupid waste of my time.