Interesting comment but this is nothing new. Hacker News threads have been suffering from "Eternal September" for years — opinions were always better and more interesting in the old days. Putting down original reporting as an example of "seen it all before" is disingenuous at best — according to the unwritten rules, one never scores points with "this is nothing new"; it's practically expected.
Frankly I'm a bit tired of all the negative comments about the NYT, The Economist and other respected establishments by simple reflex. I can scroll through comment threads or posts in the archives and describe an HN where "middlebrow dismissals" rule the roost — but we all know that those do not (or should not) represent Hacker News as a whole.
Edit: HN top comments have problems everyone knows that, I would just like to see more relevant thought coming out on top. Talk about the specific technology and techniques being used, a response to the article that demonstrates you actually read it, or compare these "new news" approaches to attempts that were made in the '00s.
>>Frankly I'm a bit tired of all the negative comments about the NYT, The Economist and other respected establishments by simple reflex. I can scroll through comment threads or posts in the archives and describe an HN where "middlebrow dismissals"
I think that this comment thread has become a good example of a typical hacker news discussion right now. The top comments don't add anything to the discussion and the vast majority of the rest are entirely political and repeat the same thing while being totally devoid of any facts or analysis. I could (and would have if I knew nothing about the topic) learn more by searching for information about the quality of life in the rural russian countryside than by reading this thread.
I find it fascinating that criticizing something for being a middlebrow dismissal is itself a necessarily a middlebrow dismissal: you're saying that his comment is okayish, but just not good enough. A bit hypocritical.
Frankly I'm a bit tired of all the negative comments about the NYT, The Economist and other respected establishments by simple reflex. I can scroll through comment threads or posts in the archives and describe an HN where "middlebrow dismissals" rule the roost — but we all know that those do not (or should not) represent Hacker News as a whole.
Edit: HN top comments have problems everyone knows that, I would just like to see more relevant thought coming out on top. Talk about the specific technology and techniques being used, a response to the article that demonstrates you actually read it, or compare these "new news" approaches to attempts that were made in the '00s.
;)