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The Urgent Quest for Slower, Better News

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Re: The Urgent Quest for Slower, Better News

#231

Post by AWildC182 »

rayiner wrote: post #197
AWildC182 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you don't have to worry about your kids being separated from you at the border, being bombed by the Saudis, or losing our homes to climate change related events. Most of the things the news covers disproportionately effect destitute-through-low-income individuals.

And yuppies reading the news and then going back to buying $12 avocado toast won’t do a damn thing to help those people.

Don't the yuppies generally vote democrat and the democrats usually oppose these things while the very-not-yuppies tend to vote GOP and the GOP usually likes/is ambivalent about these things? Like, I get it, gotta grab a side in The Culture Wars, but we should at least be fair about it shouldn't we?

Re: The Urgent Quest for Slower, Better News

#233

Post by RickJWagner »

steelframe wrote: post #14

I stopped reading the news about a year ago. I felt like my emotions were being manipulated by a sharply-honed system built precisely to invoke outrage and draw you in to read more and more of it. I've been able to direct my focus and energy to much more productive tasks since I disconnected. Of course I entirely missed that whole Supreme Court thing until after it was over, and I have no idea what people around me a…

I've recently let a couple of subscriptions (a local newspaper, and a car magazine of all things) because I also sensed that politics were being inserted where they didn't belong.

I'd gladly pay a slight premium for news content that's completely politically neutral. I long for the good old days where you couldn't tell where the news presenter fell on the political scale.

Re: The Urgent Quest for Slower, Better News

#234

Post by balasan »

We are experience trust scarcity in online media because trust hasn't been part of social media's business model. By extension it stopped being part of the news publication's business model (everyone is forced to compete for clicks). That and because on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog.

Ironically we are increasingly willing to get into stranger's cars and allow strangers stay at our homes because a few corporations like Uber and Airbnb were able to quantify, materialize and monetize trust. So it's not that much of a stretch to imagine an internet where trust plays a role in the way we distribute, consume and exchange information online. Hacker News is a case in point.

Ready for the shill?

We're building Relevant to make it easy to set up communities similar to HN, each with its own trust/reputation metric (based on personalized pagerank algorithm). So instead of using clicks / votes, all users and content get a trust/reputation score. The result is that rankings don't represent popularity, but relevance, resulting in better feeds and making communities easier to moderate. These trust metrics are much more resistant to sybil/sock-puppet attacks and can be used to build healthier business models, from prediction markets to advertising.

https://relevant.community/relevant/top

Re: The Urgent Quest for Slower, Better News

#235

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

ChristianBundy wrote: post #220
shsbr5392 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is dangerously naive with respect to how marketing works in the era of social media. Questions you should be asking yourself... Who controls the influential twitter account or blog? Do they make money from it either by posting sponsored content or do they run ads? Could someone who controls a botnet or clickfarm manipulate them by either granting or withholding likes, traffic, and clicks?

> This is dangerously naive with respect to how marketing works in the era of social media. I was going to point out that this makes the assumption that they're consuming corporate social media, but we're on HN so I suppose that's implied. I should probably delete this account too.

You can't.

Re: The Urgent Quest for Slower, Better News

#236

Post by HeWhoLurksLate »

Simon_says wrote: post #170
AWildC182 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you don't have to worry about your kids being separated from you at the border, being bombed by the Saudis, or losing our homes to climate change related events. Most of the things the news covers disproportionately effect destitute-through-low-income individuals.

Watching the news didn't help them ...

If I were in that situation, I would want all the relevant news possible, in any and all formats available. TV broadcasts of cease-fires are great news for someone who wants to get out, as are radio reports of major hot-spots, etc. Getting the relevant news can be the difference between life and death in these situations.

Re: The Urgent Quest for Slower, Better News

#237

Post by blackflame7000 »

balasan wrote: post #234

We are experience trust scarcity in online media because trust hasn't been part of social media's business model. By extension it stopped being part of the news publication's business model (everyone is forced to compete for clicks). That and because on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog. Ironically we are increasingly willing to get into stranger's cars and allow strangers stay at our homes because a few corpor…

I think the issue is too much trust. Too many people believe that because a Network, Publication, Author, or Anchor published quality work in the past, therefore, they can be trusted to reliably deliver news in the future. People's sources, access, knowledge, agenda, and effort vary wildly and each story needs to be judged on its own merit.

Re: The Urgent Quest for Slower, Better News

#239

Post by rayiner »

enraged_camel wrote: post #227
rayiner wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This view is pretentious and hypocritical. Let’s imagine that you’re a typical HN-er and you have a nice MacBook Pro or have taken a nice vacation or gone to Burning Man or whatever. For that same amount of money, you could have changed the life of a child in Bangladesh. Why didn’t you? Because you are a bad person, and you chose frivolities for yourself over necessities for someone far from you. Maybe if you read th…

So basically, if you bought a MacBook instead is spending that money to help a kid in Bangladesh, you are a hypocrite and shouldn’t criticize others for being privileged? I think this is sufficient to demonstrate the sheer ridiculousness of your stance: https://imgur.com/gallery/ORdcf0R

The point is that you have no moral obligation to read the news and learn about the suffering of distant people in some ill conceived attempt to try and empathize with them. Humans aren’t built that way. You don’t have a generalized obligation to inform yourself about the abstract struggles of others and give up your own priorities in some token gesture of support for those people.

Take two people who both go to Burning Man instead of changing some kid’s life in Bangladesh. A reads the news and votes for X out of concern for some disadvantaged group. B doesn’t read the news and votes for Y because he doesn’t perceive the struggles of that disadvantaged group. Notwithstanding that difference, radius of empathy of A and B are almost the same. Both exclude the majority of those suffering in the world—billions of people—from their radius of empathy, not caring enough even to give up a frivolity for themselves.[1] Excessive moralizing over that small difference is indeed rather hypocritical.

[1] The moral rabbit hole here runs very deep. For example, all else being equal, buying an ICE car hurts people in Bangladesh who will suffer the most from rising sea level due to global warming. But at the margin, taking the extra money you’d spend on a new electric car and just giving it to some kid in Bangladesh will do more good than the incremental environmental benefit from buying that electric car.

Re: The Urgent Quest for Slower, Better News

#240

Post by slg »

enraged_camel wrote: post #227
rayiner wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This view is pretentious and hypocritical. Let’s imagine that you’re a typical HN-er and you have a nice MacBook Pro or have taken a nice vacation or gone to Burning Man or whatever. For that same amount of money, you could have changed the life of a child in Bangladesh. Why didn’t you? Because you are a bad person, and you chose frivolities for yourself over necessities for someone far from you. Maybe if you read th…

So basically, if you bought a MacBook instead is spending that money to help a kid in Bangladesh, you are a hypocrite and shouldn’t criticize others for being privileged? I think this is sufficient to demonstrate the sheer ridiculousness of your stance: https://imgur.com/gallery/ORdcf0R

Exactly. And my initial point wasn't even criticizing or assigning blame. I was simply pointing out an action that is available to many of us that we may not realize isn't available to everyone. I know in the past it has helped me build my own empathy to learn that I choice I have made isn't open to others and why that might be.
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