The internet is increasingly a low-trust society • Hacker News Board

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#31

Post by PhasmaFelis » Mon, Jun 24, 2019, 7:12 PM UTC

blueboo wrote: post #26

rchaud wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you see is the clickbait. What you don't see are the structural changes to the media landscape over the past 20 years that led to this. Newspapers per 100 million people fell from 1200 (in 1945) to 400 (in 2014). This is from a Brookings study cited in a Wikipedia article on the topic [0]. In 2013, the Chicago Sun Times laid off all its photographers and tasked journalists to take photos as well as provide the r…

> The only “media” that makes serious money is ... > Google Made $4.7 Billion From the News Industry in 2018, Study Says https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/09/business/media/google-new... Hmm

Google made $4.7B off of the news industry, by aggregating other people's stories and advertising on them. None of that money actually went to writers or publishers.

Which is the entire point of the article you linked. If you're gonna be snarky, you should really check to make sure your information is accurate.

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#32

Post by jaspax » Mon, Jun 24, 2019, 7:16 PM UTC

lmm wrote: post #3

This is the most intelligent take on internet trust issues that I've seen. The conclusion is overly glib though: it took centuries for high-trust societies to develop the mechanisms that allow them to function as such, and even small changes can upset that balance (as we've been seeing in the real world over the last couple of years). We shouldn't assume it will be trivial to bootstrap those kinds of institutions on…

People forget that institutions take time to develop. They also forget that high-trust institutions frequently begin with a dictator. The end-point is high-trust/low-coercion, but you can't get there from low-trust/low-coercion. First you have to go through a high-trust/high-coercion state, after which you can gradually taper off the coercive elements as institutions mature and the individual actors get used to the new normal.

This is exactly how the liberal societies of the west evolved. But don't remember that any more, though.

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#33

Post by PhasmaFelis » Mon, Jun 24, 2019, 7:19 PM UTC

iagovar wrote: post #15

lotsofpulp wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think a group of journalists selling verified, accurate, non clickbait articles based on data and first hand accounts would be able to generate enough revenue to feed the journalist’s children and send them to college?

Maybe not, but it's still a problem. It's the same in Spain, most media is hard to trust on basically anything. They even adhere to stupid projects like "The Trust Project" and spin off factcheking brands, but none of that solved the problem. It's still the same people claiming that, oh no, this time you can trust us! I even experienced being the target of a report (well, the company I work for), and they did an awfu…

> Maybe not, but it's still a problem.

Of course it's still a problem. The point is that it's actually a much bigger problem than you implied. People blame the media like it's all just down to some greedy jerks making malicious decisions, and if only we could replace them with someone with integrity, everything would be okay.

The fact is that we've created an environment where it's nearly impossible for honest, non-sensationalized news to exist. Putting all the blame on the media is like blaming a starving man for stealing bread. They're culpable, certainly, but you're missing the root cause.

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#34

Post by gipp » Mon, Jun 24, 2019, 7:24 PM UTC

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #31

blueboo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only “media” that makes serious money is ... > Google Made $4.7 Billion From the News Industry in 2018, Study Says https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/09/business/media/google-new... Hmm

Google made $4.7B off of the news industry, by aggregating other people's stories and advertising on them. None of that money actually went to writers or publishers. Which is the entire point of the article you linked. If you're gonna be snarky, you should really check to make sure your information is accurate.

That article -- and the lobbying group "study" it is based on have been pretty roundly condemned even by other journalism organizations e.g. https://www.cjr.org/the_new_gatekeepers/nyt-google-media.php

tl;dr the number is total fabrication

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#35

Post by 0815test » Mon, Jun 24, 2019, 7:24 PM UTC

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #28

0815test wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just media, but the education system as well. More educated people are significantly more , not less likely to fail Intellectual-Turing-Tests about people with opposing views. i.e. far from increasing openness to experience, education itself is functioning much like indoctrination into a fundamentalist religion! The effect starts already at a High-School level and becomes worse and worse as educational attai…

What that article tells me is that people say they belong to teams they don't actually belong to, and that very few people actually do. Seems to me to be a problem with the teams.

> What that article tells me is that people say they belong to teams they don't actually belong to

I'm not sure that's consistent with the evidence. People are actively getting worse and worse at modeling the other "team", which strongly suggests that polarization is quite real indeed and not just a matter of different labels.

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#36

Post by SketchySeaBeast » Mon, Jun 24, 2019, 7:27 PM UTC

0815test wrote: post #35

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What that article tells me is that people say they belong to teams they don't actually belong to, and that very few people actually do. Seems to me to be a problem with the teams.

> What that article tells me is that people say they belong to teams they don't actually belong to I'm not sure that's consistent with the evidence. People are actively getting worse and worse at modeling the other "team", which strongly suggests that polarization is quite real indeed and not just a matter of different labels.

I'd like to see a comparison between a survey of espoused party values and the oppositions understanding - I wonder if someone was to look at the values that the political leaders are saying and voting for would there be as wide a gap, or would it fall more in line with what people believe of a party and it's members?

On a person per person basis there's dehumanizing caricature, but I wonder if you compare it to the party to which the person claims to belong, if it would be as out to lunch.

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#37

Post by eli_gottlieb » Mon, Jun 24, 2019, 7:29 PM UTC

lotsofpulp wrote: post #30

blueboo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only “media” that makes serious money is ... > Google Made $4.7 Billion From the News Industry in 2018, Study Says https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/09/business/media/google-new... Hmm

Obviously rchaud is referring to people that create media, or in this case, the journalists. I don't see what relevance Google's revenue is to this conversation. They found a way to make money by directing people to other people's work.

While those "other people" were doing unpaid internships, freelancing, and filing for unemployment insurance. Something seems very profoundly wrong with this picture.

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#38

Post by lowdose » Mon, Jun 24, 2019, 7:43 PM UTC

rosterface wrote: post #7

There's no mention of what I think is by far the biggest negative influence on trust: the media. Trust in media is at an all time low: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/trust... It's a totally self inflicted wound too. Clickbait, outrage bait, blatant political spin, stealthy retractions, journalists on social media starting mobs... Bots do not even register in most people's minds compared to tha…

Fabricating attention.

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#39

Post by CM30 » Mon, Jun 24, 2019, 7:45 PM UTC

sb057 wrote: post #18

lotsofpulp wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think a group of journalists selling verified, accurate, non clickbait articles based on data and first hand accounts would be able to generate enough revenue to feed the journalist’s children and send them to college?

That's part of the issue; there is no need for commercial first-hand accounts anymore. If someone on social media is talking about a news event and provides a video documenting their presence, that is about as verified and accurate as you can hope for.

You're being downvoted, but to a large extent, you're probably right here. For many topics journalists used to cover, you genuinely don't need them any more, since enthusiasts posting Patreon/donation funded content is at least as good in terms of quality. Tech, games, TV, music, sports, celebrity gossip, all of them can be covered just as well or better by some random guy on YouTube or some online blog site.

And that in fact be another reason why the media as a whole is doing so poorly. In the old days, a fair few people read the papers for this stuff. Nowadays they can get the same information elsewhere, without the stories they're less interested in taking up space.

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#40

Post by yborg » Mon, Jun 24, 2019, 8:01 PM UTC

jaspax wrote: post #32

lmm wrote: post #3

This is the most intelligent take on internet trust issues that I've seen. The conclusion is overly glib though: it took centuries for high-trust societies to develop the mechanisms that allow them to function as such, and even small changes can upset that balance (as we've been seeing in the real world over the last couple of years). We shouldn't assume it will be trivial to bootstrap those kinds of institutions on…

People forget that institutions take time to develop. They also forget that high-trust institutions frequently begin with a dictator. The end-point is high-trust/low-coercion, but you can't get there from low-trust/low-coercion. First you have to go through a high-trust/high-coercion state, after which you can gradually taper off the coercive elements as institutions mature and the individual actors get used to the n…

This isn't how the Unites States evolved. Arguably, the success of the experiment still hasn't been fully established, but the major institutions that govern the US system were more or less present right from the beginning.