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Don’t believe everything you read

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Re: Don’t believe everything you read

#51

Post by kmfrk »

gwright wrote: post #14

> The games industry is the only one I can think of that will quite happily publish guesswork as news. Ha. Ha. Assessing the credibility of news sources is far from a solved problem. It doesn't matter if it is breaking news, business news (in any industry), public policy news, finance news, etc.

One of the core differences between "videogame news" and "gossip news" is that the gossip rags don't rely on pseudo-sources to run a false story; they invent them themselves.

The few number of times I have looked at gossip stories, they're usually a paraphrases of copy and paste from a single shit rag like US Weekly, or whatever they're called.

And here we're talking about spreading false rumours about actual people, not inanimate product prototypes.

Re: Don’t believe everything you read

#52

Post by kmfrk »

venomsnake wrote: post #9

Or this is a brilliant cover up from Microsoft on a genuine leak. That is the fun with paranoia - there is always one more level of distrust. Also specs of next gen devices are not that hard to guess. Assuming goals are 1080p x 60FPS: If you aim for sub 500 USD of production cost that retail at 350-400 there are not many balanced hardware solutions that could fit. My wild guess is that we will have 6GB of ram (it is…

I will say that I have occasionally been burnt by using the litmus test named "Microsoft aren't that stupid ... right?"

Sadly, at times they have been. There is also something to be said for the proportional likeliness of ridiculous a story being run and the perceived ridiculousness of the associated company.

Re: Don’t believe everything you read

#53

Post by kmfrk »

danielweber wrote: post #28
mpclark wrote: post #2

You get what you pay for. When a site's only revenue source is ads paying a couple of bucks per thousand impressions, this is the inevitable result.

Newspapers have a similar model. The subscription fee just helps establish their customers as bona fide.

    In 2012, something remarkable happened at The Times.
    It was the year that circulation revenue — money
    made from people buying the paper or access to
    its digital edition — surpassed advertising revenue.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/20/public-editor/a-milestone-...

Re: Don’t believe everything you read

#54

Post by rayiner »

From TFA: "The games industry is the only one I can think of that will quite happily publish guesswork as news."

Yeah, it's not just the gaming media. The 4th estate is pretty much just a rotting corpse, and online media isn't any better (but at least it's free).

There is an awesome insider book about media manipulation: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thomas-church/ryan-holiday-tru....

Re: Don’t believe everything you read

#55

Post by niggler »

gmrple wrote: post #47
dllthomas wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My initial impulse is to say, "any such automatic system will be gamed beyond usefulness". Having said that, if someone does solve the problem that would be great.

Is this a major problem with Google now? I know this is completely subjective, but my friends and I have talked about this a couple times, and we feel that Google used to be significantly more useful 5-7 years ago. Has SEO done that much damage, or has the way we use the search engine changed? Or perhaps something else?

The way we use the news has changed. Many years ago we would sit and read a newspaper. Nowadays its all about short headlines or very shocking bits (partially because of computer-based news consumption behavior and partially because of breadth of availability). Catering to the instant and very short nature of news consumption involves a greater indulgence in sensationalism. Google contributed to this insofar as it allowed us to select what sources and what articles to read based on the title or blurb.

I wonder, at a deeper level, if the political divide in the US is fueled by the "bubble" that google allows: many years ago, people read newspapers covering all points of view, but google news lets you select which sources you draw news from (allowing you to select only fox news and drudge report, for example)

Re: Don’t believe everything you read

#57

Post by jspaur »

gav wrote: post #48
TheCapn wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not an expert on this but my gut tells me that Microsoft/Sony/whoever, when specing the device will make a bulk contract purchase for their equipment. So although retail market for cpu/gpu/ram may be so much right now they'll be able to get better hardware at a cheaper rate than any consumer wishing to build at the cheapest price avaiable. I would hope at least that next-gen aren't building at 660ti grade GPU.

I'm also assuming that if you are building a device that has a multi-year lifespan you can factor in the ever decreasing cost of components. Maybe the price of the components on day-1 are $500, but day-730 $350.

MSFT has stated multiple times that their goal is over the lifespan of the hardware to break even on it. (So 1mil units at -200 and 10mil units with at +20)

How this works with devices such as Kinect though I'm not sure. It's about attachment rates (extra controllers, batteries, etc.) on the hardware side

Then the software side has fairly obvious goals.

Re: Don’t believe everything you read

#58

Post by njittam »

srry but accidently pressed send. but one episode was about the liability of the media. and they did the same thing you did. it was just before the eurosongfestival and the made a song wich was really similair to the song we would send to the songfestival. then they sent it to some newspapers. and if there wasn't a article about in their paper it was on their website. and they have even a hint because in the name of the mp3 stood rambam.

Re: Don’t believe everything you read

#59

Post by VonGuard »

kevinalexbrown wrote: post #31

This is why reputation and reliability matter. While the example in this post is the equivalent of "I got major news outlets like TMZ to think that Paris Hilton was getting married" many types of news aren't so inconsequential. In the first few days after the Connecticut shooting, there were so many inaccuracies it made me reconsider other "facts" I heard which were never obviously wrong (e.g. it became obvious that…

In a way, there is already a system like this in your brain. Reputation is something you formulate yourself based on meta-information about the outlet you're reading. You do this already: ever read an article and look up at the URL to check and see if it's hosted at a reputable source, like nytimes.com or salon.com?

What would help is more meta data available to the reader. So, instead of measuring an unmeasurable "truthiness" (because really, what is truth, in the philosophical sense...) how about a Chrome plug-in that pulls down meta data from other sites that have written about this outlet.

So, you read NYTimes, and your little plug-i pops up some links to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jayson_Blair or some such similar thing. You can read up on that and see that there have been issue sin the past, but for the most part, NYTimes remains reputable.

I guess it would need some sort of Hacker News-like inaccuracy tracker. Post bad stories, more up-votes, more likely to be detected as relevant meta info on the TLD it comes from.

Re: Don’t believe everything you read

#60

Post by VonGuard »

te_platt wrote: post #20

How many of you laughed at how credulous news sites are before verifying that this blog post was accurate? Finding a reliable news source is hard, and not just in the games industry. Even here on Hacker News I usually read a headline, wonder if it's true, check the comments for contrarian views, then read the article.

Journalist here. FYI, the day someone I don't know emails me with a "hot inside tip" is a day I spend tracking down the emailer and calling my sources within the target company.

Just so you know, even at the big news sites, good hot tips from unknown emailers just never happen. Great hot tips come from getting corporate employees drunk, then chasing down their leads from other directions when you're sober. Anonymous insider emails spilling the beans only happen when a company is about to, or currently going bankrupt, or some such other catastrophic melt-down. Then they come crawling out of the woodwork.

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