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Negativity drives online news consumption

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Re: Negativity drives online news consumption

#151

Post by paulmd »

claytongulick wrote: post #134
ar-nelson wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I see it, news serves three purposes: --- 1. To let you know about local or world events that could affect you and those close to you. 2. To let you know about world events that affect others far away, in order to judge the effectiveness of political decisions and the necessity of future political decisions. 3. As a form of entertainment derived from the ongoing story of world history (or celebrity gossip, or…

State sponsored media generally hasn't worked out too well.

BBC is one of the best news sources around.

For a long time, Al Jazeera was great on anything that didn't directly impact Qatari domestic politics.

PBS is pretty fantastic overall and serves a lot of niches that aren't served by commercialized media and really shouldn't be.

Like yes if you set out to make a state-sponsored propaganda agency then that's what you get (see: Voice of America, etc), but state sponsorship of media doesn't inherently corrupt. If anything it's the opposite and really the accusations of bias end up being a way to try and control coverage that you find inconvenient and force faux-centrism (see: NPR).

Re: Negativity drives online news consumption

#152

Post by neilv »

About 20 years ago, I would read many newspapers every day. (I care a lot about society, and, therefore, journalism.) I learned a lot about both.

At some point, I had to take a break, because awareness of so many problems was overwhelming, and also there were diminishing returns (most problems are ongoing or recurring).

Years later, I found myself following local news for the locale where I was living (and where I had some large complaints about that locale). Eventually, I realized that, unlike before, I was subconsciously looking for and drawn to stories that reinforced my dislike for that locale. Reading was like ranting. This seemed very unhealthy, so I stopped.

One idea for LLMs would be to give me weekly or monthly updates on the news, or catch me up after some arbitrary break period. Maybe a more flexible NYT Week In Review.

Re: Negativity drives online news consumption

#153

Post by rohankshir »

correct - the SVB collapse was pretty bad on its own, but it provided the perfect opportunity to jump on the blame train and spin a bunch of negative narratives.

News(events) = boring but useful News(events + narratives) = juicy and less useful

I wrote about this more extensively here: https://claritynews.substack.com/p/a-lesson-in-how-media-and...

Re: Negativity drives online news consumption

#154

Post by gwbrooks »

paulmd wrote: post #151
claytongulick wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

State sponsored media generally hasn't worked out too well.

BBC is one of the best news sources around. For a long time, Al Jazeera was great on anything that didn't directly impact Qatari domestic politics. PBS is pretty fantastic overall and serves a lot of niches that aren't served by commercialized media and really shouldn't be . Like yes if you set out to make a state-sponsored propaganda agency then that's what you get (see: Voice of America, etc), but state sponsorship…

PBS is essentially corporate media, getting ~15% of its budget from government. NPR is even less at ~2%.

Corporate vs. public ownership matters a lot less than institutional standards and the org's cultural commitment to a rigorous journalistic mission. BBC has a relatively strong commitment; NPR (my favorite whipping boy for bad journalism packaged as Thinky Stuff) does not.

Re: Negativity drives online news consumption

#155

Post by martincmartin »

neilv wrote: post #152

About 20 years ago, I would read many newspapers every day. (I care a lot about society, and, therefore, journalism.) I learned a lot about both. At some point, I had to take a break, because awareness of so many problems was overwhelming, and also there were diminishing returns (most problems are ongoing or recurring). Years later, I found myself following local news for the locale where I was living (and where I ha…

I read a weekly news magazine (think Time, Newsweek, The Economist) for that reason. No need for AI, actual people can give you a weekly update!

Re: Negativity drives online news consumption

#156

Post by ar-nelson »

t12hrow wrote: post #150
ar-nelson wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how an unmoderated, anarchic space like 4chan is close to what I described; the entire point of what I had in mind is a very specific kind of moderation: stories are only published if (a) they're reasonably likely to materially affect some significant portion of readers sometime in the next 6 months, and (b) there's something they can do about it or in response to it. For example, if the readership of thi…

> (a) they're reasonably likely to materially affect some significant portion of readers sometime in the next 6 months, and (b) there's something they can do about it or in response to it. That's the entire point. Who are you to decide that? How can you quantify 'likelyhood to be materially affected'? How can you empirically determine if 'someone can do something about X'? Your opinion is worth the same as the next g…

I get the sense that you think I'm saying more here than I actually am. I'm not proposing that this is the only kind of news that should exist, only that it would be nice if it existed for the kind of people that want to read (only) this kind of news.

And I'm generally in agreement that most attempts to quantify 'truth' in media are hopelessly dependent on personal bias---but this mostly shows up in category #2 in my list. In things where you'd never know the difference if it were true or not, because it would never affect you either way.

The reason I thought a news service like this would work better as a government service than a private entity is because a government news service's commitment to the principles I listed could be defined by enforceable laws. "Likely to materially affect people" is something that you could reasonably argue about in a courtroom, just as much as other fuzzily-defined legal concepts like libel or false advertising.

I'm imagining a news agency whose legal responsibilities were defined in such a way that it could be sued if one of the following happened:

1. It reports something that no reasonable person would believe meets the criteria.

2. Readers experience some kind of material harm that could have been avoided if they had read news reported in another outlet but not this one. And this harm is not the result of the reader being in some very small minority of readers (say, <1%), because after a certain point this will always be true for things that affect a very small number of people.

Re: Negativity drives online news consumption

#158

Post by jimt1234 »

pmarreck wrote: post #13
gwbrooks wrote: post #10

Former newspaper city editor here. With few exceptions, positive stories -- although readers clamored for them in surveys -- never drove newsrack sales the way negative stories did. That's why we had a whole section for feel-good features but they didn't usually get prime front-page real estate. In the age of infinite content, headlines have become a sort of drama arms race. But the basic dynamic of what works and wh…

Do you think this is just how we're wired? What is so extremely disappointing to me is that, across many objective measures, many things seem to be improving, yet the perception most people have of reality is the complete opposite, thanks to this perverse incentive.

> Do you think this is just how we're wired?

I think the way the news is reported says more about us than it does about the organizations that do the reporting. If we didn't want all the negativity, we would reject it, and they'd stop reporting it. But that doesn't happen. So, essentially, we want all the negativity - yes, it's how we're wired. We just don't want to accept it.

Re: Negativity drives online news consumption

#159

Post by nonethewiser »

ActorNightly wrote: post #146
nonethewiser wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the news is inherently skewed towards negativity then maybe it's not as valuable as we assume it is. This isn't an argument against the free press or anything. As bad as bias and fearmongering in news is, adding government oversight would make it way worse. It's just a thought experiment. To elaborate, if news is inherently skewed towards negativity (and I'm just taking that at face value), then maybe it shouldn't…

Its valuable to us because of how our brains work. Learning a piece of info that is bad actually adjust our internal networks more effectively than learning what is good. It works for ML too. If Tesla had a set of training data that was inversed, ie the vast majority of cars were involved in a crash, it would have a fully working level 5 autonomous autopilot 2 years ago. Its much more efficient to have the knowledge…

That’s an interesting take. I’m not sure I fully agree. Lots of things are scary. But not everything that is scary is worth constantly defending against. When the news oversamples or misrepresents then people will orient themselves towards a worse world that doesn’t exist. It leads to unjustified resentment and animosity.

Re: Negativity drives online news consumption

#160

Post by t12hrow »

ar-nelson wrote: post #156
t12hrow wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (a) they're reasonably likely to materially affect some significant portion of readers sometime in the next 6 months, and (b) there's something they can do about it or in response to it. That's the entire point. Who are you to decide that? How can you quantify 'likelyhood to be materially affected'? How can you empirically determine if 'someone can do something about X'? Your opinion is worth the same as the next g…

I get the sense that you think I'm saying more here than I actually am. I'm not proposing that this is the only kind of news that should exist, only that it would be nice if it existed for the kind of people that want to read (only) this kind of news. And I'm generally in agreement that most attempts to quantify 'truth' in media are hopelessly dependent on personal bias---but this mostly shows up in category #2 in my…

I understand what you're saying, and it would definitely make for an interesting experiment. If every news piece meets that criteria, it would be a very specific subset of news, but valuable nonetheless.
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