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Negativity drives online news consumption

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Re: Negativity drives online news consumption

#171

Post by avereveard »

And it's not just news a lot of other media is producing negative or outright toxic content, and it's super hard to break out because drama and gossip are captivating, because satire can be fun even if disperse in a negative sea and because there is quite some selection bias from our own frustration in selecting the content that relates to us.

Let's not forget we went trough four "once in a lifetime disaster" by now. Or more depending how you count.

Today I make a conscious effort to check a channel content before consuming any drama in it. If the channel is 100% drama I pass, regardless of how captivating the original link was,to try and break out of the algorithm.

Re: Negativity drives online news consumption

#172

Post by mncharity »

double0jimb0 wrote: post #61
adamrezich wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sometime around the 2016 US Presidential elections, when outragebait headlines had arguably achieved a local maximum, I will now never forget how I overcame headline rage forever. I saw some headline about how students at some school, Berkeley I believe, had joined arms and surrounded the front entrance to the school, and would only allow non-white students to go through, forcing white students to go around and enter…

Had similar experience watching TV ads. It started with a beauty ad which was plainly targeting viewers’ body image insecurities. Was very jarring to recognize how dark and manipulative the glossy, “upbeat” ad truly was. Then recognized same pattern in every TV ad afterwards, almost all target some sort of insecurity or feeling of lack.

I was surfing market analyses one day, and stumbled on this: in the US, the largest personal care product category was shampoo, but in India, it was skin lightening products. And then I found a multinational doing shampoo to be beautiful ads in the US, was doing whiter is better ad campaigns in India. Which long-term gave the former a rather different taste.

Re: Negativity drives online news consumption

#173

Post by zztop44 »

ar-nelson wrote: post #148
t12hrow wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> perhaps government-funded I suggest the opposite. I'd like a proof that there is no government involvement. Believe it or not, I think the closest to this is ideal is 4chan /pol/. It's not backed by any major corporation (unlike HN which is backed by Y Combinator), it's not partly owned by Tencent/China (unlike Reddit), and so on. There's no algorithm, there's no karma, there's no blue badge, it barely scrapes by u…

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…

But of course, that misses the nuance. Lots of US-based readers come from Ukraine, have friends or family in Ukraine, or friends or family in Russia or another neighbouring country. Of course, that might be fine if your media hypothetical outlet is just one of many. But then people will probably just still end up the ones with categories #2 and #3 regardless.

Re: Negativity drives online news consumption

#174

Post by kukkeliskuu »

adamrezich wrote: post #46
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…

sometime around the 2016 US Presidential elections, when outragebait headlines had arguably achieved a local maximum, I will now never forget how I overcame headline rage forever. I saw some headline about how students at some school, Berkeley I believe, had joined arms and surrounded the front entrance to the school, and would only allow non-white students to go through, forcing white students to go around and enter…

Great insight! Thanks!

Re: Negativity drives online news consumption

#175

Post by specialist »

HPsquared wrote: post #131
sammalloy wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the reason people indoctrinate isn't because they want them to be negative, but to realize that being pessimistic is actually going to be a more reliable way to have a plan for life when no one is able to help I take it you are a conservative. This is a perennial city people (liberal) versus rural folk (conservative) discussion that will never have a resolution. Liberals generally don’t believe in the idea that "no…

Urban living is more anonymous and alienating than rural living. There are too many people in a city to form relationships with everyone, you don't know 99.9% of the people you see in daily life because there are so many moving around. On the other hand in a small village, most times you see another person it's a repeated interaction and you have met that person before. So the rural conservative view and values on so…

In my experience, neither urban or rural communities are impersonal.

Suburbs, however, are dystopian soul destroying hellscapes. Simultaneously parasites feeding off of the prosperous urban areas while desecrating previously productive lands.

Urban and rural peoples are natural allies, kept apart by pro suburbanite propaganda. The American Dream™ was presented as McMansions, endless pavement, strip malls, and 2 SUVs in every garage.

Re: Negativity drives online news consumption

#178

Post by arooni »

dukeofdoom wrote: post #95

Wish people could turn back time, and get back the time spent reading news/politics articles. Such a waste of time. Nothing ever happens. And if WWIII happens, nothing you can do about it reading articles.

I read far too much news/politics articles and I'd like to read more books instead. How do I go about doing this? The novelty of news and perhaps the uncertainty of rewards (slot machine syndrome) makes it appealing.

Re: Negativity drives online news consumption

#179

Post by JumpCrisscross »

numbers_guy wrote: post #2

Maybe it is because happy people do not consume the news? Happy people tend to have full lives and are therefore too busy to waste time ingesting news about events that are not going to personally affect them. Whereas, I can only speak for myself, but when I am down (like right now), I spend lots of time doing nothing but browsing news aggregator websites and leaving comments like this one. And of course, negative ne…

> happy people do not consume the news

Or consume different news. Ad-driven news is vastly more crisis-impending than subscription-driven news, which tends to be more contemplative as well as zoom out and explore regions and issues that aren't in spotlight. (I read the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Economist, Information, Monde Diplomatique and Paris Review, in addition to a number of stacks.)

Re: Negativity drives online news consumption

#180

Post by sergiomattei »

EGreg wrote: post #138

Just as I have been saying, we need an alternative to the capitalist profit-driven media organizations. Outrage drives “engagement”, for both social networks and for publishers. All of the profit-driven outleys are subject to market pressures. Even NYTimes which won more Pulitzer prizes than anyone admits to A/B testing headlines for clickbait. Let alone FOX News or YouTubers with “X does Y, immediately regregts it”…

Your landing page is a wall of text.

Simplify it.

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