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Negativity drives online news consumption

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Re: Negativity drives online news consumption

#271

Post by Dalewyn »

nomilk wrote: post #237
Dalewyn wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the most common bit of wisdom I've heard from older folks is to ignore the news. Don't read the newspaper, don't watch TV news, don't listen to radio news, etc.; they all say nothing in them is worth our time. It's among the most useful piece of advice I've ever had.

I feel like we're failing to accurately name 'news'. The vast majority of what is offered as 'news' isn't news at all, it's gossip, schadenfreude, arbitrary drama, and frivolous feel-good stories. 'News' has a ring of plausible importance. I wish we had a more accurate name reflecting its mostly unimportant, worthless, and destructive nature.

>I wish we had a more accurate name

Propaganda.

Re: Negativity drives online news consumption

#272

Post by whitemary »

hot_gril wrote: post #219
tasty_freeze wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Really makes me see the partisan stuff in the US as silly, so I don't get heated about it, Some of the partisan issues are not silly if you are affected by it. To pick a left issue, if you are gay and would like to marry your partner and get the benefits of such legal recognition, the differences are very consequential. To pick a right issue, if you think that Democrats are voting illegally by the millions, then ad…

I don't think they're equally bad, only equally silly. They use the same scare tactics every time, and it helps to look past that. Yes I care about the issues. But how I vote is different: just straight down for whatever is the minority party in my state. Only battleground states get the pandering, and I'll stop doing this if I ever live in a battleground state or they change how voting works. State propositions are…

Same but I just don't vote at all, unless there are any strong trustworthy pro-worker candidates which basically doesn't happen. I will also show up to vote against anti-worker ballot measures, which are more frequent.

Re: Negativity drives online news consumption

#273

Post by GuardianCaveman »

nomilk wrote: post #237
Dalewyn wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the most common bit of wisdom I've heard from older folks is to ignore the news. Don't read the newspaper, don't watch TV news, don't listen to radio news, etc.; they all say nothing in them is worth our time. It's among the most useful piece of advice I've ever had.

I feel like we're failing to accurately name 'news'. The vast majority of what is offered as 'news' isn't news at all, it's gossip, schadenfreude, arbitrary drama, and frivolous feel-good stories. 'News' has a ring of plausible importance. I wish we had a more accurate name reflecting its mostly unimportant, worthless, and destructive nature.

100% Agree. It's an entire article written about a celebrity or politician's tweet reacting to another celebrity or politician. It's an entire article that talks about some filler setting up the background, the actual embedded tweet, a paragraph or two quoting that tweet with filler in it, then perhaps a second reaction tweet or a bunch of tweets that random people responded with either positive/negative or both depending on what the author is trying to achieve or influence.

Re: Negativity drives online news consumption

#274

Post by mrexroad »

martin82 wrote: post #256
bpm140 wrote: post #186

About a year ago, I stopped consuming news cold turkey (save technology and movie news [the former work-necessary and the latter a personal vice]). I took the extra step of banning Twitter and Memeorandum at the router level, so that I couldn't revert easily. I didn't read a single political news story in the ensuing six months. Some of the happiest months of my life. These days I will read the section headlines on M…

[flagged]

> against a mostly harmless virus.

Wtf. It’s easy to say that now after covid variants have become decreasingly virulent as they became increasingly transmissible, but it was absolutely not mostly harmless. The human species won the lotto with how it evolved, but just spin that to play to our political leanings. I’ll take the downvotes for saying this, but with all respect, please just duck off back to “doing your own research” in whatever echo chamber you prefer.

Re: Negativity drives online news consumption

#275

Post by Dalewyn »

labster wrote: post #252
nomilk wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like we're failing to accurately name 'news'. The vast majority of what is offered as 'news' isn't news at all, it's gossip, schadenfreude, arbitrary drama, and frivolous feel-good stories. 'News' has a ring of plausible importance. I wish we had a more accurate name reflecting its mostly unimportant, worthless, and destructive nature.

But if we take all of those stories out of the news cycle, the only national news we’d have left is The Onion .

I unironically and sincerely believe The Onion is one of, if not the, the best sources of journalism in our time.

Re: Negativity drives online news consumption

#276

Post by vachina »

Gigachad wrote: post #257
nomilk wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like we're failing to accurately name 'news'. The vast majority of what is offered as 'news' isn't news at all, it's gossip, schadenfreude, arbitrary drama, and frivolous feel-good stories. 'News' has a ring of plausible importance. I wish we had a more accurate name reflecting its mostly unimportant, worthless, and destructive nature.

I’ve observed that so much of the news is published before the facts are even out. In a race to be first, they present half a story that hasn’t been verified yet. So you are left to either be outraged preemptively or just ignore the story entirely as it’s currently useless.

Yeah, they use words like “allegedly” or “according to unnamed sources” to free themselves from liability in the event when what they report turns out to be inaccurate. In that case might as well not report the news then if they’re not sure.

Re: Negativity drives online news consumption

#277

Post by initramfs »

sammalloy wrote: post #259
initramfs wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have lived in suburban, urban, and rural environments. I think the issue is more about whether globalization has changed all that. During the pandemic lockdown, many people were working from home, and some realized that paying for rent in NYC or SF wasn't worth it, if they couldn't go out and enjoy it, so it makes a lot more sense to work from home in a rural area if I am an IT person. That said, I don't think poli…

> The point is that if one is raised believing there will always be a helping hand, it is better to not expect much, even if there is nothing wrong in asking for more help than supposedly more "individualistic" areas I don’t disagree with anything here, except there is a correlation between the amount of trust liberals and conservatives give to people in their community, and one user up above directly addressed how s…

I don't disagree either, and maybe I worded it to indicate otherwise. While I think there is a difference between the notion that a helping hand exists or not and whether a person is entitled to advocate for government assistance, the two are typically correlated because liberals believe in a legal mechanism (voting) for seeing that type of assistance through a machine, the Democratic Machine (Tammany Hall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoils_system) (I wouldn't even call many government services assistance, but programs that accomplish basic services, like National Parks management, etc).

I also think the GOP relies more on the patronage system now,

What I find interesting is that there is a study of this viewpoint, and it's called Primals: https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/Penn-Primals-Project-resear...

I think that best captures the divide, more so than specific political issues, although that does overlap alot- for example, the perception of crime and immigration, while not correlated, get grouped as a platform issue on the right, whereas the Democratic platform does not consider those issues in the same light.

There is another anthropological term for fear, that I can't remember but read a few days ago- I think it was a Dutch anthropologist who coined a term in the 70s and also developed a computer architecture.

Re: Negativity drives online news consumption

#278

Post by ar9av »

bpm140 wrote: post #186

About a year ago, I stopped consuming news cold turkey (save technology and movie news [the former work-necessary and the latter a personal vice]). I took the extra step of banning Twitter and Memeorandum at the router level, so that I couldn't revert easily. I didn't read a single political news story in the ensuing six months. Some of the happiest months of my life. These days I will read the section headlines on M…

That's not the thrust of the study. Per the article, "Here we analyse the effect of negative words on news consumption...

Where it is reported a reason for consumption "...negative information automatically activating threat responses and leading one to deduce that ...motivations may make ‘fear’ and ‘anger’ more influential...

Re: Negativity drives online news consumption

#279

Post by exodust »

I think it's because people care about fixing broken things in the world. There's no mystery here. We want to know what's broken in order to discuss and debate solutions.

If there's perception of injustice or bad practice in the community, then yes people will click the negativity. Apart from that there's the "popcorn" consumption, where negative things are more entertaining.

Re: Negativity drives online news consumption

#280

Post by colechristensen »

zpeti wrote: post #66
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…

Yeah, I actually get more annoyed when "my own" political side does this. They take the worst possible example of the other side and make outragous article about them. Yet I know most people on the other side are actually good people, with good intentions, we just disagree on a few points. Yet all I ever see in the media are ridiculous parodies of the other side. I've basically stopped almost all politics reading at…

I have less of a side as I age. The opposing side would probably have a convert if they weren’t dominated by raving lunatics obsessed with offensive garbage.

I have a feeling a lot of people across the political spectrum feel the same. Some day one of the parties is going to find not pandering to the emotional appeals of their brand of extremists is actually a huge political gain. I hope for that day, but not much.

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