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Negativity drives online news consumption

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Re: Negativity drives online news consumption

#291

Post by wolverine876 »

nradov wrote: post #215
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…

I guess it's one of those game theory things. Individually each of us can improve our lives by "defecting" and ignoring the news. But if we all "cooperate" by consuming a lot of news then we have better odds of voting in ways that actually improve the world. An interesting moral dilemma: is it right to become a low-information voter in order to be happier? (I am not judging your choices. I honestly don't know the cor…

How could it be 'right' to abidicate resposibility? If others do it, how will anything get done?

Claiming powerlessness is an excuse to avoid the stress of our times. Now, more than ever, people need to step up and take responsibility.

Re: Negativity drives online news consumption

#292

Post by wolverine876 »

coldtea wrote: post #227
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…

> #2 is perhaps necessary for democracy to work Citizens that are active and care, is what's necessary for democracy to work, that is, citizens which actively monitor, and participate in, political developments. Mere "informed voters" just voting once every 4-5 years do not really make democracy, even if we were to be generous and assume that the elections-very-X-years model and the existing representation hierarchie…

> the number one source of information of citizens should be real life experience with other citizens that they're actively learning from (their issues, grievances, etc with laws, political decisions, officials, etc) and collaborate with. Not the media.

How can the real life experiences of people I know possibly inform me about Ukraine, Chinese foreign policy, the SVB bailout, pandemic issues, etc. etc. etc.?

Re: Negativity drives online news consumption

#293

Post by wolverine876 »

Merad wrote: post #168
nonethewiser wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is meatloaf really unhealthy?

I wouldn't call it unhealthy , unless you're of the mindset that red meat is inherently unhealthy. It does retain most of the fat from the ground beef which would cook out of normal burgers or hamburger steak. But it's also more filling than either of those due the fat and the inclusion of bread crumbs or oatmeal as filler.

> unless you're of the mindset that red meat is inherently unhealthy

It's not a mindset, any more than gravity is a mindset.

Re: Negativity drives online news consumption

#294

Post by wolverine876 »

throw__away7391 wrote: post #126
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…

There's a whole category of widely believed and oft repeated historical myths that originated from journalists trying to sell newspapers, writing articles that were later cited as "contemporary accounts" once the truth had faded from living memory. A few examples; the Titanic was never called unsinkable until after it sank, no one committed suicide on Black Friday as a result of the stock market crash, and there was…

> A few examples; the Titanic was never called unsinkable until after it sank, no one committed suicide on Black Friday as a result of the stock market crash, and there was no public panic caused by the original War of the Worlds radio broadcast. All of these things were reported by the media at the time.

Why should I believe you, a random person on the Internet?

Re: Negativity drives online news consumption

#295

Post by wolverine876 »

KoftaBob wrote: post #83
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…

What got me to break out of this habit is realizing that the vast majority of what news sites/tv report on isn't remotely actionable or relevant for the average viewer. It's basically something that scratches the itch of human curiosity, but with manipulative and lowest common denominator garbage. We'd all be better off if we scratched that curiosity itch by reading about things we're interested in, rather than curre…

Just choose better news sources. Plenty are serious and high-consequence information - much more than I have time to read, in fact.

Re: Negativity drives online news consumption

#296

Post by wolverine876 »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #74
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…

And thus, because profit motive drives literally everything (because it's impossible to forestall a takeover if you're broke) then all news-media trend toward maximum tolerable negativity. That is, there is a saddlepoint for how much negativity viewers desire. While I don't personally know what the threshold for psychological damage from exposure to this kind of media is, I would guess it's lower than the average exp…

I don't observe "maximum tolerable negativity". Could you give an example, maybe a link to a serious news website that looks this way?

Re: Negativity drives online news consumption

#297

Post by wolverine876 »

lynx23 wrote: post #289
wolverine876 wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you give some recent examples, especially from news organizations with leading reptuations (NY Times, Washington Post, etc.)? To a degree, that's what journalists should do: They are not writing a history book. They can't wait until all the facts are out or we'd never know if someone was arrested or accused until the trial was over.

reptuations, that was a freudian slip, right? Reputation is obviously in the eye of the beholder... What is one persons reputable source, is a money making machine without conscience for others.

People can fabricate whatever they want. They can call a leading newspaper a child kidnapping ring. But reputation refers to something else - there is truth and people do tend strongly toward it; people make functional (not optimal) decisions as a group - that's how democratic self-governent has worked far, far better than any other form of government.

It's philosophical theory that human judgment could be just completely arbitrary and that all these arbitrary opinions have equal weight. But it's cheap theory - not good enough for the first day of philosophy class - and transparently wrong, and has nothing to do with reality. We (you included) make imperfect but not random judgments all day every day, using many skills and inputs.

> that was a freudian slip, right?

Your assertion isn't about Freudian slips.

Re: Negativity drives online news consumption

#298

Post by lynx23 »

wolverine876 wrote: post #297
lynx23 wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

reptuations, that was a freudian slip, right? Reputation is obviously in the eye of the beholder... What is one persons reputable source, is a money making machine without conscience for others.

People can fabricate whatever they want. They can call a leading newspaper a child kidnapping ring. But reputation refers to something else - there is truth and people do tend strongly toward it; people make functional (not optimal) decisions as a group - that's how democratic self-governent has worked far, far better than any other form of government. It's philosophical theory that human judgment could be just compl…

I ment "you likely typoed that word because you unconsciously dont believe in what you said", which is, stretching the coloquial meaning a bit, a "freudian slip".

But reading your text, it is probably useless to talk to you about humorous viewpoints...

Re: Negativity drives online news consumption

#299

Post by jonasdegendt »

t12hrow wrote: post #245
hot_gril wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4chan only (sorta) works at a small scale, which it is. It's a niche. "No normies!"

I don't know if I consider it small scale, it has around 45M views a month according to similarweb: https://www.similarweb.com/website/4chan.org/#overview . Of course, it's still small scale in relation to behemoths like Twitter, FB, Insta, TikTok.

Given that there’s basically no way to interact besides posting or replying, I’m willing to bet most of that traffic is just lurkers. And another large chunk of that traffic probably congregates on boards like /a/ and /g/.

Some boards are incredibly slow given the popularity of the site as a whole, threads on boards like /n/ can stay up for weeks with barely any replies.

Re: Negativity drives online news consumption

#300

Post by netsroht »

pdimitar wrote: post #251
robswc wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>ChatGPT won't revolutionize almost anything, and I'll stand by my words, bookmark this comment and show it to me in 5 years, I dare you 1. I'll actually take you up on this, because I'm interested to re-visit the discourse around launch, 5 years from now :) 2. I do agree it's overhyped to a degree. I think it will revolutionize _some_ things but it could turn out like VR. I do use it every day and I don't see a reas…

My problem with the hyped up stuff, ChatGPT in particular, is that AI actually does not exist. The practitioners of the area of course have a vested interest to argue until the end of days that ACTUALLY AI does equal ML/DL and stuff but I am like "I see no Skynet so get off my back, we have no AI and that's that". :D But, I guess in 5 years we could argue whether certain progresses are indeed attributed to ChatGPT or…

This is why I prefer the term "weak AI". Weak AI is specifically trained to solve tasks whereas strong AI can teach itself to solve new tasks.

Whether humans are able to create strong AI is a philosophical question: While some argue that's not possible (can we be Gods?), others argue that this is the next logical evolutionary step.

Let's see if we can at least mimic strong AI when we let LLMs connect to external systems (internet, money, more energy, etc) and specifically allow themselves to fine-tune or train new NNs in general.

Time will tell.

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