Negativity drives online news consumption
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Re: Negativity drives online news consumption
#2Maybe 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 news would resonate more with a person who is in a bad mood.
Re: Negativity drives online news consumption
#3Maybe 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…
Some people are hoping for a catastrophe that will render all their personal problems irrelevant, be it World War III, environmental disasters or societal collapse. Like a snow day for your whole life.
Re: Negativity drives online news consumption
#4Maybe 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…
Some people are hoping for a catastrophe that will render all their personal problems irrelevant, be it World War III, environmental disasters or societal collapse. Like a snow day for your whole life.
"Like a snow day for your whole life." Thank you, that gave me a hearty laugh.
Re: Negativity drives online news consumption
#5Just flip your coordinate system, and voilà, it's all positively existing people roaming the world in wonder.
Re: Negativity drives online news consumption
#6Maybe 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…
It works the other way, too. You're happier when you don't consume the news. That is also scientifically proven, although I have no linkage to support that claim.
Re: Negativity drives online news consumption
#7We've got huge quantities of multilingual news data with social metrics (e.g. newsapi.ai), classification models, research APIs for Twitter.
But Nature's running Upworthy and dictionary-based classification? It's almost low-N by today's standards. This is the sort of paper that could have been written a couple of decades ago.
Re: Negativity drives online news consumption
#8Maybe 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…
It is a valid question, but anecdotally, I am a happy camper, who typically does not really worry too much, but events over the past few years forced to cut down on checking news, because the more I understand it, the more depressed I get over state of affairs I have zero control over. This weird level of inability to make any kind of difference puts a damper on things.
I set acceptable times for when I review stuff and even then I try hard to curate it as much as possible to avoid mindless scrolling. It is not easy and you get psychological jitters ( and you try to channel it some other ways ) and you can feel your hard trying to reach for that mouse.
But overall the results were/are worth it. Sure, we are facing eventual extinction of human race, but one could argue that has been the case for several decades now so I sleep much better.
Re: Negativity drives online news consumption
#9Maybe 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…
Some people are hoping for a catastrophe that will render all their personal problems irrelevant, be it World War III, environmental disasters or societal collapse. Like a snow day for your whole life.
This is a problem to fix, which society has not itself figured out yet.
Hope, being good enough, your time is your time and desire mitigation is a solution.
Productize and scale happiness
Re: Negativity drives online news consumption
#10Former 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 what doesn't for drawing in readers hasn't changed.