[rosterface]

There's no mention of what I think is by far the biggest negative influence on trust: the media. Trust in media is at an all time low:

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com
/washington-secrets/trust...

It's a totally self inflicted wound too. Clickbait, outrage bait, blatant political spin, stealthy retractions, journalists on social media starting mobs...

Bots do not even register in most people's minds compared to that.

[rchaud]

What you see is the clickbait. What you don't see are the structural changes to the media landscape over the past 20 years that led to this.

Newspapers per 100 million people fell from 1200 (in 1945) to 400 (in 2014). This is from a Brookings study cited in a Wikipedia article on the topic [0]. In 2013, the Chicago Sun Times laid off all its photographers and tasked journalists to take photos as well as provide the research and writing [1]. How would the quality of your work be affected if you had to do the job of 2 people?

The classifieds ads business is dead, and subscriptions have been declining for years because "news on the Internet is free". The only "media" that makes serious money is talk radio, which isn't journalism so much as diatribes of political invective.

As it turns out, that's what people are willing to pay for, or at least sit through ads for. If anything, "the media" is giving the people what they want.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers#Performa...

[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/01/business/media/chicago-su...

[brokenkebab]

The idea that the internet transmorphed media from oracles of truth to professional manipulators is taking the whole situation inside out. The fact that people used to trust media more is not an indicator that media used to say more truth in the past. Journalists lived in a high tower pretty much unreachable by an average reader, so producing rubbish, or being manipulative was billion times easier. In the past only an important journalist was able to stand against another important journalist, and even that was a slow inconclusive pushing. Nowadays, bullshit, and incompetence can be revealed in hours, and even small mistakes are publicly noted. Everybody can be media now. Naturally journalists has lost their semigod status. But it's important to understand that they weren't semigods before, it's just that you looked at them down up. And now you don't.

[blueboo]

> The only “media” that makes serious money is

...

> Google Made $4.7 Billion From the News Industry in 2018, Study Says

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/09/business/media/google-new...

Hmm

[lotsofpulp]

Obviously rchaud is referring to people that create media, or in this case, the journalists. I don't see what relevance Google's revenue is to this conversation. They found a way to make money by directing people to other people's work.

[eli_gottlieb]

While those "other people" were doing unpaid internships, freelancing, and filing for unemployment insurance. Something seems very profoundly wrong with this picture.

[PhasmaFelis]

Google made $4.7B off of the news industry, by aggregating other people's stories and advertising on them. None of that money actually went to writers or publishers.

Which is the entire point of the article you linked. If you're gonna be snarky, you should really check to make sure your information is accurate.

[gipp]

That article -- and the lobbying group "study" it is based on have been pretty roundly condemned even by other journalism organizations e.g. https://www.cjr.org/the_new_gatekeepers/nyt-google-media.php

tl;dr the number is total fabrication

[PhasmaFelis]

Which only cements the claim that no one is making serious money off of proper news media.

[vinceguidry]

Has the news industry's economics ever been truly separate from entertainment industry economics? Is the only reason news ever made money was because it offered people a novel form of entertainment?

Did people ever buy news because it was news? Or was this decline inevitable as actual entertainment was always going to eventually be able to offer a better match for what people actually buy?

[darkpuma]

Most newspaper articles don't have or need a photograph. Did the Chicago Sun Times really have a 1:1 ratio of journalists and photographers?

[0815test]

It's not just media, but the education system as well. More educated people are significantly more, not less likely to fail Intellectual-Turing-Tests about people with opposing views. i.e. far from increasing openness to experience, education itself is functioning much like indoctrination into a fundamentalist religion! The effect starts already at a High-School level and becomes worse and worse as educational attainment rises:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/republican...

If this doesn't scare the s--t out of you, I don't know what would.

[SketchySeaBeast]

What that article tells me is that people say they belong to teams they don't actually belong to, and that very few people actually do. Seems to me to be a problem with the teams.

[0815test]

> What that article tells me is that people say they belong to teams they don't actually belong to

I'm not sure that's consistent with the evidence. People are actively getting worse and worse at modeling the other "team", which strongly suggests that polarization is quite real indeed and not just a matter of different labels.

[AnimalMuppet]

Democrats with higher education are getting worse and worse at modeling Republicans. I think that means that, in higher education, Republicans get exposed to real Democrats, and Democrats get exposed to a caricature of Republicans.

[asark]

If true, that seems odd. There was an awful lot of very public searching for "what are Republicans, and how can we understand and empathize with them more?" after the last election. Tons. It's ongoing, in fact. It's mostly been—to an almost absurd degree—very gentle and good-hearted. If there's ever been anything like this sort of massive effort by Republican media figures and public intellectuals, I'd love to know about it, because their findings would surely be fascinating. I doubt there has been, at least in the last 30 years or so.

[josinalvo]

> what are Republicans, and how can we understand and empathize with them more?" after the last election. Tons.

> very gentle and good-hearted.

That has not been my impression. Just one data point.

[SketchySeaBeast]

I'd like to see a comparison between a survey of espoused party values and the oppositions understanding - I wonder if someone was to look at the values that the political leaders are saying and voting for would there be as wide a gap, or would it fall more in line with what people believe of a party and it's members?

On a person per person basis there's dehumanizing caricature, but I wonder if you compare it to the party to which the person claims to belong, if it would be as out to lunch.

[ipython]

Perhaps it's more a reflection of the incentives at work? How do you drive engagement with your content? Clearly 'clickbait' is (was?) successful at driving traffic, otherwise it wouldn't be called clickbait. Polarization is used successfully by other 'non-political' sites such as YouTube to drive engagement statistics (and hence ad impressions), and so forth. If you're trying to stay afloat in a competitive media environment, what would you do?

There is no mass incentive for thought-out, contemplative, long-form journalism. In my opinion, we have dug our own grave - the truth is that the primitive, animal parts of our brain vastly overpower the analytical parts of our brain, and so your 'outrage bait' is a news (or tech) executive's bonus for the year. If the only metric by which we measure anything is $$$, then, well...

[parasar1983]

"Journalism" has a "push" element in addition to "pull"

[lotsofpulp]

Do you think a group of journalists selling verified, accurate, non clickbait articles based on data and first hand accounts would be able to generate enough revenue to feed the journalist’s children and send them to college?

[sb057]

That's part of the issue; there is no need for commercial first-hand accounts anymore. If someone on social media is talking about a news event and provides a video documenting their presence, that is about as verified and accurate as you can hope for.

[jandrese]

Which is incredibly susceptible to someone with an agenda who wants to spin an narrative and knows how to leverage social media.

It's tailor made for propaganda. Joe Schmoe who is actually there doesn't know how to inflate his likes and SEO his account. His voice gets drowned out by the people who are getting paid to push a particular viewpoint. There is no editor providing oversight. No ethics board. No neutral point of view. It's just whomever shouts the loudest and gets there first.

[brokenkebab]

No neutral point of view. It's just whomever shouts the loudest and gets there first.

And that's exactly how news industry worked always, since invention of press (actually even before, though it wasn't industry back then).

[CM30]

You're being downvoted, but to a large extent, you're probably right here. For many topics journalists used to cover, you genuinely don't need them any more, since enthusiasts posting Patreon/donation funded content is at least as good in terms of quality. Tech, games, TV, music, sports, celebrity gossip, all of them can be covered just as well or better by some random guy on YouTube or some online blog site.

And that in fact be another reason why the media as a whole is doing so poorly. In the old days, a fair few people read the papers for this stuff. Nowadays they can get the same information elsewhere, without the stories they're less interested in taking up space.

[lotsofpulp]

There absolutely is a need for multiple, verified, consistency and fact checked first hand accounts. One person on social media does not provide an objective and difficult to falsify viewpoint.

[emiliobumachar]

Deepfakes are getting more and more accessible...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepfake

[iagovar]

Maybe not, but it's still a problem. It's the same in Spain, most media is hard to trust on basically anything. They even adhere to stupid projects like "The Trust Project" and spin off factcheking brands, but none of that solved the problem. It's still the same people claiming that, oh no, this time you can trust us!

I even experienced being the target of a report (well, the company I work for), and they did an awful job. I felt that the story they made up was only tangentially related to reality.

[lotsofpulp]

The purpose of my comment is to illustrate that the collective "we" as a society are to blame for the lack of good journalism in the market. "We" don't demand it (i.e. pay for it), and so we get what we (don't) pay for. The person I was responding to claimed the media self inflicted it upon itself (I presume based on the prose of their comment), my claim is society self inflicted it upon itself.

[TeMPOraL]

Ultimately, both views are true. We do not "demand" it with regular market means, but it's important to remember that free markets tend to structurally favor incrementally cutting corners. Even assuming we've demanded good journalism in the past (which is doubtful), we'd still end up where we are. As for media self-inflicting it upon itself, well, they shouldn't have started cutting corners. But since "media" is really a lot of competing actors, "not cutting corners for short-term gain" was an impossible outcome anyway - the whole thing has dynamics of a Prisoner's dilemma.

My conclusion is that it's less about demanding - the way we fund news, i.e. open and competitive market, is structurally unable to support good journalism. Usually problems like these are solved by governments setting standards and giving funding, but journalism is a special case (it's perceived by many as protection against government overreach), so with that option out, I have no idea how to even begin solving it.

[PhasmaFelis]

> Maybe not, but it's still a problem.

Of course it's still a problem. The point is that it's actually a much bigger problem than you implied. People blame the media like it's all just down to some greedy jerks making malicious decisions, and if only we could replace them with someone with integrity, everything would be okay.

The fact is that we've created an environment where it's nearly impossible for honest, non-sensationalized news to exist. Putting all the blame on the media is like blaming a starving man for stealing bread. They're culpable, certainly, but you're missing the root cause.

[scarejunba]

The truth is the opposite. They always lied. Then we did not know they lied. Now we know. It is not they who changed, but us.

[mtberatwork]

> It's a totally self inflicted wound too. Clickbait, outrage bait, blatant political spin, stealthy retractions, journalists on social media starting mobs...

The media isn't one unified conglomerate. It's like equating the entire tech industry to just SV gig economy startups.

[DoreenMichele]

It's a totally self inflicted wound too.

No, it's really not. In a nutshell, the root cause is the currently pervasive idea that good writing should be available completely for free.

[chongli]

Ideas follow from reality. Supply and demand would dictate that infinite supply should drive prices to zero. Isn't that what we're seeing?

The other problem is that most people can't tell good writing apart from bad, but that problem is far older than all technology (apart from writing itself, of course).

[DoreenMichele]

That's a two-way street. Reality also follows from ideas.

Perhaps most people can't tell good writing from bad, but the HN crowd is more able than average to distinguish the two. Yet the attitude here boils down to "writing isn't a real job -- if you don't like working for peanuts, then STFU and get a real job!" HN members actively find ways around pay walls, more aggressively than most use ad blockers etc. Most people here are well heeled and can afford to pay for subscriptions, but the dominant attitude is "fuck no to that -- writing should be free!"

[josinalvo]

Not so much "writing should be free", but "I dont trust and consume a specific source enough to justify subscription" with the adendum that "ads are evil". At least for me.

Edit: having read the "hand licking incident" I believe it did give me value and I would be willing to pay 1 dollar or so as thanks (not implying that I got only 1 dollar value, or even that I got as much as 1 dollar value. Just a number that seems reasonable).

There is the matter of how: to do it I would probably have to spend much more than 1 dollar in effort.

And there is the matter of scale: I want to pay you for your work in giving me an interesting insight. But if we started to do that massively, people would optimize for "things that seems insights" not for insights... (see https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/)

[DoreenMichele]

I primarily try to monetize my blog writing with tips and Patreon. Someone who doesn't want a recurring monthly charge can leave a one time tip.

Even though I removed ads from most of my sites in part to respect the boundaries of people who hate ads, I mostly get endless excuses rather than funds.

When I ask "How can I monetize my work?" people don't actually have a solution. They seem to think if you get enough traffic, that automagically leads to money, overlooking the fact that this concept only really works for an ad-based model and widespread use of adblockers kills it.

I sometimes get told "Product sales of some kind." Nevermind that this is another form of whoring out my writing to the need to sell something other than the value of the writing per se and also people on HN equally bitch about the evils of content marketing and how it is one of the things ruining the internet.

I've heard these arguments for years. I've tried to find a means to make money without being evil in some manner. The result for many years now is virtuous and intractable poverty.

When push comes to shove, the real answer boils down to: We expect large quantities of quality writing on a regular basis and we refuse to pay for most of it. We also will get up on our high horses and get all offended if you dare to use expressions like _slave labor_ to describe our entrenched expectations and the de facto outcome. Don't confuse me with the facts. My mind is made up!

It's quite tiresome to keep hearing the same BS over and over while I continue to live in poverty and yadda.

Edit in response to your edit: I call bullshit. If you honest to God want to give me a single dollar, you can do so via either PayPal or Venmo right now without further hypothesizing about how giving me a single Goddamned dollar is some new means to ruin the internet, along with every other means to pay for writing. Because beneath all the hot air is the fact that most people simply expect slave labor to create good writing. If this weren't true, I could pay cash for a cheap house in my small town and quit whining on HN about being poor.

[josinalvo]

fyi: paypal refused to allow me to change my password, venmo refused to accept my non-US account and patreon(1) refused my non-US credit card. As expected, I did spend much more than one dollar in time trying to send you money. What I did not expect was to fail.

(1) I meant to be a one month only patron.

Also, take my data point and do with it as you will. Call me evil/slaver/bullshiter/whatever. I was trying to help and also to discuss, but I no longer feel inclined to do either.

[chongli]

It isn't just a dichotomy that bad writers produce bad writing and good writers produce good writing. Good writers are even better at producing bad writing, because they produce bad writing that masquerades as good. We're not dealing with random defects, we're dealing with agents and their agendas.

[DoreenMichele]

We're not dealing with random defects, we're dealing with agents and their agendas.

That's a reasonable point, but people mostly don't tell me "It's a trust issue. I would pay if I believed I could trust the motives of the author/source."

The overall attitude expressed is consistently "I'm simply not going to pay for writing. If writers want a middle class income, they should get a real job."

Once in a great while someone will agree with the general point that if you want to be able to trust what an author is saying, you need to pay them for their writing and not expect them to monetize with ads or sponsors because that introduces a conflict of interest. One person cited Consumer Reports as an example of this model and why they pay for a subscription.

But that's the exception, not the rule. Most comments here consistently express the attitude that they simply will not pay for writing and writing is not a real job.

At the same time, journalists get attacked for not doing their job adequately well, etc. It mostly falls on deaf ears to point out that journalism simply doesn't pay what it used to and there is a cause-and-effect relationship between the lack of adequate pay and the lack of quality writing.

[chongli]

The overall attitude expressed is consistently "I'm simply not going to pay for writing. If writers want a middle class income, they should get a real job."

There's more to trust than belief in the veracity (or lack thereof) of a statement. When you trust a writer, you not only trust their claims, you trust that the substance of their writing is worth your time. The attitude you highlight suggests to me that many people do not see a lot of writing as being worth their time.

Unfortunately, people's judgements of value can be strongly influenced by price. When the quantity of readily available, free writing increases dramatically, people's judgement of its value goes down. Simply put, they no longer trust in the institution of writers as a medium.

[flukus]

The rot had set in long before they were giving away free content on the web. Before then people were paying for the distribution and not the content, the web destroyed the ability to profit off the distribution.

[RankingMember]

It's unfortunate, because while there are many bad actors, there are some outlets that don't employ these tactics that get painted with the same brush. I'm not sure how to make that better.

[e40]

The Washington Examiner is a horrible source for anything. Maybe that was your point? (That link in your comment doesn't work for me.)

[lowdose]

Fabricating attention.

[projektfu]

All modern forms of yellow journalism.