[bostonsre]

I'm not sure corporate media had much choice in the matter if they wanted to survive. Almost all are for profit companies that lost heavily when eyeballs shifted to social media. Social media companies make money off of ads, so they optimized viewership without being concerned with the consequences. In order for corporate media to stay alive and stop hemorrhaging viewers, they needed to play by the new rules. It's a shit snowball that is growing as it rolls down hill and it doesn't seem like there is anyway to slow it down or stop it. Or maybe it's more feedback loop like, like a closed loop toilet where no plumber is brave enough to confront it.

[titzer]

It's an ant death spiral at this point. The only way to be free of it is to unplug and focus on your own life.

[FooBarBizBazz]

> ant death spiral

Great metaphor. Thanks for that.

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

[bostonsre]

Yes, individuals can flee to get out of the path of said shit snowball, but their descendants, family, friends, and neighbors are directly down hill from it.

[anaerobicover]

If enough people make the choice, it loses its power. It's the same as what makes voting works.

[bostonsre]

I'm not too optimistic that its possible to have enough people willingly boycott these news delivery pipelines to the point where it changes the ad dollar calculus for these corporations. They have been pretty great at cultivating addiction in a large proportion of the population, it seems like an extremely tough battle.

[snikeris]

Individuals can divert said snowball from said people.

[bostonsre]

Do you mean all people? Or a small portion of those people? Maybe building a shit snowball bomb shelter aka cutting internet to a household might be able to save a small portion of those people, but I'm not sure how anyone outside of elected representatives could ever hope to stop it for the wider population when the thing has so incredibly much inertia.

[marcus_holmes]

They were going this way before the internet threatened them. Newspaper reporting (and journalism generally) was becoming increasingly emotion-based rather than fact-based.

The rise of the tabloids in the UK is a good example: highly-partisan papers that appealed to specific demographics with stories that aimed to evoke an emotional response (usually a negative emotion).

It's the same mechanic, though: competition for eyeballs. Social media became the super-competitor, but the ad-based model would have got there eventually even without the internet.

[blaser-waffle]

> They were going this way before the internet threatened them. Newspaper reporting (and journalism generally) was becoming increasingly emotion-based rather than fact-based.

"Yellow Journalism" was a thing as long as we had newspapers and a free press. The term was coined in the 1890s, but was almost certainly around long before then. William Randolph Hurst did what Rupert Murdoch does now, just with slower turnaround time. If you assume Fox News help make Iraq happen, then they've both caused the same amount of wars.

> It's the same mechanic, though: competition for eyeballs. Social media became the super-competitor, but the ad-based model would have got there eventually even without the internet.

It was already there, by a long shot. Internet social media just made it omnipresent, automated, and responsive.

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

[bostonsre]

Yea, they were definitely ahead of the curve. The rest of the industry still had some soul and dignity for a while there. The hacker news links to news sites with sliding bars for left or right bias are nice and all, but I'm not sure they're doing anything but preaching to the anti tribe choir. Not sure how we go about uniting or at least going the other direction without some horrible disasterous tragedy like a world war or an alien invasion. Would have thought maybe a global pandemic would have done the trick, but not bad enough I guess.