[PragmaticPulp]

This is common for Substack articles recently: It delivers a conclusion readers want to hear (Facebook bad! Zuckerberg going to lose a lot of money! Business model destroyed!) but the reality doesn’t quite match the pitch once you decipher the underlying facts.

It feels like Substack authors got started in an ultra-competitive world where they knew clickbait journalism was the norm, so they’ve gone all-in on saying whatever they think it takes to grow their subscriber base. I’ve tried subscribing to many smaller Substacks in the past year but the majority of them feel similar to this: A lot of exaggerated sensationalism and recycled material, but little actual analysis. The exceptions have been professional journalists who were already good at writing before joining Substack.

The sensational articles with exaggerated headlines do play well on places like HN where headlines get upvotes before many read the article, so the trend will continue.

[dannyw]

It's not just substack. It's a plague that has infected regular journalism; they're just more cunning in disguising it.

Think about all the "Sources say" articles you've read at 'respected publications' over the past few years. How many of them turned out to be true or collaborated?

[defaultname]

"How many of them turned out to be true or collaborated?"

The overwhelming majority have turned out to be true.

So, what now?

The faux equivalency "they're all the same" (usually pointing to a tiny, minuscule fraction of stories where something was errant) is exactly how we ended up with the rise of overtly fake news. In the same way we have normalized politicians who lie overtly and repeatedly by casting them all the same: some politician took exaggerated credit or said something that in some contexts might be misleading, ergo he's the same as the one who lies maliciously at every turn. "They're all the same"

[pavlov]

> "Some random guy posting thoughts on Substack has remarkably turned into anti-"MSM" advocacy. Amazing."

I wonder if there's a snappy name for this fallacy that professionals are somehow responsible for the failings of amateurs. It's pretty common.

- Blogger writes poorly researched post -> "mainstream journalists are much worse"

- Crypto project is fraud -> "banks are the real scams"

Applying this logic to the tech industry, we get:

- Random Wordpress plugin is poorly designed -> "the real incompetents are software engineers at FAANGs"

I mean, it might be true, but there's really no relationship between the two and it doesn't absolve the amateur.

[ABCLAW]

>this fallacy

It's a garden variety false equivalence.

[pavlov]

A bit more specific than that, it has elements of both conspiratorial thinking and “look what you made me do” gaslighting.

[bun_at_work]

Not all the news publications have the same ideals or strategies or tendency to bend the truth the same way, but all news (so far as I can tell) is impacted by the same negative incentive: advertising.

If your business model generates revenue through advertising, you are incentivized to attract attention, as we all know very well. News is no different; news publications are incentivized to write outrage-generating content to get you to look for ad revenue, whether it's CNN or Breitbart or ONN or Fox or NYT, it doesn't matter.

CNN isn't the same as Fox on this level, for sure, so it's not completely equivalent, but that's mostly because the ideology is different. But outrage on the left sells, outrage on the right sells. Those publications are different because the outrage they sell is targeted at different audiences.

[lupire]

Why would a "right-wing" ideology's outrage be one a bigger level than a left-wing outrage?

You are making a false equivalence. Fox publishes outright nonsense like "Texas has 0 deaths from Covid now, showing mask mandates are unnecessary" (asterisk: for one fluke day in the metrics, so we're not technically lying, even though we know members of Congress will cite while paraphrasing into huge lies).

[bun_at_work]

Ok I'm responding a few days late here, sorry about that.

I'm not making a false equivalence. My comment is pointing out the perverse incentive present in all news, regardless of political slant.

There is an audience for right-wing ideology outrage; there is another one for left-wing ideology outrage. The news sources are capitalizing on that.

[IncRnd]

> "How many of them turned out to be true or collaborated?" The overwhelming majority have turned out to be true.

That's not a very convincing statement. Do you have anything to back that up?

[heavyarms]

You are agreeing to a chain of comments about an article that reaches an exaggerated conclusion based mostly on opinion and not on facts and careful analysis, and your response is to claim that the entire news industry is guilty of it too based on a vague notion that there was a lot of "sources say" reporting that was (made up? inaccurate?) over a specific period.

So, in conclusion, human beings excel at pattern matching, even when the patterns aren't there, and sometimes use their pattern matching ability to validate the point of view which aligns most closely to their identity and psychological needs.

[prepend]

I had a friend who had a friend in journalism. For some reason, my friend’s mom was used over and over for “person on the street” or “sources say” when the source was just some general perception on a current event like Michael Jackson dying or whatever.

I used to follow this friend of friend journalist just to see the unnamed sources. It was funny because the articles frequently presented them as authoritative like “knowledgeable sources familiar with Mr Jackson say…” Funny because I knew the mom and she just read the same material anyone else could read.

[throw_nbvc1234]

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/aaugh-a-brief-list-of-official...

I'm sure most hacker news folks can find the right-leaning fake news easily so here's some left-leaning fake news to balance things out. Most of these include citations as well.

[oefrha]

> they're just more cunning in disguising it.

Are they? For instance, Ars Technica used to be a source of high quality tech journalism for nerds, where the journalists seemed to really “get it”. There’s still some of that left, but in the recent years, I observed more and more bland nothingburger articles coated in clickbait titles popping up in my feed; to add insult to injury, the comment section was sinking deeper and deeper into tribal outrage, consistent with the rest of the (Anglo, at least) Internet. I finally unsubscribed last year. Now I know zero source of consistent high quality tech journalism.

[clairity]

hopefully covid sensationalism will open the eyes of more folks to this kind of emotionally-wearing manipulation. simple phrases like "could have" and "may" are simultaneously designed to be outwardly innocuous, seemingly informative, and highly effective in leading people to jump to overblown conclusions that keep readers heightened (i.e., stressed) so that they desire more information. it's the same primal anxiety you see in rabbits in open fields. news media will mash that button over and over again to get their little ad revenue stream while laying waste to your nervous and cardiovascular systems.

relatedly, my neighbor was just telling me yesterday how anxious and frazzled she's been for the past number of months. she's constantly following current events on npr, nytimes, facebook, instagram, and youtube. she's having a hard time concentrating and getting things done. she's yet to make the connection between these things herself, even with gentle (and even overt) nudging.

[JW_00000]

Hasn't this been going on for a very long time (possibly forever)? I'm thinking of the stress about North Korea launching nukes that would end the world, the stories about the EU banning curved bananas and thereby introducing totalitarianism, the idea that Brexit would eventually lead to WW3, the fear by some that Trump would cause the collapse of the US, the fear by others that Obama was a Muslim who would dismantle the US from the inside, the idea that George W. Bush would cause the collapse of the American democracy, the idea that 9/11 was an inside job, the idea that the Patriot Act was the end of freedom, etc. (I choose extremes from both sides on purpose.)

[clairity]

sure, it's been going on a long time, but younger humans tend to have to relearn this for themselves. hopefully the relentless fearmongering around covid reveals the mechanisms of sensationalism for more people.

practically all projections of power, as a critical feature of organizations, reach for heightened exaggeration to drive complicity. in that way, i'd reject 'both sides' as a false dichotomy. rather, any side--any significant organization, as a consolidation of power--will inevitably project misleading hyperbole, news media being no exception, and political parties being explicitly designed for it.

the bit that we need to keep relearning is the intertwining relationship between media and other organizations in shaping narratives for their own benefit, in opposition to the ideal of media keeping other organizations honest by disseminating information they'd otherwise wish to keep private. we the people have to continually keep organizations honest.

[prox]

I would wager that advertisement income and quality of journalism go hand in hand?

[prepend]

I don’t buy this since journalism has been ad supported for a long time.

Ars Technical in particular has been around for a long time and always as funded.

There’s something different now that is maybe compounded by only being ads.

I think the friction is between cost structures from a different revenue time and just constantly using short term tactics to hold onto declining revenue.

So the issue isn’t as revenue per se, but the bad business models associated with ads.

[breakfastduck]

That's not substack. It's the entire news based media.

Journalism is probably at its lowest ever point.

[farisjarrah]

This is a bold statement. I think its an untrue statement too. Sure, the main stream media may be a giant dumpster fire. However, there are more journalists then ever doing extremely fantastic work. Just because most people don't see them or read about them doesn't mean Journalism is at its lowest ever point.

Allow me to provide just 3 of the countless example of fantastic journalism that still exists today:

- Many of the journalists covering the Portland protests literally risked life and limb to uncover policing abuses.

- Data journalists at the Covid Tracking Project were compiling and producing such high quality data that governments were using them to forecast local covid health trends.

- The OSINT journalism that Bellingcat does: https://www.bellingcat.com/

[breakfastduck]

For sure I was overly hyperbolic there.

There are certainly some good journalists out there, but any big media institutions are way too far gone.