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by geekpowa
1612 days ago
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Are we blaming traditional media companies for the content overload shitshow we now find ourselves living in? If NYT could provide a remedy, what would that remedy even look like? Wikileaks' ascendancy was on the narrative that traditional media is broken and untrustworthy. At the time I brought into that and the premise that they were disrupting this traditional industry and remaking it better. Now I realise like alot of IT focused disruption (including disruption I've worked on directly myself as an IT practioner), all they achieved was recreate the very thing they sought to disrupt, but poorly and generally worse version of it. Older and wiser now and I realise personally that the trust problem is something much more than something for 'others' to step up and fix, but substantially in how I myself consume content. |
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I am absolutely blaming them for this shitshow, yes, if we're defining content overload as the self licking ice cream cone of viral news.
What happened here was a parallel evolution. On social media, whatever got the most eyeballs got the most clicks and thus the most ad revenue, and engineers tuned the algorithm to exploit this.
Traditional Media sees this, and strives to do the same but the difference is that they are (and now arguably were) speaking from a position of moral and institutional authority, and have since diluted their brand and standing with clickbait, stories that were published without proper vetting, getting things outright wrong etc etc. That's their own God damn fault. Nothing was stopping say NYT from developing their own Substack or a version of it.
>Older and wiser now and I realise personally that the trust problem is something much more than something for 'others' to step up and fix, but substantially in how I myself consume content.
Again, you post on HN. You're an extreme outlier with the self awareness to know that certain media consumption habits are unhealthy and likely divinate a worldview where a reality forms based simply on what's in your newsfeed and not any underlying truth.