[Animats]

> I dunno. Mostly I don't want to see ads. I liked Facebook when it just told me what my friends were doing. I don't want a "news feed" from a social network.

But the news media suffer from a huge punditry to hard facts ratio problem.

Today's first-screen news stories on major outlets that didn't begin as a press release or punditry:

* Fox: "Remains of missing toddler Quinton Simon found in landfill, mother charged"

* Washington Post: "Covid deaths skew older, reviving questions about ‘acceptable loss’"

* New York Times: "Antiwar Activists Who Flee Russia Find Detention, Not Freedom, in the U.S." "Exhumed Grave Near Kherson Shows Occupation’s Brutality"

* New York Post: nothing.

* Reuters: "Hawaii's Mauna Loa volcano erupts for first time in nearly 40 years".

* The Times (of London): nothing, because they have such large ads and banners that the content is hidden.

* South China Morning Post: nothing, again mostly because of oversized banners.

* Le Monde: "The unflinching gaze of Ukrainian drones in Bakhmut"

* CNN: multiple stories, because the first screen has many headline links and small banners.

Some of this is optimizing the use of screen space for revenue, not information.

[jrmg]

I liked Facebook when it just told me what my friends were doing. I don't want a "news feed" from a social network.

I have the completely un-researched and un-backed opinion that Twitter changing its prompt from "What are you doing?" to "What's happening?" in 2009 has had an unappreciated, oversized negative affect on the world.

[cxr]

I hold an opinion that can be considered somewhat opposite[1].

Similarly, a commenter from Reddit[2] writes:

> I haven’t personally met anyone active on Twitter for years. There are very specific types of people that want to be sharing things in that way and from my experience they are very narcissistic.

> Not that Reddit doesn’t have their share of asssholes, but I find that because it is anonymous it is also more tolerable. At least it was the case until a few years ago, now Reddit became very popular and the quality of the posts has declined immensely in almost all subs.

> Twitter is just a bunch of people self promoting themselves as more intelligent, more informed, more socially and environmentally conscious, etc. Basically IG for unattractive people.

Already implicit in the "What are you doing?" prompt is the hallmark of modern social media that focuses on positioning individual personality and punditry over common, for-the-greater-good, "kitchen table" discussion in service to a given topic—the focus is on you, the contributor, rather that taking backseat to whatever it is that you're supposed to be contributing to. I'm not sure that this can be rolled back at this point, though.

1. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31180315>

2. <https://old.reddit.com/r/samharris/comments/z59ccj/annaka_on...>

[rchaud]

That change in language was likely prompted by a boost in news media relevance for Twitter after the Iran protests against then-leader Ahmedinejad in summer 2009.

Prior to that, I had not heard of Twitter. I was on Facebook and Digg and that was about it.