[xvector]

> To me, it's wild to think that people on HN don't know about this relatively recent history and are so naive to think that these protections were just pulled out of the air to frustrate developers,

IMO we have modern journalism to thank for this sort of thing. People are so misinformed with rage bait articles that they push against policies in their own interest.

But if anyone dare suggest enforcing some minimum level of journalistic ethics they'll get attacked because somehow journalists have painted themselves as some sort of unassailable paragon of righteousness.

[quitit]

Bingo. It's easy to pay for influence, especially if one can spin a story for clicks.

I see a lot of cheerleading and parroted talking points against the interests of developers, particularly small and independent developers. A lot of the changes lobbied for by large developers give them an insurmountable pricing and competitive advantage over small developers and startups, yet I don't see much consideration here for that, nor the wishes of bona fide consumers.

Epic is particularly barefaced here, since they claim they are fighting for developers, when their proposals are not altruistic. Each clearly puts them at an advantage over smaller developers and consumers. Do we have such a short memory that we forget that this is the same Epic that settled with the FTC for using dark patterns and violating childrens' privacy for the purpose of tricking kids into accidental Fortnite purchases.(1) That was only 15 months ago.

While I'd expect reddit to be less informed, I'm not so charitable with HN: it's a forum where the bulk of participants claim to be developers.

(1) https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/12/...

[fragmede]

it's almost as if there wasn’t an ethics class in the CS majors’ required courses!

[xvector]

Actually most CS majors require ethics courses. I've met very few developers that don't care about ethics, especially when they work on something product facing. We've seen entire teams at Google quit or refuse to implement something, etc.

Meanwhile in journalism, ethics is a strong part of the course structure but you see countless journalists writing poorly researched ragebait articles for clicks.

The "programmers don't know ethics" meme is just that, a meme. The fact that there even is a required ethics course in most universities is far more than you can say for most other majors. Nearly every single programmer knows about Therac-25, I'd wager most graduates today are also learning about MCAS, etc.

[fragmede]

> I'd wager most graduates today are also learning about MCAS

Emphasis mine. you'd likely win that wager, I don't disagree, and that's great for today's graduating classes, but because engineer is not a protected term, especially not software engineer and definitely not prompt engineer, theres no requirement for a CS graduate to go back and do continuing education like there is in other fields, so graduates who don't seek out and do the, eg, OCW CS ethics class aren't going to find themselves in one. Curriculum has evolved over the years to include ethics as a requirement, but that meme isn't a meme because it isn't true in a vast number of cases, as evidenced by the multiple failures in, eg, this case here.

[GauntletWizard]

How do you propose enforcing journalistic ethics, without making "Journalism" subject to capture by regulation and government oversight? We had a system - Trust was placed into journalistic institutions, whose management was committed to editorial independence. It didn't work - They got bought out and chased profits.

[xvector]

Perhaps we could require a simple "nutrition facts" on each article about the journal's conflicting interests: for example, a ragebait article about big tech? Then the disclosure of the ad revenue conflict between big tech and media industry must be required up front (at the beginning of the article.)

We could also require a list of the journalist's qualifications to be posted clearly at the beginning of each article. If the journalist, for instance, does not have an education in the subject, the article must be prefaced with a "journalist is not experienced or qualified in this field." This would encourage traditional journalism to end, and for journalism to become more of a mandatory consultancy with experts.

Finally, we could strengthen libel and defamation laws rather significantly. For example, in Emily Steel's article[1] about ATC, she should not have named and shamed a particular controller. Furthermore, the ATC group should be able to easily sue her for inaccuracies in her article[2] misrepresenting ATC as a whole. If you can get easily litigated, you're more likely to stick to just the facts.

Ultimately a formulaic approach will not solve this problem, it can only help a little bit by discouraging nonfactual reporting. Unfortunately, this problem fundamentally comes down to journalists as an industry thinking they're paragons of righteousness, and then going on to write horrible things.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/02/business/air-traffic-cont...

[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/ATC/comments/175pwim/the_nyt_articl...