[whoopdedo]

> sites like Hacker News and Reddit have shown that readers are plenty smart, and capable of sifting through the bullshit,

Oh? I've had the opposite impression. That Reddit adequately demonstrates that readers are impulsive, poorly informed, narrow-minded, and easily manipulated. On subreddits with the most passive style of moderation, the comment threads are a self-congratulatory shouting match where any contradictory information is shouted down regardless of its merit. On the other hand, where conversations are productive and good information is rewarded, those subreddits are moderated strictly and editorial control is frequently used to remove distracting comments or guide conversations.

In my opinion, Reddit validates the usefulness of a gatekeeper for news.

[asaramis]

I feel you've just perfectly described the variety of newsrooms that produce the stories we read every day!

[shaldengeki]

More rigorously, the explicit goal of sites like Reddit, Facebook etc is to present you with content that you like. In effect, they're doing a search over recent news stories to optimize for likability.

Journalism outlets, at least those operated in the traditional manner with a wall between business and copy, explicitly eschew this goal. The whole point of "church and state" separation in news outlets is to enable journalists to write about stories that readers probably wouldn't upvote, but is important for them to see. This sort of story will be given _much_ less exposure on sites that are single-mindedly optimizing for likability in general.

I think traditionally-operated news outlets serve a socially-useful function, and that the metamorphosis of these outlets into likability optimizers means everyone loses out. You may disagree, and that's your perogative!