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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

Yes. It also bothers me that quality news sources, like NPR, have fallen into the trap of presenting Twitter as representative of the general population.

They often report about how some group of people on Twitter are angry about something -- as if that matters. Reddit has almost as many monthly active users lately, yet no journalist makes the mistake of reporting on Reddit comments as if it's generalizable to the larger population.

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Twitter is a cheap way to get response quotes for an article without asking anyone any questions. It's gotten so ridiculous that some news "content" is just a series of embedded Tweets. Serious news organizations should band together and restrain themselves from this silly practice. It violates one of the most important rules of interviewing, which is to know who the source is and what her biases might be so that the quote can be presented appropriately.

There's a lot of lazy journalism looking for a quote, any quote, because they're required to have one in a story they're writing.

This isn't new. When I was an analyst, some reporters would call me for a quote about something. There were times when I didn't have anything to say because I didn't know anything about said thing. But some would pester me for a quote anyway so they didn't have to give someone else a call.

Twitter does seem to have become a particular crutch though.

The BBC was one of the most egregious pioneers in soliciting meaningless viewer responses in the pre-social media era. They would go so far as to kill 30+ seconds of airtime to soliciting/demanding "participatory" viewer responses that were invariably inane. On the plus side, at least it led to some good satire [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQnd5ilKx2Y

Auntie Beeb's insistence on such complete drivel has killed all the joy and interest. I find it utterly unlistenable much the time.

yet no journalist makes the mistake of reporting on Reddit comments as if it's generalizable to the larger population.

You should stop by /r/austin sometime, and just lurk. The amount of local reporters looking for some kind of pulse to put their finger on and even those nu-'journalist' sites (Vice,Vox,insert here) obviously mining for quotebait is absurd, and the community has been calling it out.

Of course, /r/austin isn't a remarkably interesting place to be anyway for a lot of reasons...it's just interesting to watch the "Austin" phenomenon manifested there. Different story though.

  quality news sources, like NPR

NPR is CNN marketed towards psuedo-intellectuals by replacing common terms with sophisticated sounding vocabulary. Most of the pieces that discuss topics I am heavily familiar with are shallow and often misrepresented.

I say this as someone who really wants to like NPR and struggles to find any unbiased news source.

I'm sympathetic to claims of NPR bias (still a big fan), but rather than seeking an "unbiased" source, I want a thoughtful, reasonable, open-minded and well-mannered conservative news source. It does not exist.

You might look into the magazine The American Conservative. It's far from perfect (Pat Buchanan uses it as his soapbox from time to time, for starters), but on the whole it's pretty readable.

Most of the news reporting I've seen cast on individual Reddit communities. I don't think such a thing can be done as easily as twitter except through hashtags, thus the coverage on twitter being more twitter-wide hashtagging rather than sub-tweet communities.

What's interesting is that, even though they're not well-defined, there certainly are specific communities on Twitter. There's tech, and sports, and science, psychology, politics, music, etc, and each of those can be further divided. I'm sure that if Twitter put in the work, they could suss out all these communities based on who is following who and what they tweet about. (In fact, I'd be surprised if they aren't already doing that.) They could then make these communities accessible to the public.

Twitter currently has lists, but the problem is that these lists aren't crowdsourced (to my knowledge). They're maintained by individuals, which is unsustainable, because one person can only do so much work keeping a list accurate and up-to-date.

I'd be pretty sure that "Who to Follow" is based on some sort of social graph though probably in a simplistic way, e.g. lots of people you follow follow this person and you don't.

Yeah, that's the only thing I've seen from them in this domain. It's just woefully lacking imo. I don't want to pick people to follow individually... I want to pick entire communities of people to follow.

So essentially lists created using social graph algorithms. I probably wouldn't use it personally but I can see how it could be useful.

> I probably wouldn't use it personally but I can see how it could be useful

This describes virtually every announcement I've heard from twitter.

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