Christ, we went from Information Wants To Be Free to Sharing Is Spamming in less than two decades. How naive we were back then, thinking that tech alone would suffice to bring us freedom.
the value we used to get from old media was the due diligence behind reporting. unfortunately with the rise of internet the anybody can aggregate thereby the difference between blogs and nytimes is blurred to end users. the thing that I find rather insidious is news aggregators like FB or google dont use even a fraction of the revenue they siphoned off the old media to support anything remotely like journalism. hence the rise of fake news. That was my key take away from this election.
Also, no one talks about the weather or movies anymore either. Because people don't talk anymore. So nothing has any value now. :(
Worse still, this reduced revenue for high-integrity high-overhead traditional news outlets, and led to reducing the quality of their journalism because they couldn't afford to maintain the same standards.
So even the better news reporting institutions had to get worse to stay in the game.
When I pick up a copy of the NYT I want to see hard news, not "lifestyle" crap about the hot new cocktails in New York bars or a piece weighing the advantages of a sous-vide machine. That kind of stuff I can get in more detail for free from blogs.
Have it so in 5 minutes someone can have set up their own news site pre seeded with actual news, logo from a list, then all they have to do is buy a domain and write out their fake article.
Instead of putting the ideas you pulled straight from your ass in to a Facebook/reddit/hn comment box, you could make them seem like a source and just link them instead. It'd be glorious. Fake news getting flung everywhere by everyone.
Wait what? I still find blogs pretty distinct from regular news, in that regular news are mostly bullshit and blogs tend to deliver actual information in a reasonable format.
Blogs have have plenty of incentive to be quick, but not correct.
From time to time they have incentive to be incorrect too. An apology, retraction, etc is just more ad revenue at the end of the day.
There are blogs I read that put far more effort into attempting to ensure that their analysis is correct than papers like the NYT. They don't have the resources and connections that the NYT does for hard-fact, "did this incident occur" checks, but they're far, far less likely IME to (e.g.) misunderstand or intentionally misrepresent a recently-published academic paper, pretty much regardless of the subject. On top of that, they're a lot more likely to "show their work" and their comment sections are a lot more likely to have credible rebuttals to their main claims (hell, a link to a counterargument I made in a comment was recently edited in to an article on one of the blogs I frequent).
You'd think this would be a problem mainly for factoid-type, pop-science articles about space or wildlife, but the most egregious examples I can think of come from coverage of analyses in the social sciences. This is way more damaging, since people form their opinions on policy through the accumulation of their understanding of articles like these.
I understand that journalists aren't necessarily any smarter than the rest of us when it comes to things out of their field, so there's some baseline level of inaccuracy you'd expect, but some of what you see out of papers like the NYT is just flat dishonesty. And I say that as someone who's a fan!
The community-driven content of Web 2.0 has had a long run, and it surely isn't going anywhere. It's achieved some truly amazing things: who would have thought, even one generation ago, that today we'd have information sources like Wikipedia, or that they'd be as good as the best of them really are?
However, Web 2.0 has also shown us the weaknesses of a system where all voices are equal regardless of knowledge or experience. It has proved surprisingly difficult to create and sustain self-moderating communities that function as meritocracies, both in terms of the accuracy of information or validity of advice, and in terms of the challenging legal and ethical questions when one possibly anonymous person's free speech butts up against the real and possibly serious consequences of what is said for someone else. That same Wikipedia has had entire long and well-established pages on subjects where the content was utter drivel for months or years at a time, because it was utter drivel that enough inexperienced people believed, and there was no effective mechanism or incentive for a real expert to set the record straight.
It seems likely that many of these issues could be overcome if we combined the undoubted enthusiasm of the masses for having their say with a greater amount of input and influence for real experts and diligent moderators. However, that probably requires giving up a degree of the anonymity/pseudonymity we enjoy today, which does usefully allow for more honest and open discussions at times, so that credibility can be established with sufficient transparency to generate trust. It probably also requires people to actually pay real money to support the content or offset the running costs of discussion forums, so that a greater degree of expert contribution and/or moderation is actually viable without relying on ads, affiliate marketing schemes, or other secondary revenue sources that cloud the issue. That in turn may well require some form of either micropayments or syndication, and whoever cracks that one is probably the next Stripe.
In any case, I had in mind something a little more ambitious than just a branding exercise. For example, perhaps it would be helpful if we could establish some sort of persona and web-of-trust infrastructure, so that experts with sufficient credentials and peer recognition in some field can assert those credentials in some verifiable way when commenting on relevant matters. Then perhaps we could also establish some standards for sites presenting contributions from those experts to present any relevant credentials concurrently, so that whether you're reading an article on a high profile news site or just a casual comment on a discussion forum like HN, you have same way to know how much credibility the person you're reading has in this area.
Any brand that depends on page impressions will inevitably evolve into toxic garbage.
The solution is content you pay for. Subscriptions, Patreon, donations, or mix thereof.
Does anyone else _like_ the current state of information access? It's beyond naive to think that you can get high-quality, honest, bias-free information from any source without having to have an ounce of skepticism. This pre-dates the Internet and the decentralization of content by [# of years since the beginning of civilization] years. I feel far more capable to form an opinion on something now than I did in the days before the Internet: I'm able to rapidly check a dozen different sources of information, weight them by how much I trust them and how credible I find their arguments, and assess my level of confidence about how I feel about it. This can include the issue being controversial enough that I end up with "hmm...I lean this way but don't have a strong opinion on which side is more correct". It's even easy to validate this approach: as I'm sure many others here can, I can think of half a dozen issues where traditional gatekeepers arrived at the conclusion I reached _years_ after I did.
By contrast, in the past, you had access to far fewer analyses of any degree of quality and if they were wrong or lazy or dishonest, you were just shit out of luck. Importantly, it's not like the highest-quality info sources back then were _better_ than the best sources you have access to now, so even if you think you're completely incapable of critical thought, you're no worse off.
I think the fundamental problem is how incredibly uncomfortable people have with uncertainty. It seems like purely a psychological problem to me, present only if one isn't mature enough to face down the fact that the knowledge you have access to in a large, complex society is inherently socially-constructed[1].
The "downside" of too much information only appears if one has already deluded oneself into thinking that skepticism is never warranted with gatekeeper-delivered information.
The notion of Eternal September always seemed a bit pompous, even if understandably so where some gaps really stretch the tolerances.
Hate the Freshmen just to pay it forward.
You've completely misunderstood what the phrase actually means. The notion of access to information doesn't imply access to a selected, curated subset of it: in fact it means quite the opposite. Access to a deluge of information unbarred by gatekeepers is precisely at the heart of the concept, in contrast to the highly-curated and high-barrier world of (e.g.) three broadcast networks, and thousand-dollar encyclopedias.
Don't get me wrong: I certainly don't think that it's only the "dumb" that find handling the information deluge to be challenging. From the perspective of the individual's access to information, "Information Wants To Be Free" is still very much alive and well; it just requires a little more maturity than "tell me what to believe". Every single time I've heard someone complain about the fact that they see reliable sources say seemingly contradictory things about an issue, it's because the issue in reality is more complex than their oversimplified model would like it to be. Amazing access to information doesn't even remotely mean the same thing as "every issue is now magically simple enough that you don't have to put any effort into understanding it".
FWIW, "Sharing is Spamming" is utter nonsense. If you put the time in to curate whose sharing you read, you won't end up with garbage in your proverbial in-box.
As a legit inquiry, can someone explain this phrase to me? I've heard it mentioned tons over the years and have seen a bunch of different inconsistent interpretations people have applied. Which meaning of 'free' is being used? How is it's meaning reached from the phrase? I legit don't understand it.
The real idea here was that the internet would be a game changer. Not only would information be available immediately - but you could actually find it. When it became cheap to find "correct" information the idea was that would dominate. The implicit assumption was that people actually wanted correct, accurate and truthful information.
In practice it turns out people prefer information that validates their opinions, regardless of accuracy.
Quotes abound including Ben Franklin about how people will believe what they damn well want to. This isn't a new revelation by any means save for some technocrats that probably were too autistic to understand human nature.
On the otherhand Information wants to be free has always been able to make a non moralistic statement that is true without respect to human behavior. The cost of information is not due to anything human. The reason why this is still a powerful statement is that it makes it clear that outside of totalitarian control (from SOPA to real jackboot dictatorships) you can't control the dissemination of information even amongst the peasantry. Of course if this information is news.. it could be garbage.. and often is.
You need to look at who the original people using the internet were. Generally speaking they were the students of research Universities who would be naturally inquisitive. Their bias for learning blinded them from the realities of most people who simply don't care. The truth has no direct use for them.
I also don't think seeking out validating information is the wrong choice for most people. If you weren't going to do anything with the information anyways you might as well get the endorphin rush validation brings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free#H...
At the time, I it was a positive sentiment. Government secrets would leak out (which they have). Rare or impossible to find books, films, and music would become freely available. If governments or corporations tried to restrict access to those books they would fail, etc.
These days, I often find myself using the phrase more as an ethical warning. Any information you gather or create will eventually become freed. So if you're gay and live in the middle east, don't post it on Facebook because eventually that information will be freed. Don't collect personal information of dissidents in countries were they may be persecuted. Don't collect information about your customers that you don't want eventually going public (e.g. do stupid things like store credit card numbers and social security numbers when you don't have to)
Things are going to get very bad over the next decade or so as we as a society realise the implications of this.
Any information we create, collect or store will become public knowledge, one way or the other.
"On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other."
That was said by Stewart Brand, something of a 1960s-era hippy-turned-businessman, to Steve Wozniak, of Apple Fame. Brand's previous ventures were the Whole Earth Catalog and Global Business Network. He went on to found the WELL, among the first online communities, and the Long Now Foundation.
The fundamental notion contrasts's informations high fixed costs with its low marginal costs, as well as the sometimes high use value.
For both psychological and economic reasons (marginal analysis), there's a strong incentive to keep information's price low. Much of the general conflict over content creators and consumers concerns this. Many economists, including Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, argue that information is a public good. See p. 308:
http://s1.downloadmienphi.net/file/downloadfile6/151/1384343...
With copyright and printed media, an effictive moat and gate were created by which higher prices could be sustained for some goods (books, periodicals, record albums, film), as well as advertising-subsidised publiction (periodicals, broadcast).
Hamilton Holt's Commercialism and Journalism (1909) gives a good run-down of the trade-offs in mass-market advertising-subsidised media vs. small-market, intellectual products. The same dynamics continue to apply.
https://archive.org/stream/commercialismjou00holt#page/4/mod...
There was a strong tradition, especially on the U.S. West Coast, of an open-access, technologically mediated information regime. Brand and John Perry Barlow ("Wine Without Bottles", "Cyberspace Manifesto") reflected much of this.
https://w2.eff.org/Misc/Publications/John_Perry_Barlow/HTML/...
https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
Unfortunately, this vision failed to address a few realities:
1. Changing the costs and prices of an activity fundamentally changes that activity. It wasn't just the then high-quality contributors who joined in the party, but kooks, crazies, terrorists, scammers, opportunists, etc., who had previously been priced out (or otherwise largely excluded).
2. As a medium grows in use and importance, it becomes ever more attractive to those who would seek to exploit it for personal, or political, gain. We're well into that phase of Internet use now. It's a history that's been pressaged by earlier major communications developments: cable TV, broadcast TV, radio, cinema, phonograph, public-address systems, printing, speech.
3. If it's possible to make money (or seek other non-didactic reward) through a medium, then that incentive will tend to drive out truth-seeking activities. Evolutionary systems are exceedingly good at evolving toward what is incentivised for, and extirpating competing forms.
I still subscribe to parts of the original concept: information really ought be fairly freely available, perhaps paid on a tax basis. But our epistemic systems should also be, substantially, guided by epistemological criteria.
Like water it seeks-out a hole through which to flow to freedom.
And the more valuable the information the more pressure it exerts upon people to make that hole for it.
"In current age, information is easy to copy and disseminate, and hard to keep from being stolen".