Information still wants to be free. It's just that most of it is garbage. It's always been that way, too, we just didn't notice it as much.
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 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 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.