We Analyzed 100M Headlines | Hacker News Reader

We Analyzed 100M Headlines

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151 pointsthmslee44 comments

This is why democracy is broken.

Attention is scarce. So when you combine all the resources and effort that marketing departments from Fox News to Charmin toilet paper, add Facebook as a primary medium, throw iPhones and ADHD into the mix, the only tactics that work appeal to base instincts. Make something flashy, attention grabbing, and short lived.

When that happens to ALL information, there’s no place left for balanced thinking that doesn’t come to some immediate divisive conclusion that just confirms what you already believed. There isn’t enough attention to get depth or thought provoking material in and have it win in your A/B tests.

So what happens? Democracy loses as base radicalization is mechanically forced by the attention economy to win out.

This is fairly well understood, as is the fact that none of the parties involved - Facebook, the media, or the political parties - have an ounce of incentive to change.

So, what do we do? It may be becoming apparent that the theory that democracy does not work in a world with social media is correct, but what can be done with that information?

For every Buzzfeed you kill there's another, for every social network with detailed discussion there's a bigger, dumber one.

I would love someone to propose something radical, but the only new ideas I've heard are monarchy (from people that also tend to think minorities are a problem) which is terrifying, or Chinese style rule, which honestly sort of seems to be working? I have no idea, I'm a software developer, not a political theorist, but you have hit the nail on the head.

> democracy does not work in a world with social media

Two misconceptions in one short phrase.

Democracy always worked perfectly well, just not as advertised, a common phenomenon with heavily advertised products.

Social media is just making things harder and more expensive for advertisers. They'll figure something out, with much groaning and moaning.

How is it making things harder for advertisers?

Have to hire more people, things are a lot more distributed.

Here, I have a proposal for you:

Imagine a world government wherein the killing, torture, and imprisonment of people is illegal, as the core clause of the state. In this state, the core clause does not permit the interests of the state over those of the individual; the state exists to support an individual.

Imagine a political party which comes to power through the co-option of the public sphere to support the above goals, while preaching that this party alone is capable of bringing about the revolution. Imagine a single leader which is the beating heart.

Imagine this party preaching that the global economy must be reverse-engineered to adhere to the above-mentioned goal. Imagine that technical renaissance is trumpeted.

Imagine this totalitarian state and its transparent principles. Transparent enough to call itself totalitarian.

Now imagine the orange flag flying on the marble arch on a clear day.

Sounds impossible on many levels, the least of which is absolute power corrupts absolutely. Laws to protect individuals are rarely the problem, from North Korea and China to Mexico and the US. People, positions of power, the lack of accountability, the distribution of problems and the unequal voices of those issues, the total cultural and reality differences between the great leader and the realities of everyone everywhere, trust, etc don’t get solved by the one true government.

Sorry, what is the orange flag a reference to?

Sounds like a useless government. I mean, if such a state can't kill or imprison people, how are they going to get other people to comply with their laws? And if they can, why would any other government cede the ability to do so themselves?

Banishment?

Sortition. Rule by random citizen.

One of the best articles I've read in the past decade:

"If you can't choose wisely, choose randomly"

https://aeon.co/essays/if-you-can-t-choose-wisely-choose-ran...

Sounds nice but pretty much guarantees that anything of any serious complexity will get contracted out (or hired in) to an increasingly entrenched oligarchy.

Politicians are already incapable of handling everything of any serious complexity, except maybe for a narrow domain of their own expertise. For everything else, they need to rely on other's advice.

It seems to me that often, those people tend to be lobbyists that just happened to volunteer themselves when the politician was out of their depth. If the politician is any good at what they do, they will consult several experts, but there is still room for significant bias to creep in.

Now the question is whether the average random citizen is more or less likely than the average politician, to succumb to this kind of external influence. My guess is that random selection will yield less people who are only in it for the power, but also less people who are genuinely driven by the need to solve problems within society.

Governments ran by algorithms

I appreciate that this is the top comment, and starts with 'This is Why' which is the second most engaging phrase apparently.

CNN, MSNBC, and BBC, are at the top of the fake news paradigm. Everything they report goes through a process that removes all details that do not match the narrative they are pushing at the time.

The underlining problem is that fair and honest journalism - that reports the facts and lets the viewer/reader make up their own mind - has been replaced by a sided & weaponized news media, owned and operated by those with high-level agendas (those that want to impose control on the public, engage in geopolitics, fight petrodollar wars, consolidate power, etc).

> fair and honest journalism - that reports the facts and lets the viewer/reader make up their own mind - has been replaced

When did this exist except in theory in a classroom?

Electing somebody and then not having any control over the decisions they vote is not 100% democracy... More like 1%.

"This is why"

ooh the irony...

That's not the reason democracy is broken. Democracy was broken since the time of the ancient Greeks. That's what Socrates set out to prove with his trail. Democracy is not a good system, the sooner you come to that conclusion the better it is!

Human consumption of clickbait seems to have strong similarities to our outsized appetites for fat and sugar. In regards to the tempting foods, these cravings are presumably artifacts of slow evolution; we evolved to an environment where we should seize every opportunity to consume these scarce, high-energy foods, and we have not yet adapted to the new reality where many people have plenty to eat.

I wonder if there's some similar primitive drive behind the unhealthy appetite for clickbait; a yearning for information that may help us to survive and reproduce. Some of the high-performing headlines seem to frame the information as something that will affect the reader personally.

not really sure about the negative doom-and-gloom reactions, this has existed since time immemorial and will for as long humans as a species exist. Our brains are wired to react to such content, not sure you can draw a line between social media and a purported dumbing down of humanity. We live in a time where for the first time 50% of humanity has access to information that was restricted to a tiny elite. Sure cat videos and celeb pics might be predominant, but with that comes access to wikipedia, mit ocw etc.

Fascinating, if not depressing analysis of clickbait. I guess one of the sad takeaways is that people want to be told how to react when they read something (make you cry, give you goosebumps, shocked to see).

Yikes, these headlines then are just different flavors of emotions, no different than ice-cream being chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, etc. And there's a flavor to satisfy everyone's taste.

Want to feel sad? Read this article. Want to feel uplifted? Read this one. Want to feel outraged? Click here!

So now there is a cheat sheet of terms for people to use in their click bait headlines to get even more clicks!

ARRRRRRRRGGGGHH!

This is kind of depressing and does not bode well for future information dispersal.

This is why the reason is only 1 in 10 will make you... (Can we guess?)...

Where can you collect the Facebook engagement data used for this analysis?

Facebool Graph api: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/reference/v2....

Oh, this was generated from Facebook? Totally irrelevant, then, IMO.

A lot of unstated dubious assumptions. Is the headline decisive? I bet these headlines were accompanied by pictures; maybe that's the signal.

It also depends on the channel. I think that "We analyzed x" and "...this is what we found" are pretty popular on HN.

Yep, most of these charts are based on Facebook engagement. If you anayzed the top trigrams of headlines posted to HN I think you would get quite a different picture, though some similarities as you say.

The analysis of clickbait has a clickbait title itself, they even added brackets which are believed to increase CTR.

Sincere question: What is wrong with clickbait if the article fulfills the promise? The title here seems to be what the article is about.

It's a cheap shot. It demonstrates a lack of integrity or character.

That's clearly intentional, in fact there's a section titled "How Did We Decide On The Headline For This Post?"

I am wondering if there is a similar study for other stuff too ? Like say email, blog posts etc?

Can you guess why this will make only 1 in 10 people cry tears of joy? https://media.giphy.com/media/kFgzrTt798d2w/giphy.gif

clickbait may get attention but does it change minds? I count a clickbait headline against the publisher and author.

This is valuable information, though depressingly presented.

The article reminds me strongly, and for similar reasons, of Clay Johnson's The Information Diet, a book I found overall tremendously disappointing -- this review describes most of the reasons:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/254961608?book_show_ac...

In particular, Johnson keeps presenting the situation of low-quality information as a matter of choice, whilst flagrantly ignoring two of the massive elephants in the room:

1. Search-engine and social-media rankings drive much of the engagement. A slight tweak to those algorithms can ... make Upworthy downworthy:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=upworthy

2. Agnotology. Culturally-induced ignorance, or slightly less charitably, those with more money than God lying to the world loudly enough to prevent any other message from being heard. The story of corporate-financed disinformation, and the persistence of it, even to the very same individals and organisations, over numerous campaigns -- lead, asbestos, tobacco, CFCs, nuclear power, and now fossil-fuel carbon emissions -- is absolutely depressing.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchants_of_Doubt

And if you think the practice is new or particular to the present, it's not. There's a delightful little book, the transcript of a speech, by Hamilton Holt, Commercialism and Journalism. It's the text of an address he gave at U.C. Berkeley in 1909, on the phenomenal growth of the publishing industry, and of the advertising which fueled it. He quotes an anonymous publisher:

"There is no such thing in America as an independent press. I am paid for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. If I should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation, like Othello's, would be gone. The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilivy, to fawn at the foot of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. We are the tools or vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."

https://archive.org/stream/commercialismjou00holtuoft#page/2...

i ignore emotions headlines and those about me.

Yuck.

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