Hacking Engineers and Engineering Media

github.com

65 points·exolymph··9 comments

Some great points. It is always important to remember that everyone has an agenda (especially in the current era of "fake news"). If we need to be skeptical of news seem on Facebook and other common places, why not be skeptical of things on Hacker News ... etc. One more current example (related to non-hacker news) would be that I've yet to see anything in the "trending" news section on Facebook about the Cambridge Analytica fiasco. Just shows that they curate that for their agenda.

These are good guidelines for spotting any kind of bias in media. I get that this is targetted at engineers, but aside from the tech-specific examples this advice applies to all kinds of content/reporting, and I wish it were taken more seriously in digital literacy curriculum (in the US anyway).

That's a great point, I'll make it clear in the intro that it is for both.

I wrote it initially for engineers, but then kept finding examples in other fields.

For engineers, you can read part 3 in my MongoDB series ("The Marketing Behind MongoDB") to see a common playbook at dev tool companies specifically:

https://www.nemil.com/mongo/3.html

Content marketing for SEO is everywhere. It's quite easy to spot, the author will explain why the practice of XYZ is great, in a pretty generic way, and then sprinkle in a couple of links to the sponsor that provides a product or service around that XYZ.

Bad content marketing is obvious, good content marketing hits the front page of HN

would be great if it had actual real examples for each item

To anyone reading, please do send a pull request (or an email, see my HN profile) with examples. I put this together in my free time, but would love to crowdsource more examples and general points.

what about astroturfing?

It’s mentioned as “troll armies”.

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