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Comment by pudo | Hacker News Reader

Can't emphasise this enough. Any system that lets (rich) people vote on what the truth is cannot be called journalism. It is simply not how facts work. This is also why Elon Musks recent initiative ("Pravduh"?) has all the populist appeal in the world, yet contains the risk to do serious damage to journalistic independence.

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And who exactly do you think owns the current media companies in the US?

> who exactly do you think owns the current media companies in the US?

Point being we can answer this question. If you put ownership on the blockchain, we can’t. It’s exactly what we have today, but worse.

This is shifting the goal posts. The point is we have a media that's already well under the thumb of 'rich people', to use the phrase of the person I originally responded to. And so comparing any idea to an ideal of an independent media free of this control is rather disingenuous.

For your shift, is anonymizing control in exchange for a clear ledger of control a bad deal? I'm not sure. Seems like an interesting idea at least, and given the current state of our media I'm more than happy to see any idea trying to change the game.

You have a good point, but that doesn't make this proposal any more viable.

>given the current state of our media I'm more than happy to see any idea trying to change the game.

Sounds like an intuitive statement until you really think about it for a second. Then, you realize that it's a reckless and possibly dangerous approach to problem-solving.

If you start down the solution path by asking the question "how could things get any worse?", then it's very likely that you'll find out.

echoes of elon musk unintentional dog whistle lol.

sorry, had to comment as it’s still in recent memory.

Journalists don't seem to need any help in damaging their reputation and the public's trust in them. These alternative distribution schemes seem to be a response to the bias and selective reporting done over the last two years.

OP didn't say anything about journalists' reputations and the public trust in them. He said something about journalistic independence.

For example, Seymour Hersh clearly possessed journalistic independence in his story on the SEAL team assassination of bin Laden. However, at least initially, public response to his story was lukewarm and the Obama administration in particular and the press broadly spent a lot of time and pages trying to discredit the story. In this-- and many other cases-- public trust and reputation is orthogonal to journalistic independence.

Not that I disagree with your two sentences. Clearly this is an attempt to somehow "technologize" better journalism given the low quality of reporting in the run up to the 2016 election.

But if you take "journalistic independence" as your input and reflexively give "reputation and public trust" as your output, something is broken in your journalism parser.

I would pick a different hill to die on than Seymour Hersh's story about the killing of bin Ladin, there is as far as I can tell one unnamed primary source for Hersh's reporting versus the official story - almost everyone that is not in US intelligence went on the record and all those people and the US intelligence sources would have to be in on one big conspiracy.

Big conspiracies require more proof. This is not Watergate level where there was corroborating evidence behind the FBI assistant director's reveal to the Washington Post.

Seymour Hersh thinks US special forces members are like the bad guys from that Da Vinci Code book and are actually working for Opus Dei, and this why they would be so good at keeping the Hersh conspiracy hidden. Hersh did good with My Lai but that doesn't mean he can coast on his laurels forever.

Eh, I would call very few people at the Murdoch’s and Mercer’s media conglomerates and the like journalists, and while they’ve significantly amplified extremism in the last two years, they’ve never been considered legitimate journalistic organizations like the New Yorker or the Washington Post.

WSJ is a pretty renowned newspaper. Coincidentally, they published the Theranos investigation which probably cost Murdoch $100mn.

I'm somewhat entertained by the posters in this thread shitting on media organisations. You need to understand: the business model for a whole pillar of democracy is gone.

$5 and your sarcastic comment will buy you a cafe latte, but the very last thing journalism needs more of is disruption. It's been disrupted every quarter for ten years straight and now reporters in Colorado are clinging to the goddamn blockchain because it's the last shitty hope left.

You can propose that journalism needs to reinvent itself, but this is not an original insight. Smart people have been trying for years, and it's really hard to make a public good sustainable on the web.

So if you're sitting in a really nicely paid high-tech job somewhere in SV, realise that you are the origin of this problem. A problem that causes damage to democracy in numerous countries. Maybe a little less arrogance?

FWIW I subscribe to the WSJ, NYT, WaPo, Economist, and New Yorker. I buy books and music (I think I might be one of the few left who still buys albums despite listening to them on Spotify, too).

This move is very concerning to me. The best I can say about it is that if people are willing to buy coverage, hopefully that will directly pay for more coverage in general (a rising tide lifts all journalism). But it clearly removes the editorial independence that has been THE hallmark of serious journalism since serious journalism existed.

> You can propose that journalism needs to reinvent itself, but this is not an original insight. Smart people have been trying for years, and it's really hard to make a public good sustainable on the web.

Case in point, almost all of open source software exists because someone else paid for it, and releasing it as FOSS didn't directly contradict their business interests.

You should point your snark cannon at each person who chooses to read a journalist created piece of content over the web without paying for it (as I'm assuming you just did with this article). It's very easy to point to those "wealthy tech bros in Silicon Valley" for all of society's ills when, for the most part, the real culprit is staring at you from the mirror.

>So if you're sitting in a really nicely paid high-tech job somewhere in SV, realise that you are the origin of this problem. A problem that causes damage to democracy in numerous countries. Maybe a little less arrogance?

Tech companies aren't responsible for the decline in quality of journalism. They are responsible for shining light on how bloated and bad they were all along.

Checking facts and multiple sources on news stories was a major undertaking before the internet. Media has always been biased and bad, it's just that the internet is shedding light on how bad it is.

Transparency and widely available information is the pillar of democracy, not news organizations.

Are you arguing that New York Times and Washington Post of 20 years ago were secretly just as vapid and outrage-focused as the stars of modern clickbait media?

>"the business model for a whole pillar of democracy is gone."

Its just being exposed for what it is... the only new thing is discussion about it became common enough to pass the threshold for you to hear about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

The Wall Street Journal has significantly amplified extremism in the last two years? It is not considered a legitimate journalistic organization? Please give examples.

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