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Comment by henriquemaia | Hacker News Reader

I may sound too jaded, but how do I know this piece (or book, the one reviewed here?) is not fake? Maybe I've gone way meta on this, but isn't kind of oxymoronic to write about how one fakes what one wrote and then expect the reader to take that particular writing seriously? The Kantian in me is particularly bothered with this. ;)

Edit: typos.

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No need to berate yourself about being meta. It's a perfectly valid question to wonder if this article is fake.

It seems to be a parable. Maybe the story is not true, maybe it is, it doesn't make it less insightful about the trends of the last decade about the emergent phenomena of massively profitable fake content publishing.

> Maybe the story is not true, maybe it is, it doesn't make it less insightful about the trends of the last decade about the emergent phenomena of massively profitable fake content publishing.

I'd say that depends. If this story paraphrases a bunch of facts we know to be true from other sources, then I see your point.

But if this story is not literally true, then we should be very cautious about using it as the grounding for other beliefs.

It serves as a possible mental model for how to think about (advertisement-driven) content/publications on the Internet.

The sad thing is I don't think it is massively profitable, just slightly profitable. We're all paying a very high price in the form of growing political mistrust relative to what these publishers make in profit.

Agreed, it simply became more profitable thanks to the economy of scale (thanks to the Internet).

Unfortunately it's not oxymoronic at all. In the country I currently live there is a blog supposedly dedicated to expose "fake news" and media bias, and the blog is actually a propaganda front created by an elected representative of the governing party. The "fake news" blog, expectedly, posts hit pieces targetting any report that may be remotely unfavourable to the current government with personal attacks and smear campaigns.

That’s a good question. I guess the first step is, does it pass a sniff test? Are there any claims which sound too good to be true? Is there anything that it describes which seems implausible or impossible? As near as I can tell, there’s nothing impossible about what was written.

It's one of those self-referential problems like "This sentence is false".

Regardless of whether it is fake or not, at the very least, you know it has an agenda behind it. It's advocacy. It's trying to sell you something.

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