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Comment by throwaway713 | Hacker News Reader

It’s a bit hard to take this article seriously when there are FB and Twitter "share" buttons right under the title. I don't understand how news groups constantly criticize social media and then turn around and pay for advertisements and ask people to "share this article" on those very same platforms.

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Man, I really hate this kind of low-effort comment. Comments like it seem to be popping up everywhere around the web, and I think it’s a symptom of Reddit’s one-liner snarky monoculture infecting everything else.

To address your point:

- News sites are not a monolithic entity. The writer may not want sharing buttons, the publisher does want them, and the writer decided that getting their message heard was worth the trade off.

- The idea that only those outside or independent of a system are allowed to comment on it leads to lots of terrible scenarios in which the only people allowed to have opinions are the independently wealthy.

- Every single criticism of an idea doesn’t need to be backed up by extremist behavior. Criticizing the meat-production industry shouldn’t require one to become a hippie vegan living in the wilderness.

Not disagreement in general with your post, but being wealthy is rarely independent of your investments or the industry you made your wealth with. And that, indeed make your judgement biased. Which is not an issue since the arguments count, not who or why one give them.

Agreed completely. The only way for someone to be "a neutral observer" is to be wealthy, incapable of bias or persuasion, and not tied to the industry in question. In other words, not a human being.

There should be a term for this type of fallacy - the idea that you're not allowed to criticize or advocate change of a system that you're part of. It's similar to when people say "If you think taxes should be higher, then send a check to the government!" - obviously, we have to live within the system that already exists, and it's not reasonable to ask someone who wants to change the system to put themselves at a personal severe disadvantage while advocating for it. The dominance of social media platforms means that many publishers are forced to encourage people to share links via those platforms.

Being judge and party?

Sometimes you have to play by the rules even if these happen to be the rules you criticize. Yeah, they could strive for ideological purity by publishing the opinion piece in a self-printed paper magazine but this would not be a very effective way to reach people.

Not only that, AdBlock Plus blocked 51 tracker cookies on that page.

Y'know, maybe I'm better off without VICE in my life. This one is going into my hosts file.

You can be part of a something and still realize that it is a problem.

Not to mention the clickbait/hyperbole in the title. I strongly believe that targeted advertising has negative effects on society, but "breaking the world" screams "we want to grab and monetize your attention by activating your stress response, just like advertisers do."

Do they not see the irony? Vice sucks

Yep. We're basically reaching "peak hyperbole" in the English language. All these actors vying for our attention are resorting to more and more extreme wording to get our attention. Soon, there won't be new words to use that are more extreme!

I guess they could say "YOU WILL DIE if you don't read this article" but we already had that with "copy/paste this message or you will be visited by a demon" stuff on AOL decades ago...

I dunno... when elections and public thought can be so severely subverted by small and outside forces, I would argue that it IS breaking the world. We’re just seeing the tip of possibilities now. In 5 years there probably won’t be any commonly agreed source of truth left.. if there’s no common basis for truth then there’s zero possibility of common rule.

The people who write the article are probably very separate from those programming the CMS, and the marketing types those take their directions from.

Dr. Nathalie Maréchal's site https://nathaliemarechal.net/ doesn't seem "ad-infested", just a normal Wordpress site, 2 things blocked. She certainly seems to know her stuff, and to dismiss the words in the article instantly, just because they're on a crappy site, without even engaging with the content, is lame. Complaining about blocked ads, ie. just a small number on the screen, someone even saying they should "shut their traps", someone else declaring the (easily changeable) headline clinkbait.. come on.

In other circumstances, even outright paywalled articles sometimes just get put on sites that make them readable by someone, and then discussed or not discussed based on their merit. That in this case it's made out to be such a huge issue, that blocked ads on an article that is otherwise perfectly readable is such a "case closed" argument against anything and everything that may or may not be in the article, nah.

If it's "a bit hard to take this article seriously", that doesn't mean you just found a flaw in it, it's a flaw in your ability to take it seriously, and to distinguish between the core of something, gimmicks and circumstance.

I found it super easy to take it seriously, since I looked up the author and found so many interesting things, and links to other interesting things. I started listening to this talk by the author, https://vimeo.com/98786243 [0], and it's a bit hard to hear, the audio isn't great. So? If that kept me from listening to it, I would tell that to someone asking me if I listened to it. But why inject myself into a discussion supposed for people who did listen to it by saying I didn't listen to it, because it "was a bit hard to hear"? Like, if I was asking how to download audio, denoise and compress it, fine. But just complain, what does this add?

[0] Notice how it's not on YouTube. For which people get ~zero shit by the way; every day countless of dev talks are uploaded to YouTube, and anyone ignoring them because of that would be missing out. To hold it against speakers isn't just silly at best and at worst an excuse to deflect from the content, but for "the crowd" that IMO is "supposed to" bring empowering use of technology closer to people to just judge said people for not having means or knowledge they have is kinda fucked up.

Hey thanks for writing this out. I’ve felt similarly about quite a few hacker news discussions lately.

I worry that HN is turning into hot takes and gotchas and getting away from enthusiastic curiosity.

You have no idea how publishers are hurting financially because of the monopolized (google and facebook) market of internet advertisement is tanking. It's a bit like farmers cursing larger distributors and retailers for taxing at 200% for a gateway to consumers.

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