The Scripto App Became a Fixture of Late-Night Comedy News (2018) | Hacker News Reader

The Scripto App Became a Fixture of Late-Night Comedy News (2018)

newyorker.com

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Previous discussion from a year ago, with the development team showing up in the HN thread! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16110463 - and a great comment from the original developer here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16111620

Are you able to see this post on HN anymore? It looks like they removed it. I assume just because Rob asked them to since it made him look bad.

Huh, the thing that jumped out at me more was "Oh, that's what Rusty Foster (of kuro5hin) moved on to."

It says Rob Dubbin coded the original version. That is false. I did a lot of it and Mindy helped with the front end. Rob did not code any of it. And I solved a lot of hard problems. The fact that he just gives me no credit and just says it crashed constantly is slander. It did have a problem I couldn't figure out for a long time with the chat process crashing the server. But it worked fairly well for them in production despite that issue. I solved the hard technical challenges and yet he discounted my work and threw me under the bus. Very unfair. I have no respect for those people.

    I asked Dubbin whether he would ever license Scripto to a conservative show.
    “Fox News wouldn’t use it, but I wouldn’t sell it to them,” he said. “I’m not
    interested in making their job easier.”

Seems like a prime opportunity for a competitor to come along and advertise to the other side of the political aisle.

They’d only sort of be competitors if they are unwilling to sell to each other’s customers.

True, but if one of them doesn't have that constraint, then they would indeed immediately be full-blown competitors.

Maybe Scripto only sells to folks with "correct" political opinions, but if I'm willing to sell my version (maybe call it "CueCard-o-Matic" or something) to anyone, then provided my version is competitive on features and/or price, Scripto's target demographic is suddenly a subset of my own rather than a different demographic entirely.

Doesn't sound that hard to do, either, if it's indeed an Etherpad Lite fork + Elasticsearch + ENPS database compatibility + other bits to make it familiar to ENPS users. The ENPS-compatibility-and-familiarity bits could probably even be left out if customers don't actually need that (e.g. for orgs that don't already use ENPS). Of course, I lack any exposure to the target industry whatsoever, so I'm very likely falling victim to the Dunning-Kruger effect here, but someone who does have that experience might be a different story.

This jumped out at me too. To a non-American, it seems like everything that is wrong with American politics: being so unable to empathize with your fellow Americans that one would treat them as an enemy and refuse to help them in any way.

If you were familiar with fox news, you would understand that it is mostly propaganda driven content targeting the under educated and elderly.

The shows named in the article are for entertainment, not information (that's why they need collaborative editing so much - because most of what they're doing is "punching it up" not fact-checking or adding additional factual information). News just happens to be the topic they're riffing on. Jon Stewart admitted as much on Crossfire in 2004, and just last Saturday Night, Michael Che said basically the same thing on Weekend Update while taking down Buzzfeed's latest missteps.

Of course there is also a lot of mainstream media (that does purport to be serious news) that is slanted and biased to the point that much of it is misinformation and propaganda and there isn't a whole lot of value. But the comedy news shows are explicitly that - comedy. And at this point, it's rote, saccharine, safe, and played out.

Unlike Infowars, which is hilarious and subversive and dangerous all at the same time.

I'm not sure the distinction between entertainment and news is clearly discernable for those audiences and seems to just use comedy as a platform for a predefined political agenda, more like Bill Mahr than Jon Stewart.

The genuine con artists on Fox News (Hannity, Tucker) are not the the same thing as the conned viewers.

Hannity and Tucker are both political commentators / entertainers. They don't claim to be anything but.

> To a non-American, it seems like everything that is wrong with American politics: being so unable to empathize with your fellow Americans that one would treat them as an enemy and refuse to help them in any way.

I wonder where you're from, that America seems particularly bad in this regard. Things are noisy in the media here but our politics and the crap surrounding it is quite mild relative to most of the world.

As a non-American, it looks to me like one of the primary reasons why America has become so divided and tribal these days is Fox News. It makes a living selling white working class people their own fear and prejudice back to them in order to get them to vote against their own economic self-interest. I think Fox News is one of the few things in this world that you can hate with a pure heart. Hating its viewers would be different though, and that's not something I would agree with (in fact I think one of Democrat's top priorities should be to fund much better public education in rural states) but I don't think that's what was meant by the quote in the article.

You just described the platform strategy of the GOP which is a bigger core issue than Fox News fanning the flames.

Citation please?

I see your understanding of America is vintage 2008.

“Fox News is the devil” was brought to you by The Daily Show that got a lot right, but also hid a lot as they transformed from exposing narrative to pushing it.

Here is some 2019 for you... FoxNews is probably less biased than CNN. Fox as a whole is fairly Anti-Trump, because Fox as a whole is NeoCon and they are NeverTrumpers. Fox opinion has been dialed back, while MSNBC, CNN, and CBS have been dialed up.

> Fox as a whole is NeoCon and they are NeverTrumpers

This is full of shit. Trump regularly appears on Fox and Friends. Hannity regularly talks about or interviews Trump (not to mention sharing the same lawyer). Carlson regularly defends White House policy.

Not only did you seem to skip the words “as a whole”, but you seem to be too far to one side to realize that the GOP never wanted Trump and they are begrudgingly stuck with him - because they didn’t have the sense to rig their primary system like the DNC.

I recommend taking a step back. Because if you really look at it, the GOP establishment you hate and Trump eho you hate, are enemies. It’s not 2008 anymore.

Trump appearing on Fox doesn’t mean much. Fox ran only 48% positive news on Trump according to a bias in media study in the first 100 days, I don’t think anything has improved. The highest of any network, but hardly in the hole for him.[0].

[0] https://shorensteincenter.org/news-coverage-donald-trumps-fi...

All sorts of people regularly appear on Fox News segments. That doesn't mean Fox News actually endorses those folks' agendas or opinions.

There are lots of indicators that Fox News is indeed consistently biased toward conservative stances, but whether or not someone appears on Fox News is not really one of them.

You cannot claim a network that has one of their anchors literally having daily phone conversations with the President of the country they are reporting on is less biased. That's just silly. Commentators on Fox News are blatantly supportive of the President. I don't know how one gets a cozier relationship with a network than that between Fox News and President Trump. He literally watches the network to dictate policy decisions. The right wing outrage about the border wall from Fox News directly led to President Trump changing his political position. Fox News is to Republicans in America what RT is to the Russian government.

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/05/sean-hannity-donald-t...

https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-sean-hannity-talk-befo...

Statistically Fox is the least biased MSM outlet, they are 52% negative towards Trump, compared to over 90% for the others

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2017/09/...

A Harvard study compared Obama to Trump media coverage their first 100 days in office and found Obama got 59% positive coverage compared to 20% for Trump

https://shorensteincenter.org/news-coverage-donald-trumps-fi...

> Statistically Fox is the least biased MSM outlet, they are 52% negative towards Trump, compared to over 90% for the others

And how negative were fox towards Obama? Of course they won't be as a negative with "their side" in.

> A Harvard study compared Obama to Trump media coverage their first 100 days in office and found Obama got 59% positive coverage compared to 20% for Trump

Negative coverage doesn't make them biased, undeserved negative bias does. Whether it's deserved or not is a debate for elsewhere.

>Negative coverage doesn't make them biased, undeserved negative bias does. Whether it's deserved or not is a debate for elsewhere.

That's the point, you can report a bad story about somebody neutrally and just lay out the facts, but the media has consistently reported things negatively

Regarding the methodology, from the link:

Tone is judged from the perspective of the actor. Negative stories include stories where the actor is criticized directly. An example is a headline story where Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer criticized Trump when the Labor Department’s April economic report showed that fewer jobs were created than had been predicted. Schumer was quoted as saying, in part: “Eleven weeks into his administration, we have seen nothing from President Trump on infrastructure, on trade, or on any other serious job-creating initiative.”[8] Negative stories also consist of stories where an event, trend, or development reflects unfavorably on the actor. Examples are the stories that appeared under the headlines “President Trump’s approval rating hits a new low”[9] and “GOP withdraws embattled health care bill, handing major setback to Trump, Ryan.”[10]

Negative things happening to or because of somebody isn't indicative of bias in the reporting.

Fox News has an average daily viewership of less than one half of one percent of the population. (Adweek)

Fox News is cancer, but that is not even beginning to provide a holistic picture of the political landscape. If you think the left wing has no part in this, you're misinformed or insane.

You understand that James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose and Peter Boghossian recently got an academic paper published which was just Mein Kampf excerpts verbatim, but targeted at white men rather than Jews, correct? They did this as an exercise to show how radically left academia has gone. Or in regards to specifically media, look no further than the portrayal of the Covington Catholic event on your purportedly unbiased news sources, and then watch the source video for yourself. There is a group of Black Israelites who say to the MAGA kids that "your money says 'In God We Trust,' and yet you give rights to F*GGOTS." To which the MAGA kids respond with jeers and "so what, they're people too." CNN reported the incident as the MAGA kids having approached the 2 Native Americans (untrue) and chanting "build the wall" at them (untrue, watch the full 2 hour video if you want to). The only mention of the Black Israelites was that the MAGA students were antagonizing a few "black preachers."

I hate Fox, I hate Trump, but the left wing is deconstructing foundational liberal pillars. To lay the entirety of the current political landscape at the feet of Fox News is just nuts, I'm sorry.

Politics has always been about the twin pillars of attacking an opponent and their positions, but we've now reached a point where we attack supporters, too. Discourse seems to have gone from "You're wrong" to "You're literally the worst piece of scum for even thinking this way".

Politics has always been dirty business and defaming candidates is not unusual. The trend towards shaming and dehumanizing candidates' supporters is what really bothers me.

>I hate Fox, I hate Trump, but the left wing is deconstructing foundational liberal pillars. To lay the entirety of the current political landscape at the feet of Fox News is just nuts, I'm sorry.

100% correct. I think it’s crazy how many people’s view of the American Left and Fox News together are stuck in 2008.

Even refuse to make money from them!

Someone doesn't want to profit off of something that they feel is against their own moral code and that becomes "everything that is wrong with American politics"? Wow.

So am I to believe you have no concerns with how anything you create is used?

Personally, given that I release most of my code (and all of the code for which I hold the copyright) under free software licenses, my concerns about how people use the things I create (and who those people are) tend to take a backseat.

This comment only makes sense in a world where politics are just a personal preference, instead of an power struggle with actual effects on others lives.

This position should be as non-controversial as not wanting to sell matches to arsonists.

The trouble with this argument is that both sides agree with it.

Why not both? Politics are a power struggle with life-and-death consequences, where most people choose leaders based on personal preference and likability.

I don't feel that snake oil salesfolk deserve any empathy.

I disagree. If you disagree with an actor's moral/political/ethical/what have you stance you can choose not to engage with them economically as a form of criticism and embargo. Saying 'everyone's money is green' is far more worrying to me...

The thing that people don't realize is that when it comes to certain hard lines with US intelligence, neither Fox News nor Corbert nor any other major television network crosses those lines. So for the parts that matter the most, they play on the same team. The parts that matter the most meaning things like war propaganda, i.e. WMD, such-and-such is an evil dictator (as opposed to the evil dictators the US keeps in power), etc.

(2018)

I remember reading about this a whiles before 2018.

Found it: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-06-17/colbert-r... (2014)

"Learn to code."

It sounds like they took their own advice and did just that.

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